Merry Christmas




Tan Jui Horne wrote:

 Me: "Hey have you read the gospel of Thomas?"

 Christian friend: "HERESY!"

 And that was the end of that.

I replied:

Gospel of Thomas is an early text and IMO could be as authentic as the canonized texts. Actually some mainstream Christians I know like that text, not everyone is against it. That said, the four canonized gospels are also deeply mystical. Most mainstream Christians however do not have access to mystical realizations, but there are Christian mystics around the world, including the contemplative order in Singapore that taught Lee Kuan Yew meditation and led to his Self-Realization.

Quotes from the 4 canonized gospels:

"20 the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: 21Â Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22The eye is the lamp of the body. If your vision is clear, your whole body will be full of light."

"I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life."

"Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am."

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending"

"I am the way, the truth, and the life."

'In him was life, and the life was the light of men."

"As long as I am in the world, I am the world's Light."

"Put your trust in the light while there is still time; then you will become children of the light."

"I and the Father are one."

"I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one."

"25Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air: They do not sow or reap or gather into barns—and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his lifespan?c

28And why do you worry about clothes? Consider how the lilies of the field grow: They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was adorned like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans strive after all these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.

34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own."

“Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak to you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwells in me, he does the works.” “I can of my own self do nothing.”

“If you love me, keep my commands. … Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

Also, Galatians 2:20:

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

Quotes from Gospel of Thomas:

"If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

"Be passerby."

"If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'

If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

"I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.

Split a piece of wood; I am there.

Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

"Jesus saw some infants who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him: If we then become children, shall we enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper as the lower, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male is not male and the female not female, and when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then shall you enter [the kingdom]."



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I also wrote to

Tan Jui Horng:

Most Christians, like most Buddhists, are not developmentally mature enough. They are at a mythic-literal, ethnocentric level of development. What are mythic literal beliefs?

Ken Wilber: "Then the mythic or mythic literal stage, which is just that: the myths are taken to be literally and absolutely true, not symbolic or metaphoric: Moses really did part the Red Sea, God really did rain locusts on the Egyptians, Lot’s wife really was turned into a sack of salt, Lao Tzu really was 900 years old when he was born, and so on. Because the mythic stage is deeply ethnocentric, most fundamentalist “chosen people” religious schools, as we noted, are mythic literal; this stage emerged starting around 10,000 years ago and in today’s development, occurs around ages 5 to 10—though the point is that today, although everybody begins their development at the first, the earliest, the archaic stage, they can stop their development at virtually any of the succeeding stages (magic, mythic-literal, rational, pluralistic, integral); which means that mythic ethnocentric-fundamentalist religion has stopped its Growing Up at the mythic literal level or stage in its spiritual intelligence."

Doing a google search reveals how many Americans are stuck in outdated, mythic-literal beliefs. "4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years Ago", only 32% of Americans believe in darwinian evolution. This validates my view that majority of people are stuck at pre-rational stages of development. This also partly explains the culture wars and politics going on in America.

They are not ready for rational and trans-rational discourses and forms of spiritual and personal development. And as such, they lack an open-mindedness to anything mystical or deeper than their surface-level dogmatic beliefs, and their religious faith is actually not an 'experiential trust' in a transrational and transpersonal divine but rather, a form of conceptual dogmas and belief.

This is why I tend not to discuss spirituality and religion with people in real life, except online, which happens to be because a lot of spiritual people added me online. Like attracts like. But just because we see many 'higher development' people online, doesn't mean the majority of people around us (in real life) are at a high stage of development. Religion and spirituality is mostly either treated as merely a form of mythic, childish and superstitious belief, (by pre-rational believers) or as utter nonsense (by rational atheists) rather than an inner, transformative, mystical and experiential realization (transrational level of spirituality). I only discuss mundane stuff with friends.

As Ken Wilber wrote in his book One Taste,

"Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the course of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that only one thousand out of one billion had graduated into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those of you without a calculator, that's 0.0000001 of the total population. And that means, unmistakably, that the rest of the population were (and are) involved in, at best, various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate religion: they were involved in magical practices, mythical beliefs, egoic petitionary prayer, magical rituals, and so on--in other words, translative ways to give meaning to the separate self, a translative function that was, as we were saying, the major social glue of the Chinese (and all other) cultures to date. Thus, without in any way belittling the truly stunning contributions of the glorious Eastern traditions, the point is fairly straightforward: radical transformative spirituality is extremely rare, anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world. (The numbers for the West are even more depressing. I rest my case.)... ...although it is generally true that the East has produced a greater number of authentic realizers, nonetheless, the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and always has been, pitifully small."

• Tan Jui Horng Great post. Looking at Buddhism as practiced by its native populations, I'm not surprised if merit-making to prepare for the next life's practice or chanting to get into a pure land are still the most regularly practiced forms of the religion. I mean, just look at our elders.
  
  Just guessing that it's the availability of quality instruction in those days. Meditation simply wasn't widely taught and was often cautioned against because it was easy to 走火入魔. Then there's likely the need to work your ass off just to eke out a living for most people, leaving less time and energy for much. And that's for a religion that's as mystical as they come. I would think availability for the kind of contemplation/introspection practices that are spiritually transformative are even rarer for the other non-eastern religions.

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  Soh Wei Yu In singapore, it’s like one half, mostly the older generation, are primarily at pre rational stage, another half is primarily at rational/orange. The only concerns for orange would usually be survival/achievement. Something like that. Younger tends to get stuck at orange/rational rather than prerational which is why religiousity is decreasing as people are growing up from prerational to rational. The very young are starting to go green but not that many yet.
  
  Usually interest in genuine authentic spirituality is likelier for green and beyond than orange and prerational, though it’s not the rule

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  Soh Wei Yu As society grows up the discourse must shift from catering to the prerational crowd to the rational and beyond
  
  Otherwise religion will sound like nonsense, which in some sense it is, as most mainstream religious organizations are stuck at prerational, which means it doesnt make sense when subjected to rational scrutiny
  
  This is why so many people identify themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” nowadays

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