II. The Case For Reforming Christianity

On Mysticism

Last time, I spoke about Christian morality. I argued that attacking Christianity on its moral code seemed to me like a weak attack on a strong position. If one were to assail the fortress known as Christianity head-on, then this would be the equivalent of attacking it’s most fortified keep.

Why?

Because Christianity has proven itself to be capable of being as aggressive, ambitious and bloodthirsty as its other Abrahamic competitor religions so the allegation that it is weak by its very nature seems to fall flat.

Also because the moral code of moderation and self-control preached to Christian commoners is identical to the moral code of pretty much any successful society, it makes no sense to reject it.

Furthermore, on an objective level, the moral sins that Christianity preaches against lead to weakness on the part of individuals and society at large. Only deviants do not understand the close relationship between temperance and strength.

Finally, I argued that the moral code of a religion is the only aspect of religion that the peasants understand or care about really. They will fight you tooth and nail if you touch it. And rightly so perhaps. Christianity’s code is more or less fine as is, and even if it wasn’t we need not worry so much, because no one follows it anyways. So, even if we came up with something better, we’d be in the exact same situation that we find ourselves in now with peasants declaring their faith in the new moral code and finding themselves completely unable or unwilling to apply it in their daily lives.

Yes, I find moralizing and moral codes to be largely useless anyways because immoral people never follow them and simply use moral codes to browbeat those who do care about morality. Christians certainly make a big show of caring about morality, but most of them are as pill-addicted, fat-addled and score-keeping as the rest of the peasants. This is because proclaiming your belief in something, anything, a “doxy”, means literally nothing if it is not backed up by a practice, a discipline, a “praxis”.

So, with that out of the way, we can step over about 90% of the traditional debate that has been had about Christianity over the last century and some. Now, we can talk about something actually interesting for people with working brains instead of rehashing the never-ending morality soap opera.

On Mysticism

I’ve talked about mysticism before, but I can tell that it was too much and too early from my part. In other words, I don’t think it sunk into into my readers’ heads.

In short: Mysticism = Magic.

Whether you believe in it or not, you should be able to at least understand the concept.

If you are an atheist, you find yourself in good company because modern Christians do not believe in any kind of systematic approach to understanding or practicing mysticism of any kind either. They don’t believe in speaking with spirits. Or astral projecting to the Third Heaven like Paul did. Or levitating like Simon did. Or in growing a glowing halo around one’s head like monks were said to do. Or in walking on water. Or in being able to see the future. Or the past. Or across great distances.

This is all present in relatively recent Christian lore, though, so, in theory, Christians ought to believe in this sort of thing or at least they could if they wanted to.

Sadly, modern Christians betray their lack of belief in any mysticism whatsoever because they do not make any effort to practice any kind of spiritual discipline aimed at achieving any kind of higher level of spiritual development and condemn those who do. This is because at its core, Nicene Christianity is really just a form of anti-spirituality that makes war on any genuine spiritual disciplines and seeks to make people complete subordinate to empty never-ending rituals, rote memorization of Jewish fairytales or simply blind obedience to the priests of Yahweh.

But let me step back again and re-clarify what I am talking about.

By spiritual discipline, I mean a scientific, results-oriented approach to making sense of and mastering mystical phenomenon. So, like a chemist uses chemistry to create new compounds, or a mathematician uses math to count money, so too does a mystic use a spiritual discipline to work on his own spiritual development.

Again, even if you are too smart to believe in this kind of nonsense and look down at those that do, the concept of what you are sneering at should at least make sense to you, otherwise you’re even more of an idiot than the people you’re trying to turn your nose up at. Yes, you ought to know what it is you actually oppose if you’re going to make a big deal of opposing it. But I’m not holding by breath - I am very aware that most people cannot even manage to do this.

And it is the Christians who will protest most vociferously if you start talking about mysticism with them without really understanding what it is that they are arguing against. They just know that they are supposed to be against it.

Sure, occasionally a Christian sees the Virgin Mary in his breakfast toast and the Vatican sends their top guys to investigate the phenomenon. And every Christian is required to believe in the miracles of the magic Jews of the Bible. But, when a new convert asks how he can go about being or becoming Christian, the answer is invariably the following:

• Believing the Bible

• Attending worship regularly

• Tithing

• Doing charity

In Orthodoxy and Catholicism and some of the Protestant cults, there are also many other little rituals to fill up your days that you should be doing, but that very few in reality actually do. Every single day in the calendar is supposed to have a certain prayer for a certain saint and a little ritual like sprinkling salt on your front steps or a prescribed course of food that you’re either not allowed to eat or supposed to eat on that day.

This material, performative and ritualistic approach to religion is conflated with actual spirituality. And it is the closest thing that you get to anything resembling a spiritual discipline. It is, however, nothing more than an exercise in free-will denial and a surrender to the blind slavery of a control system of an older and cruder make.

Again, these kinds of rituals stand in stark contrast to actual spiritual disciplines.

It would be like conflating gender studies curriculum with a classical education on the grounds that it’s still teaching something, therefore it’s basically the same thing. When it comes to secular topics, most of us can still differentiate between the true science and their politically-correct imitations. Probably because we can see this switch-out occurring in society right before our very eyes everywhere, in all spheres of life. Everyone can go to the grocery store to see that meat is being replaced with soy and soon what looks to be like cricket semen, presumably.

But this same switch-out happened much earlier with the spiritual sciences.

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The science of spirituality was first replaced with faith-based crackers and grape juice and group sing-alongs. Then, it was replaced with secular political and economic ideologies. Now, it is being replaced with social justice crusades like global-warming, babysitting black people, mass-murdering the unborn and so on.

Few people, however, are capable of studying the past and finding the core of the problem.

Fewer still realize that the approach to spirituality that we had leading up to this critical moment of total spiritual collapse was part of the problem.

And while a few rally to reject the insanity of modern times and seek out a form of truly reactionary thinking to try and combat it, most seem content with simply turning the hands on the Doomsday clock a few hours back from time to time to slow things down. “Progress” into materialism and entropy and death, however, is never fully halted. The root causes and issues are never found and addressed.

Case in point: the new “Conservative” position in America promoted by Con Inc. is that true patriots support true patriotic trannies. The GOP has the best trannies! The best! Don’t we folks!? Let’s give a hand to our wonderful LGBTQ Republicans! Love it! Love ‘em. Give ‘em a hand.

But I’ve gone too far off tangent to prove my point here yet again.

In mainstream Christianity, the quest for knowing and becoming is considered, if not outright heresy in some cases, then unworthy at least of the devoted Christian’s time and effort.

Superfluous at the very least - the dogma is known and belief in it is enough.

Dangerous as well in fact - seeking out new knowledge might contradict established dogma.

The true believer prefers ignorance, seeks it out even, so as to have less knowledge and thereby be able to better test his blind faith in dogma.

Now, the conflict between the scientific method being applied to unravelling the secrets of the material world and the recalcitrant resistance of Church authorities is well known and I won’t rehash it here. However, this conflict pales with the one that preceded it. While the scientific approach to the mysteries of the physical world won out, for a time, against dogma, the scientific approach to the mysteries of the non-physical world had already lost out centuries earlier. Dogma was forced to retreat in the face of the truths uncovered by natural science, but this was only a half-victory at best because dogma retained its grip on metaphysical truths and the ban on mystical science remained in the form of social taboos, mental barriers, and, of course, persistent Christian preaching against it.

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Bearing all this in mind, it is a miracle that any form of spiritual discipline has been preserved in Christianity at all. The handful of esoteric orders of monks - some of whom do actually practice a spiritual discipline come to mind. In Eastern Orthodoxy there are the famed monastic communities of Mt. Athos that I assume most people have heard of - of whom the Hesychasts are the most well-known.

Some history: the practitioners of Hesychasm, which was attacked viciously by a Scholastic conspiracy in the middle ages. They were then famously championed by Gregory of Palamas. Thanks to his legal defense, the crypto-gnostic sect was spared from meeting a gruesome end like all the others that had been purged before it.

In many ways, Palamas was used like Martin Luther would be - his theology useful to the political powers that be who needed a theological pretense to rally around. The Hesychasm controversy was part of a larger dispute between the two recently divorced halves of Christendom and also an internal Byzantine squabble. Regardless of the true reasons for Palamas’ motivations and eventual success, the end result is that, to this day, Orthodox are forced to admit that Hesychasm and its teaching are considered kosher by the Church and therefore a-OK.

Naturally, nobody has less regard and disdain for such a precious spiritual inheritance than Russian Orthodox denominations - both rank-and-file laity, and the priests. Modern Orthodox priests shake their head at you and solemnly declare that you have fallen into spiritual self-deception (prelest) for even bringing up the mystical bible of the monks - The Philokalia.

But what can they do? Dogma is dogma. Hesychasm, once approved, was never unapproved.

But why bring any of this up as all? This risks turning into quite the tangent again!

Well, I always use Hesychasm as a wedge and a weapon against dogmatic Orthodox to great effect and couldn’t resist doing so again here. See, Hesychasm is clearly a form of Christian yoga that relies on breathing methods, body positions, fasting and other methods of internal biochemistry manipulation to allow its practitioners to enter altered states of mind with the ultimate goal of achieving internal stillness (Hesychasm) so that the voice of the Christ-God can be heard. Then, in time, the Hesychast practitioner strives to become Christ. The process is as follows: Praxis (training and discipline and preparation) Theoria (visions begin, maybe even abilities are gifted to the practitioner) and Theosis (spiritual evolvement from being oneself to beoming the Christ-self). Orthodox Church dogma states that the Hesychasts aren’t gnostics-in-hiding (they are) and that their teaching of emanations has nothing to do with the gnostic concept of Christ (it does) and that they aren’t doing a form of yoga similar to say the yogis or the fakirs (they were). Some more recent sources claiming to be the faithful transcriptions of the secret oral tradition of the Hesychast monks of Mt. Athos even make the claim that they secretly reject the god of the Old Testament and label him as the arch-demon of this world.

But we will get into actual metaphysical narratives like the above in the next post.

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For now, the key point is that all spiritual disciplines concern a journey towards knowledge and, eventually, lead to the embodiment of a principle or rather the practitioner’s becoming of something greater. And this is all fancy language for describing what amounts to learning various forms of meditation and the art of achieving altered states of consciousness that allow the practitioner to interact with the metaphysical world.

By the standards of mainstream Christianity, which traditionally forbid the laity any kind of actual experiential spirituality or access to any body of techniques that could constitute a spiritual discipline like say, the more widely known collection of teachings of Kriya Yoga or Zen Buddhism, this is all a form of heresy. In Orthodoxy, in particular, priests are very clear that the following are expressly forbidden to the faithful:

• Meditation

• Dream work

• Yoga of any kind

Protestantism is slightly different in this regards.

Unbeknownst to themselves, many Protestant sects practice a very crude form of spirituality which can hardly even be called a discipline. But even the names of the various spin-off cults are derived from the ecstatic technique that the congregation once used. So, Shakers shook themselves into a frenzy. Quakers quaked and danced. Anabapists drowned and resuscitated themselves. Pentecostals spoke in tongues like the Apostles. This continues to this day:

Christcuck Pastors @Christcucks2

Das rite! Braise da lawd!

This was all a very primitive and democratized form of the simple ecstasy-trance technique that we often associate with native tribes in the woods somewhere.

But there’s no arguing with results.

Using these techniques, Protestants were once able to whip up the peasants into a feverish religious frenzy and launch the largest internecine bloodbath in European history. The techniques, crude as they are, worked miracles.

I saw such wondrous sights!

And any Populist worth his salt will study history and come to the conclusion that all bottom-up uprisings are religious revivals in nature led by shamans who managed to whip the peasants into an ecstatic lather to get them to rise up en masse.

The Sioux ghost-dancers, Tecumsah’s shaman-warriors, the Yellow Turban medicine men, the slave uprisings of Sicily, the German peasant revolts, the Tibetan Llama pogroms, well, the list really does go on and on and on.

I touched on this in my book, which you should get, and I will go into the topic in greater detail in the book that I am working on now.

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It is my firmly held belief that religion without mysticism and a spiritual discipline at its core is an empty husk of itself. The stated dogmas of the religion have to be verifiable through the application of a spiritual praxis and not simply accepted on blind faith for generations on end. At best, faith ought to be a stepping stone in one’s disciplined progression towards knowledge and becoming.

In other words, we should all strive to become Hesychasts of a kind.

We should all strive to adopt an actual, living, breathing spiritual discipline into our own lives.

We should strive to become instead of blindly hoping and outsourcing our spirituality to either the priests or the holy texts or the YMCA style potluck dinners every sunday.

We should reject the spiritual “atheism” of mainstream Christianity and re-embrace the spirituality that was stolen from us.