Discrimination in Religion

[abcrystcats]

I have finally completed transcribing my grandfather's autobiography of nearly 400 typewritten, double-spaced pages. The next task is proofreading.

This little essay was located at the end of the book, and I thought I would share it with you.

About the Author: My grandfather was born in 1899. He graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with an advanced degree and taught there briefly before embarking on a career in geophysics and mining engineering. His engineering work took him all over the world, including the Canadian Arctic, Peru, Bolivia and Australia. As a geophysicist, he is best known for his creation of the Third Theory of Comminution, which is still in use today. His spiritual explorations began as a young man and continued until his death in 1977. I do not believe he was familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell. He never mentioned him, and his extensive library did not include a single work by that author, whose explorations so closely paralleled his.

Discrimination in Religion


Religion is man’s search for God.

God is ONE. He is the universe in its entirety. All existence is in Him, including all thoughts and aspirations. Any existence without God is actually unthinkable by man, since he cannot think without God.

God is eternal and timeless. He is always in the NOW, without past or future. He has no human attributes. To man He is perfection. Those who see Him as less than this, or as nonexistent, are seeing only the limited boundaries of their own minds.

He has many names. Because I believe that the science of the future will recognize Him as universal, not made like man, and as the basis of all, I like to call Him the immaterial Ether, which fills everything and from which all material things are produced as transient forms.

The Ether is one undivided substance without time or temperature, which cannot be perceived by any material sense. It can segregate locally into temporary balanced positive and negative charges which have motion. These particles form electrons, positrons, neutrons, protons, et cetera. They aggregate to produce atoms, molecules, crystals, living bodies, suns, stars, galaxies, and all the wonders of astronomical space which are revealed by photons traveling from them. They are in incessant motion, or vibration, which establishes time and the energy which create all temperatures above absolute zero. The ensemble constitutes material existence, which is continually changing with time. Rapidly or slowly each form is becoming something else, often alternating between matter and energy. Compared with the unchanging Ether, all material existence is essentially transient and unreal.

Life is a more developed transient microcosmic manifestation of the eternal Ether. Each individual living plant or animal is an ego-will which assembles and occupies a material body, adapting it to exist as long as possible in imitation of the eternal Ether, and to procreate other bodies to be occupied and developed by returning egos of their species. As time passes each ego is eventually defeated and its body falls apart in death.

Man is a soul and has a body during this life. His body is adapted and controlled by his ego-will to live, procreate, and grow in importance and power toward ultimate perfection. His soul is a spark from the Ether and returns to it when his ego is finally defeated in death, later to enter another procreated human body in accordance with the cyclic process of natural development.

Man’s awareness, or consciousness, is almost all material, since its purpose is to aid in directing his ego-will toward the survival of his body. His spiritual awareness of his soul, or of God, is very dim and poorly developed; it is obscured by the keen physical awareness necessary for his survival, and can only be perceived when this is absent. His faint spiritual awareness is the basis of religion.

Man’s spirituality first manifested out of his desire for survival, as a search for protection from the powers of nature. To propitiate them he worshiped the sun, moon, fire, lightning and sometimes prayed for rain. He feared the cold, the flood, and the storm. He developed personified gods to contact these great forces, and worshiped them for his good and against evil.

Man’s dimly struggling spiritual perception has always had this great enemy. He fails in some degree to discriminate between the material things of his existence and the perfect Ether God of which his soul is an unseparated part. His spiritual evolution has been a slow and painful upgrading of the material things he worships as his feeble image of God.

After the nature gods came the material idols. Uncommon stones, meteorites, hideous or beautiful carved images, articles made of gold and other precious materials; all these were worshiped as saviors from death and destruction. As long as they were devoutly believed in they had some effectiveness. Only with growing doubts that a material object has supernatural powers did the worship of idols abate.

The next stage was that of the man myths. Groups and families of mythical gods were created to dwell in the Heavens. The Hindus, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and the northern German and Scandinavian races had their mythical god families. They were anthropomorphic beings with supernatural powers but with very human attributes and failings, often in very human conflict with each other. Entertaining stories were told of their exploits, some of which grew into sacred literatures. Certain Roman emperors were declared to be gods, Sons of Jupiter, and kings ordinarily ruled with the sanction of divine right. Such gods were very useful in strengthening patriotism and the stability of the state, but they did little to advance personal morality and ethics. The god families were finally discredited and disappeared. Zoroaster saw the universe as the scene of conflict between good and evil; he created a suitable god for each.

The single eternal God, who transcends human limitations and portrays human perfection, and the man-become-God, dominate the present stage of the evolution of spiritual perception. It is obviously more advanced than the older concepts, but it may still be marred by the ubiquitous human failure to discriminate between material and spiritual things. We yet ascribe material things, including the egoistic nature of man, to spiritual uses. The persistence of this error had effects that are still written large in human history.

A few great teachers with rare spiritual understanding, both in legendary and in historical times, have been given to us. These great ones made spirituality so real and so attractive that their followers were transported with joy. They organized to spread the wonderful teachings, and sometimes distorted them to make the memory of the teacher himself into a god. The teacher became the idolized savior to be personally worshiped and adored. Sacred writings and liturgies appeared. Each human organization developed its own consuming group-ego-to-power, with persecution and war to convert others who did not have the true light. Civilized history bears testimony
to the terrible effects of lack of spiritual discrimination. It was perhaps the greatest teacher of all who said; “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Nations must aspire to be healthy. The people need a religious figure to believe in and to worship. When the materiality of the figure given them becomes apparent, its worship ceases. Then the animal part of man’s nature takes over society. There is violence, crime and rioting in the streets; morality declines. The times are troubled until a new and more spiritual religious divinity appears. Thus idols replaced the nature powers, god families replaced the idols, and man-become-God replaced the heavenly families.

It seems in these present days that we are reaching for another transition. Belief in the man-become-God is faltering from the egoism of His representatives. Our times are out of joint. There can be no turning back. What will be the next religious figure to restore mankind’s faith in its future, and a measure of tranquillity to our lives?

Perhaps it will derive from the thoughts of the ancient Hindu Rishis. They are attracting much attention at present. There has never been a book written more essentially spiritual than the Bhagavad Gita. Possibly the Atman of the Gita, somewhat modified as the Self of Carl Jung, and corresponding to the Christ Consciousness of many religious people today, can be renamed and fashioned to serve as the spiritual aspiration of generations yet unborn. Whatever the form that it takes, it may come quickly.

[mtmynd]

Excellent read, Cat. Kudos to the memory of your grandfather. Do you know what year he wrote this... how old he was? The man definitely had an understanding of the great mysteries of life. I'd liked to have known him... but I have connected with him thru this essay.

Thank you very much for sharing this. It is worthy of publication.

Cecil

[abcrystcats]

Cecil, he was in his seventies. This was written in 1973/74.

It doesn't seem like much to me now, because there's so much available literature these days covering a wide variety of religious and metaphysical topics, but when my grandfather was studying all this stuff there was very little to go on. This country was very church oriented and it was more difficult to find translations of sacred writings and balanced, non-Christian perspectives on them. Nowadays you just walk into Borders or go on the internet and you find scads of information.

He was a Rosicrucian for many years, starting in the 1930s, but after he discovered the Gita he broke with them. He felt they owed much to the Gita and other Hindu writings and did not give them credit.

He wrote a book (unpublished) on the subject of the evolution of spiritual thought, using a rather unique fictional vehicle. The idea was excellent, but the book needed much revision before it could be submitted to a publisher. My uncle began the revision process many years back, but did not complete it. Perhaps that will be my next family project. I think the book would do well with a New Age publisher, perhaps presented as a older child's aid to understanding and tolerating the many aspects of religion.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

[mtmynd]

Thx, Cat.. for the info. That was a very impressive essay. Hopefully, thru you or someone else in your family, due credit will come to him and his insights.

[mnaz]

Good stuff, Cat.

Thanks for sharing. Your grandfather's view of God is similar to my own, which explains my pronounced distaste for any rigid belief or doctrine which denies even the possibility of God's existence or claims to fit God into a religious box of "absolute truth".