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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
22-Feb-2004-14:16:40 |
| Subject: |
The "sin against the Holy Ghost" |
I noticed nobody's been saying much about enlightenment on the Enlightenment Corner lately, so I thought I'd throw out an interesting quote for discussion. I'm posting the source article below, because it's interesting in its own right, but I was more interested in the quote, by Joseph Campbell:
"The wicked thing about both the little and the great 'collective faiths', prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known.
"They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the 'error of the found truth,' or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
"They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and, therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society."
Personally, I think this insight is about as Right On as spiritual writing gets, and addresses THE fundamental problem with basing a religion or spiritual path on the revelations of a charismatic teacher. That is, the *followers* of these charismatic teachers have a tendency to create dogma, organizations, and social structures that seem to actively *prevent* subsequent generations of followers from having the very revelations that the founding teacher had.
We certainly see this in established religions. Christ had revelations, but heaven help you if, as a mere follower not blessed as a result of nepotism (not being the Son Of God and all that), *you* start having similar revelations. St. John of the Cross and other mystical saints narrowly escaped becoming far-too-involved participants in a spiritual weenie roast for daring to write about such revelations.
Even here at Ramalila we've seen the mini-wars erupt when someone reports that so-and-so is "experiencing samadhi" or "enlightened" and the fundamentalists explode in a torrent of words to point out the Ramasez Reasons why this isn't likely, and that these people are Just Ordinary Crazies. In Campbell's words, "they set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief."
It's not a bad thing per se, this trend to dogmatize the teachings of great beings in such a way as to eventually render them impotent and ineffective. It just happens, like shit. :-) But it seems to me, as a student of comparative religions and comparative spirituality, that it might be a good trend to be *aware* of if one is interested in *preserving* the teachings of one of these great beings.
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