Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 21:32:37 +1100
From: Jonathan Shearman
Arlen
I spent some years at University studying comparative religion, psychology, philosophy and related subjects. My real interest was in 'spiritual enlightenment' which, needless to say, was not one of the courses offered at the University of Sydney, 1979-83. So I had to pick over the curriculum for evidence of that which I wanted to learn. There was lots of evidence in the Religious Studies department, of course, mainly in courses on Hinduism and Buddhism but also in the Western traditions and elsewhere. However the whole idea had been completely abandoned, ridiculed, and forgotten in the Philosophy department.
Why? I wondered. Surely philosophy was originally the Love of Wisdom, and surely Wisdom grew out of enlightenment? knowledge of first principles? ground of being?
It was surely there in some of the pre-Socratics - I too discovered Parmenides and also Heraclitus - and most abundantly in Plotinus, also in various medievals, especially the brilliant Eckhardt. So why didn't anyone even want to know?
When I went to Sydney Uni the philosophy department was divided into two sections: Political and Modern [i.e. Marxist] and Traditional [i.e. Cambridge/Oxford 'classical']. Both departments were formally materialist: the professor of Traditional had won his seat on the basis of The Materialist Philosophy of Mind; the other lot were ratbag leftist radicals, who would just as soon talk about the Bader Meinhof gang as Socrates. I never saw anything spiritually enlightened about Karl Marx.
I was reading Krishnamurti and the Dhammapada and Aldous Huxley and trying to write essays on altered states of consciousness and the dynamics of no-thing-ness. It's a good university, and I was generally not penalised for doing my own thing, and got through a Bachelor's OK. But I spent a lot of years wondering 'what is wrong with these people? Here is this great discovery that has been made, and there's lots of evidence, and no-one wants to know'.
Hence my eventual thesis topic, currently suspended while I make a living: 'Mysticism & Heresy: A Meditation on Enlightenment and Authority in the Christian West.' I came to see that materialism - the Modern Attitude, and its countless refinements and permutations through science and intellectuality and leftism - was and is a profound reaction against the historical evils of the Western, mainly the Catholic, church. The roots of this are so deep, and the reaction against it so profound, that hardly anyone is even aware of it; it is buried deep, deep in the collective unconscious of the Western mind, where it continues to exert a malevolent influence, and will continue to do for ages to come. It is a process stretching back centuries into forgotten and suppressed horrors and pain. Hence we are culturally, grandly, neurotic.
And here is your 'cultural firewall' between religion and science!
I read Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, the history of Western Philosophy. I saw evidence of enlightenment in Spinoza and Berkeley but little since. I wanted to know where the trail went cold, and why. I studied the early history of the Church, and re-assessed Christianity in the light of the other great ways [which I consider Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, Tao, Neo- Platonism and Sufism]. I studied the Christian mystics, some of whom were certainly enlightened. And I think I know what happened.
I have come to see Jesus as a wandering sage, in the tradition of the peripatetic monks, teachers and sages of India and China. The individual most like him in modern times, in my mind, is undoubtedly the Ramana Maharishi. [You can guess what most 'Christians' would say to this.] Jesus was undoubtedly the Enlightened One, living fully and compassionately out of the experience that you relate [as was Ramana].
But then came the foundation of the Catholic Church. Around the 4th Century AD the word-of-mouth teaching of Jesus Christ was extinguished by authoritarian religious leaders. There were bitter and intense doctrinal squabbles, murder, intrigue, politics, the execution of thousand of people for venturing an opinion ['heresy']. This culminated in the grotesque spectacle of the Inquisition, which continued for hundreds of years - indeed still continues today, albeit in the form of mere bureaucracy - where hundreds of thousands of persons were not only executed by the most foul means imaginable, but tortured with instruments inscribed with the saying 'For the Greater Glory of Christ'.
Can you imagine the mentality which made these instruments? And used them? In this sense the so-called Christian Church came to crucify Christ over and over and over again. Hundreds of thousands of persons were murdered in this way. The most feared executive of the Spanish Inquisition, General Torquemada, got his start persecuting a priest who was teaching a way of meditation very similar to Buddhist or Hindu yoga. No wonder Western culture is neurotic!
Meanwhile the ambitious, learned, powerful and extremely neurotic patriarchs of the Establishment crafted their exquisite model of the Universe, based upon Holy Scripture, and the Ptolmaic Spheres; the Great Chain of Being, the heavens above, hell beneath, etc. Doubt it, and be burned. Unfortunately for them, it was proved to be wrong, by Copernicus, Bruno [who was burned] and Galileo [who was found heretic and only absolved by the current Pope.] The repercussions of this enormous error, and its discovery, continue to reverberate through history.
This was the context in which the European Enlightenment arose. One of the founding articles of the Royal Society was to exclude religion from its topics of debate and investigation. Quite apart from the fact that if you tangled with the Church you'd end up toast, there were also, to all intents and purposes, embargos placed on all things metaphysical, because the Doctors of the Church 'owned' them. The Catholic Church methodically examined every bit of the Wisdom Tradition in their library [which was THE library], and they either adapted it - made it dogma - or banned it - made it heresy. If they OWNED it, you had to 'sign on the dotted line' - pledge eternal obedience and recite the Nicene Creed - or you could question it, embrace heresy and the non-orthodox teachings, and face execution.
You could argue, and this was the core of the thesis, that the Catholic Church methodically 'firewalled' the idea of enlightenment, so as to monopolise the one thing that all persons were deemed to treasure most highly: salvation. You could only have it on their terms - 'no salvation outside the Church' - and this was meant extremely literally, i.e. no salvation aside from that conferred IN the church, BY the administration of the Holy Sacrements, BY the Authorised Representative of Christ on Earth, the Priest. 'There is only one way to enlightenment, and WE OWN IT. Question it, and die!'
Hence the persecution of the Cathars, the condemnation of Eckhardt, and many other dreadful things that occurred in European history done in the name of 'God'.
We may have personally forgotten all of this, but this is where we come from; hence the Cultural Firewall. It is not a matter of sweet reason and lets-all-hold-hands-and-sing. This is, as Timothy Leary titled his otherwise questionable book, the Politics of Ecstacy. And these politics are exceedingly treacherous.
Hence the extreme aversion of the modern Western intellectual to anything that could be deemed 'spiritual'. The whole of Western culture has reacted to centuries of dogmatic theism with vigourous, dogmatic atheism. Pace Crick's comments on your work: 'nonsense'. He is, after all, harbinger of the Scientific Way, which he can only ever see as the opposite of anything remotely 'metaphysical'. It's a matter of deep cultural conditioning. However, from the perspective of personal experience of enlightenment, neither the original Catholic thesis, nor its materialistic antithesis, are true! It is 'the blind rejecting the blind'.
Regards
Jonathan Shearman