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Community of the Living Sacrifice |
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Christian Advaita |
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Realization means to make Real. We believe certain things to be real, and we believe certain things to be imaginary, or un-real. The goal is to make those things we believe to be real. For Belief can be very dangerous. In his book, The Passionate Mind, Joel Kramer states, "To believe anything at all is to be in a state of violence-external and internal violence. Let us see the way this works. As one moves through the world one sees there are many beliefs which are always jockeying with one another, always vying for our minds. If you have a belief about anything and that belief is attacked by another belief- another system of thought, philosophy, religion, another “ism”- what do you do? You automatically defend it, don't you? The thing to do is look at the way you work. Whether you defend it verbally to the other person or go away and defend it silently to yourself doesn't matter- your still defending it. It's in the psychological structure of belief to automatically defend itself when attacked. Is a defense any different from attack? To be defending a belief is to be attacking somebody else's. In this whole process of belief there is always defense and attack- always." So as wonderful and reassuring as belief is, it is To return to the point at hand; realization then means to make real the "beliefs" we formerly held. Realization to Maharaj meant to be one. Advaita Vedanta is the formal name of what Maharaj taught. Advaita is described as extreme Nondualism. This was a break-through for my being. I had long held the belief that there was no separation between ourselves and God. The Church sees this separation as "caused" by sin. Advaita, however sees that God, ourselves, and sin are all illusions in consciousness. Consciousness itself becomes illusion when realized, as Consciousness only exists in dualism, and can only exist when there is something "other" to be conscious of. This should be quite clear even in Christian terms. There is only one God, and all that is, is created by him. Therefore all things are part and parcel of God. Christ is part of God, all beings are part of God, all inanimate objects are part of God, and all the rest of it. So, I had no problem believing, right away, the intellectual arguments of Advaita. The Church clearly uses "sin" as an answer to a separation that in reality does not exist. We are not separate from God. We cannot be separated from God. When I was just starting out in my return to the Church, I was in a study group exploring the Eastern Orthodox "Jesus" prayer. This is a kind of contemplative prayer that traditionally uses the prayer:" Lord Jesus hear my prayer, and have mercy upon me, a sinner." Instead of using this traditional prayer, we were encouraged to search quietly in our hearts for a "personal" prayer that would become a "prayer of the heart." This was not at all difficult for me at that time, as I stated above, I had only recently come back to the Church and my sense of overwhelming love was right there on the surface. My prayer of the heart became: “Father, my friend, I love you.” This showed my strong affection, the very personal relationship that I had developed with God. God was to me the Father. The Father Christ spoke of. He was also, and perhaps more so, my best friend, knew all my secrets and kept all his promises. And in the quite of contemplation, fed my heart. I don't think that this is much different then any Christian who has dealt deeply into the heart of the Church's teachings, and found the foundation of love there. I spent a good deal of time searching my heart. I loved the Church. I believed in most of it's teachings, but I had spent much of my childhood, and most of my adult life looking for Truth. Now, I was finding the Church was not only hiding from the Truth, but hiding it from others. I intellectually embraced Vedanta, and began to study Hinduism. I quickly realized that it was futile to embrace a religion that is foreign in culture, history and mode of thought. So many people I have encountered, who have begun to study Eastern Religions, seem to take up Eastern cooking, and listening to eastern music, and even wearing eastern clothing. Certainly, getting to know the background and culture where a mode of thought or group of ideas grew up is helpful, but to let the cultural background become the where all and be all of the religion or belief is putting the cart before the horse. That is why I hoped to be able to put the new ideas together with the long hours of meditation and contemplation that had been put in and find a new or better “way”. As I said earlier, I intellectually embraced Advaita Vedanta, and wanted very much the “realization”, everyone talked about. |
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Following is an excerpt from “Community of One” : |
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Nisargadatta Maharaj (Click on Picture) |
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Sri Ramana Maharshi (Click on Picture) |
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© CLS |
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Something to get beyond. |