Healing the Split 3

It is hard to disagree with the aims of any mysticism that calls for love and compassion in all we do, for unconditional forgiveness, and that understands our innate need to live in joy and peace, with total respect and love for all sentient beings. 


But this is the message of Jesus Christ. We don’t need another religion based on His teachings!


I've recently written of the philosophies of both Stuart Kauffman and Henryk Skolimowski. Now I come to modern mystic and visionary Andrew Harvey - who arrives from a different direction altogether with his ideas on psychic free radicals of collective unconscious, which he claims are penetrating our individual psychic fields. This clearly has some common features with what certain scientific studies now tell us about consciousness and psi. Harvey's book Sacred Activism is a call to bring consciousness of the sacred into everything we do, to be agents of profound change. Harvey lectures on his idea and has founded his Institute of Sacred Activism, from which he is setting up Networks of Grace and a Global Curriculum, extolling the virtues of his own particular brand of Divine Transformative Power and evolutionary mysticism.
Harvey shows a respect for the faiths and religious beliefs held by others, for the wisdom of elders and his love for Jesus Christ, the greatest love of his heart throughout his life, he claims. But this is the Jesus Christ of the Gospel of Thomas, and many may be unable to reconcile the Gnostic teachings of Christ with their own faith.
Nonetheless 'hope for our survival lies in massive spiritual transformation and radical action,' he writes, and I cannot disagree with that, although the reader will by now understand that I think this should be the domain of the established religions. After many years of study and immersing himself in different mystical traditions and their sacred texts, which he uses generously throughout his book, Harvey forms a vision of a new mystic spirituality.
The problem I have with Harvey and his Institute of Sacred Activism is that his ideas are already put into practice in churches everywhere;
the prayer, bible study Lent and other church based groups I attend seem very similar to his Networks of Grace by another name. In fact I am not sure that the world needs another spirituality or mysticism when most of his ideas can be found, albeit perhaps expressed differently, across all the great faiths, in the teachings of the mystics and in ancient wisdom, as he will know from his own spiritual explorations.

Healing the Split 2

The other day I looked at the ideas of Stuart Kauffman, American theoretical biologist and bio-complexity expert, calling for a new scientific worldview of God in his book Reinventing the Sacred.
The Polish Philosopher Henryk Skolimowski seeks different answers to the increasingly urgent call for a new worldview, for a revival of spirituality and transcendence, in another inspiring book Let there be Light.
Skolimowski’s philosophy is of cosmic creativity and evolution and light that unite us all as the source of all life. To understand the cosmos and its evolution and the part we play we must understand the nature of light, and its evolutionary role along the path to enlightenment. Skolimowski thinks of traditional religions and science as both having filters. In religion these prevent us experiencing the full spiritual transcendence needed for this world. Science also has its filters, becoming totally reductionist, and its rationality has become limiting and crippling. It has used Darwinian evolution as a hatchet against religion, but has never tried to understand religion and finds it hard to accept that there can be any theories of evolution beyond Darwin. And physics, he argues, makes preposterously arrogant assumptions about the laws of life. And he sees profanity in modern science and technology. He calls this 'mistletoe technology,' which he says is strangling the whole tree of life.
We are in the midst of a gigantic struggle between the old mechanistic consciousness and a new spiritually inclined consciousness, and the latter needs to assert itself. We have come to the point where we must choose madness or sanctity, and we have only been saved so far from madness by the great and beautiful art and music and literature, sacred and otherwise that is available to us. But much of our art is now ugly; perpetuating the ugliness we have created around us. And ugliness is carcinogenic. Without beauty we wither. Artists therefore have a responsibility in this. 'We can and must re-articulate human nature,' Skolimowski writes, 'away from the ugly and destructive; and towards beautiful, transcendent and noble.' Furthermore, 'the violence done to beauty has been violence done to our souls and lives…the loss of spirituality is one of the consequences.'
We need wisdom and an essential task before us is to nurture the seed of the spirit and the divine. Skolimowski therefore includes meditational practices of mind and body and light, to nurture our spiritual being. It is clear there is much wrong with our present social contract, and the need to design a new one is urgent. But this needs a leap of transcendence, which must be spiritual. Religions, he says, need a renewal at source. And unless we rise to that challenge to change ourselves, politicians and political scientists will continue in their old ways and the world will not heal. Because they will not change by themselves, conditioned as they are by the past and possessed by the 'collective un-wisdom of our time…The institutions only reflect who you are, including your indolence and lack of responsibility.'

This sets an important challenge for us all.

Was Jesus a female God?

That is the claim of Polish philosopher Professor Henryk Skolimowski in Let There Be Light: The Mysterious Journey of Cosmic Creativity. Christ came to earth as goddess in male form, to bring the feminine qualities of love and affirmation, forgiveness and healing, to a harsh world. But the patriarchal status quo, the masculine dominance, has been suppressing and intimidating the forces of love that He brought ever since. "The forces of male mentality subverted the gentle teachings of Jesus." And because of this the Church failed to protest against a blatant perversion of Christ's teachings.
And the Christian churches will not strengthen and renew themselves, he writes, until they cease to ally themselves with this dominant male status quo, they cease to worship Mammon, and they truly recognise the female side of Jesus and pursue love beyond all else in their teaching and actions. At a time of global financial turmoil, when capitalism protest demonstrations are taking place outside St Paul’s Cathedral and Wall Street, alongside the successful establishment of female priests in the Anglican Church, and when it seems that at last we may see female bishops before too long, these are indeed interesting thoughts.
You can read my full review of this lovely book at Amazon.