You might be interested in this:

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/05/02/JesusSayings/

On what Jesus would say about religion today:

“He would not recognize Christianity because he wasn’t a Christian and he never claimed he was a messiah. The ‘Christ’ story was introduced by Paul, not by Jesus. The idea that ‘faith’ in a messiah could land one in heaven came from Paul and later church doctrine writers, not from Jesus. The letter-writer Paul, never knew Jesus, tells almost nothing about him, and created his own new religion. This Paulist religion was later linked to Jesus by church writers.

“The Messiah, or ‘anointed one,’ in Judaism was a title given to Jewish kings such as David, who might end the oppression of foreign kings and establish a kingdom for ‘God’s people.’ The Persians believed in a similar idea. Jesus does not claim to be such a person, and he encourages his listeners to seek spiritual resources within themselves, not to wait around for a deity to solve their problems.”

“Man’s greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain.” (Lord Byron [The term “United Nations” first appears in stanza 35 of Canto III of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; the concept of a peaceful community of nations had previously been described in Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).])

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2059

excerpt:

Shambhala Sun | September 1996

The Kosmos According to Ken Wilber

A Dialogue with Robin Kornman

How does one classify Ken Wilbur? Philosopher, psychologist, contemplative, author, avid consumer of popular culture, Wilber is one of our era’s grand synthecists, integrating many levels of knowledge from the most concrete to the most etheral into a great unified view of the living universe. The reclusive thinker granted the Shambhala Sun a rare opportunity to discuss his ideas, and entered into the following dialogue via fax machine with Robin Kornman, Buddhist scholar and the Bradley assistant professor of world literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

[start at the following section]

…
[a] In other words, a judicious blend of Eastern contemplative approaches with Western psychodynamic approaches is an interesting and I think healthy way to proceed. And if you want a more comprehensive world view, including both absolute and relative truths, then certainly there are numerous items that the West will bring to the feast. Any of those approaches taken by themselves is demonstrably partial by comparison.

Incidentally, if you’re put off by all this you don’t have to come. But everybody has an invitation to this dance, I think. It’s a real Shambhala Ball. Seriously. Chogyam Trungpa’s Shambhala vision, as I understand it, was a secular and integral weaving of the dharma into the vast cultural currents in which it finds itself. A Brief History of Everything outlines many of those currents and suggests one way that the dharma can enrich-and be enriched by-those currents. This is very simple, I think.

[q] Fair enough. What I would like to do now is to ask a few very technical questions. One of the most confusing things about being a practitioner of Asian mystical traditions is the fact that before the Enlightenment the West had a thousand year tradition of civilization based on a highly mystical religion, Christianity. And yet in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality you characterize this thousand year period as one that promised but did not deliver genuine transcendence. Why do you say that? How could a whole civilization miss the point for so long when it had expressions of the idea in Plato, the Corpus Hermeticum, Neoplatonism, mystical Christianity, and so on?

Imagine if, the very day Buddha attained his enlightenment, he was taken out and hanged precisely because of his realization. and if any of his followers claimed to have the same realization, they were also hanged. Speaking for myself, I would find this something of a disincentive to practice.

But that’s exactly what happened with Jesus of Nazareth. “Why do you stone me?” he asks at one point. “Is it for good deeds?” And the crowd responds, “No, it is because you, being a man, make yourself out to be God.” The individual Atman is not allowed to realize that it is one with Brahman. “I and my Father are One”-among other complicated factors that realization got this gentleman crucified.
The reasons for this are involved, but the fact remains: as soon as any spiritual practitioner began to get too close to the realization that Atman and Brahman are one-that one’s own mind is intrinsically one with primordial Spirit-then frighteningly severe repercussions usually followed.

Of course there were wonderful currents of Neoplatonic and other very high teachings operating in the background (and underground) in the West, but wherever the Church had political influence-and it dominated the Western scene for a thousand years-if you stepped over that line between Atman and Brahman, you were in very dangerous waters. St. John of the Cross and his friend St. Teresa of Avila stepped over the line, but couched their journeys in such careful and pious language they pulled it off, barely. Meister Eckhart stepped over the line, a little too boldly, and had his teachings officially condemned, which meant he wouldn’t fry in hell but his words apparently would. Giordano Bruno stepped way over the line, and was burned at the stake. This is a typical pattern.

[q] You say the reasons are complicated, and I’m sure they are, but could you briefly mention a few?
…

Because, you know, the unsettling thing about direct mystical experience is that it has a nasty habit of going straight from Spirit to you, thus bypassing the middleman, namely, the bishop, not to mention the middleman’s collection plate. This is the same reason the oil companies do not like solar power, if you get my drift.

And so, anybody who had a direct pipeline to God was thus pronounced guilty not only of religious heresy, or the violation of the legal codes of the Church, for which you could have your heavenly soul eternally damned, but also of political treason, for which you could have your earthly body separated into several sections.

For all these reasons, the summum bonum of spiritual awareness-the supreme identity of Atman and Brahman, or ordinary mind and intrinsic spirit-was officially taboo in the West for a thousand years, more or less. All the wonderful currents that you mention, from Neoplatonism to Hermeticism, were definitely present but severely marginalized, to put it mildly. And thus the West produced an extraordinary number of subtle-level (or sambhogakaya) mystics, who only claimed that the soul and God can share a union; but very few causal (dharmakaya) and very few nondual (svabhavikakaya) mystics, who went further and claimed not just a union but a supreme identity of soul and God in pure Godhead, just that claim got you toasted.

…

—previous—

compassion (etc.) existed long before a formal concept of “god”, or “goddess”, or “gods” or “godesses” existed.

Integral Theory explains the “AQAL” matrix (”the good, the beautiful and the true”) in a way that is far better (clearer) and less mired in obscure, inpenetrable premodern tradition than bahai scripture.

Jean Gebser’s concept of “paradigm regression” is of far greater importance than all of the absurd, confused, convoluted, backward metaphysics contained in bahai scripture.

really, all this “god exists” junk simply boils down to various archaic taxonomies of univeral archetypes that rest on discredited, irrelevant metaphysics that have no power to inspire humanity anymore.

…

compassion (etc.) existed long before a formal concept of “god”, or “goddess”, or “gods” or “godesses” existed.

Integral Theory explains the “AQAL” matrix (”the good, the beautoful and the true”) in a way that is far better (clearer) and less mired in obscure, inpenetrable premodern tradition than bahai scripture.

Jean Gebser’s concept of “paradigm regression” is of far greater importance than all of the absurd, confused, convoluted, backward metaphysics contained in bahai scripture.

really, all this “god exists” junk simply boils down to various archaic taxonomies of univeral archetypes that rest on discredited, irrelevant metaphysics that have no power to inspire humanity anymore.

as I’ve said a number of times, prophetology is a ridiculous scam, as is infallibility.

at some point people start to wonder about why the bahai faith “went bad” (became fundamentalist,totalitarian, anti-modernist, etc.), and the trail of discovery will inevitably take them to the discredited metaphysics and shia traditions that bahai thought emerged from.

evolution carries all human history forward like a wave, including the so called “prophets” and “manifestations”.

the “prophets” and “manifestations don’t create social change, they following EXISTING, underlying evolutionary trends, and to some extent, crystalize them for people that are looking for convenient a vessel to contain and actualize newly “emergent” political, social, economic and military realities.

“prophetology”, with its elaborate archetypal structures, was useful for an immature stage of human evolution before neuroscience came into being, it is now a hindrance.

discussing the “existence of god” in traditional categories is a futile and pointless exercise, especially in a postmodern/integral age.

there are an ever increasing number of fascinating “new age” movements that are far better at providing “feel good” spirituality, and do not impose the horrible conformist burdens of the bahai faith and its cultural “shia gravity well”.

again, the real issue is why bahai culture and organization is so mired in petty internal power struggles, and narrow-minded, fascistic thought policing and fundamentalism.

Eric P.
(exbahai)
Sacramento

“I’ve come to realize that the Lord’s prayer doesn’t refer to the future. Rather it refers to the present time whenever it is recited. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is happening now. “The kingdom of God is within you.”

Yes, Frank, we have to be “born again”, with spiritual lives, into the “spiritual kingdom”, as we were first born from the womb, but once we have been re-born as beings endowed with spiritual lives, that kingdom of love which is reflected in our hearts must then become instated into the material world, as it has become instated in our hearts.

That is the tricky part: establishing a kingdom of God “in earth” once it has been first established in the heaven of our ideals. This is what the Baha’i teachings promise for today, the next step, with the moral laws acquired for our personal development being applied in our collective lives on a planetary level.

warmest

Farhan

Frank wrote:
“The logic of Baha’i is weaker than the compassion of Baha’i and that may well be its salvation.”

Thanks Frank, for this glass of clear water; the logic of Baha’is is not their salvation, but that of life on this planet.

For 2000 years the Christians have prayed “thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”

If God exists as I believe he does, if He is just, as I believe He is, would He leave that prayer unanswered?
My bet is that He will answer it.

Christ did not teach us to pray “MY will be done..” but “THY will be done.”

As Lewis Mumford wrote, the God that will save us will arise again in the human hearts and not descend “ex-machina” from the machinery of our minds.

Farhan, I’ve come to realize that the Lord’s prayer doesn’t refer to the future. Rather it refers to the present time whenever it is recited. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is happening now. “The kingdom of God is within you.”

When we think of the eternal, temporal matters fade into the background and disappear. Praying for Thy kingdom come is the same as the search for enlightenment.

God exists within each of us, that is where we must search.

Peace,
Frank

Thanks Frank, for this glass of clear water; the logic of Baha’is is not their salvation, but that of life on this planet.

For 2000 years the Christians have prayed “thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”

If God exists as I believe he does, if He is just, as I believe He is, would He leave that prayer unanswered?
My bet is that He will answer it.

Christ did not teach us to pray “MY will be done..” but “THY will be done.”

As Lewis Mumford wrote, the God that will save us will arise again in the human hearts and not descend “ex-machina” from the machinery of our minds.

Frank,

I am sure you will enjoy this extraordinary talk on our relational lives and the functions of the left brain in logical thoughts and the right brain in our relational lives and global views.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

As time goes by, IQ has been enriched with AQ (affective quotient, and now with SQ, which is the “spiritual quotient”, ie our ability to introduce relationnal concepts in our mind and actions. This would be our capacity to develop our right brain.

Thanks Farhan, I did enjoy the talk. Brain research is expanding the horizons of human potential or at least helping us to understand what that is.

Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book “The Biology of Transcendence” ties the heart into brain function brilliantly I think.

Logic not only has its limitations but untempered by the right brain and the heart it leads to totalitarianism, to rule by computer.

The logic of Baha’i is weaker than the compassion of Baha’i and that may well be its salvation.

Thanks for the link and your correspondence,
Peace,
Frank

I am sure you will enjoy this extraordinary talk on our relational lives and the functions of the left brain in logical thoughts and the right brain in our relational lives and global views.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

As time goes by, IQ has been enriched with AQ (affective quotient, and now with SQ, which is the “spiritual quotient”, ie our ability to introduce relationnal concepts in our mind and actions. This would be our capacity to develop our right brain.

Very true, Frank, the idea is that to be accepted unhesitatingly, the “standard” should be accepted as supra-natural. The analogy with Genesis is that by acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, humans attempt to become peers and equals with God and they lose their paradise. A similar incident with Babel: when men want to attain the heights of Deity, then their languages differ.

You write:
“This does not mean we must reject religion, rather it indicates only that we can and should treat religion in a rational manner.”

Yes, and at the same time, we have to accept the two as complementary and functionning in synergia. In short, we can say that the left brain is rationnal, treating information like a serial computer (logical reasonning), and the right brain is global, treating information in a parallel manner (affective knowledge). I gave an interesting link to a presentation on this earlier on.

You ask :
« Was Simon transformed by Christ’s teachings or his charisma? »

I would say both love and knowledge.

You ask :
« To ask another kind of question, is the bible story accurate or created along with the virgin birth and resurrection to attract converts once the charisma of Jesus was no longer available? »

I would say historical information is mixed with mysthical (spiritual) information ; Even if there was no historical fact (which I doubt strongly), the persons who invented such a story that 2000 years later inspire love and service to more than a billion humans accomplished a miracle.

« I think poetry and revelation probably have the same or similar source. »

There is a book by Hatcher on « The Divine art of Revelation » which is close to your point.

Warmest

Farhan