Category Archives: Jesus

What Jesus Means

Posted on December 23, 2013 by | 75 comments

Here are some thoughts that may make Christmas more meaningful.

by Mohandas K. Gandhi:

My Christian friends have told me on a few occasions that because I do not accept Christ as the only son of God, it is impossible for me to understand the profound significance of his teachings.  I believe that this is an erroneous point of view, and that such an estimate is incompatible with the message that Jesus gave to the world.  For he was certainly the highest example of one who wished to give everything, asking nothing in return, and not caring what creed might happen to be professed by the recipient.  I am sure that if he were living here now among men, he would bless the lives of many who perhaps have never even heard his name, if only their lives embodied the virtues of which he was a living example on earth: the virtues of loving one’s neighbor as oneself and of doing good and charitable works among one’s fellow men.

What then does Jesus mean to me?  To me  he was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had.  To his believers he was God’s only-begotten Son. Could the fact that I do or do not accept this belief make Jesus have any more or less influence in my life?   Is all the grandeur of his teaching and of his doctrine to be forbidden to me?  I cannot believe so.

To me it implies a spiritual birth. My interpretation, in other words, is that in Jesus’ own life is the key to his nearness to God; that he expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God.  It is in this sense that I see him and recognize him as the son of God.   

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Posted in acknowledgments, healing, Integral Theory, Jesus, philosophy

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Forgiveness

Posted on October 1, 2013 by | 290 comments

What follows may shed light on why Jesus Christ is nullified in Scientology.

In The Gospel According To Jesus, Stephen Mitchell performs a rather competent analysis that shows Christ’s reported teachings for the most part were Middle Eastern iterations of what Lao Tzu and Siddhartha Gautama and other philosophers had communicated for four or five hundred years.   If there were distinctions to be made, they were based more upon emphasis than anything else.  His conclusion was that in essence what Jesus Christ most uniquely brought to the philosophical mix was the all-healing, all-powerful teaching of forgiveness.

Mitchell quoted from William Blake for support:

There is not one moral virtue that Jesus inculcated but Plato and Cicero did inculcate before him. What then did Christ inculcate?  Forgiveness of sins.  This alone is the gospel and this is the life and immortality brought to light by Jesus, even the covenant of Jehovah, which is this: if you forgive one another your trespasses, so shall Jehovah forgive you, that he himself may dwell among you.

By comparison, Scientology inculcates the following.

People attack Scientology; I never forget it, always even the score.

–          HCO Manual of Justice (1959)

On further living I found that only those who sought only peace were ever butchered.  The thousands of years of Jewish passivity earned them nothing but slaughter. 

–          Ethics, The Design Of (1969)

There was no Christ.*

–           Class VIII, lecture 10 (1968)

When I walked down the street and away from the church of Scientology for the last time, I had settled in my mind that I was going to forsake twenty-seven years of dedicated service in favor of experiencing the two most important human virtues.  Both of those virtues I found wanting – even prohibited –  in Scientology.  Forgiveness was one of them.

* the context of the quotation:

In R6 (a matrix implanted into every earth being’s mind 75 million years ago which dictates future behavior until ‘handled’ with Scientology) everybody is shown crucified. So is the psychiatrist shown crucified, although the psychiatrist is a dominant character and that’s how he gets away with what he gets away with. He electric shocks people. The medical doctor is not really represented in R6. It is only the surgeon. The surgeon is shown cutting bodies to pieces. That’s the right thing to do. Actually he shreds a body down to just raw meat down to a skeleton and the skeleton is in agony and then it too is chopped up. Anyway, every man is then shown to have been crucified, so don’t think that it’s an accident that this crucifixtion…they found out that this applied. Somebody, somewhere on this planet, back about six hundred BC, found some piece of R6. And I don’t know how they found it either by watching mad men or something but since that time they have used it and it became what is known as Christianity. The man on the cross – there was no Christ – but the man on the cross is shown as every man so of course each person seeing a crucified man has an immediate feeling of sympathy for this man.

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Posted in Buddha, Jesus, l. ron hubbard, philosophy, Tao Te Ching

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Scientology Culture

Posted on September 28, 2013 by | 168 comments

Henry David Thoreau’s description of mid-nineteenth century American culture could serve as a fairly accurate description of Scientology culture today, in my opinion.

Thoreau:

It is remarkable that the highest intellectual mood which the world tolerates is the perception of the truth of the most ancient revelations, now in some respects out of date; but any direct revelation, any original thoughts, it hates like virtue.  The fathers and mothers of the town would rather hear the young man or young woman at their tables express reverence for some old statement of the truth than utter a direct revelation themselves.  They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families, – damn them!  So far as thinking is concerned, surely original thinking is the divinest thing. Rather we should reverently watch for the least motions, the least scintillations, of thought in this sluggish world, and men should run to and fro on the occasion more than at an earthquake.  We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us, to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us.  I go to see many a good man or good woman, so called, and utter freely that thought which alone it was given me to utter; but there was a man who lived a long, long time ago, and his name was Moses, and another whose name was Christ, and if your thought does not, or does not appear to, coincide with what they said, the good man or the good woman has no ears to hear you.  They think they love God!  It is only his old clothes, of which they make scarecrows for their children.  Where will they come nearer to God that in those very children?

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Posted in healing, Integral Theory, Jesus, policy, quotations, Scientology, squirreling

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Justice

Posted on September 20, 2013 by | 95 comments

Jesus Christ is reported to have said, ‘The measure by which you give is the measure by which you will receive.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. {Oi chusoi Dios aei enpiptousi}, — The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

‘Compensation’, Essays: First Series.

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Posted in acknowledgments, David Miscavige, ethics, harassment, healing, Jesus, justice, monique rathbun, office of special affairs, philosophy, quotations, the future

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The Gospel According to Jesus

Posted on September 2, 2013 by | 139 comments

That is the title of another book by Stephen Mitchell, whose translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching I have many times recommended on this blog and in my books.  The subtitle is: A New Translation and Guide to his Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers.

Mitchell undertakes an effort begun by such noted Americans as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom assayed to differentiate the life and words of Jesus from the hype, falsehood, misdirection and fear they perceived had been added to the Scriptures by others.

I am going to share one passage from the introduction of Mitchell’s book that I believe might resonate on several levels with people who have invested in the Scientology experience.

Excerpt from The Gospel According to Jesus:

He enjoys eating and drinking, he likes to be around women and children; he laughs easily, and his wit can cut like a surgeon’s scalpel.  His trust in God is as natural as breathing, and in God’s presence he is himself fully present.  In his bearing, in his very language, he reflects God’s deep love for everything that is earthly: for the sick and the despised, the morally admirable and the morally repugnant, for weeds as well as flowers, lions as well as lambs.  He teaches that just as the sun gives light to both wicked and good, and the rain brings nourishment to both righteous and unrighteous, God’s compassion embraces all people.  There are no pre-conditions for it, nothing we need to do first, nothing we have to believe.  When we are ready to receive it, it is there.  And the more we live in its presence, the more effortlessly it flows through us, until we find that we no longer need external rules or Bibles or Messiahs.

“For this teaching which I give you today is not hidden from you, and is not far away.  It is not in heaven, for you to say, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down for us, so that we can hear it and do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, for you to say, ‘Who will cross the sea and bring it back for us, so that we can hear it and do it?’  But the teaching is very near to you: it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”

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Posted in acknowledgments, healing, Integral Theory, Jesus, Tao Te Ching, Uncategorized

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