A friend of mine has posted these observations, which were in turn put to her by a long term acquaintance. I thought I\u2019d give answering them a shot.<\/p>\n
1) \u201cYou’ve had all this time to reach intimately into yourself and your relationship with God and that sense of presence. Bear in mind what you say won’t make sense to most people, and you could lead them astray by describing how you live and what you see.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n I do bear in mind that what I say won\u2019t make sense to most people, if only because I find that most people haven\u2019t had a peak mystical experience, and a fair proportion of those who\u2019ve had more moderate mystical experiences have largely dismissed them as \u201cone of those things\u201d (or, as one atheist friend beautifully put it \u201ca brain fart\u201d). I\u2019m acutely conscious of the fact that if I do something to take apart someone\u2019s existing belief structures, I can\u2019t give them their own mystical experience on which to build. That is either given (as in my case) or acquired through a long process of practice. Possibly also via the use of pharmaceuticals or other radical ways of adjusting the brain, but I\u2019ve no competence to suggest those.<\/p>\n That leaves me thinking of \u201cNo disassemble\u201d from \u201cShort Circuit\u201d and the picture of a child surrounded by mechanical or electronic parts which he or she (usually he) has taken apart and has no idea how to put back together.<\/p>\n I do have some ideas about how to put things back together, but they take a lot of time (disassembly is far quicker!) and I made a decision many years ago that I didn\u2019t want to be in the position of a guru. In part that was because I considered myself unfitted for that role, in part it was because I was scared of being the focus of a huge weight of expectation, and of what that might do to me.<\/p>\n Those who ask me what I really think, however… eventually, I\u2019ll answer them truthfully, even if by doing so I\u2019m taking them down the rabbit hole with no expectation of them ever coming out of it. It seems to me that the original speaker is terrified of that happening to them…<\/p>\n There is, of course, an implication there that the speaker thinks my friend is woefully misled herself. But hey, I think the speaker is woefully misled, and probably needs to listen long and hard to what my friend has to say.<\/p>\n I also need to think more about \u201ccould lead them astray by describing how you live and what you see.\u201d<\/em> <\/span>I recoil at the idea that anyone should ever be told that sharing their experience or their perspectives (\u201cexperience, strength and hope\u201d if you like) is a bad thing. I do self-censor when talking to people whose beliefs I judge to be fragile \u2013 and rigidity and brittleness often go together \u2013 but as an overall objective, I think there\u2019s little better than being able to share about how you got where you are, what assisted you in getting there and how you now view the world at large.<\/p>\n 2) \u201cWhen you hear people talk about their own spiritual experience you need to connect them up specifically with Jesus, in case they get deceived by other spirits. It’s all about that name – the man on earth who died and rose again.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n My goodness, how many ways is that statement bad? There\u2019s the magical thinking of there being power in a particular name (which, of course, wasn\u2019t actually \u201cJesus\u201d, but something more like Yeheshua, or if you like Joshua). There\u2019s the equally magical thinking of seeing a world of disembodied spirits, which is (with thanks to Walter Wink in \u201cNaming the Powers\u201d) pretty definitely not how Paul, the writer of most of the early attempts at theology on which the speaker probably relies, saw spirits \u2013 the Hebrew concept was that no spirit could ever be<\/em><\/strong> disembodied. There\u2019s the issue of ignoring Matthew 7:22-23 \u201cMany will say to Me in that day, \u2018Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?\u2019 \u00a0<\/sup>And then I will declare to them, \u2018I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!\u201d<\/em><\/span>.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the concept of \u201cThe man on earth who died and rose again\u201d<\/em><\/span>. Concepts, unlike mere words, do have some power (and OK, words might have power inasmuch as they are signifiers for a concept). What a horrendously denatured version of the gospel! Implicit in that is the idea that at root, Christianity is nothing more than an escape plan (and, of course, \u201cJesus\u201d is its label).<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost enough to make me think that deconstructing such a belief would be a good thing irrespective of whether you could construct something better to take its place (and get that to take root in the consciousness of your interlocutor…)<\/p>\n 3) (In the context of mentioning mutual friends of mine who are 10 years older than me…) \u201c…we can be in turmoil as we reach the last part of our lives, because we are being prepared for eternity.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s the escape plan again. Now, in my own perspective, our whole lives are preparation for \u201ceternity\u201d, inasmuch as we don\u2019t manage to taste it during our lifetimes \u2013 and I can think of no gift greater than being allowed to taste it ante-mortem (or from Luke 9:27 ,“Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”<\/span><\/em>) given that I don\u2019t actually know<\/strong><\/em> what happens post-mortem (and I don’t think anyone else does either). By \u201ceternity\u201d there, I obviously mean the concept rendered in the original as \u201czoe aionios\u201d, which is usually translated as \u201ceternal life\u201d \u2013 but that is a terrible translation. It might mean \u201cthe life of ages\u201d or \u201cthe life of the aeon\u201d, but I think the true sense is more like \u201cthe fullness of life\u201d.<\/p>\n If I\u2019m right about that, the implication of \u201cprepared for eternity\u201d is that they are being persuaded that the life they are actually living is worthless in comparison to that which they can anticipate after death, and that is, to my thinking, a deeply immoral thing to suggest to anyone.<\/p>\n 4) (I mentioned 7 chakras in eastern thinking, and how they were about balance and energy, which I said I found helpful in dealing with my faith at a level beyond words.) \u201cWords like ‘chakra’ should be avoided because they belong to another way and there is only one way (Jesus) that leads to God. ” Again, we have the magical thinking that words have power in and of themselves, coupled with an implicit equation of what is almost certainly one of the \u201cmany mansions\u201d of John 14:2 and the \u201cother folds\u201d of John 10:16 with (and there is no way of putting a finer point on it) Satanism. This is the kind of thinking which, were I to put a cover saying \u201cWar and Peace\u201d on my Bible (as I might, in some circles, be slightly embarrassed to be caught reading the Bible), I would have in some way changed the contents. OK, I did originally think of using the cover of, say, The Bhagavad Gita, but I don\u2019t have a Bible thin enough to fit that dust cover… though, come to think of it, Crowley\u2019s \u201cMagick in Theory and Practice\u201d would fit on my RSV.<\/p>\n Back, I think, to Matthew 7.<\/p>\n As it happens, I am very much with the Dalai Lama on this point. If someone is using the language of chakras (whether in conjunction with other Hindu, Buddhist or Jain concepts or not), I am far more disposed to try to assist them in being the best Hindu, Buddhist or Jain that they can be than to persuade them that they are following the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as Shakespeare put it. If they\u2019re merely using them as a language (and set of concepts) to assist healing, I might even point out that there are much wider systems of concepts into which that language fits, and which they should probably be exploring. (The Dalai Lama has famously told many people that, rather than converting to Tibetan Buddhism, they should strive to be a better practitioner of the religion they grew up in).<\/p>\n Actually, of course, the Dalai Lama\u2019s point rather indicates that those from the West who are talking about chakras should maybe be exploring traditions more native to them, and that is something I am always keen to mention. I suppose, in so doing, I\u2019m actually going to be \u201cconnecting them up with Jesus\u201d for some value of those words. Probably not the value my friend\u2019s acquaintance had in mind, though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A friend of mine has posted these observations, which were in turn put to her by a long term acquaintance. I thought I\u2019d give answering them a shot. 1) \u201cYou’ve had all this time to reach intimately into yourself and your relationship with God and that sense of presence. Bear in mind what you say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1381,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions\/1381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n