METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE, part IV

METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE, part IV - by Guenther Zuehlsdorf, translation from the original German edition into Portuguese by Huberto Rohden and translated into English by Flavio de Mello.

"Do not provoke ideas, do not do reasoning, do not analysis nothing, do not meditate, do not look into yourself - allows merely the spirit to live its natural state"  Tilopa.

Never any of the great teachers of mankind developed a scheme of intellectual thoughts to find out what is meant by "Truth" - With spontaneous naturalness, they put aside all intellectual ideologies and all the traditional rules, leaving their disciples, often, in a state of strange emptiness. But, this proceedings had certain purpose: to strip man of his props and crutches for him to stand up by himself and to find, beyond all thinkable things, the unthinkable Reality. Traditions, dogmas, scriptures, methods, meditations - everything was subjected to the discretion of man himself, in order to find out whether these things may or may not lead him to a direct and immediate experience of the Real. And according to this, all conventions and prejudices were reduced to powder.

And yet, does not exist, perhaps, some sector in human life as dominant by traditions and conventions as precisely, the religion. All religions claim to be the continuation of the message of some of the great masters and try to interpret what they taught. But to the extent that religion expanded externally and was systematically organized, was also losing its true content(1). All external means, not excepting refined psychological and subtle intellectual acrobatics techniques, as well as stunning religious services and artistic ritualism - none of this, however, seems to have had the least influence on the real and genuine spiritual experience of man. On the contrary, all these practices appear to have been an impediment to spiritual evolution, since man sought in these external things what he should only find in his inner self.

Religious life moves in and out of church organizations. The great masters of humanity, however, gave proof that the Eternal, rarely comes to us through the channels of shapes and traditional regulations, which is why they almost always were branded as heretics and blasphemers. Man only takes seriously the awareness of the truth when he comes to comprehend that every knowable sensory phenomenon is of secondary importance. Organizations and teachers who insist on something else aim to make themselves an end, refusing to be means to a higher end. All spiritual institutions have minor importance to the spiritual development of men; they should not serve as a deterrent and should not, in any way restrict the spiritual freedom; organizations exist because of men, and not vice versa. When an institution or person recognizes this truth, it is clear that will suffer decrease in its external prestige, but will gain much more in its internal meaning.

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Translator's Note:

(1) The same happened with the messages of Jesus, the Christ, after the institutionalization of Christianity.

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