I Met With A Christian Priest

[2000]

I have been pursuing this work for some time now. Enlightenment is a topic that spellbinds me, and I have been adamant about practicing it. So when I ran into the pastor at my former Church (I used to be a Christian) I couldn't help but ask him about just that. 

I asked him about Jesus being enlightened. He basically said that Jesus was God's True son, and that we are all simply God's apex of creation. He went into how traditional Zen and Buddhist methods of consciousness work will lead you away from Jesus, therefore leaving you an empty atheist. I disagreed and stated that I am indeed not an atheist, nor have I ever been, and I loosely explained the "nothingness" and "ego-death" concepts to him. I stated that I do know there is a God, and that God is all of us reduced to the most certain and True form, nothingness. He disagreed with me.  Nonetheless, I questioned him on weather Jesus was merely an enlightened man who shared his ideologies and thus (perhaps even unintentionally) sparked the Christian faith, and mentioned Ibn Battuta and The Buddha as other examples of people who kindled religions with their concepts. He basically said again that Jesus was God in the flesh, and these other guys may have had some high degree of spirituality, but didn't embody the Truth. If you are familiar with Western religion, this should ring a bell.

I was simply wondering about people's tenets on the situation. I was deeply conversed with a man I have known for many years, and couldn't help but notice his hortatory towards his own faith (duh!). This bothered me, and I seek other opinions about the matter. Does anyone have any thoughts on religions? Perhaps this plays in part to default positions (me being raised Catholic/ other people brought up to believe a certain doctrine)? 

[Toby]

It is not about arguing for or against something. For me it was like I threw the baby out with the bathwater, because growing up I perceived christian approaches as being just something one has to believe in or not believe in. It took me years to reconnect to the essence of christianity after I was doing more the Advaita / Zen approaches. There are in fact a lot of things, teachers... that have a christian background that say exactly what Advaita or Zen is saying. You could for example ask him what his view on Meister Eckhart, John of the cross or Theresa of Avila is. Modern christian mystics may be Cynthia Borgeaut, Bernadette Roberts or Thomas Merton.

[Justin Evans]

I see religions holding legitimacy where the experiences aim towards truth. However it is taken in their own flavor and slices portions of the big picture and rejects the rest out of faith in their customs  and morals or limit their perspective of what is possible in reality.

 

The reason I believe this happens is because the truth is so subjective that it takes unique physical and emotional labor to discover the truth. Most of society is not going to do this. Instead, they find an easy set of rules and imitate the standards that enlightened people would live by, but lack the understanding of WHY these standards are important, therefore morals have to be used to follow them, which creates a culture and religion.

[Richard Alpert]

4 hours ago, 2000 said:

I have been pursuing this work for some time now. Enlightenment is a topic that spellbinds me, and I have been adamant about practicing it. So when I ran into the pastor at my former Church (I used to be a Christian) I couldn't help but ask him about just that. 

I asked him about Jesus being enlightened. He basically said that Jesus was God's True son, and that we are all simply God's apex of creation. He went into how traditional Zen and Buddhist methods of consciousness work will lead you away from Jesus, therefore leaving you an empty atheist. I disagreed and stated that I am indeed not an atheist, nor have I ever been, and I loosely explained the "nothingness" and "ego-death" concepts to him. I stated that I do know there is a God, and that God is all of us reduced to the most certain and True form, nothingness. He disagreed with me.  Nonetheless, I questioned him on weather Jesus was merely an enlightened man who shared his ideologies and thus (perhaps even unintentionally) sparked the Christian faith, and mentioned Ibn Battuta and The Buddha as other examples of people who kindled religions with their concepts. He basically said again that Jesus was God in the flesh, and these other guys may have had some high degree of spirituality, but didn't embody the Truth. If you are familiar with Western religion, this should ring a bell.

I was simply wondering about people's tenets on the situation. I was deeply conversed with a man I have known for many years, and couldn't help but notice his hortatory towards his own faith (duh!). This bothered me, and I seek other opinions about the matter. Does anyone have any thoughts on religions? Perhaps this plays in part to default positions (me being raised Catholic/ other people brought up to believe a certain doctrine)? 

religion = belief system = dogma

[Prabhaker]

4 hours ago, 2000 said:

He basically said that Jesus was God's True son, and that we are all simply God's apex of creation. He went into how traditional Zen and Buddhist methods of consciousness work will lead you away from Jesus, therefore leaving you an empty atheist.

There are two types of religions in the world: prayer-oriented religions and meditation-oriented religions. Christianity is a prayer-oriented religion.

Prayer and meditation are absolute contraries: prayer moves outwards. Prayer is addressed to a God.  Meditation moves inwards. 

Christianity is an extrovert religion. The emphasis is on serving people - love, compassion. The emphasis is not on meditation. The extrovert religion prays to God; the introvert religion meditates. Prayer is extrovert; it is addressed to God. 

Meditation is reaching to one’s own being. Love is an effort to reach to the other’s being.

There are religions which say that if you meditate, you cannot love. There are religions which say that if you love, how can you meditate?

If you meditate, that looks selfish. When the world is in such a misery, people are hungry, ill, dying, and you are meditating – the whole thing looks to be too cruel. Somebody is dying on the road, a beggar, and you are sitting in your temple and meditating. It looks selfish. ’Throw this meditation away,’ says the extrovert religion. ’Go and help people – that is the only way to reach God.

A healthy person is one who when he wants to move in, he moves. There is no hindrance. He has no compulsion to be an extrovert. And vice versa. If you are compulsively an introvert – whenever you start moving without, there are inner hindrances. You have to fight, you cannot flow, you have to force. Then you are ill. A healthy person, a healthy being, a healthy energy, is always ready to move anywhere. There is no compulsion to be somewhere in particular.

When you can pray like Jesus and meditate like Buddha , then you are complete , whole and healthy.