Watching the way the old time religions try to resolve their antagonisms with each other is always interesting. They usually begin by invoking a common deity and a shared interest in a united front against the forces of atheism (read “evil”) in the world.

This approach is never sustainable, however, since much of the world’s terrorism is fuelled by adherents of those same religions. It’s an internal problem, not an external one.

It’s true that many terrorists are not “religious” at all but psychopaths looking for a cause that will allow them to express their blind anger and vent their blood lust. But, if a faith harbours such animosity that it acts as a magnet for such people, it has only itself to blame.

The worst cases of this religious hatred are to be found in the three Abrahamic religions : Judaism, Roman Christianity and Islam. Why should that be?

They are all “book” religions, depending on “revelatory” texts to underscore their beliefs. These beliefs, of course, are a moveable feast which feed off contradictions in the texts to support just about anything they want. Protestant Christians are said to have over 20,000 denominations. Atheists, not unreasonably, claim that this invalidates them altogether.

The Abrahamic faiths also come from that hotbed of incendiary politics, the Middle East, where religious faith has been ruthlessly politicized for two or more millennia.

In the West now, a sharp reaction to the Abrahamic frenzy has been discernible for some time. People are turning away in droves from the old, barnacle-encrusted religions towards a more “modern” spirituality. That is to say, to practices which emphasize direct experience of spiritual reality, without the intervention of a “church”, although it may involve a “guru”, or teacher.

If this is the way the world — or a significant part of it — is going, why not use that trend to mitigate the failures of the old system, without seeming to attack it.

If every church or faith, reiterated its support for a universal spirituality that transcended the cultural forms that dominate individual religions, their members would not find themselves in the awkward position of having to defend a set of old rules and rituals against another set of old rules and rituals, thus in a bound removing the sparking points of religious conflict.

In other words, recognize a global mysticism above religion and its institutions.

It could be done, but it would take a lot of will and sacrifice on the part of religious leaders who are already inculcated with the need to hold their own “turf”.

It all depends on whether you’re referring to “God” or Godhead, I suppose. Godhead is the ultimate ground of being which, if it is a substance at all, is comprised of pure undifferentiated awareness.

Does this “feel” anything? How can we know. God, however, is the “supreme personality of Godhead” as the Hindu Upanishads put it. Since that is shown to manifest in the human realm, we should expect it to have very similar consciousness to ourselves.

Andrew Cohen’s emailed quote expounds this week on this question :

How Does God Feel?
I’ve always wanted to know, how does God feel? What I’ve discovered is that how God feels is always a paradox: On one hand, from the perspective of the unmanifest, unborn, empty ground of all being that has never entered into the stream of time, everything is always already perfect. Nothing has ever happened, and so God rests eternally, peacefully and blissfully. But for the part of God that has entered into manifestation, that decided to create the universe, the experience is one of ecstatic urgency, a feeling of ecstasy and the simultaneous sense that I must… And the intensity behind this ecstatic urgency is emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, philosophically, and physically overwhelming. And what begins to emerge in the human heart and soul, as we awaken to the authentic self or spiritual impulse, is the dawning recognition of the fact that each one of us, at our highest level, is that manifest dimension of God, the same energy and intelligence that originally inspired and initiated the entire creative process.

Andrew Cohen
From a retreat in Rishikesh,
December 2005

This is a preliminary review of National Geographic’s new book, The Gospel of Judas, which contains a translation of the recently-discovered manuscript and three scholarly articles written for a general readership.

I have covered the discovery and recent history of the Gospel in another post, so I just want to throw out a few first impression here.

The main point the press picked up on was the way Jesus regards Judas as a friend, someone who enables him to escape from his mortal body and fulfil his mission on Earth.

From the start, I didn’t think that was a well developed point, especially since Judas apparently took 30 silver coins for his pains. Of course, that may well have been a later addition to strengthen the view that Judas was a devil incarnate. But there’s a far more interesting point.

Judas seems to belong to a Gnostic group of Christians known as Sethians. Jesus is also portrayed as one of their number. They believed that only some people contained the “divine spark” that would take them after bodily death to a higher region called the Barbelo. Those who lacked this spiritual element would perish after death.

These ideas are rehearsed in the Gospel of John, the most spiritual of the four New Testament Gospels and the one with the greatest affinity with Gnosticism. In John, there is famous, much-quoted passage:

“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it that it may bring forth more fruit.”

There are echoes here of a salvationist philosophy as believed by later groups like the Cathars who were known more as heirs to the Gnostics than Rome.

When Jesus tells Judas that he will destroy the “man who clothes me”, Jesus regards that as a great service, not because of atonement or bodily resurrection, but because it frees him to return to the spiritual realm of Barbelo, where “his generation” live. He and Judas don’t belong to the “human generation” who will perish.

This is a very different strand of Christianity, unknown to those who follow what was written by Rome and its apologists. The more information we discover, the more we see a darker and far more spiritual side to Christianity than is generally accepted today.

Books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and its offshoot, The Da Vinci Code are only reflecting incompletely this new knowledge, which has still to be fully expounded and assimilated into our culture

Although this is primarily a “spiritual” website, it’s always interesting to reflect on what moves the world, “good” or “bad”. Over the last 24 hours, the term, 666 has been the prime mover.

The 6th day of the 6th month in the 6th year of the millennium was always touted as being the day when the “Beast” of the Book of Revelations would be born again. Mind you, nothing much happened in the last millennium, unless you include the Norman conquest 60 years later, so why now?

Well, the press had a field day. Even respected authors, like Colin Wilson, could be found writing sagely in a UK daily newspaper on the subject. Our own Supernatural blog had a tsunami of traffic to Deborah’s post: 666 Around the World.

So, has the Devil’s spawn been let loose into the world again? Who says he’s ever been away?