Through language, we rub on each other's self! In this friction we polish our being.
The Separation between State and Religion
In time we will realize that Democracy is the entitlement of individuals to every right that was in its times alloted to kings. The right to speak and decide, to be treated with decency, to serve and be served by people in a State of “love” that is, to serve with one’s work for the development of ‘life’. To belong to the Kingdom of Human Beings without racial, national, social or academic separations. To love and be loved. To die at the service of the whole and be honored in one’s death, for one’s life and work was legitimately valued. To be graceful and grateful. To have the pride and the humility of being One with the Universe, One with every realm of Existence, One with every living and deceased soul. To treat with dignity and be treated with dignity for One is dignified together with All others and Life itself. To walk the path of compassion, not in the sorrow of guilt but in the pride of being. To take responsability for one’s mistakes and sufferings and stand up again and again like a hero and a heroine and face the struggle that is put at one’s feet and in one’s hands. Millions of people, millions and millions of people might take many generations to realize the consciousness of our humaneness but there is no other dignified path for the human being.
The “work” as I conceive it is psychological and political. Psychology is the connection between the different dimensions within one’s self and Politics is the actualization of that consciousness in our practical lives. Religion is the ceremony that binds the connectedness between the individual and the Universe. The separation between religion, politics and science, the arts and sports is, in the sphere of the social, the reflection of the schizophrenia within the individual and the masses. The dialogue between individuality and the "human" belongs to consciousness. The tendency to develop cults resides in the shortcomings we’are finding in life as it is structured today. “Life” has become the private property of a few priviledged who cannot profit from it because as soon as it is appropriated it stops to be “life” or “life-giving”.
We are all the victims of our own invention and each one is called upon to find solutions. The only problem is believing our selves incapable of finding them. We are now free to use all Systems of knowledge objectively, sharing them without imposing our will on each other. To become objective about our lives means to understand that the institutions that govern its experience are critically important. That we are one with the governments, one with the religious activities that mark its pace, that the arena’s in which we move our bodies and the laboratories in which we explore our possibilities are ALL part and parcel of our own personal responsibility. That WE ARE ONE WITH EACH OTHER AND EVERYTHING AROUND US and acknowledge for ourselves a bond of love in conscious responsibility. That we human beings know ourselves part of each other and are willing and able to act on our behalf for the benefit of each and every individual. That we no longer allow governments, industries, universities or any other institution to run along unchecked by the objective principles of humaneness. That we do not allow gurus to abuse their power or governors to steal the taxes and use them to their personal advantage in detriment of the whole. That we do not allow abuse from anyone anywhere because life is too beautiful to do so and that we are willing to stop the rampant crime with the necessary compassion Conscious knowledge is every individual's right. Conscious action is every individual's duty.
Showing posts with label Elena: Martin Luther and cult life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elena: Martin Luther and cult life. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 March 2010
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In sum, Foucault’s recuperation of Hellenistic ethics clarifies both the general conception of ethical practice and some of the substantive ethical and psychological issues at stake in Nietzsche’s middle works. For our purposes, the significance of Foucault’s resurrection of the Hellenistic and Roman practices of self‐cultivation lies in the way he clears several obstacles that stand in the path of comprehending Nietzsche’s own concern with these practices. In the first place, Foucault demonstrates the extent to which the reception of Hellenistic self‐cultivation has been marred by Christian polemics against self‐love, which its early theologians consider the besetting sin of all paganism. These polemics, Foucault shows, have cast a long shadow over every attempt to recover a positive notion of the work of the self on itself. In other words, one of the great merits of Foucault’s excavation of the Hellenistic practices of the self lies in the way it frees the reception of this tradition from the incrustations of Christian polemics. He demonstrates that Christianity wrongly interprets Hellenistic self‐cultivation as closely connected, either historically or analytically, with a “conceited ontology” that gives license to various brands of hyper‐individualism.13 Foucault’s interpretation of Hellenistic self‐cultivation sets it apart from individualism understood either as a solipsistic withdrawal into the private sphere, a crude exaltation of singularity, or, as indeed Augustine saw it, an inflamed self‐love that blossoms into a love of power over others.14 According to Foucault, an intense labour of the self on itself can, as it did with the Stoics, fuse with fulfilling one’s obligations to humankind, to one’s fellow citizens and to a denunciation of social withdrawal.15 Once it emerges from the shadows of Christianity, he argues, the Hellenistic tradition can be rightfully seen as a rich vein of philosophical therapy that takes as its starting point a conception of the subject as a series of reflexive spiritual and material exercises. We can then recover the remnants of a philosophical therapy, “a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas and procedures”, focussed on analyzing how the self can work on itself in such a way that it does not rage vengefully either against the mortal losses it suffers or against those who brim with such vengefulness. It follows that if Nietzsche anchors his middle works in the Stoic tradition’s intensification and valorisation of the practices of the care of the self then his ethical project must also be sundered from any necessary connections with the chain of synonyms that Augustine associates with this tradition: perverse self‐love, love of domination, apostasy from God and the sin of pride.17 If this can be established then it is also plausible that those critics who equate Nietzsche’s ideal of self‐cultivation with narcissistic self‐ involvement and/or grandiose exaltation of the self over others, merely reprise Christianity’s moral and hermeneutic prejudices against the Hellenistic arts of living.
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I believe that most Fellowship members are, like myself, coming from a religious tradition that thinks of God as an entity outside of one’s self and of the human being as its helpless subject, at the “feet of his mercy”. In other words, most come from a Christian tradition.
If we look at Martin Luther, it concisely defines the “attitude” most members had been programmed with whether they were protestants or Catholics: (Coming from Colombia I had been raised in a very Catholic tradition that was essentially the same as the one presented in these texts from Martin Luther):
Luther came to understand justification as entirely the work of God. This teaching by Luther was clearly expressed in his 1525 publication On the Bondage of the Will, which was written in response to On Free Will by Desiderius Erasmus (1524). Luther based his position on Predestination on St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians 2:8-10. Against the teaching of his day that the righteous acts of believers are performed in cooperation with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians (rather than infused into them) through faith.[39] “That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law,” he wrote. “Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ.”[40] Faith, for Luther, was a gift from God. He explained his concept of “justification” in the Smalcald Articles:
The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24–25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us … Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).[41]
There is no difference between this paragraph and what is actually practiced in the Fellowship Cult only that Jesus is replaced by Robert Burton, the guru. The attitude and practices members have towards the guru carry exactly the same weight that this text holds towards God or the Messiah. Salvation or redemption is in practice translated into “awakening and consciousness” and faith has been supplanted by verification in the discourse but has assumed the character of absolute submission through blind faith.
This “belief” is present in how the “priest” is perceived. Through the priest and therefore the guru who has come to replace him, the “sins”, “our” sins are taken away! “Taken away” as if by magic by his sole presence. This sets off the hierachical structure of spiritual and physical life in cults.
The guru, as the representative of God or in modern terminology: “consciousness” has the same capacity or is at least endowed with it by the followers or lambs, the sheep: The innocent wolves in sheep clothing that the guru must protect and lead to a new land, (for the members perceive themselves and act as both sheep under the guidance and mercy of the guru) and wolves who are making supra-human efforts to reach “salvation”, “consciousness”, “awakening”.
“All have sinned”!
Have we all sinned? Did it matter whether we called it sin or something else? Children do not perceive them selves as sinners. The idea of sin is taught to us, implanted in us. People probably adopt the role of goody-goodys (not sinners) or baddy-baddies (sinners) in life early in high school according to how they perceive their parents are in relation to their particular society. This role people adopt carries out throughout their whole life in very precise and determining ways.
Here is the rock on which all cults are built including that of Catholicism and Protestantism. We have to believe!
Against the teaching of his day, that the righteous acts of believers are performed in cooperation with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians (rather than infused into them) through faith.[39] “That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law,” he wrote. “Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ.”[40] Faith, for Luther, was a gift from God. He explained his concept of “justification” in the Smalcald Articles
In contrast with these philosophy, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way presents the idea of self-remembering as the key to the development of consciousness. The practice of self-remembering is said to be one in which the individual is able to hold himself aware of his own self at all times and doesn’t allow the external world to “seduce” him out of his own presence through identification, which is the main obstacle to “awakening”, followed by the expression of negative emotions, imagination, lying, inner considering and unnecessary talk.
We wouldn’t need to go too far to understand that negative emotions, imagination, lying, inner considering and unnecessary talk correspond to what in other traditions is understood as our “sins”.
The interesting thing is that while traditional religions take the backbone on which an individual can rest to “work” on his self away by separating man from God and connecting them through FAITH, the Fourth Way or any way that stands on man’s capacity to deal with his “obstacles” gives back the AUTHORITY man has over his own self and with that authority, the CAPACITY to achieve “grace”, “redemption” and “consciousness” or “salvation”. Man in such “ways” is conceived as “master” of his destiny!