I’ve been following the vlog of a young woman who
experienced a Kundalini Awakening a few years back, Vanessa Ooms. Apparently a Kundalini Awakening can be very
life-disrupting. She has gone from an almost
ecstatic bubbling exuberance in the beginning to a gloomy sullenness, and her
tone is often carping and sharp (hmmmm, not that I am claiming to be any Mr.
Sunshine). For about a year recently she
seemed stuck in a negative social context with herself dropping old friends and
old friends dropping her or least growing distant and critical. She seemed to feel persecuted and isolated
and struggling to deal with that. Given
her collapsing social circle she had only her own intellectual Inventory to
fall back on which she must have felt so insufficient that she reached out for
more mental content. This got her caught
up in the New Age spider web. Her Page
is cluttered with the stuff and her most recent vlog was entitled “The Law of
Attraction” which she said was inspired by some new generic New Age author she
had just found. She was basically declaring
that she was now reduced to being some non-entity’s New Age parrot.
This is all very disappointing for me. You see, I wanted to believe that the
Kundalini would bring some kind of Light of Truth. But poor young Madame Ooms, even after what
describes objectively as an entirely genuine Kundalini Awakening, is simply now
circling the drain and is well on the way to becoming totally
insignificant. Of course, such is not the
necessary outcome of a Kundalini Awakening.
At roughly the same time another young woman, Soulful Toz, had a
Kundalini Awakening. But her life
situation was significantly different. She was with a very wide well educated
and well-traveled social circle that gave her plenty of support, even at times
when her personality seemed entirely imploded and she could only manage to
stare at the walls with her mouth hanging open – for days on end. It was the Nightmare Worst Case Scenario of
Transcending the Ego. Nothing inside of her was left in charge. But her friends made her eat. Her friends brushed her hair, made her brush
her teeth, and made her change her cloths once a week whether she needed too or
not. Anyway, her personality, given the
exemplary social context she live in, came back brilliantly re-organized. Rather
than stewing in isolation, she traveled the World, and her series of vlogs goes
on like a travel log. One can imagine
all the intellectual influences that come her way at this time. Now Madame Toz is doing extremely well, and
my only complaint with her is that she may have become too normalized, and I
would wish her to be more of an activist. So a morose self-isolating paranoia, as per
young Madame Oom, is not Kundalini’s necessary outcome.
But that still leaves me with my
disappointment. If the Kundalini does
not present a Vision of Truth, well, what does it do? Oh! I
think I once got an answer for that in a dream. I was in a large field where I used to take
walks when I was a child, and this woman who was singing and playing guitar
came walking by. She was extremely
coarse, round in all the wrong places, and ugly, but her playing and singing
was angelic. Then a group of young men happened by (it
seemed very busy for an isolated grassy field) and they were all pointing and
laughing and ridiculing this lady. That
irritated me no end and I turned on them and snapped with a snarl in my voice that
they should all shut up and listen and they’d hear the loveliest song they ever
heard. Apparently my response triggered
the dream’s denouement. The dream scene
of the Field flashed away and that Lady was now standing very near me, facing
me, looking me in the eyes and she said “The Faculty most worth Cultivating is
the Faculty of True Discernment”. Then
suddenly I was transported into a moonlit arbor where a very beautiful Goddess
Diana, the patron Goddess of the Hunt, was strolling amongst the trees. Then a proud, arrogant, and undeniably good
looking hunter came along and decided to flirt with her by bragging about
himself. He said that he was out hunting
but that he was so skilled with the bow and arrow that he felt it was not
giving the poor animals a chance. Without
saying a word she pulled a very crooked and malformed arrow out of her quiver
and loaded it into her bow. She pulled
back the string, and looked away from where the bow was pointing, even closing
her eyes, and let the arrow fly off into a nearby bush. She then walked over to the bush where we could
see the end of the shaft and the feathers sticking out, and she retrieves the
arrow, and on the very end was a dead grouse. She turns towards my Point of Perception and
says “Chance? Nothing happens by chance.”
Now, this dream, or dreams, but they came as a
unified couplet, came after my own Initiations into Kundalini by a few
years. Apparently what the dream was
telling me was that the Kundalini brings no positive Truth, but it does enable
the capacity to Discern the Truth, and the methodology for exercising and
strengthening this capacity for Discernment is the presumption that there is a
Truth behind everything that occurs.
Yes, some things are in fact random, but the constant practice of
seeking the Meaning in Things will “cultivate the faculty”.
I took that dream to heart and over the years I have
found that I did indeed seem to be possessed of the Faculty of True
Discernment. It was not so much that I
would ever think of or get some vision of the Truth, but that I would Know the
Truth when I saw it or heard it. But,
perhaps more importantly, in the absence of the Truth, I would experience a
Doubt Sensation. Indeed, decades ago I came across what is now
an obscure book of Zen Teachings by Huang Po which had several stand out elements
which got my attention. He talked of the
importance of the Doubt Sensation – that one arrives at Enlightenment by a
practice of clustering and intensifying Doubt, which he describes as a tangible
feeling in the forehead – what many people today would take for a
headache. In Kundalini parlance, it is an open Ajna
Chakra. Anyway, what we can take away
from Huang Pu is that by short circuiting Doubt by clinging onto a Faith, as a
drowning man will clutch at a straw, we are doing exactly the WRONG thing in
our pursuit of Enlightenment. For the
Faculty of True Discernment to kick in and work for us, we need to be able to first
of all know when certain things are NOT true. The Discernment of the Truth works in two
ways – positive affirmations of the True, and negative denials of the Not True. There are the rare ‘eureka’ moments when
we come across something and we Discern
it to be True, but then there is almost everything else in our social and
intellectual discourse which elicits Doubt.
We would be doing away with more than the better half of the Faculty of
True Discernment if we shut ourselves off from Doubt. And often this is what the New Age
recommends, claiming that doubt is negativity and we need to be positive about
everything. For instance, our Madame
Oom, with her parroting of the old worn out “Law of Attraction” chestnut, she is
telling us that by admitting Doubt we are attracting the Doubtful. But Huang Pu would say she has it all
wrong. One can only arrive at the Truth
by first actively rejecting all that is not true, and that is a heck of a lot
that needs to be rejected. To go through
the Forest we need to get past all the Trees.
Yet when we look at the New Age Intellectual
Infrastructure it is largely based on Faith, which is the diametric opposite of
Doubt. And this New Age stress on Faith
seems to source directly from Paulist Christianity’s emphasis on Faith that was
most distinctively found in Post Reformation Protestant Christian Doctrine. Here it is appropriate to look more closely at
the origins of this concept of Faith.
Paul was the first significant proponent of the Faith Idea and so we
need to put Paul into his proper context.
The most important thing to know
about Paul was that he was not a follower of Jesus, but he was the founder and
head of the Greek Mystery Religious Sect that co-opted the fame of Jesus of
Nazareth. To understand Paul’s disproportionate
influence over ‘Christian’ Doctrine one only has to realize that within 40
years of the crucifixion of Jesus, Judea was marched upon by a pincer movement of
several Roman Legions and Jerusalem was completely razed. You see, Jews throughout the Roman Empire had
over the previous years gone into insurrection where wild blood lusting Jewish
Mobs had committed vast genocides upon various Greek Communities throughout the
Empire – millions of victims were killed and even entire cities and regions had
been entirely depopulated by the massive slaughters. So the Roman’s aim in marching on Judea and
Jerusalem was to eradicate the threat – to kill all Jews who could not run and
escape from out of their reach, out of
Roman jurisdiction. Well, the
True Followers of Jesus were after all Jewish and so they were either all
slaughtered or they scattered and fled to Damascus and points Eastward. That left only the phony derivative Greek
Mystery Sect founded by Paul to represent ‘Christianity’ and Jesus to later
ages. Paul is largely thought to have
limited his influence to only his Letters which are contained within the New
Testament, but all of the 4 Gospels had been either written by avowalled Paulists
or they were edited, amended and appended by avowalled Paulists. Perhaps the only Biblical Record of what
Jesus really taught is the Sermon on the Mount, cited by only one of the 4
gospels. You can find it in Mathew
Chapters 5 thru 7.
We can acquire a great deal of insight into Paul’s
Doctrine if we come to realize one fact, that in all of Paul’s writings he
never quoted Jesus even once, and not once did he ever refer to anything Jesus
ever said. He did not even bother to lie
and make things up. He simply turned the
discourse away from Jesus and limited Doctrine to what he could make up on the
spot. And it is clear that Paul’s
Doctrines change from letter to letter depending most probably one what he
believed would most appeal to the target demographic he was addressing at each
point in time and place.
However, when
you place Jesus into historical context, we find that he was from out of what
then was a recent development in Hebrew Religiosity – Religion for the first
time in Human Evolution encompassed a Moral Vision – it was the Invention of
the Moral Distinction between Good and Evil. The Persians had been the avant garde in that
respect, with Zarathustra being first to equate God and Religion with Morality
(dividing the Polytheistic Pantheon of
various Pre-Moral Gods and Goddesses into two camps – the Angels on the Good
Side of Light, and the Demons on the Evil Side of Darkness. Incidentally, the Hindu Pantheon got really
trashed, whereby the Gods of Hinduism show up as the Devils of Zoroastrianism). This Persian Zoroastrianism had a profound
influence on the Hebrews. Adam and Eve,
the Garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are all straight out of
Persia. Then recent to the time of Jesus himself we
have in Hebraic Tradition the actual first use of the term “Messiah” to refer
to the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, the first Righteous King (and I hope not
the last). Jesus was greatly impacted
by this Evolution toward Morality. So we
can see in his Sermon on the Mount a very challenging demand for the highest
moral standards, in both conduct (that had previously been covered by the Law) but
also in regards to thought and disposition.
Morality had to be all pervading.
The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus spoke of was to be reserved only for
those who were worthy of entering it – the Righteous. If one looks exclusively at the actual
Teachings of Jesus, there is no ‘Salvation’.
Sinners would not be allowed into any Heaven of Light and Goodness
because just their presence would pollute and darken it and it would no longer
be much of a Heaven of Light and Goodness.
Wherever Sinners go, that is by prima facie logic what we would more
correctly refer to as Hell. It can be
compared to what Groucho Marx said about Country Clubs, that he would not wish
to belong to one that would take himself as a member. So if Heaven is full of Sinners, well, no
thank you. But the vast majority of
Christians don’t seem to have a problem with it.
Perhaps we should make it more clear exactly what Paul
wanted his people to have Faith in. To
keep it short, what Paul did was to take the Moral Religious Revolution of
Hebrew-Persian origin and transport it to Greece where they reacted to it by
stripping out all of the moral requirements, and returned everything to the Pre-Moral
Religious Mystery formulas familiar to the Greeks where the Ultimate Religious
Experience was mostly about getting really drunk at orgies. Sins were forgiven, cancelling out the need
for Morality, and Eternal Life attained by the easy formula of getting baptized
(and Secular Catholics, outside of the Religious Orders of Monks and Nuns,
likewise believe that Salvation comes by simply participating in the
Sacraments). In one of Paul’s secondary
doctrines, Salvation and Eternal like could also be obtained by avowalling the
belief in Jesus as Divine and therefore able to remit sins. It is interesting when we consider that they
found it necessary to make Jesus equal to God Almighty because it suggests that
it was understood that God Himself would never consent to any idea smacking of Free
and Condoned Sin. Also notice that people
were only required to make the declaration of faith, that is, they only had to say
the words. No one then ever expected
anybody to truly believe such nonsense. Faith and Belief are two different animals. It was simply a Magic Formula that appealed to
the Greeks then and still has a massive appeal today. It seems that next to nobody bothers to
ponder the Moral Implications involved with telling people it is a Core
Religious Principle that they are not held to the slightest Moral
Responsibility. There is even the
Doctrine of Original Sin, which we can’t blame on Paul himself, but on his
greatest advocate, the satanically clever ‘Saint’ Augustine. The Doctrine of Original Sin sets forth the
notion that people are not only expected to sin, but that sin is inevitable,
and that the only Unforgivable Sin is to maintain the possibility that a man
might be able to refrain from sin by using will power and a pretense to moral
fortitude. Augustine had invented the
Doctrine of Original Sin in order to prosecute a rival Bishop, Pelagius, whose
crime was to suggest that Old Men, who know when the impetuous flames of their youthful
inclinations have died down somewhat, should make the effort to live
righteously. What we need to carry away
from this tale, is that according to Modern Christian Doctrine and Beliefs,
Pelagius would still be wrong. We should
therefore all be frightened of our Christian friends and neighbors. The more religious they are the more we
should depend upon them to stop at nothing, and to sin against God and Man as
though they thought it some kind of sacred duty – to absolutely prove their
faith in Christ’s infinite capacity for forgiveness (and by implication, God Almighty’s total surrender
of His Heaven to the Pall of Evil). My only conclusion would be that Paul was the
Anti-Christ and Augustine his right hand man, or I should say left.
But for our present purposes we need to appreciate
why Paul created this notion of Faith in the first place. You see, Paul had his own ideas about the
Religion that he wanted to sell and its primary requirement was that it would
have to be both attractive, and easy. He
must have felt that Jesus with his strict moral requirements was chasing away
too large a share of the Market.
However, this was a cosmopolitan period and region that Paul lived and
dealt in, and so his target audience was likely to have heard about what Jesus
actually said, did, and about what the True Apostles of Jesus were teaching and
able to accomplish. They probably heard
a lot about the idea of the Holy Spirit and its attributes. So Paul’s devotees were probably given to
complaining that Paul’s Church was exhibiting none of the known attributes of
the Holy Spirit. Paul responded in two
ways, first, he redefined the Holy Spirit to mean that it was only a kind of a
feel good sensation and that it should encourage them toward the normal social
virtues, especially in regards to being open to giving freely to others (particularly
to himself), and secondly he blamed the people themselves for their not having
the Holy Spirit (and here he meant the real Holy Spirit – the Miraculous Holy
Spirit that they had heard so much talk about).
It was because they lacked Faith.
The Paulists even rewrote much of the gospels so they could put the same
words into the mouth of Jesus. This
created an obvious contextual contradiction.
We are presented with Christ’s ability to take thousands of people
totally by surprise with inexplicable Miracles, and then almost simultaneously we
are asked to believe that Jesus insisted that none of these miracles would have
been in the least bit possible unless every one of those thousands of people
had absolute diamond pure Faith that the ‘Miracles’ had been entirely possible
all along. It’s a contradiction,
right? A True Miracle does not happen
BECAUSE of Faith. A True Miracle happens
Despite Doubt. Paul’s Doctrine of Faith
can then be seen as a reduction to the dynamic of “Blaming the Victim”. We can
imagine Paul telling his clients “It only seems like I am taking all of your
money for nothing but you would have plenty of results except that you do not
have enough Faith”. But Jesus would
have been too busy feeding the masses with multiplied fishes and loaves,
healing the lame, cleaning the lepers and giving sight to the blind. Even Paul’s devout followers cannot site even
one Miracle that they can attribute to Paul.
By current Vatican Policies regarding the issuing of Sainthood Status,
Paul would be rejected at the very first screening. Not only did he not have any miracles under
his belt, but he was known to be nasty, ill-humored, violent, bad tempered,
greedy and mendacious, which were all attributes widely accepted as natural
enough in the Greek World in which he flourished, but not what we would
nowadays think characteristic of a Saint. European Catholic Civilization had discerned
this ‘truth’ about Paul and therefore Paulist influence declined and the
influence of the Moral Religious Order ascended. But the Protestant Rebellion brought Paulism
back to its old zenith. Protestants are
supposed to read their Bibles, and you would think they would notice what a
prick Paul is.
That brings us to the New Age. Firstly, the “New Age”
is a serious misnomer. The origins of what we now refer to as the New Age
Philosophy and Spirituality source out of the seminal writings of Madame
Blavatsky and Anne Bessant (who, taken in the Artistic and Literary sense,
wrote at levels quantums above the 4th grade level New Age pulp
being turned out nowadays. You know, if
people want to read that New Age crap, they might as well read the highest
quality crap that’s available, and you can’t find better than Blavatsky and
Bessant). Both Blavatsky’s and Bessant’s
Ancient Wisdoms jump back to before the Evolutionary Leap of Moral
Consciousness arose into Human Consciousness. Apparently the 5th Century B.C. was
not Ancient enough for either of them, are perhaps in deliberate reaction
against the strict Moral Standards of the Victorian Era, their snub of the basic
concepts of Good and Evil was intentional.
So the New Age Movement grew out
of Pre-Moralism and has been stuck there ever since. We can see this in what so often are the New
Age ‘crowd pleaser concepts and sales pitches’ – “Attract Wealth” which
translates to encouraging predatory greed and mendacity in Business People, and
“Attract Relationships” which is code for how to become a successful sexual
predator. The New Age also has a very dark side with those who attempt to amass
Personal Power with the deliberate and focused intent on ‘Weaponizing’ it,
through spell casting, hexes and curses. One of the biggest names in 20th
Century New Age Thought was Carlos Castaneda who basically issued manuals for
sorcery. Compared to that, the Pre-Moral Greek Religious Ideal of ‘getting
really drunk at orgies’, is relatively benign and harmless. The New Age
Doctrines are in many ways a return to pure Tooth and Claw. It’s unfortunate that so many people who find
themselves with newly Awakened Kundalini use the New Age as their first stop
for ‘grounding’ themselves. Hmmmm,
‘Grounding themselves”… strange expression.
They should prefer to take wing and Fly.
Anyway, I had
been often curious about what happens at New Age Seminars… you know, how New
Age authors write books and then go on book signing tours, and at each whistle
stop, they contract with various local hotels or resorts to conduct Weekend
Seminars, which are the real money makers for those with New Age Business
Plans. So I went to a few of these
Seminars and time and time again the same issue would come up with people
saying in effect “Your stupid ideas don’t work. I think you are just a big Rip
Off”. The answer back would always be
along the lines of “it’s all your own fault you stupid idiots. You just need Faith. Look at me!
It works great for me. I got
plenty of money (well, plenty of other people’s money. Hmmmm, well even that must be a lie, because
nobody with a lot of money would be on the road, hustling suckers and living
out of a suitcase)”. Oh, by the way,
these Seminars can really get bazaar. I
went to one Seminar on Channeling and found out the big secret to channeling – that
the Inspiration comes when you just start Making Stuff Up as you go along. So the New Age Secret to Channeling Inspired
Truth is to be a well-practiced Liar… well that may be a bit harsh. Let’s use a euphony and call it ‘Story
Telling’. But it was well worth my 300
bucks to be made privy to that particular Truth regarding foundational New Age
Philosophy.
Anyway, now let’s take a look at the Law of
Attraction. When you think about what
that must mean you get the idea that the Universe is Structured entirely around
each Individual, and it is the Attitude and Expectations of each Individual
that pulls all of the Universal Strings.
Well, the contradiction there is that not EVERYBODY can be the single most
central point of the Universe. In all
of the Moral Mystical Religious Spiritual Traditions we have the notion of
opening up to the Higher Truth and to a Collective Understanding which is
transcendental to the Individual Self.
We are expected to get beyond Ego-Centric notions. I was once told in a visionary dream that
“Birth is but an illusion and Christ is the Life in All Things”. As far as the Higher Truth is concerned THERE
ARE NO INDIVIDUALS. There is only One Great
Life Force. In that sense we can see that the Doctrine of
Law of Attraction is an appeal to our delusional sense of separateness. Basically it appeals to the animal impulse
for seeking rewards and gratifications.
If we are looking for the Next Big Evolutionary Step for Humanity, we
won’t find it in the impulse for instant self-gratification. Even my house cats are more evolved than that. But perhaps young Madame Ooms, who seems to
have grown bitter and suspicious of her social circle, and who undoubtedly has
suffered a lot because of it, is due some simple animal satisfactions at this
point just so she can keep up the will to continue going forward. But I certainly hope she doesn’t get stuck at
that level. And I would hope that the
Kundalini’s Doubt Sensation will be too overwhelming for her to be able to
override with fabricated and artificial notions Faith in all that New Age hocus
pocus and snake oil promises. I think
that will be so. In that recent vlog she
freely acknowledged how silly and cliché she must have sounded. Yeah! That was her Doubt Sensation talking
loud and clear.
Now let us take a look at the concept of Hope. A lot of people think they require Faith
because they see it as a Positive Idea, despite the real world fact that Faith
is always cited in the Negative, in the sense that Lack of Faith is why we
never get anything we want. Faith is
Supposed to Get us Everything, but the catch there is that it just so happens
that nobody ever has quite enough of it.
For instance, of the millions of people who have dropped hundreds or
even thousands of dollars on New Age clap trap, we can point to no success
story beyond the ordinary – people who fish every day will eventually catch a
fish; people who practice at being convincing liars and swindlers will
eventually get good at deceiving people and make a place for themselves with
the Local Chamber of Commerce; and
people who constantly troll the clubs
until closing time will eventually get laid and find the romance they had been
seeking. If people want anything more
than that ordinary kind of stuff, Faith is not how they will get it but the purported
lack of faith will be sited as the reason why they don’t. This
applies especially in regards to people’s honest and worthy desire for
Enlightenment. It has often been
mentioned by many of those who belonged to vast Religious Spiritual
Organization run by this or that New Age Guru, that in the decades in which
they were actively involved, they never met a single Member or Devotee who
attained Enlightenment… and the more they got to see of their Gurus, the less they
seemed to be as Enlightened as they claimed to be. The conclusion is obvious. All that Faith multiplied by millions was
good for nothing.
But don’t we need something positive in our
lives. Well, yes. Hope. Nobody will ever throw hope back in
your face as an accusation, as they do with faith. Faith makes promises it can't keep. Hope is above all that. Hope is the quintessential life affirming attitude. Hope is never giving up. Hope is believing that we will always find a
way. Hope is crawling blind through a smoke
filled burning house and reaching up to feel for a door handles. Hope is stopping to help somebody out of a
free-fire machine gun kill zone, and then, once clear, going back to help
somebody else. Hope is in advancing an
Idea for an entire lifetime and not getting anywhere with it but still
believing that long after you’re dead, somebody else will be carry on with your
same Idea or something even Better… that the Idea, or I should say ‘Ideal’, has
a Life of Its Own. So Faith just trips
us all up and ends up betraying our trust in it. What we really want and what
we really need is for everybody to Hope for the Best.
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