 136. Religions (A Review) |
A PROPHETIC CRITICISM OF “GREAT RELIGIONS”
The “religious” awareness and “experience” of the Western “world” is trapped within an archaic structure of myths, dogmas, and irreducible social conflicts that no longer serve the right “religious” and Spiritual process of humankind. These myths, dogmas, and irreducible social conflicts are, even now, being forcedly perpetuated by the large-scale cultural, political, and economic dominance of the “religions” of the ancient “world”.
Human beings themselves cannot awaken to the esoteric process that fulfills their Spiritual heart-impulse until the spell of mythological and ego-possessed thinking is broken. And a unified, whole bodily culture of humankind, in which East and West will realize a new cultural synthesis, cannot take place until all the old “religions” are submitted to the Principle of Truth Itself—or to the Universal Principle of Prior Unity and the Intrinsically egoless Transcendental Spiritual Principle (or Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State) That Is Reality Itself. As a matter of urgent necessity (for the sake of global cooperative order and peace), it must be universally accepted that every human being, and every collective human manifestation—and, thus, every “religion”—must be always held subordinate and accountable to the Self-Evident (and Universally Self-Manifested) Truth That Is Reality Itself.
People tend to think of “religion” as a benign influence on individual thought and behavior—and this is, indeed, the case when the more benign aspects of “religious” awareness and “experience” begin to inform the thought and behavior of any individual. Yet, in the context of the larger “world” of the collective of all of humankind, “religion” is only rarely found to be functioning on the basis of its benign aspects—and, indeed, most characteristically, the ego-based and even negative aspects of “religion” are most apparent in the collective (and inherently non-sectarian) larger “world” of all-of-humankind-together. And, at large, it is certainly the case that very few individuals become truly creative personalities, mystics, Saints, or even reliably good men or women as a result of their “religious” beliefs and associations. “Religion” is, in general, an exoteric cultic phenomenon that controls the thought and behavior of individuals through external and psychologically manipulative “techniques”. Thus, the principal “religious” phenomenon that is common in the “world” at large is not true (or free) “religious” awareness and benign behavioral habits on the part of individuals. The principal phenomenon of “religion” is all the separate and separative institutions that contain and otherwise manipulate broad and massive segments of the human population.
The primary institution within any “religious” tradition is (itself) the “religion”—insofar as any “religion” affects the “world” at large. And large-scale (or “great”) institutional “religion” is—because of its “worldly” public status—not primarily a benign power in human society. One has only to look at the cultural and political conflicts in the total “world” of today to see that the immense institutions of ancient “religion” have now become, for the most part, contentious, absolutist, and the perennial sources of irreducible social conflicts. And “great religions” characteristically are “established” (and their power legitimized) by a nearly indivisible union with the State (or the otherwise secular national power). And the problematic nature of all of this is made extreme by the immensity of these “great religious” institutions, each of which controls even many millions of people.
The power of the “great” traditional “religious” institutions is, for the most part, a “worldly” power. That is to say, these institutions are actually political and broadly social agencies that manipulate the political, social, and economic motivations of the citizens of all nations. The only public alternative is control of the people by exclusively secular political institutions, which tend to suppress and exclude not only “religious” institutions but also every kind of benign “religious” (and, otherwise, esoteric) awareness, “experience”, practice, and association—and this pattern of enforced secularization has also begun to spread to many areas of the Earth that have, traditionally, been under the powerful influence of “religious” institutions. In the popular media of the present time, small, “non-establishment religious groups” are often (with negative and “demonizing” intent) called “cults”—thus making such groups “fair game” for hostile and suppressive commentaries. Nevertheless, any “religious” (or, otherwise, esoteric) group (or non-”orthodox” sect, or even “great religion”) may appropriately be called a “cult”, if the word “cult” is intended simply to mean a system and a culture of devotion to a particular “subject”. Therefore, all exoteric “religions” and all esoteric sects (or cultural entities) are cults—and to use the word “cult” with bad intentions is nothing but a power-game, whereby “established” cults (and the agencies, within the larger society, which support the dominance of the local “established” cults) make suppressive efforts to subordinate, de-legitimize, and exclude the non-”established” cults. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that, in general, non-”establishment” cults (or minority sects) are, characteristically, oriented toward the promotion of a more universal (or deprovincialized, and non-”tribal”, and not at all “bonded-to-the-State”) form of the “religious” (or, otherwise, esoteric) practice of life. Truly, the “worldly” domain of the “establishment” of so-called “great” institutional religions”—and not the small-scale (and, especially, esoteric) domain of “non-establishment religions” and otherwise sacred institutions—represents the more direct and practical threat to human development, and (ultimately) to the communication of the Truth of Reality Itself.
