A MESSAGE FROM ARUNACHALA

Paul Brunton (1898-1981), London, England, was a philosopher, mystic, writer, traveller, who left a successful journalistic career to live among yogis, mystics and holy men, studying a great variety of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. Throughout his life engaged in an inner and spiritual quest, he felt himself in charge of spreading his experiences to the world and, as the first person to write accounts of what he learned in the East from a Western perspective, his works had a great influence on the propagation of Eastern mysticism to the West. He was also, at the beginning of the early 1930s, one of the first Westerners to bring Arunachala and Sri Ramana Maharishi - one of the most celebrated seers of modern times - to greater attention of the public worldwide.

In A Message from Arunachala, Paul Brunton constructively attacks and pulverizes most institutions of modern civilization, where in the chapter RELIGIONS, he presents an interesting approach on the decay of the church.

The word religion comes from the Latin word "religio" which has a meaning influenced by the verb "religare", to connect, to cling to something concrete or abstract. In the abstract sense, it refers to the supernatural, to the divinity, to the mystic, to the faith in something supposedly intangible which does not need a scientific demonstration. A word that is usually linked to the concept of some church, sect, creed, but which is nevertheless divorced from the soul of what is true Religion, which is to be in tune with the creative power, the union with the Infinite, the overflow of mystic experience in ethical experience.

In times when there are churches on all continents of the planet, all of them offering redemption and believing that they are truth-keepers, "impetuous religions, saviours, in their mythical naivety, pushing unprepared, ignorant and unsuccessful crowds despised by consumerism and soulless culture in the midst of society, take refuge within these temples, worshipping and waiting for the eternal paradise reserved for them as a reward for suffering", the text below is presented as another important warning.

“Our disillusioned century has made the unpleasant discovery that its spiritual guides are not necessarily spiritual; that when they bless opposing armies or propound contradictory policies with equal vehemence, they merely reveal themselves as ordinary blind men who hold opinions, just as you and I and other lesser mortals hold them. And that it is also true that the custodians of sectarian religion in every land were among the first to attack true Religion when the latter publicly appeared and was voiced by the great Prophets. As they drew their stipends for supporting a mixture of lingering obsolescent superstitions and hardy truths, it was hardly to be expected that they would support undiluted Truth.

When a religion suffers from spiritual decay, the people become too dependent upon half-frozen forms and a far-off Deity through the offices of an unilluminated priesthood. The backs of the latter become loaded with theological lumber and the backs of the former with antiquated futilities. That which should have been as a divine voice to the living, grows dreary and dull, unable to meet actual needs and constantly harking back to the dead past. Can we blame young men who hesitate to entrust their spiritual destiny to those who utter dreary platitudes about divinity, but show so little of it themselves?

Priests whose dogmas are as iron-clad and as intolerant as they can make them; preachers who are more concerned about pew-rents that about spiritualizing their selves; clergymen who are prisoners of disproved doctrines which belong to their cloth; gaitered bishops who make the mistake of imagining that a religious organization must be propped up by the State, backed by its power and fed by its finances, instead of the Church being inspired enough and vital enough to back up the State with its spiritual energy; clerics who pour out insufferable cant and sanctified tomfoolery, their hollow words re-echoed back by the walls of half-empty churches; persecutors who have failed to grasp the first letter of the alphabet of true Religion, thus meriting Montesquieu's sagely cynical sentence where he begged them "if they could not behave as Christians, to behave at least as men!" - all these sightless servitors of an unreal God should not deplore the shortcomings of our generation but attend to their own”.