The Western intellectual tradition, beginning around the Enlightenment, actively repressed any higher levels of its own spiritual intelligence. Historically, with the rise of modernity, the mythic God was thoroughly abandoned – the entire “Death of God” movement meant the death of the mythic God, a mythic conception for which rational modernity could find little evidence.

And here they particularly made a crippling error: in correctly spotting the immaturity of the notion of a mythic God – or the mythic level of the spiritual line – they threw out not just the mythic level of spiritual intelligence but the entire line of spiritual intelligence. So upset were they with the mythic level, they tossed the baby of the spiritual line with the bathwater of its mythic level of development. They jettisoned the mythic God, and instead of finding rational God, and then pluralistic God, and integral God, they ditched God altogether, they began the repression of the sublime, the repression of their own higher levels of spiritual intelligence. The intellectual West has fundamentally never recovered from this cultural disaster.

The Western intellectual tradition – and that now happens to mean the modern (rational) world in general – thus came crashing into the modern age bereft of any higher, post-mythic forms of spiritual intelligence. Each level of consciousness has a version of science, art, spirituality, and morals, among other lines. These are simply four different multiple intelligences: cognitive, aesthetic, spiritual, and moral.

But when modernity confused the mythic level of spiritual intelligence with spiritual intelligence itself, and therefore ridiculed anything that looked spiritual or religious, it created what can only be called a “ludicrous layer cake”: all of science was identified with the rational level if the cognitive line, and all of spirituality was identified with the mythic level in the spiritual line. Instead of mythic science and religion, and rational science and religion, there was now only rational science and mythic religion. The former was rational, modern, and all good; the latter was prerational, premodern, and all bad, or at least all ridiculous.

Once that catastrophic confusion occurs, then generally one of two things happen. If the level is despised, the entire line is despised, and thus that multiple intelligence is frozen at the despised level, and any higher development in that line is effectively prevented. This generally results in the repression of that intelligence.

Alternatively, if the level is loved, development in that line is also frozen at that level, but in this case caught not in repression but fixation, with consciousness not attempting to push the despised level away, but compulsively pursuing it and obsessively thinking of it.

In both cases, the affected multiple intelligence is frozen at the level that the level/line confusion occurs. In the case of repression, the entire line is then denied and suppressed, resulting in its atrophy and dysfunctional manifestation. If this occurs in the spiritual line of development, then in many cases, the repressed spiritual impulses are projected onto others, and then, like the anti-gay-porn crusader who is attacking his own shadow, this person becomes an obsessed, hyper-rational crusader fighting any and all spiritual endeavors, seeing them as complete irrational hogwash (with a pre/post fallacy not far behind). We then have science declaring war on religion.

In the case of fixation, the particular level is so glorified that, while development again freezes at the level where the confusion occurs, instead of the multiple intelligence being denied, it is obsessively and ferociously defended against all comers. But the only thing defended is that particular level in that line, which is then identified with the entire line and confused as the only correct type of the particular intelligence allowed. Ironically, in these individuals, as their own higher levels of that multiple intelligence attempt to emerge, they will end up repressing them, repressing their own emergent potentials in that line because they are fixated to a particular level in that line. If the line is the spiritual line, then these individuals end up fixated at a lower level of spiritual intelligence (usually mythic), and ironically can project their own higher, emerging spiritual impulses onto others, seeing these higher spiritual impulses as anti-spiritual. They then often end up denying higher levels of both science and religion, and lash out blindly at what amounts to their own higher potentials. We then have mythic religion declaring war on science (and the liberal world in general).

deesine on March 14, 2008 at 1:02 AM

Those of you arguing about this really should spend some time reading some Christian Apologetics.

Justin Martyr, the most important of the Apologists, is a perfect example of how the realization of a universal Nous or Mind would be translated downward into an exclusive mythic property. He had three main points:

(1) “Those who live according to the Logos are Christians.” This is fine; the Logos is the universal Nous or universal Mind in each of us, and if a Christian is defined as one who lives in Logos, then to the extent that any of us live in Logos, we can all be called Christians. This is very similar to D. T. Suzuki saying that all true religion has satori (realization of universal Mind or no-mind) as its basis, and therefore all true religion has Zen as a basis. There is nothing in Justin’s position so far that is divisive or merely mythic.

(2) “What anybody has said about the truth belongs to us, the Christians.” This is still fine, as Justin has defined the terms. As Saint Ambrose would later put it, “Whatsoever is true, by whomsoever it is said, is from the Holy Spirit”. All Truth issues forth from Spirit, and if a Christian is one who is actually living in this Truth, then all Truth belongs to Christians, as defined. Again, this is indistinguishable from Suzuki’s “All truth is Zen.”

(3) “If the Logos in its fullness had not appeared in Jesus, no salvation would be possible for anybody”. And there Justin steps over the line, or down the line, and into mythic possessiveness. It follows only from any such line of “Christian” reasoning that the Logos needed to descend into some particular embodiment or incarnation. If it is understood that Buddha or Krishna or Lao Tzu was also a complete embodiment (Descent or Incarnation) and realization (Ascent or Ascension) of Spirit, that Jesus is non-unique, then we have the notion of avatar or world teacher, which is fine. But the only way to claim that just one of them is “the absolute and unique incarnation of God” is to ground that claim in mythological dogma that is separated out and protected from reason, from evidence, and from direct spiritual realization, and given a privileged status that is merely sociocentric, not pneumatocentric, in origin.

And the sad thing about this proprietary stance is that (1) it separates and divides Christians from all other humans and other world citizens; (2) it divides Christ from all Christians, because Christ is, in the final analysis, unique; and (3) it ultimately divides God from this world altogether, since the Incarnation and Ascension, for this earth, both happened only once, no matter how much the first two genuinely universal points of Justin’s ever-repeated argument are stressed.

Christian apologists are razor sharp in applying these distinctions, and so we have to put it to them very bluntly: “Is Jesus Christ unique? Is, to give just one example, Gautama Buddha also an absolute Incarnation and the Ascension of the full Logos?” If they say yes, then they are following genuine or catholic faith, and the only true conclusion of their reasoning; if they say no, they are still stuck in their local volcano god and his “only begotten”. It will do no good, at this point, to claim that Buddhists are participating in the same Logos that was uniquely manifested in Jesus. Many modern Christian mytics, incidentally, are perfectly happy to answer yes.

The Trinitarian Doctrine (three Divine Forms, One Substance) is almost identical to the Buddhist doctrine of the Trikaya (three Bodies of Buddha), as worked out in The Lotus Sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra, etc., and was designed to answer the same question: If Buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha) is timeless and eternal, how did it come to appear in the historical person Gautama Shakyamuni, and what is his relation to it? The answer was also essentially the same: the formless Ground or Truth Body (Emptiness, the Dharmakaya; Father) appears in the world of form, as the Nirmanakaya of Form Body, the historical manifestation (Guatama; the Son), mediated by the Transformation Body (the Sambhogakaya; Holy Spirit) – all three of which are different but equal aspects of the Svabhavikakaya (Godhead). But the Buddhists drew the only correct conclusion: there are therefore potentially an infinite number of equal Sons and Daughters of Dharmakaya; not only is Jesus accepted as a perfect Nirmanakaya manifestation, it is expected.

deesine on March 14, 2008 at 1:10 AM

-

deesine on March 14, 2008 at 1:57 AM