Dualism and the Dark Age
The narrow-minded think
“This person is mine, and this one is not.”
For those of noble conduct the whole world is one family.
Maha Upanishad 6.72
Dualism. Dvaita. The bane of good souls and the people generally in the Kali Yuga (“the Dark Age”). “Us vs. Them,” “God vs. the Devil” or “God vs. humanity” and divisions into binary dualisms generally are, I dare say, the great cause of suffering in this Age. The proclivity to create “the Enemy/enemies” else to manufacture a scapegoat is at the social, cultural and cognitive level perhaps the primary problem proffered humanity in this Dark Age, the Kali Yuga. The Abrahamic religions, all three, have proven to fall prey to the bane of dualistic delusion, and are in fact very much responsible for spreading said self-destructive and life-denying way of thinking to nearly the whole world in this Dark Age, the Kali Yuga.
dvaita n. (fr. 1. %{dvi-tA}) duality, duplicity, dualism (cf. %{-vAda}) , doubt (Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon)[i]
The
Hebrews created a succinct dualism by calling themselves “God's chosen people,”
more than implying that the rest of the world was “not-chosen.” The Hebrews designated all who were not
Jewish as Gentiles, “Samaritan” designating those Israelites who had split off
from Judaism early in the history of Israel and who were generally hated by
Hebrews. In their father Abraham’s break
with his ancestors' and their religion and exemplified by the Hebrew people's
historic practice of killing every man, woman, child and animal amongst their
conquered foes, such as when they returned to Palestine after the “Exodus,” the
Hebrew construction of reality is very much based on a rejection of anyone
“not-us.”
Christians
separate themselves from “God” by their notion of the “sin nature,” and from
the rest of the world by the dichotomy of “the saved” vs. “the lost”—this,
despite the fact that their own scriptures tell that Jesus Himself said He came
to minister to the Jews, not the “Gentiles,” not the rest of the world's
people, as He said “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” (Matthew
15:24, New International Version). His
supposed followers are the ones who decided that Jesus came to save the whole
world, AFTER Jesus had parted from their company. Not unrelatedly, Christianity contends that
only Christians have “the Spirit of God/the Holy Spirit” in their hearts,
whereas according to the ancient teachings that Jesus certainly came to
understand during His studies and practice in India (something I am assuming
throughout the course of this work), Atman, “God’s Spirit,” is extant in
everyone’s heart, “a flame about the size of your thumb” according to the
Upanishads. I dare say, when Jesus
mentioned “the Holy Spirit,” He was talking about Atman as He had
learned of such in India during His “missing years,” and was not referring to
something exclusive to His followers. This is clearly evinced by Jesus’s saying,
“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me,” and “Whatever you don’t
do to the least of these, you don’t do to me,” from the “Parable of the Sheep
and Goats” (Matthew 25:31-46). In other
words, Jesus was acknowledging that the “Spirit of God”/Atman is extant
in everyone, regardless of their religion or faith, and proclaiming that our
action towards any other is an action done to “God,” the True Self of all. Thus “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” because
they are “thyself”/your own True Self, i.e., beyond the illusion of time and
space, beyond the illusion of maya, we are all That Eternal One.
It also seems
many Christians (though not all, mind you) seem to have more faith in the
existence of evil and “the Devil,” in “the Enemy,” “the Satan,” than in the integrity and compassion of
whatever or whoever is “God,” and in fact thus empower and give license to much
veritable evil and to a great many injustices by their faith in “the Evil One”
and by their animosity towards the rest of the world/non-Christians, as well as
by narrowly prejudiced judgments of any perspective that disagrees with their
own particular dogma. The word satan
is a Hebrew word that means “accuser” or “adversary” (not unlikely derived from
the Sanskrit sapatna m. a rival,
adversary, enemy RV.) and satan is
used in the Old Testament on many occasions to describe adversaries who are not
supernatural, and who were not identified as or with the person later rendered
“the Devil.” As already much noted, “the
Devil” was in fact derived from an inversion of or polemic against the
Vedic/Hindu “Deva” (“God”), as per Zoroastrianism’s opposition to the Vedic
Divine/Vedic tribes, as daeva came to mean “demon” in their scripture
the Avesta, and thus in the Avestan language usage generally.
In the book of
Numbers an “angel of Yahweh” is said to act as a “satan” (an adversary) to the
donkey of Balaam who was on a journey to curse the Israelites (Numbers 22:22). In other words, the “Angel of Yahweh” was a satan
to the donkey who was a satan to the Israelites. The definition and use of the Hebrew word satan
as “adversary” (and Arabic word shaytan as “tempter”), and later
rhetoric against “the Devil” as well as against whatever foe/satan (who is
often as not one of the other Abrahamic religions) betrays the fact that all
three of the Abrahamic religions are built on and too often maintain their
faiths more by their opposition to whatever “adversary” than by their devotion
to the compassion and unity of the Divine. The Abrahamic religions often seem to define
themselves as much by whoever is their “satan” as they do by whoever is
their “God.” Consider the Muslim
Jihadist “Great Satan” to refer to the United States, “Little Satan” as Israel,
and “Lesser Satan” as an epithet for the Soviet Union, a la the late ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini of Iran.
The Hebrews did
not believe in an “Evil One” or “Devil” in Abraham’s time, though there were
various satans as “adversaries” variously mentioned in the Old Testament,
and their later construction of Satan/The Devil was essentially derived from
anti-Vedic Zoroastrian dualism and their evil god Angra Manyu/Ahriman. Christians (and the Abrahamic/Abrahman-ic
religions generally) do eat heartily of “the fruit of the knowledge of good and
evil,” and have spread that mind of “sin” across the span of the globe,
fomenting dualistic delusion, arbitrary hatred, and separation from the Divine,
from Nature and any number of “others” (non-Christians, “pagans,” “heretics,”
etc.) and from what they call “the World” generally, clearly missing the point
of Jesus’s sayings, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and “The Kingdom of Heaven
is at hand,” i.e., here and now. By
their very discursive constructions, God/us vs. “the satan”/i.e., whatever
adversary, the Abrahamic religions show themselves very much dependent upon
having an enemy, a far cry from Jesus’s legitimate teachings and likewise far
from the teachings of the Upanishads—the which very likely influenced Jesus’s
teachings from His time in India.
Upon the
conversion of Constantine, Christianity spread across Europe by the sword and
the power of the Roman Empire, and then after the fall of Rome, by the Roman
Catholic Church, efforts which nigh utterly exterminated the practitioners of
the Old Ways else forced them underground, including the remnant Druids the
Romans had not slain and other “Pagans” who would not convert. Charlemagne continued the persecution of the
people of the Old Ways, meeting a peak of brutality in 782 as he ordered the
death of 4,500 Saxon “pagans” during what has become known as the Massacre of
Dresden. In 1054, the Roman Catholic Church
and Eastern Orthodox Church split from each other, though this division among
the Christians did not lead to any immediate nor general wars. Then came the
Crusades, with Christians attacking the Muslim “others” of the Middle East in
their endeavor to conquer “the holy land,” and thus picking a fight with Islam
that has lasted to this day. During the
Fourth Crusade Roman Christians were diverted from their original goal of
retaking Jerusalem and sacked Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern
church, instead. Though this action did
not have a papal sanction, this offence solidified the break of the Western and
Eastern churches.
Then came the
Inquisition, designed to weed out heretics, “witches” and others who defied the
patriarchal authority of the church. Heretics
began to be executed as early as the 4th century once Rome was
Christianized, with the Inquisition beginning in the 12th century,
with an estimated 5-10,000 killed for being “heretics,” and witch hunts in full
swing by the 15th century, with upwards of 100,000 “witches” executed
or dying in prison. Displaying yet
further penchant for dualistic divisions and propensities to bifurcate,
Christians soon enough began to fight against other Christians as Catholic
versus “heretical” Christians and as Catholic versus Protestant, with 6.5 to 18
million slain on all sides in the “European Wars of Religion.” Once Protestants had won their liberty from
the Catholic church, the dominant Protestant church in whatever region of
Europe began to attack other Protestants (as well as minority Catholics), such
as the Anglican persecutions of Puritans in England and Lutheran persecutions of
groups of the “Radical Reformation,” including anabaptists, Mennonites, etc.,
in continental Europe.
Upon fleeing
Europe and attaining the liberty to practice their religion without persecution
in the American colonies, the Puritans soon began to persecute other Christians
including Baptists, Quakers and Catholics, as well as rendering any who might
practice vestiges of the Old Ways as “witches” to be burned at the stake. These days Baptists (and other
“Evangelicals”), who were among the most persecuted groups of Christians in
Europe and then in the American colonies, are among the most dualistically divisive
of Christian sects, fervently fomenting the dichotomy of “the saved vs. the
lost” and doctrine of “God vs. The Devil,” contending that all religions other
than Christianity are “of the Devil,” sometimes even including Catholicism and
Mormonism, and in the most extreme cases even all other Christian sects as “of
the Devil” in their stark and harsh dualistic judgements and condemnations.
Among the most
recent Christian groups to dualistically divide themselves from other
Christians, the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” i.e., the
Mormons, continued the “us vs. them” practice of Christianity generally in
their break with other Christians, rendered all non-Mormons as “Gentiles,” and
represented themselves as “the Chosen people,” mimicking the Hebrew
construction of exclusivism. Persecuted
by other Christians and sometimes violently provoking “the Gentiles,” the
Mormons were forced to leave their homes back East to escape conflicts with
other Christians, chased from New York to Missouri to Illinois to Iowa by mobs
and assassinations, finally settling in the lands well into the Rocky Mountains
to so far away as Salt Lake to escape other Christians. The Mormons then showed their own penchant
for dualistic violence during “the Mormon War” at the “Meadow Mountains
Massacre,” during which the Utah Territorial Militia and their Native
allies—imitating the Hebrews’ post-Exodus conquest of Palestine—killed every
man, woman and child (old enough to testify) amongst the Fancher Party, a group
of settlers from Arkansas traveling west through Utah.[ii]
The play of
dualistic violence is rife throughout the history of Christianity, obviously
from its inception, as the religion was founded on an act of violence. Christians rapidly went from persecuted
minority to persecutors of minorities in the matter of a few centuries, and are
quite caught up in constructing all sorts of “us vs. them” divisions that have
led them to exact innumerable violences against whatever “others,” all “in the
name of God.”
From their initial conquests, Muslims
separated themselves (and to some degree, the “people of the book,” Jews and
Christians) from “the infidels,” and from all (including Jews and Christians)
who do not accept “the kalima,” the Muslims’ all-important confession of
faith in Allah and Mohammad. Though the
Hebrews eradicated their conquered foes and the Christians try to “save them”
(else eradicate them), the early Muslim conquests only attempted to eradicate
those who would not convert (other than Jews and Christians) amongst those they
conquered. Jewish or Christian cities
that the Muslims had conquered who chose not to convert were granted “djimi”
status, levied a one-percent poll tax and otherwise granted self-rule. Regardless, Islam is still based on a
distinct dichotomy of “us vs. them,” “the faithful” vs. “the infidels,” despite
the less succinct separation they originally placed between themselves and “the
people of the book” (i.e., until the Crusades, European colonialism, and the
establishment of the modern state of Israel in what was Palestine, that
is). Muslims continued their dualistic
divisions by splitting into Sunni vs. Shia and various other “us vs. them”
dichotomies, shedding the blood of millions over their internal “us vs. them”
divisions.
The Abrahamic religions are all three too much caught up in the fear or pride-based division/delusion of “us vs. them,” and are thus blinded to the beautiful Oneness of God, who is certainly transcendent to religion and is all that truly Is. They “can’t see the forest for the trees,” blind to the reality that beyond the illusion of time and space, humanity and all beings are Advaita, literally “not-second,” not other than the First, the Eternal, brahman, “God,” Nature manifest and unmanifest, Being Itself/Herself/Himself, ignorant of the religious and scientific truth that each and all are “quantumly entangled,” so to speak, with every other and Other, that all else is illusion and delusion, forgetfulness of our true Nature as One with the Divine, according to sanAtana dharma. In terms of the purported sayings of Jesus, this would be realizing that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2, Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15), is right here, right now, if we would but learn to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31), as Atman, to realize that whatever you do or don’t do to the least of these, you do or don’t do to “God,” to your own true Self (Matthew 25:31-46). An account that Ram Dass recounted somewhere (if I’m not mistaken as to the source) said a Sikh saint once replied, upon being chastened for pointing the bottom of his feet towards the altar at a temple, “Where might I point the soles of my feet where God is not?”
advaita mfn. destitute of duality, having no duplicate S3Br. xiv, &c.; peerless; sole, unique; epithet of Vishnu; (%{am}) n. non-duality; identity of Brahman or of the Paramatman or supreme soul with the Jivatman or human soul; identity of spirit and matter; the ultimate truth; title of an Upanishad; (%{ena}) ind. solely.[iii]
In the difficulties I
encountered gathering material, I could not help thinking of the ancient
writing and statuary that must have been intentionally destroyed. Accounts of the antagonistic attitudes of
Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (Islam) toward the sacred artifacts of
the religions that preceded them revealed that this was so . . .[iv]
[i] Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (from
Monier-Williams' 'Sanskrit-English Dictionary'), s.v. “dvaita,” accessed May 3,
2021, https://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/csl-santam/php/index.html.
[ii] “The Mountain Meadows Massacre,” American Experience,
PBS: WGBH Educational Foundation, accessed April 21, 2023,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mormons-massacre/.
[iii] Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (from
Monier-Williams' 'Sanskrit-English Dictionary'), s.v. “advaita,” accessed May
13, 2023,
https://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/csl-santam/php/index.html.
[iv] Merlin Stone, When God Was A Woman (New
York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1978),
xvii.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment