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Enlightenment Religions
Enlightenment is the term used by those religions which meditate to increase spiritual awareness. So the enlightenment religions are the ones which use meditation. The goal of the enlightenment religions is to strip away all personal concerns and exist only as a spirit substance. In that state, the spirits of different persons combine in a state called various things such as nirvana to form a collective being, which is sometimes equated with various gods. The spiritual state is the goal and often the only concern. As such, other concerns are often trivialized if not outright opposed. Knowledge and morality are included. Sometimes they are given trivial mention, and sometimes they are degraded as being a hindrance to enlightenment. Therefore, the first problem with the enlightenment religions is that knowledge and morality cannot be ignored or trivialized. The second problem is that the goal of achieving a higher spiritual state results in corruption. Knowledge is inseparable from morality, as only awareness ends sin, and sin develops to the extent that abstract awareness is deficient. Acquiring knowledge and overcoming and preventing or avoiding sin are such demanding challenges that to trivialize that subject at all is to allow or promote sin. The problem with the goal of achieving higher spiritual states is that spirit powers are the ultimate source of power, and power unleashes sin like emptying a bag of feathers. Not only that, power reinforces all of the subconscious sources of corruption. It is the positive reinforcement for the psychological conditioning of the basic causes of sin, which stem from domination and include selfishness, jealousy, bigotry, etc. So enlightenment creates power without sufficient moral bearings. Superficially, the opposite appears to be the case, because there is some innate concern for morality. The problem is that overcoming the subconscious forces that create corruption is so difficult that it does not take care of itself. Persons who seek enlightenment mistakenly assume that increased spirit powers take care of everything. They are totally wrong about that. Spirit powers do not increase moral state one iota. The most basic reason is because abstract understanding is not increased. Spirit powers increase perceptive awareness, which is not the same thing as abstract awareness. Abstract awareness is the ability to understand nonpercievable realities. Acquiring abstract understanding is no small task. It depends upon the condition of the unified reality in the mind, while corruption dissociates reality in the mind. It also depends upon learned skills or habits in using the mind. Those skills are developed over very extended time and under conditions which are very demanding. The adherents of the enlightenment religions do not relate to their god as a creator. So their god is not the same as the creator God of the Christians. They generally do not assume that molecules exist as objective realities but as illusions, and therefore there is not a creator of them. So deduction indicates that their god is not the creator God who created molecular life. Enlightenment religions came out of the Oriental society, which was close to flat for power structures. The flat society reduced the corruptions of power, but at the same time it eliminated the extreme victimization by sin and evil which characterize the western world. Orientals could not develop a lot of concern about sin, because they were not victimized by it in a major way. So the Oriental society developed around social interactions rather than overcoming sin, and the enlightenment religions did not develop clear concepts of sin and evil. To a large extent, the same orientation and assumptions exist in the affluent part of the western world. Affluent westerners tend to not believe sin matters or that there is such a thing as evil. But there is also a victimized class of persons in the western world, and they acquire concerns for sin and evil. The western religions are concerned only with overcoming sin, while God does the rest of the saving. This approach is more realistic, because overcoming sin is the only real limitation. An element of achieving enlightenment is in reducing personal concerns, which are sometimes called ego. Any sin which is not overcome prevents such concerns from being eliminated, because sin creates forces in subconscious minds. The problem is that the methodology of meditation is to will away the concerns. That method cannot be highly successful. Sin, or corruption, cannot be willed away to any significant extent, because the problem involves psychologically conditioned reactions in the subconscious mind. Undoing those reactions requires more than thought. It requires certain behavior which is corrective, because the patterns are created by behavior. It takes behavior to correct problems of behavior. Christ taught what the corrective behavior patterns are. Elements of what he taught can be found everywhere, but without the right perspective and set of concerns, the path gets lost. Overcoming sin does not result from focusing on oneself. Sin is a wrong against other persons, and therefore it can only be overcome through proper relationships to other persons. But the relationships which overcome sin are not in corrupt persons hugging each other, as affluent persons tend to assume. It is in correcting relationships to the victims of sin—a path which is hard to find and follow. |