Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

Forgiveness

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.

Justice

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.

Christmas

 

Christmas marks the postulated birthday of Jesus Christ.  While some say the holiday can be traced back to a day of worship of the Sun at the outset of its return from its shortest day of the year, the Christ birth narrative is the story that has stood the test of time and garnered the most widespread acceptance.  You can choose whatever story you like best, and so it will be with God according to a wonderful movie now in theaters, Life of Pi.  Incidentally, I highly recommend you go out and see Pi if you haven’t already.  A perfect holiday entertainment.

Another movie I watched recently inspired this post.  That is The Quantum Activist featuring quantum theorist Amit Goswami.  In the film, Goswami explains how quantum theory relates to consciousness.  In doing so he touches on the advice of Christ to love one’s enemies.  While I have heard the advice so many times before, including in L. Ron Hubbard’s What Is Greatness?, I have generally found it difficult to apply.  I suppose it was a combination of other recent reading, particularly Ken Wilber’s work on integral spirituality and others on quantum mechanics and its relationship to consciousness, combined with life experiences that set the stage for Goswami to reach home to me.

Per the King James Bible, book of Matthew, Jesus Christ is reported as saying:

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Goswami put Christ’s love advice in the context of recognizing the non-duality of reality, something quantum theory is tending to corroborate as the truest description of existence.  He did so by also noting the tangible, unprecedented 20th Century accomplishments of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King in following Christ’s words.

I think in Scientology we are all educated in a way to justify and even accept the destructive emotions in the anger band, including ‘hate.’   I think to indulge in anger and hate might have an effect similar to that covered by Rene Brown in her interesting lecture earlier posted on this blog.  Brown noted that when one desensitizes oneself to any emotion one numbs oneself to emotion generally.   And so it might be with such things as anger and hate.  If you let them into your heart and nourish them you lose the capacity or ability to love or experience higher toned emotions.

Since recognizing and accepting the wisdom above imputed to Christ, I haven’t harbored any animosity toward anyone in a few days in spite of the fact certain folks are concurrently doing all they can to fracture and upset our family during the holidays.  While I cannot attest to it making one lick of difference in those who have declared me to be their enemy, I can say I am feeling a great degree of equanimity and peace.