Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,
Yesterday I spoke of my destiny leading me to drink deeply from two very different **patterns** of spiritual culture. In more recent years, I have explored the ‘pattern’ offered by Catholicism. But before that, I experienced intensively a new pattern of spiritual culture now emerging throughout countless ‘holistic venues’ in the West.
How many examples of this New Age cultural pattern have I experienced since 1980? I both visited and lived at the Findhorn community in Scotland over many years. I participated in countless holistic seminars and workshops, wherein people of a New Age persuasion assembled for a weekend, or even a week or two.
And in that short space of time, ‘New Age Culture’ was created in a miniature sphere - wherein the participants could leave behind the mainstream world to live and breath the New Age air.
I even co-founded a holistic educational charity in Cambridge, which offered such seminars regularly and was actively dedicated to expressing what we all believed was ‘the new spiritual culture’.
Thus, at this charity we had a room called a Sanctuary. The Sanctuary was intended as a place of meditation, and was consciously devoid of imagery. Chairs were arranged in circles and a sign hung on the door, with words from my own pen:
‘This sanctuary is dedicated to the idea that there are no words or forms that can express the ultimately REAL without also limiting it, and that no religion or belief may be said to be the TRUTH but only a refraction among many such refractions that serve to guide the way.
This room is therefore dedicated to silence and simplicity that every seeker may feel welcomed there to find within the SACRED REALITY for which no words suffice but from which healing, inspiration and renewal FLOW’.
I relate all of this, because I want to provide a clearer picture of what I mean by ‘an emerging New Age model of Sacred Culture’.
Now that my path is decisively Catholic, I have been asked if I still stand by the words I wrote for that sign. The answer is both yes and no.
Yes, inasmuch as I believe that spiritual reality does indeed transcend the forms human beings use to express it.
No, inasmuch as the words on this door have an agenda I no longer aspire to. That agenda is one of relativising or even dismissing the value of these forms.
For it does not follow - ipso facto – that because the forms necessarily limit the ‘ultimately real’, they are as dispensable as I once believed.
In fact, although the words I wrote suggest the forms are limiting, I now ask whether it is a far greater privation to have no forms at all.
That is to say, whether these limited forms may not serve to open the heart and mind to the limitlessness far, far more than could ever be the case by simply dispensing with them.
Yes, this sign that once hung upon a door to a New Age Sanctuary in Cambridge expresses the New Age Agenda: Drop the Forms which Limit Us and Enter Herein …
Without ever asking whether these limited forms might yet offer far, far more than we New Agers ever imagined.
These days I meditate on the ‘limited forms’ of the Catholic religion. And how my heart and mind have been opened by them, in ways incomprehensible to my New Age experience.
Recently I have been speaking of the universal tragedy of the Fall. This is indeed perceived through a limited form. But how much richer my own life is for having perceived it.
And how much more open, how much more **human** my HEART has become by standing before what the Judaeo-Christian teaches of the Fall …
And how impoverished my previous life appears by comparison. And yes - less **human**. Herein lies more of my pained concern regarding the New Age project for Stripping the Tradition …
So much for these morsels of New Age autobiography. Tomorrow I hope to elucidate the themes of these confessions, by drawing more on my Catholic experience.
8 comments:
Roger,
I guess what you're looking for is a return to a wisdom culture, instead of the mind-culture that we have now.
The difference between these two can only happen when we can appreciate what part of mind-culture has always been in the Church.
Then it may be much easier to appreciate the wisdom the Church has always had.
Adam chose knowledge over wisdom. The Church has not escaped this as much as it has tried. Wisdom is still filtered through knowledge. It is always compromised by the agenda and forms of the dominant mind.
Nirvana can't solve it. The greater story of Jesus has to be appreciated, which is outside of orthodoxy now. We must see the blessing from secular society for the Church to learn a lesson for itself.
Blessings,
Sun Warrior
Thank you, Sun Warrior.
Yes I certainly agree with you about a wisdom culture, as opposed to the merely mind-culture that has arisen in the wake of the Enlightenment.
If you’ve read many of my earlier posts(?) you may gather that one of my all-time favourite quotes is from the Quantum pioneer Bohr who said:
‘The opposite of a fact is surely a falsehood. But the opposite of one great truth may well be another great truth.’
Without making any pretensions to ‘great truth’, I feel we are holding ‘opposites’ about the Church – both of which I see validity to.
It may seem in my posts that I am being triumphal about the Church. Especially the one which will be going up soon.
That I may indeed not sufficiently 'appreciate what part of mind-culture has always been in the Church'
as you put it.
And the truth is that I have experienced far, far more of a ‘wisdom culture’ in traditional Catholicism, than I ever imagined possible. I have been shocked ...
At the same time, I am aware of a great deal of dead formalism, rigidity, legalism – the mind-culture you rightly point to. And for which purification is sorely needed.
And I agree that secularism can and does play a role in that catharsis.
I am ever trying, at least trying, to hold the opposites
And this means holding them in different balances at different times.
And right now, I am feeling a need to publicly hold and point to how very much of the wisdom-culture I have been shocked to discover in Catholicism ...
And perhaps let your voice hold the opposite for me for a little while, Unknown Friend ...
Hello Sun Warrior & Roger,
Here are few pieces by Cardinal Ratzinger on the how reason and Christianity are not mutually exclusive:
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.2/ratzinger.htm
http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/news.html
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=61549
Indeed as Tomberg observed, a cognitive Christianity will outlast the traditional and warmth streams.
Theosophists often talk of the Ancient Wisdom or the Ancient Wisdom Religion. What they are trying to convey (unknowingly) is that 'wisdom' innate in the soul.
This is the wisdom the soul responds to.
The down and upsides of knowledge- a deep subject we hope to hear more of.
Greetings,
Bruce
Thanks for these links Bruce!
I hope I didn't seem to dismiss reason for faith!
(I did say I agreed with a wisdom culture opposed to a *merely* mind culture. -Emphasis to 'merely' just added).
No I certainly think we need wisdom and knowledge/reason ...
In a sense. this is the critique of the New Age present here - that just because form of thought etc are not adequate to describe that which transcends them, doesn't mean we should junk them!
Of course, RS would have the same deep critique of the New Age dismissal of mind.
As for your comments re Tomberg
I will say
I really do wonder whether later in his life he would have held to this.
His book Covenant of the Heart pg 70 suggests possibly not to me.
And there are many other examples in his late writing that suggest the same.
And reading now his German biography, it is still even more clear to me - his RADICAL break in favour of the Traditional Stream.
Bruce it was so hard for me, for so many years to see how deeply Tomberg eventually embraced the Traditional Stream ...
For years I could not believe it. I now think I had a real block - because it was in right front of my eyes, through repeated studies of the later material.
I have no idea how much you've studied it, however.
But as for myself, having intensively read and re-read the late Tomberg - well, as for myself, I couldn't see what was in front of my nose.
And now in this German biography, I read Tomberg writing 'Ich bedauern' - I regret - writing the Anthroposophical writings.
He says something like:
The distance that separates from this earlier effort is the distance of two entirely different lives ...
All potent grist for my own personal mill.
Though I don't know whether it might be for yours.
Again, Bruce, thank you,
And THANK YOU for your info/links to an earlier post - which I've only recently seen and acknowledged (and you might not have seen my belated acknowledgment).
Your material concerns extremely important issues for me - and when my personal life settles down, I really hope to follow these up.
Really, Bruce - real *gratitude*
Maybe we can have an exchange off this site when I'm not overwhelmed.
Warm, good wishes to you and to your work,
Roger
Dear Roger,
Thank you for ALL of your posts. They are enriching to me.
One of the things God has always told me: 'Don't beat up My Church.' When God came to me, I had forgotten the Church long ago. Resentments were in me for which I had not explored. Everything that He showed to me ended up already being in the Bible. It was just hidden, and it was fascinating unearthing what has always either been overlooked, de-emphasized, or not even considered.
Perhaps a little about me. I am a Protestant minister's son, with a degree in history, and spent my adult life in one of the largest corporations in the world.
I was your typical modern man. Divorced, two children, career obsessed, cynical and finally accepting that I was 'alone.'
A turning point came in my long journey of one fundamental truth I had to face about myself. I had no integrity. To establish that, I had to give up what I always held so dear, love. Ironic, especially for an admirer of Jesus, even if it was just in principle.
AFTER I had faced this, and took a leap into the unknown without knowing where it would take me, God came to me.
It had many of the hallmarks of those fortunate enough in the past who have had this happen to them. When God gets that close, you feel an exhaustion that you have never felt before. And such pure Wisdom, like a small seed, which exploded into blooms of meaning so simple and profound, that it not only healed me, but 'converted' my experience of reality.
I am the son of a United Church of Canada minister. In 1925, the Methodist, Congregtional, and parts of the Presbyterian Church formed into one. It has become a moderate, liberal, mainline church, and my dad was what I might call an 'intellectual' Christian. Emotions and enthusiasm must be tempered with the highest calling to listen to the greatest thinkers of theology. Authority rested in the depth of observation, reason, and 'insight' into the condition of humans living on earth in relation to God, to realize inwardly what Christ was sent to reveal.
I took a degree in history in university. This gave me an appreciation of change over time, especially the import of how ideas form, change, and hence propel civilization on it path. North American academe stresses volume of information over quality. Processing vast amounts to educate and calculate one's conclusions. There is little time for reflection, unlike European universities. Here, it is a training school for workaholics.
I found it to a much greater extreme in big business, where management's greatest fetish, control through information, is overdosed by data from the computer revolution, and seduces it into the illusion that this excessive knowledge is actually useful and increases its control.
In total, all three primary influences, mixed with the typical elements of a white middle class man's personal life, educated me through experience of what modern man is.
In one moment I was this man. In the next, God. However, in this unsuspecting moment, it was not God. For some reason He came to me as The Great Spirit.
Having never ventured into Native Spirituality, the experience was beyond my understanding. It was not just the visions. Actual tactile events conformed and instructed WITH the visions. When I sought counsel, I was told that so many signs given at once to one person was beyond anything she had heard of. But it was all there. I did not understand.
In the coming days the experiences and visions intensified. A massive crisis of 'Who are You' tore asunder the very essence of my being. "You are not the God of the dry, dusty pages of the Bible. You are real, alive and free from any bounds. Who are You???"
Throwing myself beside my bed, I cried out once more. "Who are You, and who is God?"
At that moment, which can never be put into words, the Two became One. In the blackness, in the Void... Father.
I knew that I had not lost my mind. What I experienced in Presence coming to human consciousness is well documented in others in history. The Church is rife with them. Even Carl Jung experienced many of the characteristics. We would have to throw out major components of modern psychology if we did not accept his revelations, how ever he arrived at them.
But why did He come in Native form? This was the Wisdom, this was the seed, that revealed The Great Story of civilization within The Creation through Time.
From this, the one greatest question that civilization has never been able to answer became clear. Why is Jesus so confusing? Why can't we 'figure' Him out?
The answer was in the question. Father ultimately sent Jesus for one purpose: to confuse the mind. The implicatons of this is as fascinating as it is broad-ranging. The meaning of the Revelation formed into something that can be understood simply, through modern parlance, much of which we have always known but we could never quite put together.
We already know the answer, we already have the story. But what do we know of civilization, if all we know is civilization?
The dialectic between the People of Original Sin and the People of the Original Wisdom began. Native wisdom pre-dates the rise of the mind to its dominant position in our lives. It is dismissed as a lesser form of human experience orbiting around the evolutionary center of the structure or our consciousness, the dominant mind. To understand this, one must first appreciate what the dominant mind is within us.
With a language that speaks this meaning to us, we can then enter dialogue with wisdom that has never known the dominant mind. That is wisdom culture, preserved by indigenous peoples the world over.
Civilization has never adequately answered its two primary questions: who am I, and what is reality? This is caused by the many factors that have been constructed by our human-centered consciousness. If we do not realize the implications of it, we can never answer the questions.
Right now, civilization, including the Church, assumes that human consciousness is the apex of Creation. We assume that reality is the equivalent of God, humans and inert matter. This forms the existential dilemma that we are 'man, alone in an inanimate universe.'
This condition was asked for by Adam, to live with knowledge instead of Wisdom. God granted his wish. Silently, Father has guided mankind through this choice, giving every once in a while overt help, such as the Ten Commandments. But the characteristics of the dominant mind is that of control.
Wisdom is turned into malleable knowledge for us to manipulate within our civilized context. We are the ones who must decide between good and evil, what it is, through the pride of the mind's dominant perception over the heart, emotions, body, will, and even the earth. This is the blindness that we are in from our own choosing.
Because of this characteristic, even the simple wisdom of the Ten Commandments was turned into the horror of the Temple that Jesus found.
The features of the dominant mind are such, that God chose a new way to confuse the mind, to ironically, get it focused without being able to manipulate it to its own satisfaction.
The dominant mind abhors a question that it cannot answer and thus ultimately control on its own terms.
The Jesus Question has never been answered to the mind's satisfaction. How could a man manipulate inert matter with just a thought? It got the mind of Western civilization focused for 2000 years. Theology has made incredible strides 'around' the question, but the nature of Jesus Christ has never been answered to anyone's satisfaction. Questions always remain, but the minutae of our investigation has reaped massive rewards nonetheless.
But the question will not go away. Easter is upon us, our faith swells, our spiritual acumen is heightened, our submission to His Truth reinforced. But who was and is this Soul? What was He when He walked the earth? What is He now? Revealed but as hidden in meaning as God Himself! Is/was He man, god-man, or God? We've got great theories, many experiences to flesh things out, but that box we are in is always nagging us and we can't really see the walls we wish to penetrate through. We must be satisfied with what we do 'know,' and bow to what we don't.
The convergence of the dominant mind's achievements with Native wisdom is the path that is to come. Creation is not inert matter. Humans souls are not the only 'conscious' entities in the universe, likened unto God. If we wish to understand who Jesus Christ is, all we need to do is ask those who never had the question in the first place.
It is not superficial New Agism. It is wisdom older than civilization, preserved in the hearts of one people, waiting for the fruition of mind-man to complete for the Original Wisdom to once again return the mind to its rightful place, in support and submission to the epicenter of All, the True Heart.
The Church has done a great job with the tools it was given. Its mind has created an expression of what it understands to be the True Heart. This is what God intended, to help mankind through the time of the mind. To emerge from the state that civilization is in requires wisdom from another great source of ancient wisdom that is OUTSIDE of man-centered, mind-centered civilization.
This is as it should be. This is what God intended when Adam chose knowledge over wisdom.
This is The Great Story of which the mind-twisting puzzle of the Bible story is a part of. We must first understand our blindness before we can see. We cannot see the cave we are in because we have never been outside of it. God wants mankind now, to use what He has Given to all peoples, to understand who we are and what reality is. In so doing, the wisdom that God is All will germinate and blossom into a reality that we never knew existed.
Father is All. Creation begins and is Him. In the Beginning there was Wisdom, and the Wisdom was with God, and the Wisdom was God. One Word, consciousness, the seed of Truth, waiting to bloom in us as part of All Creation, as it has always been.
It is the Redemption of Adam here on earth, awakening to a Creation that knowledge alone can never know, and the dominant mind will eternally compromise. The end of the Separation of man from God, the lifting of the veil as the shroud of the dominant mind disintegrates confronted with its truth.
Thank you for my indulgence of your time. I hope this begins to give some clarity from which I speak.
My baptized name is Brock Shaver. I live ten minutes from Niagara Falls, Canada. 'Sun Warrior' is the name that formed when I was asked to choose a new name. That is another story of this journey that came to me in the passing of one moment on the first day, of the first spring of the new millennium.
May your path be blessed, and your prayers be answered. Wisdom comes to you, my friend, for your heart will tell its truth in the silent stillness of what is.
Blessings,
Sun Warrior
Dear Sun Warrior,
Thank you for your lengthy and very moving posts.
You raise so many issues with so many profound sides and there is simply not time for me to address much that you have raised.
However, I printed out your entries, read them and re-read parts, marked them up – even read portions to my wife (whose eyes are not the best).
So my attention is with you. Even if I cannot hope to do justice now to the many things you raise.
So being necessarily selective, what do I select?
I find your journey very moving and I am grateful that you share it. It is clear to me – as it was to my wife – that a great deal of authentic and profound experience has attended your meeting the Great Spirit.
I am moved by your process of realisation ... your honesty ... what you say of 'no integrity' of love, of so much else.
My response again is selective and truncated ...
I am also moved by your emergence from what John Paul would have called 'the culture of death'.
I also value your insights into that culture ...
For example what is in your prenant lines about:
'volume of information over quality. Processing vast amounts to educate and calculate one's conclusions. ... Here, it is a training school for workaholics.
I found it to a much greater extreme in big business, where management's greatest fetish, control through information, is overdosed by data from the computer revolution, and seduces it into the illusion that this excessive knowledge is actually useful and increases its control.
Etc.
The word 'calculate' is very striking for me here ...
So much of the mental processes of our era are simply and **increasingly** ONLY calculation, akin to what a machine can do - computing and not true thinking.
Better than anyone I know, Rudolf Steiner described the ascension of this kind of dead thinking/mental calculation …
He charts its growing emergence through the Renaissance and the dangers he sees of its rise over the centuries to come.
His answer might be somewhat different than yours on some points.
For him, there is no going backwards, and he decries ‘atavistic’ spirituality – under which he certainly includes Catholicism – and I would imagine also native cultures.
Obviously, I am not at all in agreement with him on this last point.
Nonetheless one of Steiner’s volumes is called The Redemption of Thinking – and I do believe the West can learn much from what he meant by that.
Which involves an honouring of the Western Mind and an attempt to infuse it with life …
These are profound and complex issues and having spent time absorbing your rich posts, I confess I am writing now quite off the cuff as to what surfaces in me in response.
Off the cuff … I put a lot of careful work into honing the weblog entries – but here in these replies, time pressures demand that I am a little more spontaneous and rough ...
Still I hope Sun Warrior, you will feel I am engaging with your very moving trajectory.
I know so little of Native American Spirituality. I deeply resonate with your call for abandoning the view of nature as inert - and the beauty and wisdom of the Native cultures in that regard.
I find myself wondering to what extent this Western view of ‘inertness’ is an inheritance of modern rationalism beginning in Renaissance Cartesian dualism … mind and substance …
And to what extent it can be ascribed to pr-Renaissance, pre-Reformation, pre-Rationalist Christianity …
Wonder if you or anyone out there can give more a considered approach to this question than I am capable of doing right now …
I know so little of the Native path – and the native suffering you describe elsewhere , with moving FEELING …
In this regard I find myself thinking of the book that has inspired much of my thinking, the esoteric Catholic masterpiece Meditations on the Tarot, where the author interprets the Johannine Christ that he has come that nothing should be lost, but that all should have eternal life to mean that all pre-Christian traditions willl not be forgotten, but will resurrected through Christ, as Lazarus was resurrected …
Also in Covenant of the Heart, Valentin Tomberg says
‘The words of the creed
Credo in unam, sanctam catholicam et apostolicum Ecclesiam (I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church)
receive their *full significance when the Church becomes universal (catholic) not only in space, but also in time – i.e. when it embraces not only all peoples of the present, but also times of the past. This happens, too, when in the course of the history of Christianity the past is gradually resurrected.
There sounds out ceaselessly in the history of Christianity the awakening voice of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, and who promises to be with us even unto the end of the world, saying ‘Lazarus come forth!’
Pg 127 emphasis and line breaks added by me …
So, so much else you raise, Sun Warrior, but I must stop for now.
May the Great Spirit of God be ever with your journey and your work, Sun Warrior.
Roger
Dear Roger,
Thank you for taking the time with my messages. They have been lengthy, and I appreciate the care in your considerations. They are an attempt at an introduction of myself, and by no means do I wish or expect to divert your attentions from your focus. My writing is in respect and inspiration from your journey, and gives me deep pause to reflect on so much that you write about.
One of the essential revelations for me about modern man is how 'equation thinking' is now the dominant mode of thought. Our society would fall apart without numbers, from money, to scientific perception that converts reality into measurement, managing components of a business like variables in an equation to produce one number (the quarterly profit), to personal lives that must arrange so much activity from work to personal life into a series of priorities to maximize one's time.
James Hillman once quoted that there are three perfections in the universe: myth, music, and mathematics.
From this observation I have realized that modern society has replaced myth with math, and meaning is now a calculation. As much as rational man dismisses religion and God because they are invisible and unprovable, mind-man does not want to accept that the foundation of his thought is invisible numbers, or the most elemental fact, human thought is invisible as well.
This is why I perceive Western society as mind-man, pure mind culture without need or reference to story. It is an evolution from Adam's choice of knowledge over wisdom, the mind growing stronger through the initial phase of poetry (the true language of Spirit), through prose (religion, story, the mind turning wisdom into a 'drier' form of meaning like the desert of inert matter that we find ourselves, but not having forgotten wisdom), to mathematics (confident mind, able to control inert matter through its own explanation, without need for wisdom, thus finding its own safety and security without dependance or reference to another force of consciousness).
Having written this, perhaps many reject the 'forms' of religion because it sounds like dry concept, and they seek a return to prose and then even the poetry of the meaning of their lives, without realizing that they can find it in the Church, if only they could get through the desert of the 'familiar.'
Now I am out of time, LOL.
Blessings,
Sun Warrior
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