FROM THE RITUAL TO THE SPIRITUAL

From the religious point of view, every man who follows the will of his ego attaches the greatest importance to the ritual and knows little of the spiritual. What most impresses and moves him, comes from outside ... nothing comes from the inspiration of his inner being. What comes from outside has an automatic effect, derived from a formula, a ritual, from external circumstances, and it is what he trusts and is sure of.

To show an example within ecclesiastical circles: when someone is ordained a priest through a ritually correct ceremony, by a ritually valid Ordinator, it becomes a priest for all intents and purposes, although from the inside, be a sinner. If someone is made a bishop by a ritually correct ceremony, it becomes bishop for all intents and purposes and has the power to ordain priests, even though from the inside, be a sinner.

For adherents of ritualism, external circumstances are more important than internal substance; the external is worth more than the internal; the outside is fundamental, the inside has little importance.

Ecclesiastical theologians believe that Jesus has transmitted to his disciples, a kind of invisible fluid, that can be transmitted from person to person, through certain rites, certain fixed formulas, such as "I baptize you", "I absolve you", "this is my body".

This channel of conducting fluids, they say, must be continuous, without interruption, through the centuries, for these fluids to reach man. And this is the view of these ecclesiastical theologians about the transmission of the divine powers of Jesus to humans.

While Christianity lived in its spiritual infancy, and even in its adolescence, no other concept was possible, since, for the spiritually immature man, external circumstances are the only reality.

However, when a man enters his spiritual maturity, ritual immaturity is overcome, and that man attaches greater importance to the inner substance than to the external circumstances. The initiate and mystics of all times have always affirmed the sovereignty of their divine substance over all the tyrannies of human circumstances; they have always given greater value to their spiritual centre than to the facts of the ritual peripheries.

This man knows that all his value is in the inner substance, despite the external circumstances. He knows that the spiritual is a value, whereas the ritual is just a fact.

Einstein, that famous universal scientist, mystic, visionary, humanist, pacifist, stated that: "From the world of facts (science) it does not lead any path to the world of values (consciousness), because values come from another region". A fact is an act, value is attitude. Value or attitude is the creation of free will. Where there is no free will there is neither value nor attitude.

If we apply this principle ... from ritual to spiritual, we can say that from the world of ritual circumstances it does not lead any path to the world of spiritual substance, because it comes from another region.

Typical in this case is the attitude of two great celebrities of ecclesiastical Christianity: Augustine, in the 5th century, and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century; both, during their lives, advocated the idea of ritual automatism, redemption by external factors - and both, at the end of their lives glimpsed the spiritual value of redemption by internal factors. Augustine wrote a thick volume of Retractations, where he made an examination of conscience about his life and writings, and Thomas Aquinas when he declared at the end of his life: "All that I have written seems like straw to me", and he never wrote anything again.

If we ask why this attitude of the spiritually immature man, and the truly spiritual man, we will see that the difference comes from the following: the profane man has not yet comprehended the bipolarity of human nature - whereas the intuitive man knows that exists in the centre of human nature, a divine nucleus, which Jesus calls Soul, and which modern psychology calls the central Self.

In the Gospel, that centre appears as Father in us, the Kingdom of God, the Light under the bushel, the hidden Treasure, the precious Pearl.

The ritual is a fact, a circumstance - the spiritual is a value, the substance.

There is permanent parallelism between physics and metaphysics, between the material world and the spiritual world. So much so that in the past, the force came from outside, from the muscle of animals, from water, from the wind. In the last century, man began to use the force that came from boiling water and electricity, which starts to mark a transition to a new energy source.

Only in the 20th century did man discover the force that is born in an invisible way from within - atomic and nuclear energy.

Energy means acting "from within"; the rest is just a "performance from the outside", a force from the outside.

The same phenomenon occurs in the world of spiritual metaphysics.

In the past, the force of good and evil was considered coming from outside man. An evil external force made man a sinner while a benign internal force redeemed man.

The redemptive force comes from within man himself - just as from within man comes the force of evil.

The great problem of our spiritual metaphysics is to discover and harness the nuclear force of our inner redeemer Christ - just as the great problem in physics was the discovery and use of the nuclear and atomic force of material origin.

Few men discover this spiritual nuclear force. In few men awakens this internal Christ. For the great mass of Christendom, redemption through external factors continues - only a minority discovered their spiritual redemption from within.