To Have or to Be?

“God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me. Once He has become an idol, God’s alleged qualities have as little to do with my personal experience as alienated political doctrines do. The idol may be praised as Lord of Mercy, yet any cruelty may be committed in its name, just as the alienated faith in human solidarity may not even raise doubts about committing the most inhuman acts. Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.”

The Quiet American

“Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.”

Mere Christianity

“It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’

“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“In my view it is not necessary to destroy anything, all that need be destroyed in mankind is the idea of God, that is what one must proceed from! It is with that, with that one must begin – O, blind ones, who understand nothing! Once mankind, each and individually, has repudiated God (and I believe that that period, in a fashion parallel to the geological periods, will arrive), then of its own accord, and without the need of anthropophagy, the whole of the former world-outlook and, above all, the whole of the former morality, will collapse, and all will begin anew. People will unite together in order to take from life all that it is able to give, but only for the sake of happiness and joy inthis world. Man will exalt himself with a spirit of devine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Vanquishing nature hour by hour, already without limits, by his will and science, man will thereby experience, hour by hour, a pleasure so elevated that it will replace all his former hopes of celestial pleasure. Every man will discover that he is wholly mortal, without the possibility of resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will grasp that there is no point in him complaining that life is a moment, and he will come to love his brother without any need of recompense. The love will only be sufficient for the moment of life, but the very consciousness of life’s momentariness will intensify its fire just as much as it formerly ran to fat in hopes of an infinite love beyond the grave.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“‘Let me tell you something, mother,’ the Elder said. ‘Once upon a time, a great saint of antiquity saw in the temple one such as you, a mother who was also weeping for her infant, her only child, whom the Lord also had summoned. ‘Do you not know,’ the saint said to her, ‘how daring such infants are before the throne of God? There are none more daring than they in all the Kingdom of Heaven: ‘You gave us life, O Lord,’ they say to God, ‘yet no sooner had we beheld it than You took it away from us again.’ And with such daring do they ask and demand that the Lord immediately accords them the rank of angels. And therefore,’ said the holy man, ‘do you too rejoice, O woman, and weep not, for your infant is now with the Lord in the assembly of His angels.’”

Living Buddha, Living Christ

“In the Gospel according to Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven is also described as yeast: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ A little yeast has the power to leaven a lot of flour. The flour is our consciousness. Inside that consciousness are negative seeds: seeds of fear, hatred and confusion. But if you have the seed of the Kingdom of God inside and know how to touch it, it will have the power to leaven, to transform everything.”

Living Buddha, Living Christ

“The Buddha was not against God. He was only against notions of God that are mere mental constructions that do not correspond to reality, notions that prevent us from developing ourselves and touching ultimate reality.”

Living Buddha, Living Christ

“In the Greek Orthodox church, the idea of deification, that a person is a microcosm of God, is very inspiring. It is close to the Asian tradition that sates that the body of a human being is a minicosmos. God made humans so that humans can become God. A human being is a mini-God, a mini-theos who has been created in order to participate in the divinity of God. Deification is made not only of the spirit but of the body of a human also.”

Meditations

“The gods either have power or they have not. If they have not, why pray to them? If they have, then instead of praying to be granted or spared such-and-such a thing, why not rather pray to be delivered from dreading it, or lusting for it, or grieving over it? Clearly, if they can help a man at all, they can help him in this way. You will say, perhaps, ‘But all that is something they have put in my own power.’ Then surely it were better to use your power and be a free man, than to hanker like a slave and a beggar for something that is not in your power. Besides who told you the gods never lend their aid even towards things that do lie in our own power? Begin praying this way and you will see. Where another man prays ‘Grant that I may possess this woman,’ let your own prayer be, ‘Grant that I may not lust to possess her.’ Where he prays, ‘Grant me to be rid of such-and-such a one,’ you pray, ‘Take from me my desire to be rid of him.’ Where he begs, ‘Spare me the loss of my precious child,’ beg rather to be delivered from the terror of losing him. In short, give your petitions a turn in this direction and see what comes.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The ‘inner voice’ is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.

“Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus ‘feminine’ or ’soulful’ characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one’s specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.”