Jeff April 3, 2012 at 12:44 am # An Experience: Years ago I had a life changing experience. I was spending a weekend at a Trappist monastery. A friend and I entered the church for the first time, We suddenly and simultaneously each had a marked spiritual experience. We stared at each other in shock and surprise. It was the presence of the Holy Spirit, fiery and enlivening. It lasted but a moment. What shocked me most was not the mere fact of experiencing “spirit” (I was used to that in my new age and eastern religious exposure) it was that it simply wasn’t the same spirit as I had encountered in those arenas. I had been taught the cardinal principle (dogma?) that God or Spirit or the Absolute in every religion, despite different approaches and words, was the same in essence and taste. I could no longer think that, based on my experience and what I was reading in the Bible. I was undone. Unless I reinterpreted and redefined the words of the Bible in the light of systems alien to the Bible – making it say things it doesn’t. – I couldn’t blend Christ and Hinduism/Buddhism. I still had a way to go but eventually I left eastern and new age thought behind and became a Trinitarian/Nicene creed type as that understanding had the best fit to scripture and my own experience of the Three Persons of the Godhead. I came up with this parable to express what I met in my spiritual journey A Parable: The coast of Namibia is the only place in Africa where elephants swim in the ocean. Two gnats went out to sea. One landed on an elephant; the other on a whale. Both returned to land and shared their experiences. While their respective accounts had differences both said something like this: “It was huge beyond belief, wet, gray, and above all, alive!” Many gnat theologians decided the two gnats had experienced the same thing, while others disagreed. The discussion continues. Obviously the whale is Yahweh. What is the experience of the elephant? I think the “elephant” is deifying and absolutizing via “spiritual” practices and teachings your inward awareness which is created in God’s image. Your inner awareness and self is Godlike being made in his image and through proper training and continued mental programming you can expand it into an experience and perception of “absolute reality”. From the Christian perspective this is embracing the primal lie of Genesis that you can be as God! and is the root of eastern religions. Anyway this is the conclusion I’ve come to in this area. I know this is offensive to sincere and well intentioned followers of eastern spiritualities, but Jesus Christ is termed the rock of offense and the stumbling stone. I know I barked my shins against him and it was painful, but in the end 1
I trusted in him. Reply johnboy April 4, 2012 at 1:06 pm # Jeff, what you describe, in my view, is based on a common and facile caricature of the East, which, by the way, in no monolithic tradition but, instead, very pluralistic with many schools. For example, regarding anatman or no-self, in both Buddhist & Hindu traditions, many westerners tend to misappropriate the teaching when they adopt it, misinterpret it, when they critique it. One of the many practical take-aways from advaitan sensibilities for Christianity would be to simply translate the concept “identity” into “intimacy,” whenever it is encountered, to consider identity a reality we approach — not actually, but – asymptotically. In other words, even for some (maybe even most) advaitans, no-self is an adjectival & analogical interpretation of a phenomenal experience not a literal & ontological description of a metaphysical reality. The concept entails, therefore, an epistemic critique and not a positivistic description. This approach recommends we employ phenomenological vagueness for depthful, dynamical realities like God and self (i.e. both dei & imago dei) in the place of substantialist, essentialist categories. Many advaitans are panentheists, then, as are many Christians. It’s more like swimming in the ocean and either BEFRIENDING (literally) a whale or BECOMING (metaphorically) a whale, in the latter instance by being swallowed like Jonah. And these are not mutually exclusive propositions. Many have experienced both realities. It’s trialectical because first (there is a mountain) the whale is encountered and befriended, then (there is no mountain) one is swallowed by the whale, then (there is) one is spit ashore by the whale, for personal identity thus perdures even in the East! That’s one of the signs that point to the Resurrection, which we celebrate this Holy Week! Namaste Jeff Reply johnboy April 4, 2012 at 1:20 pm # RE: What is the experience of the elephant? I think the “elephant” is deifying and absolutizing via “spiritual” practices and teachings your inward awareness which is created in God’s image. Your inner awareness and self is Godlike being made in his image and through proper training and continued mental programming you can expand it into an experience and perception of “absolute reality”. <<<<<< This is tantamount to calling the Eastern experience a navel-gazing anthropomorphic projection, the same critique that Feuerbach leveled at Christianity and other theisms. It's a nonfalsifiable tautology whether leveled by Feuerbach at you 2
or leveled by you at the Eastern traditions. Alternatively, though, we might consider the inner experience to be an encounter of the indwelling deity, even as we needn't deny that, at the same time, many of us from all traditions are engaging in no small amount of self-projection, an activity from which we progressively desist on our journeys of transformation (theosis, where humanization = deification). Reply
3