The best part of any church service should be the sermon, for, while every other ingredient is known, the sermon is, or should be, original, imparting either a unique lesson or a well-worn one expressed freshly. No one does this better than Richard Chartres, Bishop of London (Pictured above with the Queen).

True to form, he produced a sparkler during the Funeral Service for Margaret Thatcher at St Paul’s Cathedral this morning. Soaked in mysticism — and a little humour — its theme was immortality, or “everlasting life” as Christians prefer.

There was a glancing reference to that most mystical of Christian texts, The Cloud of Unknowing, and he spoke refreshingly of the Afterlife as “another dimension of existence”.

Christians often find comfort in the ancient phraseology and poetry of the biblical texts, which have taken on the quality of music. Some get quite heated about the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer, which they would like to be set in stone.

They should realise that these words are not meant to be entertainment, but a living expression of the highest spirituality — which is distinct from emotionality. When emotion prevails, as it often does in church services, the essential mysticism is drowned out. The Bishop ably avoided the trap.

If all sermons could be set in such pellucid language as this one, I believe attendances would rise. The Bishop has an instinctive awareness of this, saying that it was typical of Margaret Thatcher that she was always trying to help out in “typically uncoded terms”.

He quoted her on the purpose of going to church: “We often went to church twice on Sundays, as well as on other occasions during the week. We were taught always to make up our own minds and never take the easy way of following the crowd.”

Today, there was no shortage of people in St Paul’s, mostly the “great and the good”. Margaret Thatcher herself was undoubtedly both great and good, although the small bands of protesters outside the cathedral will never accept that. They have been mesmerised by the stale thoughts and unworkable ideas of Karl Marx and his modern followers, such as Ed Miliband, who was present.

Marxism is a perverted reworking of Christian ideas, where harsh “solidarity” has replaced the simple companionship of the original. Marxists regularly blame religion for subduing “the people,” blind to the fact that Marxism itself has become an angry secular faith intolerant of all others.

For religion in general to prevail in our shrill, noisy and overcrowded society, it must demonstrate in clear, approachable language the whole object of its being: everlasting life — immortality.

The iconography of the Church derives from ancient Jewish texts which baffle the young and anyone not brought up in a Christian context. The Bishop resisted the prevailing showy language and posturing. I often wonder why he is usually passed over for the role of Archbishop of Canterbury, as happened again in recent weeks.

In his later work, The Book of Privy Counselling, the anonymous Cloud author sets the standard very high, as does his subject matter. It is the logical, if counterintuitive, way into the modern world for the Church of England.

Today, the Bishop of London, who is patron of London Internet Church (.org.uk) showed how it could be done.

John Evans

Recent Related Articles

Born Again is an intriguing and evocative phrase in the Christian pantheon. It arises from the Baptist version of the faith and traces its origins back to John the Baptist in the New Testament, in particular to the scene in the Gospels when Jesus is “baptised” in the River Jordan by what seems to be the leader of a mystery school, so typical of the period.

Immediately after he was baptised, as he was praying, the heavens opened and a dove came down and rested on Jesus. It was the Spirit of God in the form of a bird that had come down to show who Jesus was. Jesus saw it and John also saw the dove. Suddenly there was a voice from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”.

This account, with its burst of light, the dove and a voice, has all the hallmarks of a mystery rite, presided over by an adept, and accords with specific states known to manifest in such a context.

Born again lives on today in the southern states of America, where being a born again Christian is a settled part of the religious heritage of the Old South.

This ceremony is now widely imitated in churches around the world. In modern times, a Born-Again Christian is someone who has been baptised into a Baptist church or another denomination, usually by two burly men dunking them in a river and declaring the dunkee “born again”, a mere shadow of the ancient procedure.

I was “Christened” into the Church of England as an infant when a Vicar put a finger into a font of “holy water” and traced a cross on my forehead, a sad case of reductionism.

The emergence from water to air imitates the action of birth. Modern clergy are often ignorant about real spiritual states and resort to play-acting rather than the initiations found in the ancient mystery schools and in the solitary practices of genuine mystics.

But what does it mean? Are people really born again? The truth has its origins in ancient Egypt, with echoes of it living on in the higher degrees of masonic rituals, in the spontaneous, or induced, mystical states of mystics, and in near-death experiences (NDEs), widely reported in hospitals.

Here’s how it’s presented in my book The Eternal Quest for Immortality — Is it staring you in the face?: “The process involves the emergence of something alive, though not physical, from out of the body. There is a distinct “plop” or shock as it happens. The living body remains unaware that the separated part has gone, temporarily in the cases we are describing. This “soul” is the personal consciousness and is therefore the essence of a person. It is the part that survives bodily dissolution at death. The undisputed fact that it can leave a living body shows that anecdotal reports of the soul departing a person in pain and distress, as in near-death experiences, are true. Death is not the fearful thing it seems to outside observers. It’s as if a lifeboat removes consciousness from the worst aspects of physical shut-down.”

In ancient Greece, young soldiers were put through a process leading to this experience as a means of removing all fear of death. The tiny force of Greeks who sacrificed themselves against the vast armies of the Persian king Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae, gives a sense of their fearlessness in the face of assured extinction.

In his book A Search in Secret Egypt (1935), Paul Brunton illustrated how the mystery schools precipitated this mystical state in their candidates. According to Brunton, the candidate was taken to a chamber deep inside one of the pyramids, tied to a sarcophagus and left in total darkness in the sealed room overnight. You can imagine the terror of the situation, even if you were not claustrophobic or afraid of the dark.

Fear was the essence of the practice. So horrific was the experience that the personal consciousness (soul) springs out of the bodily envelope into a place of supreme calm, where darkness doesn’t exist.

This is the after-death state, the Bardo of the Tibetans and for which all cultures have a special name. In the Far East the experience is called “a showing of the nature of reality”, demonstrating its temporary nature. Dante calls it Purgatory — you can’t get away from sin in Roman Catholicism.

Many commentators wonder why modern Christian denominations in the West are declining so fast that they are being ignored in favour of secular governance and more mystical philosophies.

The reason is obvious: churches have become meeting places for the nostalgic, and comfort stations for the elderly. All the life and living truth has been sucked out of them, as science replaces genuine mysticism in public discourse.

Religion will only become relevant again when the real story behind the much edited texts of antiquity is told without the concealments. Total honesty is the only way to resurrect the original meaning. That is Syntagma’s mission statement.

Christianity in particular must be Born Again!

To round off this discussion, here’s a link to my own experience of the state. If you read Syntagma regularly, you have probably come across it before and are excused: Consciousness after death

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Coming up: Mystology: A different way of looking at the world. Also a website, mystology.com.

Recent Related Articles

Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, has written a compelling article in Newsweek magazine, Heaven is Real, on his experiences when he was effectively brain dead.

He writes: “In the fall of 2008 … after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.” Note the wording: a scientific reason.

That consciousness continues after death, and also out-of-body-but-alive states — which is experientially the same thing — is well attested here on this site, including many of my own experiences. It’s good though to have one of the “enemy”, a neuroscientist, on board. Follow the link above to read the four-page article.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain. … For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

He continues, “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. … my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe.”

It’s interesting that Dr Alexander continually refers to this dimension as “the afterlife”, so certain is he that this will be his experience following his actual bodily death. Many mystics, and others who have had similar episodes, will confirm his diagnosis. It is as “real” as the world around us right now.

Actually, there’s no reason to suppose that this life is not a spiritual experience too, a sort of Out of Bounds course to make us ready for higher states of being.

But back to Alexander’s account: what he experienced was a full-blown tour of “heaven”, beyond intermediate states, which often occurs very close to death. Remember, his brain was being eaten alive by bacteria and the thinking/emotional part was completely closed down. This was the big bazooka.

In this life many people get introductions to higher-level states. The first serious one is being bathed in “divine light”. Beyond that lies an initial tentative out-of-body excursion which includes the powerful moment of an address by a superior being. For both experiences, one remains in touch with this world and can see it.

Alexander had temporarily lost his brain-led ability to be in this world. His spirit/consciousness simply floated up into levels above where others were aware of his plight and greeted and guided him, as described in the article.

As he so eloquently puts it: “My near-death experience … took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. … According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

There are many such testimonies around describing in minute detail the glories of an afterlife. Science, as always, crowds them out, either from a belief (and it is a belief) that they are plain wrong, or from a deep prejudice that they cannot be right.

If we — the human race — are fully to come to terms with this life as it truly is, we must stop listening to the wilder fringes of scientific opinion, such as Richard Dawkins, and accept that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [their] philosophy”.

FACT!

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

The Mystic in the 21st Century is coming soon.

Recent Related Articles

Underlying all the world’s religions and spiritual belief systems is a layer of innate knowledge and first-hand experience widely known as the perennial philosophy, or wisdom tradition.

It is usually debunked by materialists and science as ancient superstition.

Yet you don’t have to be an archaeologist to find it. Armed only with some staying power and a mental trowel to chip away the political verbiage and fanciful reliquary from your faith and culture, you can stumble upon eternal gold.

One part of this ancient treasure trove is the notion of an etheric body, largely derived from the Greek Mystery Schools of Antiquity and tracing its origins much earlier than that.

Often described as the inner body, it occasionally becomes visible as a body of light, or as a feeling of energy and aliveness beneath the outer physical structure.

The odd thing about it is that, while the external appearance ages, the inner body remains the same throughout a person’s lifetime. The reason is that it stands outside time.

Put aside science and established religion for a moment and try to imagine that something beyond time can exist within you supporting your being. After all, even the space-time continuum must ultimately have emerged from a state more advanced and powerful than itself.

Dr Sam Parnia has recently completed a three-year study of near-death experiences (NDEs) at the University of Southampton. NDEs clearly involve a more ethereal body than the physical one. He has reached the conclusion that the inner body is real and cannot be explained by the brain changes neuroscientists claim.

As with NDEs, the subtle body (another name for the same thing) is able to leave its fleshy equivalent at will, but usually during sleep when most people don’t notice it.

Science confirms that the sleeping body is paralysed during this time, which actually demonstrates that the life force is partially absent. Some dreams even point to this phenomenon, but are usually misinterpreted or forgotten on awakening.

The traditional view that the Timeless realm loves its creations in time is found expressed in many texts in the standard religions. For example, the 13th century Catholic theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote: “God’s nature, his being, and the Godhead all depend on his work in the soul and that he loves his work!”

You can sense your own inner, or etheric, body by switching attention from the head and its abstract thinking to the visceral feel of your body. This is the most widespread mystical practice of all. (See One Simple Thing).

The solar plexus is a good place to start, but eventually it will become a whole body experience as your consciousness aligns with the inner body. You will become more relaxed and still, the energy replacing the nervy state of normal experience. If you stick with it regularly, you will be able to use the quiet sense of Being in any conditions, especially when you feel under threat.

This state has also been shown to strengthen the immune system against disease and even ageing. In fact, since the etheric body is ageless, you will remain essentially young until you die, whereupon your passing on will be seamless.

It was said of Taoist sages that they retained a youthful countenance into old age as proof of their successful cultivation of the Way. No expensive serums or miracle unguents for them. Their ageless look came from within, outside of time.

First published here on October 31, 2011.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Spiritual Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

Recent Related Articles

Following on from an earlier column in this series: A personal introduction to God, the question has been asked: What are Heaven and Hell?

To claim to know the answer would be like lecturing Isaac Newton on light or Gautama Buddha on meditation. But, I suspect, we have all touched on the reality of heaven and hell in the course of our lives, so we should not be reticent about airing our own experiences.

The previous piece (linked to above) marked up the human ego as the principal cause of pain and suffering in this world. Since all humanity experiences it on a daily basis, could we describe this life — our present existence — as Hell?

Yes, we could, and with some justification. Even a bed of roses has many thorns.

My own view though is that this Earth is peopled by beings with a range of attainments:

1. The Unconscious ones,
2. The partly Conscious — moving up the ladder,
3. The Conscious, who are in the ante-room of a higher life and catch glimpses of it occasionally.

What then of Heaven? Is it situated on this Earth as well? That is an interesting question, especially when some religions use fear as a means of controlling their “flocks” and leading them to heaven. But fear is not a very heavenly word.

A practised mystic would say that while we can gain tantalising glimpses of a more sublime existence from our human standpoint, we can’t live it until we have progressed up “the ladder of understanding” here and now. The ladder is accessed in the manner set out in the piece linked to above.

Mystical, or spiritual, experiences, which differ only to the extent that the former tend not to be associated with any religious movement, are lessons that take us to an enhanced level. That’s why they come in a definite sequence, like exams, one leading to another. Here are two of them:

The first has many names and crosses all religious and spiritual divides. The most common in the West are: the “Divine Light” in general mysticism; and the “Prayer of Quiet” in contemplative Christianity. A detailed description is given here: The Comforter.

The second experience, which follows later, has several obscure references but is known widely across the Far East as “Seeing into the Nature of Reality”. The full version is an out-of-body experience and is described here: The Nature of Reality.

Taken together, they prepare humans for a very different form of life, that of posthuman spiritual beings who, I think, would find it almost impossible to live in this chaotic earthly jungle unless they were Bodhisattvas — as outlined in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition.

The question then arises, are these other worlds in another part of the universe and differentiated in space? I suspect Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed contains a possible truth: “What is the Kingdom of God like? To what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed …”

The worlds exist in the same space, but are invisible to anyone on a lower step of the ladder of understanding. That parable has sometimes been thought of as a shock tactic to bring a big thought down to earth, but at some level of Being, the whole universe might seem like a mustard seed containing all there is.

Note that in the first experience (above), the subject is aware of a higher world but can’t see it. In the second, he is in the higher world and can see the lower, but the exercising body below has no idea that the higher exists.

Scientists also talk about a multidimensional universe but can only express it in the crudest, theoretical terms with mathematical equations.

From our point of view it is beyond anything we can experience for ourselves. We should give our thinking faculties a break and concentrate on what is before us, staring us in the face.

That is where the immediate truth lies and is all we need to know.

“The kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are the children of the living God. … See what is in front of your face, and what has been hidden from you will be disclosed to you.” The Gospel of Thomas.

* The image above is by Laura F. Crites (elfwood.com)

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

True Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

Recent Related Articles