RELIGION
Lao Tze, Buddha, Abraham, Jesus were letting people know what God is, not trying to start religions. As their lives faded in our memory, like meditative communion not soon renewed, society, like the ego of an individual, toned them down. As a transformer steps down the high tension wires for household use, their resonating energy was carried along, adjusted to meet our developing human needs.
We preserve the feast flash frozen until we’re ready to thaw it out again. Yet while our ego fends off the limitless Self, it is likewise accommodating to It more and more.
Our congregations provide for us, and serve what we need right now. Then at some point, we lift the Baby from the bathwater that warms It.
888
The Holy Book
Have you ever seen a sacred scripture in your dreams? The volume lies open, scintillating, massive, on a gorgeous pedestal. Then when we try to read it, the lines are blurry or jumbled. The meaning we receive from this dreambook is none else than the meaning our own soul brings to it.
So it is with the Bible or other holy texts or manuals of instruction. We recognize in them the truths we have always known, the private insights we have been privileged to access and then planted under the loam of human doubt and societal routine. We dig them up and find a diamond crystallized by the pressures of our life, a magic mirror before our souls, in which we see our Self with increasing clarity.
When reading, we will therefore find meanings at our present level. In the West we are most likely to be concentrating on the Bible. We may find it to be an ethical treatise, a UFO report, a patriarchal panegyric, a literary masterpiece, mathematical formulas, an accurate history, an invitation to a secret society, a prediction of the earth’s imminent destruction, and so on. Whatever theory we espouse, we will find abundant, specific and convincing evidence to support it. Prohibitions against “the worship of forms” (usual translation, “idolatry”) can be turned into the worship of forms. Calls for peace can be used to incite wars.
The Bible is tailor-made for numberless interpretations. It is replete with stories and gnomic parables offered without commentary. The most vital points may be veiled or else hidden in plain sight. It is read in translation, with the originals of the Hebrew books soaked in puns and no original language version at all for the oral teachings of Jesus. It was composed over centuries and edited with variant purposes. And according to the ancient Talmud, even the prophets, receiving their inspiration as visions, were apt to make errors in writing them down.
The very title of Exodus in Hebrew, Shmot, means “Meanings,” among other things. The Bible resembles an ancient parchment palimpsest in its multilayered camouflaged texts.
The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. Beneath and between all these strata and errata, God worms Its way through to miraculously deliver the higher rungs of truth to those who’ve been prepared to climb them.
Moses stood before a crowd and called out, “Don’t be selfish.” In the midst of the noisy group, the scribe was furiously recording his words, “Don’t ...eat ... shellfish.”
Layers of Meaning: Praying
When Hannah prays fervently to have a child, this seems the very proof-text encouraging a desirous wish list when we meditate.
The hidden layers: Hannah’s barrenness has caused her to doubt the divine omnipotence. Her wavering belief is represented by her mocking servantwoman, as in other Bible tales. What she seeks is solely the assurance of the All-power, not any material blessing. And so she pledges that her son Samuel will be a Nazirite, a man who will never marry. She surrenders all desire for a continuing line of descendants. The cloaked meaning is the reverse of the apparent one: actually, she’s desireless.
Layers of Meaning: War
The first war in the Bible, for example: Abraham defeats a coalition of armies, with the aid of “his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen.” (Genesis, Chapter 14) Every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent, and the name of Abraham’s disciple Eliezer, as a kabbalist pointed out to me, adds up to 318. So “318” is one man. We have here not a scene of carnage but two mystics hid in plain sight, dispelling the so-called military powers. We also notice that right off the bat the teachings are for Eliezer, no relation of Abraham, and for anyone brought to learn.
888
To be born into a certain religion is another presentiment of each person’s unique qualities, memberships and tasks.
The faiths suggest the incipient Sangha, the sacred community we will develop worldwide.
Sacred community can unfold right out of our family, neighborhood or workplace, leaderless, as the daily play of the Presence shared.
As Mullah Nasruddin found out, we can’t sell firewood from a milk wagon. We can’t pour new wine in old bottles.
But if we work within each group, using their terms, can we eventually help to sprout their kernels of truth so all the religions flower, so that everywhere ten people will grab the coat tails of an uplifted teacher?
As mystics, we may be conversant with many religions, and expert in one or more. We might not participate in any organized religion, or may help raise up the awareness in local congregations, ministering to them with loving care through meditation in action.
We’re not “in” a religion. We don’t belong to a religion or a party, we belong to God.
Every religion has its unique contributions and special foibles. The faiths of humankind fit together cohesively like a jigsaw puzzle. So we’re naturally all-inclusive, as the specific truths of each ingredient are subsumed within the birthday cake.
And truly, since God is our inner Identity leading us uniquely, each member of a church is a separate church unto himself.
The ceremonies, robes and music that create a sacred space have become divisive. Then we wonder how to promote ecumenicism (as in Chinese culture), and try to breach the walls. There is one God, we are all Its emanation together. This is the starting point, not someplace out of reach.
The world’s religions resemble departments in a university. We can take courses in different departments if we want. We can invent our own major. A teacher can be a college-wide professor, rather than a department member. All the departments are essential, working together for the benefit of the university.
We all practice unrecognized religions: political ideologies; the arts; science; sports; money; sex; war; and so on. Each rides the waves of the divine energy. They seem to have harnessed the ultimate power, and do provide subconscious bridges.
Beloved, we see that this is a spiritual universe where neither God nor man needs protection. So why defend our religions?
The religions open the portal to this essence: We can live enlightened and unobtrusive in the truth and nourishment at the heart of all denominations, honoring them all.
888
For myself as a Jew, the diaspora gave us a chance to universalize our faith. And the holocaust freed great yearnings for God from their casings, sending all that had been gained in millennia of struggle as clouds into the skies, to cross the world and rain down into the souls of utterly untrained Jews, who would be mobile as sheaves of virgin bond, blank pages, in our continued search.
888
A ritual action is a teaching device, if we can fathom it. For instance, my teacher began a practice of stopping in the doorway before leaving home, to realize that God went before her and remained behind. (She unknowingly paralleled the Jewish ritual of kissing the mezuzah on the doorpost.) Some students at the time adopted the same discipline. She was very regular in this for several years. But when she had absorbed the lesson, she dropped the little outward act. She and her students also regularly took a moment of realization, a silent grace note, at the start of work, when meeting someone, before meals, when starting the car or traveling. This corresponded to reciting a religious blessing. Again, as her work matured, she no longer needed to do this by a formalized rule.
So ceremonies contain meanings. We might stabilize our higher efforts with the constancy of such rites. The object however is not to perform lifelong rituals as an obligation, compulsion, or a way of gaining merit, not to make an idol of a practice. (When we feel the security of bowing to conceptual idols, we may sometimes develop kneeness envy. But not to worry, a concept of God is not God.) What we seek is to dig out the hidden message and express it in the reality of leaning, learning and living.
Living Ceremony
When a religious ceremony becomes the vehicle for interaction, for seeing each other’s glowing face, for experiencing the immanence of the Creator, it can be a living ceremony. When we each bring our gifts to the temple according to unique talents, this lives. Any ceremonies done in such ways may subconsciously enact the great principles (for example, communion wafers: if you eat God, then you are God yourself), so they have the advantage of sneaking around our mind and catching us by surprise. They are a precursor of the Dancing, the wonderful added things of sacred relationship, when we reawaken to Really Being with You.
888
One person in a congregation may be ready for a clarion wake-up call, while we as a group might be prepared for a snooze alarm that plays gentle music through a lighter sleep. This is the slow wave of change in the middle of the human bell curve. Sensing that we wander sleepwalking in the dark, the great middle of our one Being knows the pace has been right so far, there’s no profit for us all in stampeding into the ditch. Yet to unearth the buried treasure of religion, exploring’s a necessity for those of us on the edges of the journey.