[TraineeHuman]

Ortho: Brook seems to have made a major point here more eloquently than I was attempting to hint something similar in my previous post. A different way I would put that point is as follows.

When a person reaches (the lowest level of) spiritual enlightenment, they no longer experience “life” or “the universe” as being (ultimately) a problem.

As far as this is concerned. it doesn’t matter if their life is as a slave in an iron dictatorship etc etc. I’m not saying that life isn’t full of problems that have to be addressed – even getting the shopping and washing done, let alone dealing with financial, interpersonal and many other issues. What I am saying is that such people’s answer to “the big question”, which we could rephrase as: “Are you basically happy?” or “Does it usually feel great to you just to be alive?”, is “Yes.”

A second part of this point is that the more you can adopt that point of view, the harder it will be for anybody or anything to oppress or exploit you. It’s essential for becoming a “lightworker” – because it works. Try it. Try making some major plans and decisions and opinions in your life based on the assumption that no problem can ever be big enough to get the better of you.

Secondly, Brook also brought up the topic of accepting your dark side – the “Antichrist” within you. It would take too long to go into this in detail. (I have actually written a long ebook over half of which is on this topic.) Suffice it to say that as a matter of fact embracing your shadow is the most important and central topic of the esoteric teaching in virtually every religion on the planet.

One person whose work this topic was central to was Carl Jung. Jung’s father had a Th. D. and was a high-ranking member of many secret societies. Some of these professed to be in existence to (secretly) preserve the esoteric teachings of Jesus. Well-read theologians are very familiar with the fact that everything in the Sermon on the Mount, and so on, is taken straight from Rabbi ben Hillel. Hillel’s teachings were written down around 100 or 90 BC, and they contain “all that, and much more”. I don’t know if Hillel’s writings are easy to get hold of today, for obvious reasons. But they certainly were accessible in the seventies, and I’ve read some of it. And they don’t contain deliberate mistranslations, such as where the feudal dictator King James ordered the first “Blessed are …” to say “the meek” even though it actually said something very different indeed. The High Priest of the Scribes at the (supposed) time of Jesus was Hillel’s grandson. So what that person was teaching would certainly have been almost indistinguishable from what Jesus publicly claimed to be teaching.
You’ll be aware that in the Bible it says that Jesus reserved the core of his teachings for his disciples, in private (and that the general public wasn’t capable of understanding it, let alone living it). Since this “esoteric” teaching can’t have been the Sermon on the Mount, etc, the question is, specifically what was that esoteric teaching?

“Embracing your dark side” doesn’t mean being rude or nasty, but does mean constantly seeking to be very honest with yourself (about your intuitive feelings), when the great majority of people are busily engaged in (subconscious) denial of most of the less superficial things/issues about themselves. And for me at this moment, being honest with myself demands untangling myself from “voices” which aren’t truly mine, and particularly (just lately) my stepfather’s. A person will never ever even get to know or “see” their dark side without “embracing” it, that is, accepting it nonjudgmentally, which requires learning to accept and strongly like themselves complete with all their faults and weaknesses and failures. Not to do this is to live in a very superficial way indeed. It’s a bit like pretending that a PR image of you is who you really are.

Jung also studied a great many religions around the world, and wrote a couple of books explaining how he had discovered that most of them had essentially the same esoteric teaching, in contrast to their exoteric teaching, which was all that the masses could cope with. The exoteric teaching was always essentially to “be good”. By contrast, the esoteric teaching says that one can only ever truly become good by doing you-know-what. That’s why the Prodigal Son was worth more than 99 brothers who were just busy at “being good”. The Prodigal Son was the only one who explored – and lived out -- what it actually meant to become good.