When he was young this writer loved to argue. He would argue about almost
anything. And, of course, he thought he was always right. After many instances of being disabused of that opinion, (facts have a way of doing that),
that balloon has been deflated. Along the way, he has become sensitized by
the discordancy of argumentation to the degree that his body shakes when
there is a strong argument. However, some of the topics of some of those
arguments still engage his consciousness. Among them is the question of
whether Jesus was a capitalist or a socialist. Certainly, there are more than
just those two options, and certainly the incarnate Christ was above petty
politics; but this dichotomy persists, and is even a factor in present day political discussion. Some believe they are compatible. Democratic Socialists
have governed capitalistic nations in Europe for decades, and those nations
have prospered. In its simple and sharp distinction, this dichotomy is still
intellectually engaging.
To capitalistic thinkers, the parable of the talents seems to be incontrovertible evidence. On the other side, when Christ sent out his disciples, he commanded them to take no possessions and no money, only the clothes on their
backs. In a debatable way, there is even democracy in the New Testament
in the various forms of elections of new apostles. If one sets out to count
the numbers of capitalist versus socialist allusions in the Gospels, one finds
something different; one learns the dichotomy is not between capitalism and
socialism, it is between a heavenly and an earthly outlook. Christ frequently
speaks of “the kingdom of Heaven,” which is so foreign to earthly consciousness, that it can only be intimated in parables. Christ even states succinctly
our duty to both: “…render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Christian Mysticism tells us there is a continuum in the cosmos. It stretches from “clod to God” as the maxim says. Throughout this continuum, the
unity of the Universal Spirit is discovered by the Principle of Analogy, “As
above, so below….” In the continuum are different worlds with different laws,
through which different kinds of experience is gained. We humans are fortunate to have vehicles of consciousness corresponding to almost all of the
worlds except the highest, which is the World of God. However, though we
have vehicles of consciousness, we are not very conscious, if at all, of most of
the worlds. This is, in part, because we are undeveloped in them, but mostly
because of our fall into matter.
Our fall into matter has been so deep, and so thorough, that we are almost
unaware of the higher spiritual worlds. It wasn’t always this way. Paul, in the
first chapter of Romans, tells us we could see to the very godhead before we
fell into corruption. We think in the world of thought, and we emote in the
desire world, but we still believe it all originates in the physical world. The
belief that everything has its origin in matter is classic materialism. We have
focused our attention into matter so exclusively for so long that materialism is a habitual attitude, a bad habit. Materialism is the norm. We are told
to “come to our senses” (the senses that relate to the outer material world)
when we focus deeply on inner things. The psychiatric definition of sanity is
based in materialism. Mental health workers try to bring patients back to reality, which means back to the physical world, back to materialism. Mention
of other worlds is called “crazy talk.” Many psychologists and psychiatrists
see religion and spirituality as enemies of mental health.
Even a brief visit to a mental hospital, opens one to the fact that many patients do try to escape adjustment and responsibility to this world, by focusing attention into the inner worlds in a skewed and distorted manner.
Disorientation in the inner worlds is an easy thing to have happen. Most
neophytes are disoriented when first opening consciousness to the higher
worlds. One such individual told this writer that it was astounding how seers
like Max Heindel could be as clear and objective as they were about something so chaotic. However, the fact that there are people with mental health
issues relative to the higher worlds, and that there are involuntary clairvoyants who do not have fine-tuned control of higher world consciousness, does
not mean that one cannot have healthy, stable spiritual development. That is
one of our goals when we say “a sane mind, a soft heart, a sound body.” The
inverse of the current outlook might be true, i.e., that psychological health is
impossible if one is a materialist.
One of the dangers and problems with adjustment and adaption to reality
lies in the structure of the continuum of the cosmos. The continuum is more
than a series of worlds or states of being along what is called the spirit-matter
pole. At the heart of the spirit-matter pole is the focus of a great divide. Everything on one side of the divide is abstract and spiritual. On the other side,
everything is concrete and material, even though interpenetrated by spirit.
The farther one proceeds from the divide, the greater the degree of abstraction, or concretion. The heart of the spirit-matter pole is more than a locus. It
is something like a compound lens and mirror. By means of it, the Universal
Spirit accomplishes the manifest creation in a process called reflective projection in Christian Mysticism. Thus, the deeper states of creative manifestation are reflective projections of the corresponding deeper states of spirit.
To be specific, the chemical state, which is the objective of materialism, is the
reflective projection of the state of spirit called Divine Spirit. Divine Spirit is
the deepest state of being in our human spiritual anatomy. It is the home of
that great being of the Christian godhead called the Father (not God, a being
far greater, behind and within the godhead.) From this, one can see a potential problem, which is that one can mistake the reflection for the reality in a
way that is analogous to the way an audience is fooled by a stage magician
into believing a mirror image is a reality. Illusion. In this, materialists suffer
from spiritual malnutrition in an insatiable hunger for more of what cannot
be satisfying. The experience of Divine Spirit in faith is always satisfying,
while matter can never be.
Both capitalism and socialism are materialistic. Both suffer from inversion
and the resultant confusions and illusions about the nature of reality.
There are other characteristics of the spirit-matter pole beyond abstraction
and concretion. One of them is that states of spirit are unlimited, while states
of matter are of varying degrees of limitation; the chemicals being the most
limited. Inverted misunderstanding of this characteristic has proven to be
troublesome to our spiritual health. The value of this material world in which
we are focused, lies in its limitation. Limitation is a blessing, not the blockage,
as some spiritual seekers have come to think of it. In limitation, we learn the
rudiments of reality in a manner analogous to the way little children learn to
read with a limited vocabulary. The stubborn resistance of solid matter awakens us to objectivity, and generates Conscious Soul simultaneously. Even our
individuality, our discrete focus of the Universal Spirit, is awakened by the
separation between chemical bodies. However, the selfishness that brought
us to fall too deeply into matter and materialism as we did, has transformed
some aspects of the blessing into a curse. In our inverted state we tend to see
value and wealth in matter, not spirit. We always want more. In the transcendent spiritual worlds there is always more, but not in the concrete worlds.
That doesn’t seem to deter us from trying, at almost any cost. We want more
luxury befitting our egoistic self-conceit. It is not the materialistic pursuit
that generates suffering, it is the selfishness and excess. This is true in large
and in small, in nations and in individuals.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a measure of a nation’s economic activity and is the sum of the market value of all final goods and services produced by an economy during a period of time. The GDP measures the growth
or contraction of a nation’s economy. Nations are ranked by either the size or
growth of their economies. As of this writing the United States is the largest
economy and Tuvalu is the smallest, while Libya is the fastest growing economy and Venezuela is the fastest declining economy. Comparative ranking
like this implies competition and that is where the rub is. There is a limit to
natural resources. New discoveries of natural resources are made but, ultimately, there is a limit. There is only so much Earth. New techniques and
technologies allow us to get more out of resources more efficiently, but there
is a limit. Eventually, life on Earth becomes a zero-sum game, which is a
situation in which one participant can only gain by another losing the exact
amount as the gain of the first. Being as we are, this inevitably means war.
For example, water is a precious resource, and bitter wars have already been
waged over riparian rights, and it is likely that there will be more to come,
unless there is change.
The type of change that is necessary is stated in a favorite quote of Max Heindel by Thomas Paine: “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” Eventually, all are to share in the wealth
of the world. That sounds like socialism but it is more than that. Socialism
is founded in sharing material wealth, so it is still materialistic; matter is the
end. It is altruism that is the resolution of the material crisis of the earth. In
altruism love is the end. Once we realize the truth that in spirit, we are equal
and all essential parts of a spiritual unity, material equity will follow. We
do not have to enter politics or statecraft to help humanity progress toward
this goal. We are mystics, and as practiced, practical thinkers, we are significant contributors to the psychic background environment. In our prayers
and other concentrations, what we think and hold in our heads and hearts,
affects what others think and feel. We have a duty to use what we have developed in our spiritual exercises for the benefit of all.
Nations, races, clans and families have played a valuable role in our passing
from humanity as a once-homogenous whole without individuation, to becoming a collection of free, stand-alone individuals. As free individuals we
may choose to see and live in the true realization of our unity in Life Spirit,
and when we do so, it is voluntary. As we do that, we dissolve nations, creeds
and all other barriers to free, loving unity. Along the way we must reverse
our inverted materialistic evaluation. We must uplift where we have drawn
ourselves down along with the Earth.
We have purchased our relationship to the Earth, at the high price of blinding
materialism. Now we must be responsible for what we own, and we must tend
to its needs. The Rosicrucian philosophy teaches us that it is our eventual
duty and privilege to levitate and guide the Earth in its evolutionary path. To
do that, we must build our individual and collective soul bodies with the soul
being the stuff of the “new kingdom,” the new etheric globe. We do this every
time we do something altruistically from the goodness of our hearts. We do
this with emphasis in our healing services when we transduce Life Spirit into
usable etheric healing force. These are actions we can take, but we must also
change our attitudes about matter and the Earth. Christ said, “…my kingdom
is not of this world.” He also told us that the Kingdom Of Heaven is like a
pearl of great price which can only be purchased with an attitude of selling
all that we have, individually and collectively, while still maintaining the responsibility and coming to the realization that, “The earth is the Lord’s and
the fullness thereof.”
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