Christianity
Christian
civilization is now old and worn out for us.
It has lost the powerful élan vital that it had
in the first centuries of its rising.
We, the tired Western civilization, pretend
that we know all the answer, but we are longing for a new genuine inner
experience and are, to a great extent, turning to the East, expecting a renewal
from there.
I
refer to other civilizations to illustrate my point because one can observe
another society sine ira et studio, that is, dispassionately.
But with our own religious tradition it is the same.
We could say that Christian teaching is a content of our
collective consciousness.
If we look more closely, however, we see that it is based on symbols such
as the crucified god, the Virgin Mary and so on.
If we think about these, about what they mean and how to link them up
with our actual life, we discover that we do not know because they are full of
unconsciousness. We find that precisely those known aspects
of our spiritual tradition are completely mysterious to us in many ways and that
we can say nothing about them. So
consciousness contains a
secret reverse side which is unconsciousness.
TPoPA 221
As
soon as you start talking about mythology, you must not take the terms
concretely; that’s the mistake of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition.
Read myths as newspaper reports by reporters who were there and it
doesn’t work. Reread them as poems and they become luminous.
MoL 9
Let
us see if something can be made of this bit of nonsense by interpreting it, not
as history, but as poetry, mythology: not by demythologizing the Bible
(as one school of theologians would have it, the book has already been
demythologized enough through its interpretation as fact), but my remythologizing
it as symbolic of the spirit. The documents of religion – any
religion, all religions – are to be read, not as early editions of the New
York Times, but as poetry.
Do
we, who belong to the Christian civilization, really know at bottom what it
means? What archetype is behind the Christian civilization?
Could we honestly claim that we know what we mean when we say we believe
in a Trinitarian God and in Christ? Even the greatest
theologian has never claimed to do so. Catholic theologians,
for instance, speak of the mystery of each dogma. Some
aspects can be put into words, but the nucleus is absolutely unknown to us.
We would say that there is an archetypal content or an archetype behind
it which, by definition, we do not know. TPoPA 226
If you're not familiar with the Bible and would like to learn its essence, the best introduction in my mind is in these 2 steps:
The Sermon on the Mount
Matthew: 5-7
The
Book of Proverbs - (The Wisdom of Solomon)
Our religion tends to be ethical in its accent - sin and atonement, right and wrong. It started with a sin you see. In other words, moving out of the mythological zone - the garden of paradise, where there is no time, and where men and women don't even know that they're different from each other - the two are just creatures. And God and man are practically the same. He walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where we are. And then they eat the apple of the knowledge of the pairs of opposites, and man and woman then cover their shame. They're different. God and man are different. Man and nature - (nature) is against man. Bill Moyers 2 12m. 40s
Every natural impulse is sinful unless you've been Baptised, or circumcised in this tradition that we've inherited - for heaven's sakes. Bill Moyers 2 22:30
We cannot identify with Jesus - we have to imitate Jesus, but to say I am God as Jesus said is for us blasphemy. However in the Thomas Gospel; Jesus says; He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be He. Wow, that's Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, only don't know it, and the word Buddha means: To Awake. Bill Moyers 34m
The shift of perspective from the repose of the central Cause to the turbulation of the peripheral effects is represented in the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They ate of the forbidden fruit, “And the eyes of them both were opened.”44 The bliss of Paradise was closed to them and they beheld the created field from the other side of a transforming veil. Henceforth they should experience the inevitable as the hard to gain. 1000 faces, 247
What is remarkable about Christianity is that in its system of dogma it anticipates a metamorphosis in the divinity, a process of historic change on the “other side.” … cont’d … MDR 327
When the Semites moved in as conquerors, then, they dislodged deities to make way for their own, and the Hebrews are the most extreme in turning against the Goddess, who represents the powers of the Earth. In the Old Testament, the local goddesses of Canaan are called the Abomination, and this hangs on in our Christian tradition. G 16
The Christian attitude of mind, with its one-sided emphasis on the struggle for good, exposes a person to the risk of a certain aggressive pride that comes clearly to the fore in Gauvain, in contrast to which Perceval’s uncertainty strikes modern man as being far more sympathetic and understandable. TGL 215
The circle of knights around Arthur mirrors the symbol of the Self as it was manifested in the first half of the Christian age, an image in which the light, spiritual, masculine aspect of Logos predominated one-sidedly and whose vital expansion served the civilizing purpose of overcoming pagan and animal primitivity.
Arthur’s knights, in particular, devoted themselves to this task. At this stage, the problem of the shadow, of the individual inner opposite, is not yet constellated but is still projected outwardly on to the barbarian opponents who must be overcome. TGL 216
In
the second-century Gospel According to Thomas, for example, the following words
are attributed to Jesus, when asked by his disciples, “When will the Kingdom
come?” Jesus said, “It will not come by expectation; they
will not say: ‘See, here,’ or: ‘See, there.’ But the Kingdom
of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it”
(Logion 113). TMD 205
The gods of the Gentiles are devils and in the name of God you must get
rid of them. That rejection of everybody in the world but
oneself is what underlies the ferocity of the missionary work of the Christians
in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries in
This
apparently unique life became a sacred symbol because it is the psychological
prototype of the only meaningful life, that is, of a life that strives for the
individual realization – absolute and unconditional – of its own particular law.
Well may we exclaim with Tertullian:
anima naturaliter christiana!