08-06-2016, 01:15 AM
Seth had this to say about religion, in which he briefly talks about 'Mohammedanism'. I don't understand what Seth is getting at.
Quote:The exterior religious dramas are of course imperfect representations of the ever unfolding interior spiritual realities. The various personages, the gods and prophets within religious history—these absorb the mass inner projections thrown out by those inhabiting a given time span.
Such religious dramas focus, direct, and, hopefully, clarify aspects of inner reality that need to be physically represented.
These do not only appear within your own system. Many are also projected into other systems of reality. Religion per se, however, is always the external facade of inner reality. The primary spiritual existence alone gives meaning to the physical one. In the most real terms, religion should include all of the pursuits of man in his search for the nature of meaning and truth. Spirituality cannot be some isolated, specialized activity or characteristic.
Exterior religious dramas are important and valuable only to the extent that they faithfully reflect the nature of inner, private spiritual existence. To the extent that a man feels that his religion expresses such inner experience, he will feel it valid. Most religions per se, however, set up as permissible certain groups of experiences while denying others. They limit themselves by applying the principles of the sacredness of life only to your own species, and often to highly limited groups within it.
At no time will any given church be able to express the inner experience of all individuals. At no time will any church find itself in a position in which it can effectively curtail the inner experience of its members—it will only seem to do so. The forbidden experiences will simply be unconsciously expressed, gather strength and vitality, and rise up to form a counter projection which will then form another, newer exterior religious drama.
The dramas themselves do express certain inner realities, and they serve as surface reminders to those who do not trust direct experience with the inner self. They will take the symbols as reality. When they discover that this is not so, they feel betrayed. Christ spoke in terms of the father and son because in your terms, at that time, this was the method used—the story He told to explain the relationship between the inner self and the physically alive individual. No new religion really startles anyone, for the drama has already been played subjectively.
What I have said, of course, applies as much to Buddha as it does to Christ: both accepted the inner projections and then tried to physically represent these. They were more, however, than the sum of those projections. This also should be understood. Mohammedanism fell far short. In this case the projections were of violence predominating. Love and kinship were secondary to what indeed amounted to baptism and communion through violence and blood.
In these continuous exterior religious dramas, the Hebrews played a strange role. Their idea of one god was not new to them. Many ancient religions held the belief of one god above all others. This god above all others was a far more lenient god, however, than the one the Hebrews followed. Many tribes believed, quite rightly, in the inner spirit that pervades each living thing. And they often referred to, say, the god in the tree, or the spirit in the flower. But they also accepted the reality of an overall spirit, of which these lesser spirits were but a part. All worked together harmoniously.
The Hebrews conceived of an overseer god, an angry and just and sometimes cruel god; and many sects denied, then, the idea that other living beings beside man possessed inner spirits. The earlier beliefs represented a far better representation of inner reality, in which man, observing nature, let nature speak and reveal its secrets.
The Hebrew god, however, represented a projection of a far different kind. Man was growing more and more aware of the ego, of a sense of power over nature, and many of the later miracles are presented in such a way that nature is forced to behave differently than in its usual mode. God becomes man’s ally against nature.
The early Hebrew god became a symbol of man’s unleashed ego. God behaved exactly as an enraged child would, had he those powers, sending thunder and lightning and fire against his enemies, destroying them. Man’s emerging ego therefore brought forth emotional and psychological problems and challenges. The sense of of separation from nature grew. Nature became a tool to use against others.