Notes on orthodoxy . . .

Ganesh is pictured standing on or above a rat and likewise Shiva stomping on a dwarf. The rat and dwarf represent the evolutionary body; the reflex path of human and animal life – the human can find awakening to the cosmic and leave the rat behind. The Christian likewise finds himself “born again” to the cosmic and rising out of the everyday unenlightened body, rising to the cosmic through the Christ. They rise out of nature. But Buddhism starts from alienation in the social order and comes after a long tradition of Hindu orthodoxy. Perhaps it is that as William James says the enlightened moment comes as a flash venture and is sustained by orthodoxy building walls around but killing the spark. Buddha said that when he first became enlightened he felt that he shared something “with the animals.” He left the artificial life of the calcified institutions of borrowed and inauthentic inherited “Enlightenments” behind to find himself first back to nature. From there he advanced again to the cosmic in a second awakening, but the first requirement was to leave the official orthodox culture bereft of spirit behind. So we have it is Japanese zen that all of the public social order is a conspiracy of “language and logic” which must be left behind to find enlightenment. This is in the Christ as well as he rose in opposition to the Pharisees who had banished the shamans and intuitives to written codification and law, creating the same structured orthodoxy, making it impossible to find the “father we cannot see” – the Self in the Vedic texts. For years I complained that the communion was an extension of the animal sacrifice of the pagans and that is what Christ yelled about and was in opposition to at the “money lenders in the Temple.” The King James version presents an anti-Semitic picture of Jews as money lenders in this episode at at time of a rising indegeneous trade class but the point of the story was not in that they were selling (blue laws), but in what they were selling: they were selling animals for the purpose of live sacrifice in the Temple and that is what Christ was railing about (See Tolstoy’s translation in The Gospel in Brief). So the substitution of pseudo-sacrifice or substitute sacrifice by the early Christian churches as a management strategy to engage and absorb the pagan cycle is virtually in opposition to the Christ’s direction. But it is fascinating; it travels the heart through space/time to the ancestors through the ages in a singular act; better if performed in Latin as it actualizes a koan mechanism, shifting consciousness to the Right Side of the brain. Tolstoy’s late writing incidentally, is excellent reading for people in their descent particularly those who were raised Christian, like Tolstoy. It offers a potential path back to the Gate.

For more see Entering Aquarius.