 161. Teachers, Spiritual |
In ancient texts linage was referred to as the family of or, the house of, example, the house of Abraham. The family or house of David, spiritual linage is different than biological linage or family linage.*
Sometimes one's true brother or true sister is born into a different biological family, sometimes they meet, sometimes they don't.
Since the ancient days it has been said that if God-Realization, Liberation, or Enlightenment is the purpose of your life, the best thing you can do is spend your time in the Company of a Realizer. It is by sympathetic association with the Realizer, Communion with the Realizer, that Realization is accomplished, and not by self-effort.
What Are True and False Religion, Spirituality and Meditation?
What is popularized, hyped, and commonly believed to be religion, spirituality, or meditation is invariably a form of self-meditation, self-glorification, and self-survival. Such subhuman games are sold to masses of people via an appeal to naive and neurotic needs for certainty, hope, fascination, superiority, a positive self-image, and egoic immunity from fear and death. Thus, religion, spirituality and meditation become diluted, reduced to the worldly or self-preserving levels of less than human interest. The typical follower is childish, ultimately irresponsible, self-involved, amoral, experientially undeveloped, weak and out of balance in the dimensions of action, feeling, and thought, and irrationally attached to the enclosures of cult and belief.
Just so, in the popular view, religion, spirituality, and meditation are considered to be inherently different or separable things. Thus, meditation tends to be embraced as a merely psychological or physiological technique, even "scientifically" respectable, without religious significance, and often without spiritual content. Religion is commonly embraced without esoteric spiritual understanding or the higher responsibility of meditation. And spiritual or esoteric notions are popularly accepted in a vacuum, as an alternative to true religious and moral responsibilities, and with a simplistic view of meditation that is really a commitment to subjective illusions, self-glorification, and self-survival rather than to sacrifice of self in the Divine in every area of experience.
The popular promotability of religious, spiritual, and meditational ideas, cults, personalities, and practices depends on the subhuman and childish state of the general population. The responsive audience of such propaganda is the same subhuman mass of "consumers" that is the target of TV and the common media all over the world, and little more is required of anyone than to dutifully purchase the "product." To actually use the "product" is not demanded in any profound sense. Just buy it, praise it, own it, believe it, and glamorize yourself by association with it.
The whole matter of the popular communication and acceptance of religion, spirituality, and meditation is as obnoxious and absurd as any area of vulgarity in the world. It is all an appeal to the sense of self-divided fear and the general absence of intelligence that keeps people irresponsible and dependent, locked into problems, forever searching for solutions without becoming responsible for the problem and the need itself.
Truly, neither religion, nor spirituality, nor meditation expresses the human relationship to Truth unless each is directly and rightly integrated with the others. Religion, which is founded on personal and moral self-sacrifice, or truly human ecstasy, must maintain direct and conscious association with higher esoteric processes, the secrets of the spiritual adaptation of Man. And the religio-spiritual understanding of human sacrifice in the ultimate Reality must be associated with practical disciplines and transcendental means of higher or more perfect human adaptation through the full technical range of meditative and self-sacrificial processes. And all of this must be integrated with a right understanding and valuation of the Spiritual Master and the radical or perfect Destiny of devotees, or true practitioners.
*An individual who is said to be a "son" of someone or from the "family" of someone does not necessarily mean a physical lineage, but can be referring to the equality of spiritual-self-realization of the other individual. To be from the same "house" or "family," is referring to the sameness of spiritual development, the spiritual house, or the spiritual family of all those who have attained GOD-SELF-REALIZATION (At-one-ment). Example: To be from the house of David does not mean to be a biological descendent, but means to be equal to, and in the same spiritual state of GOD-SELF-REALIZATION.
