Primeval Panentheism, Part 2 of 3
The Rise & Fall of Abrahamism
In the first part of this three part series, we discussed how spirituality is a normal part of being human. The natural spirituality that we all have is meant to be served by religions, rather than our religions being served by our natural spirituality. The primeval religion understood this, and in addition it was panentheistic: Recognizing that God interpenetrates Nature (Immanence) while yet being beyond it (Transcendence) at the same time. Over time, Man began to forget that God is present in Nature and instead came to idolatrously believe that Nature is God, that The Creation is itself the ultimate reality and does not signify anything (or Anyone) higher. Nature Religions, then, are potentially good but also dangerous, and it all depends on how it’s approached - the same can be said for literally anything else. But in essence, every means God has of enlightening Man can be something that Man misunderstands to his own peril, but that is a risk God is willing to take since the glory experienced by just one man “getting it right” is more than worth thousands getting it wrong.
Man lives in Nature but he also lives in History. When God is approached in the former, it is understood that He is present in some special aspect of The Creation such as The Sun. Abrahamism represents, more singularly than any other religious system, the way of approaching God through the remembrance of historical events wherein He freely chose to act. To be sure, all cultures considered their history to be sacred and its remembrance to be a way of approaching God, but over time the sacred histories of most tribes were forgotten. In Abrahamism the idea of “God-in-History” is emphasized almost to the exclusion of all other means of approaching God. Because approaching God through Nature had gradually become dangerous as explained in the first part of this series, many had for the most part forgotten how to connect with God altogether. The peoples required a shock to jolt them back into the consciousness of God. Thus, God decided to spread the knowledge of a specific set of historical events wherein He was present to ensure that there was still a path of spiritual evolution open for humanity to walk. Many men could no longer approach God through Nature but they could still approach God through History, and insofar as Man approached Him correctly through History the correct sense of God’s presence in Nature could be regained. After all, to correctly perceive God at all is to perceive Him in both Nature and History.
The Israelites of the Bible, more than any other people in antiquity, saw God in History rather than in Nature. They saw their unique history as a drama being directed by God and acted out in real time. Their exodus from Egypt, their wars, and even the downfall of their own kingdom were all seen by them as means of knowing God. When God acts decisively in History, that event becomes a doorway to the Eternal. Temporality thus becomes a ladder to eternality. This is so regardless of whether that event is experienced firsthand or if it is only remembered through hearsay or writing. Abrahamism is the religion of The Sacred Event: Remembering these events, such as The Crucifixion of Christ, thus becomes the primary spiritual praxis. For these events to be remembered their story must be told, and so there is the necessity of the critical importance of the written word. The emergence of these texts is itself a sacred event for the Abrahamist. God inspires a man to write a book having knowledge in it that no man could ever discover on his own: Revelation. But the written word is an imperfect medium for approaching God. Reading about revelations is no substitute for really experiencing revelations of your own, which is what the writings are meant to be helping you have instead of taken as ends in themselves. Because of the singularly important role of History in the spirituality of Israel, it made sense for God to want to spread their religious sense throughout the world, and indeed that was always His plan from the first moment that He began interacting with them when He made a covenant with Abraham. God foreknew that Man would lose the correct panentheistic perception of God-in-nature and would need an approach for Him in History as an alternative.
When I first finished reading the whole Bible, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelations, I was struck by the fact that the whole object of the book seems to be to humiliate Man and glorify God, which leads credence to the idea that the book is of divine origin since none of the naturally and nobly proud men of antiquity could ever write a book like this. Man’s wickedness and God’s goodness in spite of it is a central theme of the Biblical drama. History is a record of words and deeds, and so Sacred History is a record of the words and deeds of God, though we would be severely mistaken (and Abrahamists usually are) for thinking that the events recorded in Abrahamic scriptures are the only history of God’s dealings with man. There is no book capable of containing all of the history of God’s deeds in this or any other world inhabited by sentient beings, nor would any man ever live long enough to be able to read such a book in its entirety even if it did exist. But by reading The Bible we are brought into contact with Sacred Events which can make us have the correct frame for how we interpret our own experience of history in the way that God wants us to, which can help us to understand Him and grow spiritually. Rightly interpreted, The Bible provides the framework of understanding God’s dealings with every nation and every major historical event. We are meant to read the history of our own people in the history of the people of Israel, and see how the patterns in Israel’s history play out in our own nation’s history, such as how nations fall when they turn away from God and yet still have a chance at redemption, how nations are tested and tried in accordance with His will and can be blessed with prosperity when they worship and obey Him in the ways that cause real spiritual growth.
An important fact that most Perennialists, and most modern people just in general, do not grasp is that Christianity is the direct continuation of the Religion, Culture, History, and Identity of Ancient Israel whereas Judaism is not. The erroneous idea taught now is that Judaism is the Old Testament religion, and Christianity is something that emerged out of it. The truth is that Christianity is all that the Biblical, Israelite Monotheism religion ever was. Moses and Abraham were Christians, but Jesus the Divine Avatar had not yet been born. Judaism is actually a corruption of the old testament religion and Christianity is its only direct continuation today.
While as a Perennialist I believe there are many different pathways to God, I do not believe that all these paths are equal and lead to the same levels of Enlightenment, nor do I believe that all opinions about God are equal. The Truth is, some religions have an inferior understanding of God. While all Abrahamisms suffer from conceptual limitations, Christianity is the most accurate Abrahamism. The positive fruit of Abrahamism is that it places our personal relationship with The Supreme Being at the core of existence as is indeed the case.
History is the study of changes over time, but some changes reveal The Changeless. It was God’s Plan to use The Israelites to show how He can be present in history, but the climactic event in that historical saga is when God incarnates among them as Jesus Christ. There have been many divine incarnations on many worlds that are suited for a specific people in a specific time and place, and to receive a divine incarnation is one of the greatest blessings that God can give. Among the divine incarnations that have happened in the ancient past in this world are Krishna and Rama. God incarnates to grow closer to Man and help Man to grow. As St. Athanasius put it, “God became man so that man might become God” and indeed this is the greatest help in an individual man getting divinized, which is the purpose of life.
Because it teaches that God can be incarnated as a Man, Christianity is the most similar to the original primeval religion of mankind out of the three major Abrahamic religions. Revering Divine Avatars is a critical component of the religion of the Golden Age. One of the characteristics of The Golden Age is that it is ruled by a Divine Avatar. Judaism and Islam are vastly inferior to Christianity in this respect. Christianity syncretized very heavily with Indo-European spirituality in Europe, and this was always God’s Will, in fact it should’ve syncretized to an even heavier degree than what it did. The high philosophical elegance of Christian Platonism, the nobility of Arthurianism, and many beautiful aesthetic traditions in Europe are the fruit of the marriage of Euro-Aryan Spirituality with Christianity. Christianity, in fact, was always meant to be a syncretistic religion that improved and purified whatever spiritual sense was already present among any given Ethnos. How could a religion of love be anything but syncretistic? What is love if not a syncretism that merges two different things and creates something new from that union that is a mix of the two yet also different? Sadly, as we can see also from reading The Old Testament, whenever God initiates a movement among Mankind most people do not correctly carry out His Will, and so the Christian movement was often lead by dogmatic fools who destroyed the divine works of previous ages out of a misplaced zeal.
Because most of them rejected Christ, a Divine Avatar, in such an arrogant and spiteful manner, The Jews have since received a punishment that is very severe and have become a cursed people. Most Jews are not even blood descendants of The Israelites though they claim to be1. Now they are chosen by God in a different way: to be the tempters who we grow spiritually by overcoming. Many Jews, especially the Jewish Elites, mistakenly believe that they are inherently superior to all other peoples, and this has made them enemies of God and of most of mankind. The thing is, every people is “A Chosen People” in the sense that God has chosen each people to do a specific task which is their purpose for existing. The mission of each people must be accomplished for that people to grow spiritually. The Bible is actually a record of how most of the People of Israel failed to obey the mission that God gave them and this is meant to teach us how grave the consequences of disobeying God really are. All peoples could potentially become as cursed as The Jews if they reject God decisively enough. To reject God is always to fall into the hands of The Dark Powers who have also rejected Him. Ultimately, all entities, human or demonic, that become enemies of God will be utterly destroyed at the right time and all of their evil deeds will be subverted into being ways of advancing God’s will to bless those who are faithful to Him. The Creator can never be out-planned or meaningfully challenged, and whenever He is dishonoured He will regain the honour that He lost at the hands of those who rejected Him by torturing them in this world or the next. May He have mercy on us.
The very best and wisest among the Abrahamics have always recognized that God is present in Nature and in History too, though their religions vastly emphasize His presence in the latter. The best example of this that I can think of is St. Francis, whose “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon” is the best expression of the Primeval Panentheism that I have yet found within a Christian framework. Here it is in full:
Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord, All praise is Yours, all glory, all honour and all blessings.
To you alone, Most High, do they belong, and no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.
Praised be You my Lord with all Your creatures,
especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is the day through whom You give us light.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendour,
Of You Most High, he bears the likeness.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,
In the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,
by which You cherish all that You have made.
Praised be You my Lord through Sister Water,
So useful, humble, precious and pure.
Praised be You my Lord through Brother Fire,
through whom You light the night and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.
Praised be You my Lord through our Sister,
Mother Earth
who sustains and governs us,
producing varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
Praise be You my Lord through those who grant pardon for love of You and bear sickness and trial.
Blessed are those who endure in peace, By You Most High, they will be crowned.
Praised be You, my Lord through Sister Death,
from whom no-one living can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Blessed are they She finds doing Your Will.
No second death can do them harm. Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks,
And serve Him with great humility.2
In this Canticle, St. Francis correctly recognizes that the elemental forces of Nature are literally alive just as The Pagans did. But, he recognized that these forces are subservient to a Supreme God which is a reality the pagans of Europe gradually forgot and Christianity was the means God chose to remind them of this. St. Francis is a Christian Animist and in his canticle the lost primeval panentheism is restored. But sadly, this complete harmony of Paganism and Christianity was seldom achieved as God had intended for it to be due to the ignorance and wickedness of man.
St. Francis saw how God is fully transcendent and fully immanent. Typically, Abrahamists assert that He is transcendent: Above and beyond every other thing, The Other; Whilst Pagans assert He is immanent: Present everywhere and within everything, The All. Both sides think their perception alone is correct and the other wrong but in this both sides are mistaking their piece of truth for the only truth there is and neglecting to see that the truth they have is just one piece of a larger puzzle which can be integrated with the other side’s piece. The truth is that He is Transcendentally Immanent and Immanently Transcendental: He is in everything and separate from everything at the same time. Though everywhere, He is not everywhere equally: He is more present in some things than in others. Hierarchy is an indispensable part of the Universe that He made and something in the universe is higher than another to the extent that He is more present in it and the extent to which it takes on His likeness as He is higher than any other thing. Indeed, God is omnipotent, and omnipotence is taken to the logical conclusion by recognizing that God can have two positive contradictory qualities like Transcendence and Immanence to the maximal degree possible and reconcile them perfectly into a single whole as an intrinsic part of His Being. It matters not if your mortal mind cannot comprehend that. To say He is only Transcendent and cannot be therefore Immanent, or vice-versa, is to blasphemously place a limit on what He can do: Who are we to do this?
Indeed, He is present in every blade of grass, so walk with reverence on the earth that He made, my dear reader. Yet, how can He who is goodness and truth and beauty itself be reduced to mere grass? He touches all and yet is untouched by all: Though blades of grass are trampled or burned, He is not trampled or burned. Wherever goodness, truth, beauty are present, there He is, and yet He is beyond even these. He is eternal and infinite Being participating freely in every becoming, grand or subtle.
Both Immanence and Transcendence carry a danger of idolatry when the one attribute is considered in exclusion to the other. We have already discussed the idolatry that can happen when God’s presence in Nature is taken to mean that the plain facts of Nature are all that there is to reality, but acknowledging God’s presence in History is also just as potentially dangerous. God is present in Nature and History, but if we make mistake of thereby concluding Nature and History are God we are lost, for God is our natural telos, not Nature or History. As swimming is to a fish or flying is to a bird so glorifying Our Creator is our natural telos. So when we misunderstand God, we misunderstand ourselves, and only the Enlightened Saint is a fully realized man.
Abrahamism is a religion of prophets, who proclaim the sacred events of the future and interpret the sacred events of the past. But the purpose of the prophets is actually to draw us out of history by putting us in touch with the Eternal One who is sovereign over History by telling us of those events when His Divine Energies were at work. The sacred events of the past are meant to be a doorway to Eternity and leaving history altogether, they are not meant to keep us stuck in the past, and the anticipation of more sacred revelatory events are not meant to make us waste our lives away in anticipation of the future but to teach us that the future is in God’s hands and thus not worth worrying about so we can focus on spiritual growth in the present. Yes, History too can be a false idol, and this is the idolatry of our age. Everything that God can use to save Man can be a means for Man being ensnared if Man does not approach it correctly. The idolatry of history lies in believing that we are approaching a utopian time-period where all the needs of man will be fulfilled indefinitely in a matter of time, where all the problems intrinsic to life in the material universe are solved forevermore. This never happens: While some ages are surely better than others, there is no coming time of permanent betterment but rather history continues its cyclical rise and decline as it always does. The wise man therefore seeks to leave behind the cyclicality of history altogether by entering God’s Abode. The Sacred Events of Abrahamism are meant to be a means of leaving behind this cyclicality which the Dharmis call Samsara. But this age has forgotten this, and so they have reduced God to history, and the delusory belief in a coming materialistic, even transhumanistic “Golden Age” without any suffering that will last forever propels people to all kinds of atrocities. This is what we see with Communism and Liberalism, which are rightly understood as Abrahamic heresies. These secular ideologies are to the path of approaching God by means of History (Abrahamism) as superstitious savagery is to the path of approaching God by means of Nature (Paganism).
Given that in most places of the world Abrahamism has devolved into a lethal spiritual poison because of this Idolatry of History, God will destroy Abrahamism and replace it with a new religious movement based on realizing God through Nature. Indeed, though it is difficult to discern because it happens on a timescale too vast to be written about in mere history books, the paths of God-in-History and God-in-Nature have always had a cyclical relationship with each other. Whenever one path becomes degenerate, God replaces it with the other. Just as God-in-Nature religions were replaced with God-in-History religions, so God-in-Nature religions will now spread and replace the God-in-History religions, and these new God-in-Nature religions to come will themselves degenerate after milleniums have passed to be replaced by a new God-in-History religion. This is good: The perception of God in nature will slice through the maddening abstractions of thinking about history, and at a time when different political entities are destroying Nature to advance their goals in pursuing their idolatrous vision of History people will begin to recognize the sacredness of Nature once more and this will put an end to the madness of trying to use totalitarian force to bring about a utopian “End of History” vision.
The Peoples saw God in Nature, then they became corrupt so they saw Nature as God. To save them, He made them to see God in History. Then they saw History as God, so they must be made again to see God in Nature and that is precisely, I believe, what He will do.
Will the “world end” as the Abrahamic religions proclaim? Of course not, strictly speaking, not literally, because this world is a never ending cycle which only those who have attained Enlightenment as the great Saints have done can escape. However, the particular historical drama of Abrahamism will indeed come to an end just as every historical drama does, and as it reaches its conclusion God will act decisively in History many more times just as He did when He took on the form of Jesus to preach and be crucified and resurrected or when He liberated The Israelites from Egypt. But this will represent the end of an age, not the “end of the world” or a permanent end of all suffering in the material plane of existence. We are in a Dark Age, and there is a Golden Age coming, and though that Golden Age will be tremendously better than the present time of woe beyond what we can imagine it still won’t be perfect because nothing in this low plane of existence called the material universe ever is. The goal of any wise man in any age is to leave behind this universe altogether and enter the higher spiritual realms through a process of individual spiritual transformation. These higher realms of existence are free from cyclicality, so it is like they are in a permanent Golden Age, but the fulfillment is spiritual and not just material. No one can make you walk this path, you have to do it on your own, and no “historical process” ever gets you to the end of this individual spiritual journey. But at the end of the journey awaits freedom from illusions and the cyclical dramas of history.
The world passes through Dark Ages and Golden Ages cyclically. We are approaching the nadir of the Dark Age, but as we reach the bottom the cycle of time has no where else to turn but up. The decisive turnings of the wheel of History is indeed always a Sacred Event where God is present in a special way and this can be a means for some who contemplate the event to transcend History altogether. The Bible records the closure of a previous world-cycle before this one where Mankind had to be purged with a flood and only a few who heeded His Will were spared. Indeed, as this world-cycle comes to a close there will be many opportunities for those who are pious to serve God and thus rapidly grow spiritually. This is always how it is: Sacred Events where one age transitions from another, or critical turning points in the drama of cyclical history are always times when God is present more so than in other times because He cares about His creation very much, and those who serve Him as Noah did during such a time are blessed indeed. From the narrow standpoint of time, these events seem overwhelming in their sheer importance, but from the grand standpoint of eternity even the decisive Sacred Events of Abrahamism (or any other Sacred History) are just yet more transient phenomena that come and go as all things that are lesser than God do. The true devotee, then, uses these Sacred Events as a stepping-stone to ascend to unity with God, but the common man is lost by being absorbed in these events and their drama. During the precise moments when these Sacred Events are happening, they can be a means for those who are interpreting them correctly in real time to rapidly ascend to the highest levels of Enlightenment. But most will not understand what is happening when God acts in real time.
Though being Immanent in either Nature or History carries with it the danger of Men ignorantly falling into idolatry, it is a risk that God is willing to take, because He loves to be immanent in His creation, He loves to take on infinite multi-variegated forms, to love us and be present to us in many different ways. The stupendously exuberant variety of forms in the universe are a testimony to God’s playfulness and passion, which are some of my favorite qualities of His to ponder. His passion to love and be loved in turn is such that He is father, mother, king, teacher, son, beloved, brother, and hero to His devotees in accordance with His Will and their varying natures. The variety of His different incarnations, such as Lord Jesus and Lord Krishna showcases this passionate love that He has.
When we love God’s immanence this universe of illusion is redeemed and justified. We purify the whole universe in loving it as God’s revelatory masquerade. There was always the danger we’d forget The One behind the many forms, and our forgetting is just a part of His Play, one that is more than made up for when we finally remember Him, though when we are caught up in the terrors of the universe’s ever-fluctuating drama it may not seem so in the heat of the moment. We may think that we can avoid being thrown this way and that by the mighty gales of illusion if we cling to the reality of God’s Transcendence, but in Transcendence too there is great danger, because of the fact that our mere ideas about Him are not Him-in-Himself. Transcendence by definition is beyond our mortal faculty of understanding, so our ideas about His Transcendence are nothing like it, in fact they are precisely unlike it! Perhaps few concepts correspond less with what they are meant to than real Transcendence and the mere idea of it. Our dogmatic idea of God’s transcendence can be just another false idol if we don’t humbly recognize its limitations. It’s the most dangerous false idol of all because in our arrogance we can think we have found the Blessed Creator LORD but have not. Everything is a stepping stone for experiencing God in our consciousness directly, including our mere ideas of Him, but with each stepping stone we can stumble and fall into the pit of idolatrous ignorance. The way to God is narrow indeed! To walk the royal road and return to God’s embrace we must recognize His sovereignty over all, be satisfied with nothing less than the direct perception of Him, and humbly recognize our tendency both to arrogantly declare our mere ideas about Him to be Him and to be seduced into thinking that The Creation can take the place of our Creator.
There is another danger of Abrahamism which much more subtle. The monotheistic religions of Abrahamism have a dangerous tendency within them to make it seem that the only supernatural entity worthy of our attention is The Supreme One and thus they demystify the world. By making it seem like God is totally distant and alien to this world and the only supernatural subject of concern, they make the whole perceptible world seem unworthy of our attention even though the truth is that it is marvellously alive at every level with many wonderful beings worthy of reverence. This demystified world paves the way to a spiritually lethal myopic atheism because as this excessively Transcendent and abstract conception of divinity is cast aside by the peoples, all they are left with is that demystified world, a numb universe of secular procedures, a spiritual wasteland.
To be able to correctly recognize the Supreme Being once more the peoples had to forget about all the other supernatural entities that were distracting them from Him, and now that fickle Mankind has forgotten The Creator yet again they still have forgotten about all the other entities, so they are left with the illusory world of dead scientistic atheism.
When the shadow of this nihilistic worldview casts itself on the world, it’s not that the peoples have arrived at an “End of History” per se as there is ultimately no such thing, but it is indeed The End of This Cycle and each new cycle must close with a breathtaking cataclysm that few wind up surviving: only a few people will have their genes pass into the next cycle. This cataclysm is both a means of salvation and of punishment: For the former who cling to the unchanging truths in spite of the madnesses of the nihilistic age it is salvation as they are spared from the cataclysm ultimately and they are blessed with the chance to be progenitors for an ascendant race of humans. But those who brought about this nihilistic crisis and revel in it or care not to remedy it, they are cast aside. The age of nihilism is allowed to persist for some time as a punishment in itself before it is horribly cast away.
Abrahamisms have that tendency to exult the Supreme God above all the other lesser divinities and spirits that do indeed exist alongside Him to the point of forgetting about them altogether, but we would be foolish to think that the Ultimate God was ever unknown to the world’s peoples. Though most forsook Him as we discussed before, the most sophisticated systems of thought among The Pagans tended towards Monotheism. Consider that Plato considered all of existence to hinge upon an ultimate source he called The Good, which Plotinus called The One. Plato and Plotinus providentially prepared the way for the Greco-Roman world to receive the revelation of The Biblical God by pointing out that all the phenomena of this world must come from one metaphysical source that is ultimately good, and the wisest among the Christians know that Plato and Plotinus worshipped the same God as themselves in their hearts which is why many Platonists took to Christianity intuitively. Plato is as much a worthy prophet as Moses and in some ways he is actually better. Platonists, Aristotelians, and even Stoics with their concept of The Logos all worshipped though in a different and more abstract manner the Ancient and Eternal Creator of the Universe as The Israelites did, before whom all spirits bow, who manifested Himself as Jesus of Nazareth in accordance with His plans.
This reality of ancient Pagan Monotheisms that preceded Christianity is even more apparent in The East, where we have perhaps one of the best instantiations of the primeval panentheism of Man that survives in our times: Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism. In Sanatana Dharma, the original conception of religion, of various elemental deities who are subordinate to one supreme God, is most apparent, as well as the reality of transcending the cyclicality of reincarnation and history through attaining spiritual enlightenment which is correctly recognized as the purpose of life. As well, in this Eastern religious system The Supreme Being incarnates as a man (and as various other creatures, as well!) to save Man from his ignorance, re-establish the path of spiritual evolution, and rescue man from the dark spiritual forces. Rama and Krishna are two such incarnations. It is clear that Jesus is another avatar of God as Rama and Krishna both are.
Sanatana Dharma is not perfect, but it is good to use as a lens to interpret the other religions through as most Perennialists do: in fact, interpreting religions in terms of Sanatana Dharma is almost all that Perennialists do, and much of their work is interesting. The chief problem of Sanatana Dharma is that it takes the chief object of spiritual practice to be permanently forgetting our identity by becoming one with God, an idea that is most apparent in the work of the great Bengali guru Sri Ramakrishna3. This is what most oriental religions want, the total dissolution of individual identity. Such a thing is not even possible. We have a self and will always have one. Why would God even want to create individual beings and give them the gift of free will and individual existence only to ask them to totally give it up in dissolution? What God wants is entities that will serve Him as His images in creation, His children, and thus the highest thing to strive for is to be a god who serves God. Contrary to the Oriental conception, the highest goal of spiritual striving is to be a highly individuated being who is permanently free from the cycle of life and death and confirmed in the habit of serving God virtuously and imbued with tremendous power, enough power to be worthy of the title of deity. This idea has always been the primordial Aryan conception of what the path of spirituality means in contrast to the oriental: Whereas the oriental wants oneness with God, The Aryan wants to be a god, and thus instead of dissolution of identity we have what East Orthodox Christians call Theosis or what Mormons call Exaltation. The Pagan Greeks knew that it was possible for men to become gods, and kept this idea esoterically in their myths with stories like men becoming constellations in the sky.
In any case, it is possible to dissolve one’s identity by submerging it in God for a time and then to return to being an individuated being. There is no need to set these things in stark opposition to each other, the oriental path of dissolution and the occidental path of individuation. But the latter path is more common in our history, more proper for Aryans, so we promote that. The highest mode of individual existence is to be one of the gods who serve God. The Aryan wants to become a Daeva, or like one of the Yazatas who serve Ahura Mazda, or one of the Valar who serve Eru Illuvatar in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.
In some ways the ancient Pagan Monotheisms of Neoplatonism and Sanatana Dharma are much better than the Abrahamic Monotheisms because they do not carry with them the heavy baggage of political and social strife that has become such an obstacle in our time to people approaching God through the Abrahamic ways. But if the most sophisticated among the Greeks considered all the deities to have one source who is to be sought above all, and if the spiritual leaders among the Vedic Indians thought the same, it is clear that the one Supreme God is best and Abrahamism is a manifestation of His Will. While the strict Monotheism of Abrahamism has certain dangerous conceptual limitations and implications, it is ultimately more sophisticated than the idea of a pagan universe of constant strife between beings who are just as petty as mortals like you and me.
Sanatana Dharma’s continued presence in this world is a tremendous grace which the degraded humanity of this world does not deserve. It’s emphasis on practical religious techniques called Yoga to produce lived religious experiences is sublime and cuts away at much nonsense created by the meandering theologies of Man. If Abrahamism is a religion of prophets who discern God in History, and if Paganism is a religion of shamans/druids who discern God in Nature, then Sanatana Dharma is a religion of Yogis that discerns God within oneself. But here too there is a danger, as the mind of ignorant man makes everything good into something potentially evil: if the goal of bringing stillness to one’s mind (the purpose of all yoga, as the great sage Patanjali said) is not kept as the north star of the Yogi’s activity then one winds up drowning in an endless ocean of introspective navel-gazing. But this is the fault of a Yogi who is not taking their religion seriously enough and not practicing it rightly. As well, the powerful religious experiences that a Yogi can have may result in him worshipping their own Ego as god and wanting others to worship it too!
Without question, every religion in our dark age has been corrupted thoroughly. We live in an age where religious institutions are not only usually useless but in many instances actively dangerous. Religion itself is a false idol. But a man must never despair, God’s plans can never be thwarted. Though few will be able to do it, yet still it is possible to ascend to the highest level of consciousness and attain the summit of divinity even in as degraded a time as ours. One can do this by studying the lives of holy men and the scriptures of all religions and discerning the eternal truths these reveal, trusting one’s intuition, and being open to being guided directly by God instead of mere scriptures or priests. If you have Faith that you can attain the highest degree of Enlightenment then it is possible for you even in this dark age. The door to the highest realms is never closed to anyone. To even know about the highest states of existence at all means you are being prepared for them. In the third and final installment of this series, we will discuss practical steps we can take to practice the primeval panentheism in this modern world.
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I’m often surprised by how often even Dissident Right-Wing people will become incredulous when you point out the fact that most of “The Jews” are not the literal blood descendants of the biblical Israelites. You don’t believe anything else Jews say, so why do you believe them when they tell you who they are? Of course they’re lying about that too.
https://ignatiansolidarity.net/blog/2015/06/04/canticle-of-brother-sun-and-sister-moon-of-st-francis-of-assisi/ was my source for this canticle
Rama, Krishna, and Sri Ramakrishna are three different people. This is very confusing so let me clarify. Rama and Krishna are two different incarnations of Vishnu, and Sri Ramakrishna is a bengali Guru of the Hindu Faith who was named after these two incarnations.