In the time of Augustus Caesar the lesson, delivered through Jesus, of the Christ was the immateriality of the material world. The great mystery of Christianity has centred on the Resurrection – to fit in with the lessons contained in the mysteries of old. But the lessons of his miracles – the feeding of the 5000 from a single loaf of bread, the changing of water into wine – have all been ignored other than as proofs of him as the ‘only Son of God’. The many miracles of similar sort performed by modern gurus, I am thinking particularly of Satya Sai Baba, but cannot declare that he alone performed such demonstrations, go to show that these gifts are not in anyway exclusive as claimed by the churches through the ages.
But all of this is to miss the point. The point of those miracles was that the material world was a world of appearance and not a substantial reality as is claimed by those who would separate consciousness from the material world.
The religions of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all make the material world the be all and end of all of Creation. They do this by placing God somewhere else. By destroying the notion of Creation as a Living Vital process, by declaring – along with modern materialistic Science – a definite beginning to Creation at which point, it is claimed, the Universe came into being.
The great majority of religions the world over declare the the world is the living representation of the Divine, whether it is called Wakan tanka or Divine Mother, Shiva or whichever name is given, they all share one thing in common. Creation, the material world in which we live, is Divine in Essence and that means it is uncorrupted.
According to the Ancient philosophers of Greece, and the modern philosophers of India, Creation is in a state of Becoming, founded on an ideal realm of Being – the root, in Sanskrit grammar, rather than the stem, of any word. There is an incorruptible form which exists beyond this realm of Becoming.
It is only in this state of Becoming that we can speak in terms of a corruption. What is corrupted is the form of one existence as it changes into the form of another existence. As if we were to say that the Butterfly is the perfected being and the Caterpillar the Becoming form, but the Chrysalis is a corrupted form. This is ridiculous. Each is a perfected condition of Being even though it may be based on the corruption of a form existing prior to it coming into Being.
There is no doubt in my mind, and I see it as a growing awareness in the minds of others, that Creation is itself Divine and those that seek to relegate it to a position of an object to be exploited, ravaged and destroyed – because it was corrupted by the Fall of Adam or whatever other philosophic standpoint they choose to adopt as excuse – are themselves sadly mistaken about the Paradise in which we all are living.
