Essay: Ashes to ashes

ASHES TO ASHES (Via Revelation)

‘Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, while strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life.'

If we took all the words Jesus spoke, from the gospel which quotes him the most, there would be barely enough to warrant a thin booklet - but in these would be a philosophy of mind-shattering, global importance. Much of what he said was so unacceptable as to be offensive to his peers, who couldn't wait to get rid of him. Judging by the fewness of these quotations, it would appear that he had little to say, but actually, most of what he uttered ended up either in the dusty archives of the Vatican or on the bonfires of the early priesthood, considered inappropriate for common consumption. Today it would still be considered so, and is still as earth-quakingly consequential as to pose a threat to the whole of Western establishment. Nothing is of greater menace to those in our corridors of power than true Christianity.

Jesus said some incongruous, unpalatable things during the few years of his ministry, the logic of which if followed through would alter not only the aims of our society, but our whole way of living. When he threw the money-lenders and merchants out of the temple, he upset more than just their moneybags and apple-carts: our bodies, he says, are also the temple of God, in-which there is no place for the like of those. One of those incongruous things, said when a would-be follower sort leave first to bury his father, was "Let the dead bury the dead". We tend to gloss over or ignore altogether the more perplexing or unpalatable aspects of his teaching; however, if we edit out (even further) all the disagreeable bits, we would probably end up with not half what he has to say - what remains could no longer be Christianity. Either we accept his philosophy in totality, or not at all - we cannot have it both ways; to ignore or even modify chunks of it because they do not suit our lifestyle, is to dump Christianity in the trash can.

However ignored Jesus may have been, flippant he never was, and we can be sure there was a wealth of meaning in that unseemly statement. Do not grief for the dead, he tells us, for they at least have found release from this sick system. Weep rather for the living, still bound, struggling within. The real dead (and none so blind) are those who refuse to see the everlasting Life about us, and will not believe that death is but a portal to a new life. The vast sums of money poured into the dying industry are beyond conception. We some of us spend almost as much on sending off our dead as we ever did on their lives. The more pompous the person the more lavish is his funeral, and the greater is the concealed glee of all those who undertake by way of business those ‘final arrangements'. Dying is indeed very Big Business, and where big business is, Love is certainly not!

Our ceremonial procedures for the dead are all part of the religious mystique promoted by the Church, and they help keep the cogs of the Mammon machine well oiled. They really belong to that loveless order that will not admit the continuity of life past the immediate grave - the ‘make hay today, for tomorrow we die' cult, who believe in no justice or reality beyond that they can carve out for themselves here and now. It is the same spiritless ritual, prevalent in Christ's day, that has continued through the ages to ours, and it can find no place or purpose in the Living Kingdom of his philosophy. Reincarnation and Karmic Law were realities to the Nazarene, and in denying any ‘afterlife' to all but its faithful, the Church rejects completely the fundamental basis of Christianity. They are indeed ‘the dead burying the dead'.

"I am the way, the truth and the life" said the Nazarene. Christ was not the inventor of an early form of Communism. Nothing was further from his mind than the creation of yet another ‘ism' or indeed another religious revival. Neither was he an anarchist: his philosophy was not the negation of law and order. His purpose was to illuminate the unreality, the web of illusion we have woven into our lives, to reveal to us the real nature and mode of life, and our blatant rejection of the authentic law and order of Creation.

He attempted to dispel our seemingly eternal ignorance and show us by his own example, our true nature - our real identity and role in life. His philosophy was ‘new wine' - not to be adopted and adapted by the prevailing (but dead) social and religious orders, and thus decanted into ‘old bottles' - Jewish, Roman or otherwise. It required a brand new order with a completely new outlook and set of rules: a ‘new bottle'. To embrace his truth, society would have to undergo major reconstruction - like us, it must be ‘reborn'. Of cause it was not reborn - the social environment ever since has never been conducive to his ‘new wine', and from the beginning that wine was tainted and spoiled.

Each successive political or religious institution, even those originally based in all sincerity upon truth, quickly defaults, degenerates and decays into corruption and strife when clear sight of that truth is lost. When the visionary ceases to vision, delusion and chaos will once again seep into the minds and motions of all who follow. In this way begins all exoteric religious and political institution. The discerning eye of the councillor closes, and we again seek refuge in the deceptive security of darkness, rather than the apparent insecurity of the eternal, loving light. His enlightened words become just repetitive chants, without positive meaning or application in our lives, and once again we will blunder blindly along any obscure, convenient path, leading or being led in every kind of devious perversion, for the most part quite unaware of our error and plight. Who of us would disagree that the world is living in just such a nightmare of its own conjuring?

So where now in this Godless society can Love be found? The answer lies not so much in where it can, as where it cannot be found. It is in our self-centred viewpoints and vanities where Love is lost, and in the blind alleys of our egotistical enterprises that we must cease our searching. It cannot thrive in our self-serving, big-business empires, and where it may be fleetingly glimpsed, it survives briefly in spite of them. It cannot be encompassed or rationed by any political or religious dogma, but prevails only where these do not. Therefore if we wish seriously to rediscover it, we must withdraw every effort and every penny from these impediments to its flow, and redirect them to where they are dearly needed.

All the chants and prayers in the world, no matter how precisely or devoutly we may utter the words, are just meaningless hocus-pocus which can never help us see or accept the reality of the Kingdom. There was ever only one straight and true path to enlightened freedom through all our mistaken meandering. It lies not in the exclusive domain of any limited religious or political organ, but only in those thoughts and actions that encourage the free interplay and exchange of Love through each and every one of us. The only valid contributions to Christianity any of us can make, are those spent in full recognition of the equality and interdependence of all manifest life. There is but one Universal Law, one infinite authority, and one Kingdom in-which we each of us from the smallest atom to the most complex organism, must play our vital part.

Any deposit of civilisation can happily endure, not by vainglory, wealth, government by laws and orders nor balance of military power, but only by Love - for all peoples and all creatures alike. The realistic way to secure meaningful peace, and realistic progress through our substantial ingenuity, is when the very least of us can equally share in the benefits from our efforts ... as Jesus puts it, "when the lowest is lifted up and the highest made low." Ultimately, every involvement in our lives must be one of giving, and if Mankind is to survive in this threatened world, the time must inevitably come when every action we perform is from love. It is the way of Life itself, the method and motion of the Universe - God in action.

So how on earth, we may ask, do we extricate ourselves from this unholy mess - this dire dilemma of our own making? Is the way back lost to us forever, or can we re-enter the Kingdom and return to our forfeited Eden? To enable us to do this, we must first be prepared (as Jesus puts it) to recognise and remove the ‘motes that are in our eyes' - those preconceptions and prejudices which prevent us from recognising the truth about ourselves; for only when those obstacles are identified and removed, will we be able to see the way forward. All roads lead to Buddha (enlightenment), we hear, and certainly if one views life from within any philosophical background, one can approach truth from that point. But Jesus warns us: "Be ye not called Rabbi, for one is your Master, even Christ. And call no man your father upon earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."

The hierarchy and dogma of any ideological order are an impediment to the flow of Love, obstructing our vision of reality and preventing our direct perception of the Creator. Our attempt to approach God via the medium of such agencies, serves only to secure their comfortable seats within their fallacious organisations. It ensures for them our abiding fealty and support to their cause, and (much to their satisfaction) our continual referral to them in all our inward searching. Therefore we can call no man ‘master' or ‘father' - neither King nor Councillor, Pope nor Priest, for that in itself is a denial of the authority and paternity of the One Eternal God, the father of all!

While from a window of any church or temple one may perceive the Universal Reality, unfortunately the many ‘paths to enlightenment' trodden by billions of earnest disciples, by nature of their multiviousness are deceptive and treacherous. Whichever dogmatic route we trustingly choose to our redemption, it has two directions in which we may tread. One will point the way of our release from the complexity of erroneous involvement, to the clarity and simplicity of reality; and the other lead us backward, burying us deeper in perpetual posturing and karmic retribution. Broad indeed is the way to destruction.

We are not here considering just another concept, and the world is not in need of just another cause. We do not need to unite again under yet another new banner - rather we need to forget the ill-conceived and unhealthy ideologies we already have. Where your image of God and mine, your religion and mine, your politic and mine can find no agreement, then neither can be proven true, and no amount of logic or defensive posturing can make them so. It is only when we stop burdening ourselves with such ideologies and discriminatory yokes, that we will see the real face of the Creator. This is not just one more personal opinion - another arbitrary point of persuasion to be accepted or rejected in the light of one's own personal belief. It is a direct observation - a revelation of naked fact, testified to by the greatest seers throughout all ages in history. It is demonstrable by any of us who would take the trouble to open our eyes and minds, look beyond our preconceptions and acknowledge the reality sitting solidly before us.

Here, this moment of this life on Eden, is the focus of the dynamic Cause and Motion, and these very bodies - yours and mine, are the seat, the ‘temple', and the implement of its accomplishment. It is through these finite and fallible instruments, but for our misconceptions and wilful disbelief, that the justice and unfoldment of Creation are manifested. The injustice so far evident in our affairs is owed entirely to our personal and collective inability to comprehend our own divine origin and nature, and our failure to carry this reality through into our every thought and act. The result of this is readily seen in the conflict and confusion that plagues us.

What we cannot seem to lodge in our primitive minds is that there is a purpose being enacted in the heavens about us that has nothing to do with our pious bowing and hymn-singing; and nothing either to do with our verbal and physical clubbing of each other into political or religious submission. There is a Big Universe out there, with a Big Purpose behind it, creating bigger and better cultures than any of our miserly achievements so far, with which we in our pretentious societies are out of step. While we continue in our interminable charades of pompous pageantry, our eternal peek-a-boo in paradise, the Kingdom cries out for recognition from the mouth of every one of its needlessly suffering creatures.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the thought is also father of the deed. Everything we do, say, write and even think is an act of creation, and we create in a world which continually accepts the observed commonplace, fact or fiction, as the normal. That ‘normal' then becomes the accepted behaviour, and every disgusting, immoral or sadistic scene we read about or watch on our televisions (and now even in innocuous ‘games' via our computer monitors) becomes unconsciously the accepted daily reality. To dwell upon violence is to be potentially violent, and the products of our fertile imaginations today become the grotesquely real stuff of news updates tomorrow. As we can appreciate, it is not enough merely to clean up our streets - the violence begins in our minds, and to rid our lives of it, we must root it out of our thoughts and daily activities.

We are the most vital creative agency on earth - the vanguard; but yet a most self-willed, self-deceiving and rebellious one at that. At the mere mention of a greater order or higher authority in our lives, we must shuffle off into a corner and form an organisation of our very own. We cannot countenance any Law and Order that is beyond our own making or apparent control, and so we are perpetually creating laws and orders of our own. We just will not be part of anyone else's grand scheme - and yet we keep pretending we are, every time we kneel or say a prayer. The further we deviate from the harmonious Universal pattern, the more counterproductive to our welfare and coexistence our daily endeavours become. Every step we take to determine our own limited security and comfort without consideration for the balanced order of Creation, moves us further from the all-embracing support and sustenance of the Creator. All our effort, all our striving to enlarge upon this greater Order, to create our own separate, exclusive unities and to ‘better' our own personal positions in it, merely begets imbalance and discord between us, our neighbours, and ultimately our environment.

We have only to open our eyes to see that there is nothing more we need contribute in order to achieve a greater harmony, a more lasting unity or a more complete perfection. All this exists already - if we would simply let it be. If for once and all, we would admit to the evidence of our senses of the balance and harmony in Creation, and allow that we must inevitably be part of this greater order, the totality of which being beyond our limited conception or comprehension - then from that very moment the grip of our delusions and the shackles of our restrictive societies would begin to fall away. From that very moment, hope would spring anew for the future of all life on Earth - Eden would once again be glimpsed. The Nazarene's task was to break these yokes, shatter our illusions and reveal to us our natural, naked selves beneath our makeup and thin but terrible daily disguises. It was to tear off the badges and regalia that set us apart from each other and obscure our real identity. This way he hoped to release us from our self-imposed mental bondage, shake off the shackles of our counterproductive live styles and reveal in us in all its simple splendour, the manifest soul of Creation.

Life, to Jesus, is not a ladder to be climbed, clinging desperately to each slippery rung. Nor is it a pyramid of success we must attempt to be atop. To be complete, we have no need to ‘succeed', unless that success is measured in terms of helping each other achieve greater fulfilment. To him, life is a plateau on which we all may live happily and equally, our contentment coming from knowing ourselves for what we are: living manifestations of Love, and if we seriously wish to find this plateau and return to our lost paradise where ‘the lion will lie down with the lamb', we must take down our parochial flags and contract out of our contrived, restrictive allegiances. Acknowledging our greater duty to the Kingdom and the Brotherhood of all, we must cease our insane killing of each other for whatever supposed ‘worthy' reason. We must dissemble our weaponry, redirect our energies from making artefacts of war, to those implements of peace (turn our ‘swords into ploughshares') and cultivate an economic environment conducive to the common good of all in this and future lives. Thus will we all finally enjoy lasting, realistic progress and profit.

Tom Manson.

(Read The yoga of Christ Whereislove)

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