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Religions
All existing world religions have errors both of doctrine and of practice. Yet, avatars have arisen in all religions and there are truths of spiritual science buried and distorted in all religions.
The Middle Eastern religions all erred in making divinity external, and in attributing personality to it. Christianity, as it is today, is a particularly noxious superstition, completely corrupting the teachings of its avatar (indeed, not even possessing any record of that teaching). Christianity is noxious because of the fanaticism of its Jesus Freaks and revivalists, with their Puritan asceticism, sectarian intolerance, and their anti-empirical emphasis on faith (euphemism for superstition and dogma). The asceticism is a misunderstanding of the methods and ideas of the early Christian mystics, who practiced physical austerities in order to have religious experience. These hermits never claimed that everyone should follow that path. Christian asceticism is also a reaction to the spiritually impoverishing form of Roman debauchery. Puritanism, which is asceticism for no purpose, ultimately leads back to the same spiritual impoverishment suffered by the Romans.
Emphasis by reformers on faith in the Christian bible over experience is what led to the Protestant revolt and to Puritanism. This is idolatry. The bible is what the scholars call a corrupt text. It was so mangled and corrupted by Jewish and Hellenic ideas that Christ's true ideas of reincarnation, the law of karma, and the law of grace, and the divinity within are almost totally obscured.
Of course, there remain certain uncorrupted passages in the new testament, with their explanations omitted. For instance, 'as ye sow, so shall ye reap' is only true if we posit reincarnation and karma, as is 'those who live by the sword, shall die the sword.' The entire turn-the-other-cheek philosophy makes no sense except as a way of avoiding getting entangled in other people's karma, in which case it is the same as Krishna's basic advice. Forgive your enemies, become indifferent to their action against you, or you will waste future lives being part of their punishment. In saying that he was the son of god, the carpenter did not imply any special divinity; rather we know from modern avatars that he taught the divinity within, i.e., we are all sons of god, which must have seemed either blasphemous or totally unintelligible to the Hellenized Jews and Romans of his day. So his idea became translated as a special divinity, not unlike that claimed by the Roman emperors.
The chief problem with Hinduism and Buddhism is their rejection of worldly concerns, their rejection of evolution and emphasis on other-worldly and timeless meditation. They wish to get off the wheel of reincarnation, not knowing of the evolutionary path we must follow. The Hindus and Buddhists also destroyed the purity of their avatar's ideas by externalizing internal archetypes as a pantheon of gods and demons. Hindus also have certain overly rigid views about reincarnation and karma which tend to deny the role of free will. Belief in a mechanical and external karma and in a rigidly cyclical history have been India's excuse for sacred cows, caste, over-population and every other failure to meet the requirements of life. Speaking of sacred cows, Cayce makes it plain that animal consciousness is quite different from human, and human entities do not reincarnate as animals.
These criticisms really apply to the unintelligent followers and fanatics in every religion; the intelligent and creative thinkers in every religion have always been in accord.
Religion begins with certain questions: 'what is man and what is his relationship to the universe?' 'What about survival of death and what about immortality?' 'What is the law of retribution or reaction in the universe?' 'What is the meaning of it all?'
Man is an immortal droplet (Atman) of Brahman encased in a mind, encased in a psychonic body, encased in a physical body. Our souls were once part of oversouls and have participated in the drama of the physical evolution of the universe over billions of years. We are now going through a stage of evolution as psychonic bodies incarnating in Homo Sapiens. In this form we shall regain the status of cosmic citizens of the universe. This stage will last billions of years. Ultimately, the physical universe will collapse and explode again, having different basic particles and geometries. Long before that we will have reintegrated into the Great Spirit.
The law of retribution is 'as ye sow, so shall ye reap.' This is a subjective and psychological and internal law. It appears that the superconscious center of self decides fate as a lesson, and a spur to evolution. This is true of higher centers as well as individual centers. As Edgar Cayce put it, karma is the self meeting itself. What is the point of it all? Several phrases which all mean the same thing: LILA, novelty, creativity, free will, evolution.
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