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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
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A different experience of ChristianityIn what has sometimes been called His 'hard teaching,' Jesus describes the problem of the humanity of his time, the problem He perhaps came to overcome. Briefly and succinctly He describes the action that must be taken. We must change what is within us. To find the Kingdom of Heaven, we must search within ourselves, 'for the kingdom is within you.' To live in that Kingdom of Heaven, or to live according to the divine teaching of love, we must cleanse ourselves within. Then we can love without thought. This chapter also describes a book, called A Different Christianity, written by Praxis Director Robin Amis, and published by State University of New York Press (SUNY). This is often regarded as a 'hard teaching,' in which Jesus describes the problem of the humanity of his time, the problem He perhaps came to earth in order to overcome. Briefly and succinctly, He describes the action of self-therapy which must be taken. To find the Kingdom of God, we must search within ourselves, 'for the kingdom is within you.' Then we must learn to live in that Kingdom, and this means that we must accept the rule of God, and learn to live according to the divine teaching, which is to live according to love. For this, we must cleanse ourselves within, for only by a higher love, agape, can we transcend our own self-love. To act out of love, this is a hard part of the teaching, because thinking cannot do this. Since the writing of the book A Different Christianity, the ideas outlined in it have become more firmly confirmed by experience, their implications have come to seem even more far-reaching. This view is fundamentally different from that of modern Christianity. It is a view of life that at one-time believed that in order to be saved we must first cleanse ourselves and then - with God's help - our souls, our psyche's, must be healed. And then they believed that the only true way to be healed was one in which we became actively and not merely verbally obedient to God. To this, Saint Paul added detailed instruction on how this could be done; his instructions were fundamentally correct for the time. Because of all this, the early church developed ascetic and psychological disciplines intended to cleanse the soul, to heal it, and to make it a fitting instrument for the service of a God who was Himself known inwardly; the Christ within, the Healer of souls. Thus it opened the way for a true Christian consciousness opening to a life of true self-knowledge. At one time this Interior Life was a fitting equivalent of the inner sciences of the great faiths of the East: of Yoga, Sufism and Zen Buddhism - all of which found their parallels in that early church. |
different christianity
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