 31. Christianity vs Jesus |
Exoteric “religion” is primarily a communication that intends to bring political and social order to the public “world”. Exoteric “religion” is primarily a social gospel. Esoteric ecstatics, on the other hand, are very difficult to control—in the usual (conventional) sense. It is virtually impossible, for example, to interest ecstatics in being socially productive for its own sake. Ecstatics generally value the practice of being civil in relation to other people—but it is very difficult to get them to labor in factories and bureaucratic business organizations merely for the sake of “worldly” success, or, otherwise, to get them excited about the mundane purposes of a great State! Therefore, exoteric “religion” tends to eliminate all aspects of “religious” communication that suggest anything but how to be a productive and positive social personality. To reinforce these qualities—and even to suppress ecstatic qualities—is the guiding purpose of exoteric “religion”.
Even though Christianity is, in its origins, an esoteric movement, it was reduced to an exclusively exoteric “religion” as it became more expansive and eventually achieved the status of the “official” (or politically enforced) State-”religion” of the West. Christianity thus became an exoteric (or conventionally social) institution, and it reduced the teaching of Jesus of Galilee to a social gospel. The result is that now everybody commonly assumes that, since the “New Testament” is, historically, the primary “religious” influence in the Western “world”, “religion” is supposed to be a social gospel, and Jesus must (therefore) have taught a merely social gospel.
In this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch)—when even all cultures are being moved toward the way-of-”knowing” represented by scientific materialism, and all cultures are losing their sacred basis for order, and are tending to be dominated (more and more) by the forces of political materialism—the interpreters of the “religious” texts of cultures other than the culture of the West are, likewise, moving more and more toward an exoteric interpretation of esoteric teachings. India, for example, has, since the later nineteenth century, been undergoing a kind of renaissance of Hinduism. The Bhagavad Gita is a principal text in this movement in India—and one of the dominant tendencies of current interpretation conceives the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita as a kind of social gospel. In other words, the Bhagavad Gita is, now, publicly interpreted as a source of exoteric instruction about how to live the way of “good works”, rather than the mystically interiorized esoteric way of life that is characteristic of traditional Indian Spirituality.
Thus, the Bhagavad Gita—which, in its origins, is an esoteric teaching about Spiritual and Transcendental Realization—is being used, more and more, to support a cultural, political, and social movement of an exoteric kind. In this manner of “religious” interpretation within the Indian cultural sphere, the Bhagavad Gita is being interpreted (and, thus, used) in a manner that is very similar to the traditional exoteric interpretation (and even the earliest exoteric inventing) of the “New Testament” in the West.
To the degree that they are “religious” at all, people all over the Earth now commonly conceive of “religion” as a kind of social message. It is commonly presumed that “religion” is reducible to a kind of humanism—even a kind of atheistic humanism (or a humanity-centered, rather than Deity-centered, positive social life)—or, at least, that “religion” is totally compatible with the “world”-oriented, humanityoriented, socially-oriented propaganda of the time.
You are constantly “TV’d” into the presumption that you are born for the sake of being born, that you are born into this “world” for the sake of this “world”. The presumption conveyed by TV (or the pervasive conventional mentality) is that life is an end-in-itself, and one is supposed to be enthusiastically involved with things of this “world”. Luckily (so the usual person presumes), there is science, technology, and a certain amount of freedom—and, therefore, it is possible to be rightly enthusiastic about conditional existence. People have a great deal of hope that, during their lifetime, they will achieve more and more pleasure, leisure, and fulfillment of their human functions. All over the Earth now, everyone is being propagandized into social consciousness, the positive social gospel that is now coming from the realms of scientific materialism and its political arms around the “world”. If current secularizing trends continue, sacred texts such as the “New Testament” and the Bhagavad Gita are in danger of becoming obsolete. If that occurs, then positive and enthusiastic social principles or ideals will, more and more, be communicated all over the Earth completely independent of any kind of “religious authority”—and, of course, entirely removed from any kind of esoteric teachings.
However, it is important to understand that the teachers and the teachings that are at the origins of the true scriptures of humankind (and of the various cultural movements associated with those scriptures) are not of an exoteric nature. Those teachers and teachings were not about the social gospel which the State has traditionally looked to “religion” to generate. If you understand the real fundamental (and esoteric) teaching underlying the “New Testament” and other traditional scriptures, you will see that those scriptures are not exoteric social gospels at all. Rather, those scriptures are esoteric communications about transcending the egoic “self” and the “world” and Realizing True Communion (and, ultimately, egoless Self- Identification) with the Divine Self-Condition.
