Messiahs, canons, penal substitution & the formation of orthodoxies.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of the Gospels, may have lived and died sometime during the period 10 BCE to 20 or 30 CE. It was not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, three centuries later, that an agreed creed confirming the triune interpretation was established, and not until the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE that the biblical cannon of the New Testament was agreed - some three and a half centuries after the events that they purport to record. (Not exactly contemporaneous recording!) During the intervening period many differing interpretations and versions of “the life of Jesus” and its significance competed with each other, ranging from those that identified Jesus as fully divine to those that identified him as fully human, from those who saw the teachings in the light of lapsarian and eschatological thought and those who took them to be more immanentist or gnostic.

It should also be born in mind that the loosing sides in the many disagreements and debates during this formative age would run the risk of being declared 'heretical' and would be in considerable danger. A fact which may have lead to the destruction of many alternative gospels and other writings. In these theological battles of the early church the winner took all and and all evidence of the loser's thought was expurgated.

The writers and subsequent editors and translators of the competing gospels and other writings went to some lengths to tie in the stories they were telling with the Jewish belief in a messiah. There was a need in marrying the two halves of the evolving bible, the Jewish written Old Testament and the new writings of the New Testament – to make the new mesh in with the old. The messiah was the bridge that allowed that linkage to be made.

With regard to the doctrine of penal substitution, it might be interesting and informative to consider the influence of both Zoroastrian and of Pagan belief on its development; Zoroastrian belief being millennial and dualistic and Pagan being sacrificial and resurrectional (the enactment of death to create re-birth and regeneration, often the death and subsequent resurrection of a god or demi-god, or of their human incarnations or substitutes).

Judaism may well be the father of Christianity, but Paganism is the mother and Zoroastrianism its great uncle.

The challenge of polarity

Polarity has always been a theological challenge to monotheism. In attempting to make the deity universal, that is to be all encompassing, the deity becomes just as strongly identified with all that is harmful, destructive, negative, "evil", or repulsive as with all that is constructive, positive, healing, "good" or attractive. An omnipotent and omnipresent god is equally good and bad, equally loving and hating, equally constructive and destructive. If not, then they are not omnipotent and omnipresent.

Watching the apologists for monotheism attempting to salvage a “loving” god from that paradox is interesting. 

The Zoroastrians did so by having two opposed deities and life as a battle ground between the two. It is likely that the Jews incorporated this into their theology during their exile in Babylon, only in a lop sided way, with their “God” on the side of goodness and, as a result of the fall, “Satan” leading the opposing team. In time the resultant lapsarian theology has become much more pronounced in many forms of Christianity than in Judaism or Islam, but is implicit in them all.

That is the problem with calling things “God” - they inflate into monsters who run eternal concentration camps called “hell”.

But why go down the route of using a noun? Why not a verb? Why not “godness” rather than “god”? Why not a quality that things can possess, a bit like a static electric charge, but which can not exist independent? That is the approach taken by Shinto. Kami are a quality possessed by things, not something that exists independently. They are not universal, nor are claims made about their being omnipotent nor omnipresent, but we all know the tangibleness of special places that fill us with senses of wonder, or of peace, or of calm, places that move us. They do indeed seem charged with something indefinable.

The Impenetrable Wall

The unanswerables due to ineffability:

1. Whether god exists or not
2. Whether god is one or many
3. Whether god is permanent, impermanent or intermittent
4. Whether god is universal or local
5. Whether god is male or female, or neither, or both
6. Whether god is concious or unconscious, sentient or insentient, cognisant or uncognisant
7. Whether god is anthropomorphic or alien
8. Whether god has any intentions or what those intentions are
9. What god may or may not think or believe, want or wish
10. Whether you can or cannot communicate with god
11. Whether your beliefs about god are true or untrue

Ineffability implies incomprehensibility: that is the impenetrable wall.

There are experiences that we can have when confronting that wall, and, yes, I feel it is important to confront that wall.Those experiences can sometimes be given names like “god”, like “the peace that passes all understanding”, like “touching the divine”, like “being in the presence”, like “being touched by god”, like “seeing the light” …; these experiences are very real and can be important to our spiritual growth, but they can lead to many delusions.

Interestingly, people tend to interpret such experiences in terms of their culture, Christians in a Christian way, Muslims in an Islamic way, Hindu in a Hindu way, Buddhists in a Buddhist way, and so on. Such experiences are taken as a confirmation of the ontology of their respective weltanschauung. Thus in monotheistic cultures they are often taken as confirmation of the existence of a deity.

"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God." 

The Cloud of Unknowing

And I would suggest that even the word “god” can be one such stumbling block, one such attempt to explain experiences in terms of a familiar culture. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.

So you have dealt with the illusion of the everyday self and have created the "ghost in the machine", your escape pod, discovered the Buddha within, found your real nature. Now you need to destroy that illusion, that Buddha Nature, and wake up.

The Twin Illusions

Some speak of “absolute or divine consciousness” as opposed to “everyday consciousness”, or some such terms, suggesting that our routine states of mind are not fully real, that the state of consciousness we experience in meditation is somehow more so, that our everyday is no more than an illusion. This thinking is so much a part of the ways of seeing our human predicament intrinsic of in the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, amongst others faiths, and now absorbed into the New Age and other “think” of our Western mind.

However, I wonder, in the light of our modern scientific insights into the brain, whether it is these traditionally described states of mind that are not the real illusion, the real misconception, the real misunderstanding. The distinction between the “illusionary” nature of everyday life and the deeper “reality” of the meditative mind being no more than that between “background consciousness” and “foreground consciousness”; the trick of meditation being no more than learning to avoid higher level excitation of the brain whilst allowing, or even boosting, lower level excitation, thus experiencing the “background” state without its being masked by the foreground “noise” of higher level activity. A state that may we be very pleasurable and may lead to increased levels in the brain of those chemicals that lead to feeling of well-being, happiness, confidence, euphoria or even ecstasy, and which may therefore be taken as being more “real” in some sense.

In such brain states one may well believe that one is experiencing “oneness with everything”, or “unity with the divine”, or “being in the presence of God” or … ; well, that will depend on which discourse tradition you subscribe to as to how you will describe it. But, I am sorry to report, the meditative state may be no more “real” than the everyday state, just as much an “illusion”, but a grand illusion as opposed to a collection of petty illusions of the everyday.

Being carried away by the power of the experience of the meditative state can lead being deceived into believing in that grand-illusion every bit as much as you were originally deceived into believing in the petty-illusions. I suspect that part of understanding the “middle-way” is to learn that both polls, clinging to the petty-illusions of the the everyday state or clinging to the grand-illusion of the the meditative state are mistaken. In the end you are reduced to the ground of just being, no more, no less

Perhaps that is why so many Zen masters have resorted to hitting their pupils in order to force them to recognise their ground-state, to liberate them from the twin illusions.

An Ultimately Heraclitan Buddha

Although ultimately a Heraclitan answer, no-self points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced; even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness itself, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. It is in part a mind-trick to lend plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation; but then, re-incarnation is a doctrine that lends plausibility to the belief in a "self".

Strip away everything until your "Buddha-nature" stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion and strip that way too. 

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind: the ultimate deconstruction. 

Self, no-self, no no-self, no "self" at all, no "no-self" at all, just words being stretched over the moment like a very inadequate pair of underpants. Do us all a favour and take them off, or, on second thoughts, keep them on. 

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again in your being, in your meanings, in your culture.

Random notes on sitting practice

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others are not warmed by us: we are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time sitting is not an end in itself, nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?