There is a metaphysical distinction between Jesus of Nazareth, the historical human personality, and the Christ as God’s “Only-Begotten Son” (Nicene Creed), the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Ordinarily, when we speak of Jesus, we talk as though Christ were Jesus’ last name.

We say, “as Jesus said to the woman at the well,” or we might say, “as Christ said to the woman at the well,” or again, “as Jesus Christ said to the woman at the well.” This ordinary usage is convenient but it can create a serious problem in understanding not only who Jesus was but also who we ourselves are.

Most Christians, of course, know that Christ was not the last name of Jesus of Nazareth but a title given to Jesus by the early Christians, meaning the “anointed one” or Messiah. Nevertheless, even though we know the origin and meaning of the title, Christ, we still ordinarily use the word Christ as if this were Jesus’ last name in the same way that Smith is used as a last name for persons whose ancestors were blacksmiths. Understanding the origin of the last name doesn’t alter the usage in either case.

What exactly is the problem? The problem comes when we try, in light of this familiar usage, to interpret the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God.” What we usually end up mistakenly thinking is that the Creed means Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Only-Begotten Son. That is, we mistakenly think that Jesus, and Jesus alone, was God’s Son, and that all other humans are therefore less than Jesus.

That is not what the Creed means. To think so is a serious metaphysical error. And this error is so grave that, unless corrected, it can actually prevent us from taking our place with Jesus in the Christ Consciousness, and later in the Kingdom of the Father. It is the Christ who is God’s Only-Begotten Son, not Jesus.

True, Jesus of Nazareth knew he was the Christ; that is, that he had the Christ Consciousness (and the higher nondual consciousness of oneness with the Father). He knew that, as Christ, he had been directly begotten by God from all eternity. But Jesus knew and preached that the same was also true for us.

We too, according to Jesus, are to become Christ by putting on the mind of Christ, that is, the awareness that we too are directly begotten by God. One of the reasons Jesus called himself the Son of Man was that he wanted us to realize that our reality and destiny are the same as his.

Most Christians make this theological mistake of thinking that Jesus of Nazareth, rather than the Christ, was God’s only-begotten Son. I made it myself, and it caused me a great deal of confusion when my consciousness was trying to realize Christ Consciousness. ….

To see the rest of this article by Jim Marion: >>>Click Here.

~ From: Putting on The Mind of Christ, by Jim Marion

The division of ‘windface’ into wind and face is a conceptual division that seemingly divides experience into a face, ‘me’, and the wind, ‘not me’. As a result the ‘person’ and the ‘world’ seem to become two distinct and independent entities or objects.

In this way the seamless intimacy of experience is fragmented into two apparent parts — an inside self and an outside object, other or world — which are imagined to be joined together by an act of knowing, feeling or perceiving. Hence we say, ‘I know such and such,’ ‘I feel the wind,’ ‘I love you’ and ‘I see the tree.’

However, in the seeing of a tree for instance, there’s no seer and there’s no seen. There is no inside ‘I’ that sees and there is no outside ‘tree’ that is seen. The ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ are concepts superimposed by thinking onto the reality of the experience, which in this case could simply be called ‘seeing’.

It’s thinking alone that divides the seamless intimacy of experiencing into a subject and an object, into an ‘I’ that sees and a ‘tree’ that is seen. However, awareness, or ‘I’ and the reality of the tree are not two separate experiences. They are one. ‘I’ and ‘tree’ are one experience in the same way that the wind and the face are one experience. There’s never a subject or an object of experience. There’s always only seamless intimate experiencing.

Or we could say that the apparent ‘I’ and the apparent tree share the same reality, are the same reality. It’s only a concept, an idea, which apparently divides them. However, this division between the seer and the seen, between the experiencer and the experienced, never actually happens. Separation is an illusion. It’s never actually experienced.

In other words, I don’t see a tree. In the experience of seeing, I am the tree. I am its reality. The only substance present in our experience of the tree is seeing and seeing or, more generally, experiencing, is awareness, our self. The awareness that’s seeing and the reality of that which is seen are not two separate things. They are one and the same.

We should say, ‘I am tree-ing.’ That is, ‘”I”, awareness, is treeing.’ The amness of ‘I’ and the isness of ‘tree’ share their being. The amness of self is the isness of things. The apparent mind, body and world is ‘I’ mind/body/world-ing.

All the great religions are founded upon this realization. For instance in Christianity the saying, ‘I and my father are one,’ means precisely this. It means that ‘I’, the awareness that is seeing these words or experiencing whatever is being experienced in this moment, is one with whatever is being experienced, that is, it is one with the reality of the universe.

The Sufis say, ‘There is only God.’ The Hindus say, ‘The Atman (the apparently individual self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality of the universe) are one.’ The Buddhists say, ‘Nirvana and samsara are one.’ This isn’t an extraordinary experience, known only by a few enlightened sages. It’s the direct, intimate, immediate experience of each of us, although it may not have been noticed.

In fact, the knowing of this unity between ‘I’ and the ‘world’, is a very familiar experience. It is known as beauty. When we are struck by the beauty of an object or landscape, all that keeps us at a distance or separate from that object dissolves and in that timeless moment, timeless because the mind is not present there, we realize our identity with the apparent object.

The experience of beauty is the dissolution of the apparent ‘objectness’ of the object and the ‘subjectness’ of our self, leaving only the seamless intimacy of experiencing.

Of course, when the mind returns it recreates the separate inside self and the separate outside object, other or world and we think and feel, as a result, that ‘I’ see the ‘landscape’. Thinking now attributes beauty to the landscape and in that moment beauty is downgraded from a revelation of the eternal nature that pervades all seeming things into a relative quality of the mind that belongs to some objects and not others.

In that moment, time and distance or ‘otherness’, which is another name for space, are created and the true experience of beauty is again veiled. When the same dissolution between ‘I’ and an apparent other is known, the very same experience is known as love.

Happiness, peace, humour and intelligence are all names that are given to the experience of this direct recognition of the seamless intimacy of experience. In fact, all the names of the mind, body and world refer ultimately to this one reality. It’s for this reason that love, happiness and peace are said to be unconditional, absolute. They depend on nothing. They are interwoven into the fabric of all experience.

Once the ‘I’ and the object, other or world have been conceptually separated from the seamless intimacy of experience, love, happiness, peace, beauty, etc., which are inherent in all experience, seem to become veiled and, as a result, the seemingly inside self embarks on a search for them in the apparently outside world.

The resolution of the search, which is known as peace, happiness or love, always involves the recognition that experience is not divided into two parts — ‘I’ and ‘other’, ‘me’ and the ‘world’ — whether or not it is actually formulated in these terms. Likewise, suffering always involves the forgetting or ignoring of this simple, primordial fact of experience.

Happiness is simply the unveiling of this ignorance. It is not a new experience. It does not come and go. It cannot be given or withdrawn. It can only appear to be forgotten and remembered or recognized. It’s like the keys under the papers. They seemed to be lost but are, in fact, always there. In the experience of peace and happiness the inside self and the outside world dissolve. In the experience of love, the one who loves and the one that is loved dissolve.

In fact, our only experience of the world and all others is made only of knowing, so we could say that in the experience of peace and happiness, the apparent otherness or outsideness of the world is dissolved in our experiential understanding that there is always only knowingness or awareness. That is peace, happiness, love and beauty.

However, it is only the mind that thinks that peace, happiness and love seem to be lost and seem to be found. Presence never loses itself.

~ From: Presence Volume II: The Intimacy of All Experience, by Rupert Spira. For more info about Rupert’s books, Click Here

Harding was born in 1909, in Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. His parents belonged to the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect notorious for its ultra-Puritanism and intolerance of other denominations and, of course, all other religions.

At 21, while studying architecture at University College, London, Harding apostatized from the Brethren much to his parent’s horror. To justify this step, he sent to the elders of the Brethren a thesis explaining that he saw the great religions as complementary rather competing, and as having, at their common core, the Beatific Vision.

From age 21, Harding was remarkably successful in leading a double life. Without knowing quite how he did it, he managed to earn a respectable living as an architect in private practice, while devoting most of his time and energy to “the discovery of What and Who he really is”, to piecing together an elaborate but credible cosmology-cum-epistemology, and increasing to work out its application to everyday life.

In fact, Harding’s crowning achievement has been to devise a toolkit of exercises or experiments for getting behind words and concepts to direct seeing into our True Nature. In all the great spiritual traditions, the true mystics — the Seers — have, hitherto, been limited to words or silence in their attempts to share their vision. No wonder they rarely succeeded.

But now at last, thanks to his toolkit, the essential vision is entirely shareable, indeed obvious and natural. It’s also revolutionary, and therefore resisted in traditional circles — decreasingly, it seems.

The first book that Harding wrote was his magnum opus, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in The Universe. He wrote this book, of 650 huge pages, over eight years to 1950. His main purpose in writing this book was to answer his two questions: ‘What am I?’ and ‘What do I amount to in the universe?’ A shorter edition and a number of other books followed from time to time throughout his long life.

It’s been widely acknowledged that the greatest aspect of Harding’s spiritual teaching work has been his devising of thirty or so sense-based workshop ‘experiments’. These ‘awareness exercises’ are designed to enable people to see or recognize Who they really are beyond outward appearances. In the 35 years prior to his death in 2007, Harding travelled to more than 20 countries across 5 continents, offering ‘Look for Yourself’, or ‘Seeing Who We Really Are’ workshops, based around these experiments.

One of the simplest and most effective of Harding’s exercises can be done just by sitting down opposite a friend. Point to your friend’s feet, then yours; to his torso, then yours; to his head, then back to where others see yours. What, on present evidence, is your finger pointing at? (Warning: it’s no good just reading about this, you have actually to carry out the experiment for yourself.)

What you see by carrying this exercise in basic attention, is what it is to be 1st-Person Singular — the noumenous No-thing that is nevertheless keenly aware of Itself as the Container or Ground of the whole display. This seeing is believing. Altogether unmystical (in the popular sense), it is a precise, total, and all-or-nothing experience admitting of no degrees — so long as it lasts.

Now your task is to go on seeing your Absence/Presence in all situations, till the seeing becomes quite natural and continuous. This is neither to lose yourself in your Emptiness nor in what fills it, but simultaneously to view the thing you are looking out at and the No-thing you are looking out of. There will be found to be no times when this two-way-attention is out of place or can safely be dispensed with.

The initial seeing into your Nature is simplicity itself: once noticed, Nothing is so obvious! But it is operative only in so far as it is practised. The results — freedom from greed and hate and fear and delusion — are assured only while the One they belong to isn’t overlooked.

I’ll let Harding himself conclude this all too brief overview. In his Religions of the World: A handbook for the open-minded. he writes:

“Arrived at his goal, the truly Awakened one is, in fact, not Christian in any ordinary sense. He has broken loose from his parent tradition and become universal, above all distinctions whatever. But on his way there he has had a hard time of it. It’s no easy task to reconcile his direct vision with his inherited faith.

His intuition of the One, his dawning identification with the One, his clear sight of that One as the Light or Emptiness within, his resulting freedom from all desire and emotion and even love for man or God, his inability to meditate in the prescribed fashion (visualising, for instance, the Passion of Christ), or to pray, or to think good thoughts, or even to think at all — these sure evidences of his Enlightenment must at first seem to him grave spiritual defects.

To his spiritual counsellors or former co-religionists they may seem downright sinful. All the same, it is his direct experience, his original contact with the Real — ignored by the majority, condemned by the orthodox — which is the heart of this religion, as of all other religions. It is what makes Christianity true.

Because she gets to the Root, becomes that nourishing Root, she becomes also the whole tree with all its leaves and fruits. Ultimately, the (Radical), Mystic or Realised Christian has no preferences, no personal opinions. She doesn’t pick and choose among the innumerable sects and doctrines of Christianity.

Because she rests in their common Source, she is free of it all, and it is all very good indeed.”

~ For more info on Douglas Harding and current activities of the Headless Way, check out: www.headless.org. You can also try out many of Harding’s ‘experiments’ from links on the home page. This is an extensive resource and highly recommended. Ed.

A marvel!
See how existence becomes manifest in non-existence!
How the in-time holds firm alongside Him whose attribute is eternal!

~ Ibn Ata’ Illah (1250 – 1309), From: Ibn ‘Ata’ Illah: The Book of Wisdom / Kwaja Abdullah Ansari: Intimate Conversations. Trans. Victor Danner & Wheeler Thackston

The book is entitled: The Silence of the Mind and is the first in a tetralogy (1 of 4) to be published by Obooks. The other titles out in 2012 will be: The Wondrous Journey into the Depth of Our Being, Life is Eternal Newness and I Am Boundlessness.

Like, I Am That, this rare work has been made available to readers throughout the English-speaking world through a perceptive and awakened translator — in this case, Petrica Verdes. For the past few years, Verdes has been practicing meditation and living in various meditation communes in Italy, Germany and the UK. Translating Ilie Cioara’s work has been for him a labour of love and a process of spiritual growth.

Verdes said: “In 2002, I came across one of Ilie Cioara’s books in a bookshop, and I wrote the publisher straight away, asking if they could pass me the address of the author. The book just mesmerized me, I felt an energy around the text and I used to meditate with it and carry it with me.

We just “see” something and understand it profoundly, intuitively, without needing to filter any knowledge through the mind. This practice has become part of my life. It is a great gift to understand that truth is very simple. Applying it is more difficult, but this apparent difficulty is easily overcome with a little persistence and thirst for the divine.”

Ilie (rhymes with lily) is unique in a way, in the sense that he lived in almost complete isolation in Romania. Early in his life, he was hunted by the secret police and finally gaoled for six years because he did not support the communist regime. He seemed to be just an ordinary man, with a deep longing for the divine, living in very adverse circumstances. He belonged to no tradition of enlightenment, he wasn’t part of a lineage, he had no master, he never travelled to India.

Originally a Christian mystic, he repeated a mantra-like prayer frequently each day for over 20 years. One day, he felt an intuitive impulse to drop the mantra, and just practice ’silence of the mind’, by listening to the noises on the street etc, in the now. After following this practice for a few years, one morning, as he was waking up from his sleep, ‘he’ suddenly experienced what some have called, ‘liberation’ or ‘enlightenment’.

Until the age of 55, when Ilie awakened spiritually, he hadn’t written a single page, and never tried to be a teacher. Because he lived in almost complete isolation, his words have a freshness and a direct simplicity, devoid of any spiritual jargon. Ilie felt the impulse to share his experience and insights using short verses which could give the reader a taste of no-mind. The verses were followed by prose explanations (see example below).

Most of these writings had to be hidden in the apartment of a friend, until 1990, when the iron curtain fell, so as not to be confiscated by the communist authorities. They describe the practice of ‘Self-knowing’ using all-encompassing Attention. Like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti etc, his is a simple message of discovering our inner divine nature through the silence of the mind.

~ Resourced by Pete from: The Silence of the Mind blog, Non-Duality Magazine and Yogi Times

~ Book details: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara. Trans. Petrica Verdes. Softcover: 145 pp. Obooks, John Hunt (Oct, 2011) ISBN:10: 1846948290 & 13: 978-1846948299

~ You can get good used copies Here

John Sherman describes his former self as ‘a two-bit hustler in the sixties who morphed into a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary bank robber and bomber. After being captured and breaking out twice, and several years on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, he was caught and spent the next eighteen and a half years in a federal prison.

Three years before his release, John stumbled on a little-known Eastern spiritual teaching, and awakened to reality. After his release, John met and married Carla and together they ’stumbled’ upon the actual secret of eternal peace and joy, and are now happily sharing this with others. When encouraging others, John says …

“I want to suggest something to you that you can do for yourself that works. I know it works because it worked for me, and it worked for Carla, my wife, and it has worked for a growing number of people around the world now; people who have, maybe even despite their better judgment, actually tried to do what I suggest.

I do have a theory as to why it works, but my certainty that it works comes from my own experience, rather than from a theoretical understanding, and the ‘why’ of it is actually entirely beside the point. So here it is, the simple act of inward looking that snuffs out the fear of life.

Step 1: Learn to Move the Beam of Your Attention at Will

To begin, just relax for a moment, and notice the obvious fact that you have the power to move your attention at will. As you read this, move your attention away from the text for a moment, and direct it instead to the feel of your underlying nature. If you’ll try, with your whole heart, to bring the beam of your attention into direct contact with the reality of your true nature, you will snuff out the fear of life, which is the first cause of all human misery.

I call this action looking at yourself. If you’ll just try to look at yourself with the eye of attention, the ‘fear disease’ will disappear, and with it the perception of your life-experience as a problem to be solved, a threat to be destroyed. It’s that simple.

Notice the feel of your chest and belly expanding and contracting, and then bring attention back here to this page. Do that a couple of times so that you become familiar with what I mean by ‘moving the beam of your attention at will.’

That action of moving attention at will, as you just did, is all that’s needed to accomplish what I’m asking you to do. The more you practice this simple act, the more you’ll become familiar with how it feels to do it. And the more familiar you become with the feel of it, the more skillful and direct you’ll be in the effort to move the beam of attention where it must go.

Step 2: Turn the Beam of Your Attention Inward

Use that skill to actually turn the beam of attention inward, trying to make direct, unmediated contact with the reality of your own nature, by which I mean you, just plain and simple you. You know What you are, and you will surely recognize yourself when you see yourself in this way. It really is that simple. Repeat this as often as it occurs to you to do so.

There’s no step three.

A Few Tips About Where to Look

The act of inward looking may be simple, but the actual doing of it can seem anything but easy. But consider this: the feel of you is the only thing that is always here. All else — thought, belief, understanding, things seen and heard and felt, emotions, pain, pleasure — literally all else comes and goes.

So, looking for you is looking only for what is always here. Anything that is newly arrived, no matter how wonderful it may be, cannot be you. Likewise, anything that has been here and left, even if it might return, cannot be you.

Furthermore, you’re the plain and unmoving field in which all else comes and goes. You have nothing to give to you or take away from you and you are, therefore, profoundly uninteresting to the mind’s eye, which has no purpose other than to keep vigilant, to stay on the lookout for things to grasp, things to reject and destroy, and things that are safe to ignore in a forest of bright, shiny, ever-moving, fantastically fascinating parade of phenomena.

The fear of life is a kind of auto-immune disease. Its only function, insane as it may be, is to keep you safe from your own life, and this mission demands ceaseless attention to incoming phenomena. Because of this, its natural orientation is ever outward.
You, on the other hand, are wholly and perfectly inward.”

~ To read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ For more info on John’s work, visit his website

~ You can also download John’s Free eBook — Look At Yourself.

If any reaction of the mind surfaced, it disappeared immediately in contact with the sparkle of impersonal Attention. A state of quiet and all-encompassing joy characterized me in all circumstances, whether pleasant or painful. My behavior was that of a simple witness, perfectly aware of what was happening around me, without affecting my all-encompassing state of peace.

The State of the Sublime is, of course, difficult to describe, but not impossible to experience by someone who authentically practices awareness. In order to communicate it, a simple and direct language is used, which is not filtered through reason, because the “ego”, with its subjective perception, is no longer there. To put it this way: the psychological emptiness is the one who lives the present moment, expresses this encounter into words and still remains present and available to the next moment.

As a result of this direct encounter with the moment, always new and renewing itself, I felt the need, initiated and fueled by intuitive impulses, to express “Self- knowing” using verse. It was a natural thing to do. In few words I could encompass and communicate the essence of the experience. In the first year I wrote 300 poems. Later on, their number reached 1000, of which 600 are accompanied by prose explanations, such as the ones in this book.

I would also like to describe a few effects which, as a result of becoming aware of the reactions of my own thinking process, have completely disappeared, without any other intervention from my mind.

After experiencing this phenomenon, I felt like a broken vessel, from which the following started to disappear: my interest in astral journeying, my religious beliefs, my egoism, desires, fear, envy, pride etc. My awareness remained open all the time, offering me the possibility to pass from the finite dimension into Infinity.

After encountering this extraordinary phenomenon^ with the help of a global perspective I understood the whole human tragedy, caused by the misinterpretation of life in its constant mobility and newness from one moment to another.

Faced with the freshness and the aliveness of life, each individual — according to his own conditioning, as a result of wrong education — behaves completely inappropriately, because the structure of the mind cannot in any way comprehend arid embrace the beauty of life. The shadow of the past is actually a memory pattern, clouding and distorting the reality of the present moment.

Life cannot be encountered and understood objectively, unless we are in a state of complete freedom and serenity of the mind. Life is newness, moment by moment, and it demands, even forces us to encounter it with a new mind, with a new brain and with new brain cells, which have not been used previously.

It is a well-known fact: scientists claim that man, during the whole span of his life, uses no more than 10-15% of his brain cells and memory potential. As you can see, our psychological possibilities are almost unlimited.

After these explanations, it will be easier to understand the process of our own conditioning, as well as the phenomenon of breaking the shell of the “ego”.

As I had shown previously, life demands that we encounter it directly, without any memory baggage. How do we lose the memory baggage? It is all very simple! Here is how:

We encounter the movement of the mind with the flame of total Attention — requested by the aliveness of life in its continuous flow. Without the light and serenity provided by Attention, nothing can be understood in a real way. In the light of Attention, any reaction of the mind (thought, image, fear, desire) — which functions chaotically, obsessively and dominates us — is instantly dissolved.

In the psychological void that follows, a new mind appears, expanding into Infinity, as a state of Pure Consciousness, pure understanding as well as transformative action. This simple state of “being” is in itself an action in which the entity who performs the action doesn’t exist anymore. The old man, conditioned by his behavioral patterns, loses his authority as the chaotic, uncontrollable reactions dissolve — energies which sustain and fuel the “ego”.

Only in this way, by a simple encounter with the reactions of the mind and its subsequent demise, the barrier of the “ego” is broken. Through a momentary opening, our real being is revealed, transforming and healing us. This all-encompassing Attention, without any purpose, is the Sacred itself in action.

There is, in fact, another type of attention directed by will, which behaves subjectively by limiting itself to one object. By its very nature, this type of attention defines itself as lack of attention.

Beware, nevertheless, not to make a mere theory of this simple meeting with yourself! Simply becoming aware of “what is”, of what we encounter, brought about by the flow of life, without having any purpose or expectations, places us in a state of simply “being”, which transforms us by itself. That is all there is to it.

~ From: The Silence of the Mind, by Ilie Cioara pp 131-134

~ Hung-chih Cheng-chueh (1091 – 1157)

“All that a guru can tell you is: ‘My dear Sir (or Madam), you are quite mistaken about yourself. You are not the person you take yourself to be.’” ~ Sri Nisargaddatta Maharaj

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” ~ James Joyce

“Never confuse a single mistake with a final mistake.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There are only two mistakes one can make in regard to the road to Truth: not starting, and, not going all the way.” ~ Adyashanti

These four camps are: 1) mainstream theist religion (with its sub-camps: Christianity, Judaism and Islam — each of which is further split into different denominations); 2) an amorphous New Age movement; 3) scientific/rationalist secularism; and 4) postmodernism (in both its secular and quasi-spiritual forms).

Each ideological camp possesses certain virtues and certain limitations.

So … which of these four basic ideological camps am I favorably biased toward? All and none. I see advantages and disadvantages to each position. I want to completely affirm what is positive about each of these camps, but, because of their serious limitations, I prefer a way beyond all of them — the Perennial Philosophy / Psychology or Primordial Tradition.

This is that esoteric or mystical way of enlightened adepts, found within all the sacred traditions, who live and teach from the context of authentic God-Realization. I want to celebrate and proclaim what these greatest sages and saints have discovered and so beautifully exemplified. We can be enormously enriched by their virtuous life-examples and inspiring wisdom-teachings, which comprise the real gold shining in a glitz-darkened world.

Anyone who resonates with the mystic Traditionalist / Perennialist view will not be enamored of scientism (scientific reductionist materialism), though a mystic-traditionalist will appreciate the scientific method and careful thinking. Nor will a mystic go along completely with the postmodernists, though appreciative of their Zen-like sense of “indeterminancy,” “non-knowing,” emptiness and “this-ness” and deconstructive stance toward phenomena, dogmas and institutions.

Nor will a mystic be enthused by non-mystical, institutionalized religions, though appreciative of their many exceedingly positive contributions for the individual and the commonweal. Nor will a mystic be impressed by New Agers who invent their own religions or sects based on a few “peak / peek” experiences, fancy thinking and garish gimmickry, though a mystic will appreciate the new, open attitude that New Age circles have catalyzed in our society.

Mystic-traditionalists cherish excellence and find themselves being critical of mediocrity, especially in the fields of psychology and spirituality, where mediocrity often runs amok. A mystic clearly sees the potential in each and every person for so much joy, fulfillment and beatitude, and yet so much of this potential goes unrealized, especially when people explore unfruitful or limited psychological and religious paths.

Though I align with the Traditionalist camp of the Perennial Wisdom, like the mystics in whose footsteps I endeavor to follow, I also tend to be a pragmatist. My attitude: whatever truly works or gets results in wholeness / holiness, then use it. This might consist in devotional surrender to the Beloved, selfless service to one’s community, detached mindfulness or witnessing of the flow of experience, formless contemplation, penetrating self-enquiry (“Who Am I?”), radical stillness / relaxation, group chanting, vision quests in nature, pilgrimage to sacred sites, or “letting go, letting God.”

It seems to me that the world’s religious traditions must be evaluated, not in terms of their membership numbers — it would be better to use percentages of authentically holy people, if that could ever reliably be determined — nor the lavishness of their pageantry and pomp, nor the impressiveness of their architecture and artwork, nor the cleverness of their theological or philosophical schemas. Rather, the traditions need to be evaluated on how effectively they free people from the trap of egotism and liberate them into godliness.

All else, to my mind, is ultimately irrelevant.

~ by Timothy Conway, Ph.D. (Excerpted from his book: Our Religions’ Future, Ch.1: Biases & Basic Issues in Spirituality, 2006.),

~ To read Tim’s unabridged paper on the West’s Four Ideologies and the Perennial Wisdom Tradition, >>> Click Here