From the heights of our self-imposed ordinance of “No politics”, you might be led to believe that there’s very little else to write about.

I’ll admit the air is very thin up here on the moral high ground, but there really is something to get worked up about apart from the dismal state of the nation. What, you may ask?

Why, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course.

I’ve written a few pieces recently on the state of the Church and of Christianity (see the footer of this article), suggesting that the Gospels are allegories of a process used by early mystics with a universal truth for us in our scientific age.

The texts suffered the indignity of being converted into quasi-historical documents for the political purposes of the Roman Empire.

Rowan Williams, the current incumbent at Lambeth Palace, often gives the impression of being a thoroughly wet liberal who takes the soft option on every issue of our age. His undoubted intellect is seen as a barrier to both truth and communication — Gordon Brown in a cassock.

But wait, who is this speaking from the pages of Friday’s Daily Telegraph?

Addressing the Hay Festival of Literature on author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the Archbishop says, “First of all he takes the Christian myth, or a version of it, seriously enough to want to disagree passionately about it.”

Leaving aside the impression of clutching at straws, look at the words: Christian myth. Slip of the tongue, perhaps? Or the realization that a modern audience simply won’t take the infantilized story presented to us as fact any more?

I believe many theologians in the Church, whether of England or Rome, know this to be true. One historical Cardinal is said to have remarked, “The Jesus myth has served us well down the years”. Is Rowan Williams echoing that sentiment, but in a less cynical way?

Williams continues, “It’s not just dull or remote, it’s dangerous. You’ve got to tussle with it. It’s still alive.” The words of a mystic indeed.

But he’s not a pushover. He disagrees with Pullman’s atheism, but likes his “search for some way of talking about human value, human depth and three-dimensionality, that doesn’t depend on God.” By this he means Blake’s and Michaelangelo’s depiction of the Creator as an old bearded man looking down on us from a very great height. Inner resources can carry us much farther than a rigid anthropomorphism.

Then, something very intriguing: religious authorities shouldn’t “silence the demons” that people carry with them, the essential internal conversation between good and evil. C.G. Jung could not have put it better.

“The threat in Pullman’s novels,” he goes on, “is the Authority — people like me in his imagination — which wants to divide the human spirit and cut off and silence that demonic voice, that voice of the imagination.” Or even that voice of experience, he might have said.

I think this is a very significant moment for the old Church of England. Coming close to pantheism, or at least panentheism — where everything is God, even our enemies — the Archbishop speaks with the real voice of mysticism.

In these dark times, the inalienable lightness of darkness does need to be explained. Rowan Williams may well be its establishment prophet.

Who would have thought it?

John Evans

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Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

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On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

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The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism

Gordon Brown’s new back-to-the-future idea is to introduce “old fashioned banking” again to the High Street. After all, banks lend out other people’s money, so should be careful where they put it.

He will “ban” 100 percent mortgages, make borrowers save up their deposits, and force them to meet “old fashioned” bank managers, who will get to know them like GPs did in the days of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. Ahh, the past is so reassuring, isn’t it?

But Chancellors of the Exchequer also spend and allocate other people’s money. Shouldn’t they be tightening up their rules of tax and spend in the vast public sector? And shouldn’t State benefits be handed out sparingly to those who truly need them? Isn’t it also imperative that no-one should be given a public job unless they are urgently needed on the front line and well qualified for the task?

Brown didn’t begin to address that problem. Bankers will be sent for re-education by Captain Mainwaring characters, but the good old “public realm” will just carry on as before, squandering other people’s money.

Isn’t this just another sneaky way of blaming the banks rather than himself?

Labour MP, Chris Mullin, in a new book* writes: “The trail leads back to Gordon — but if it all goes wrong he’ll be nowhere to be seen.”

* A View From The Foothills

Do you ever have “There is a God!” moments? I had one last week.

I was walking down a narrow pavement alongside a completely empty road, when the tinkling of a bicycle bell assailed my ears from behind. One of those aggressive two-wheel types was attempting to force me to stand aside on a pedestrian walkway.

I won’t go into how irritating these people are, fury is not a pleasant subject to write about. However, whatever allows these oiks to ride along pavements should be repealed by the next Conservative Government.

Naturally, I ignored him — it’s always a he. He rang the bell again. I sauntered on. Again he tried, before snorting and turning onto the road. As he passed he gave me a backward glance of total exasperation.

My returned stare must have unsettled him. He wobbled, desperately corrected his trajectory, hit the curb, and fell off.

I walked past with a beatific smile of satisfaction.

There is a God!

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to make sense of the causes of this world depression. I’ve pieced together bits that have appeared here over the past few months in the hope they make a coherent and plausible case for what went wrong.

In the beginning
1. In 1977, President Carter pushed through an Act forcing banks to give mortgages to sub-prime borrowers.
2. In 1999, President Clinton signed off the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from investment banking.
3. Clinton also encouraged the securitization of morgage debts into Collateralized Debt Obligations by Bears Stearns. Astonishingly, they were given Triple A investment status by the involvement of government-backed Freddie Mac. Thus, potentially toxic assets were bundled up and sold off to the world’s banking system.

Note: these are both Presidents of the left.

Reinforcing causes
Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long because he believed “downturns will happen and can be cleaned up afterwards”. Meanwhile, just enjoy the white-knuckle ride.

In the benign conditions created by Greenspan and his student Gordon “No more boom and bust” Brown, high leverage (debt) was seen as a one-way bet for financiers and private-equity outfits, some of dubious provenance.

A system of shadow banking was set up outside the regulatory framework which passed debt around between different institutions, hedge funds and capital markets, creating more money than the original debt. The normal effect of a burgeoning money supply is inflation, which eventually squeezes out any asset bubbles that form along the way.

However China simultaneously introduced a massive deflationary element into the mix. Trillions of dollars of very cheap goods poured out of the country to soak up the growing money mountains of the developed world.

The deflationary effect masked the inflation embedded in the Western economic boom, allowing it to last much longer than normal and storing up more problems as time passed.

On the ground, it seemed as if the good times would go on forever. A classic psychological contagion set in among politicians, financial markets and the ordinary public. No-one could lose was the signal, everyone was a winner, even the poorest with no income, no job and no assets.

The Endgame
When sub-prime borrowers in America started defaulting on their loans, as they were bound to at some point, bankers found it impossible to trace the indebtedness through the system because of the sliced and diced nature of the securities that now concealed them.

These assets were effectively worthless as they could not be valued. The whole planet was suddenly stripped of value. There were no hooks left to store capital and savings, except gold and flighty commodity markets. Meltdown time had arrived.

The growing realization that banks all over the world held these poisonous assets, effectively closed down the inter-bank lending markets. Banks no longer trusted any other not to fail and default on their loans. The Credit Crunch was born.

The rule of Up-To-A-Pointism suggests: “If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences. Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.”

Let us hope that the new financial system that emerges takes note of this simple rule.

Prediction
The world will now skate helter-skelter in the opposite direction. The pendulum of opinion will overshoot the mark and overregulate financial markets, thus breaching the Up-To-A-Pointism rule.

Something akin to a 1970s situation will be created as legislators try to close off all exits. The result will be a stifling, sealed commercial environment with few incentives for innovation and hard work.

It will take another “liberalization” package of measures a few decades down the line to set off another period of prosperity, leading to another bust.

Plus ca change …

I’ve just watched the seventh of eight episodes of Channel 4’s patchy series, Christianity. It was presented by Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, a colleague of Richard Dawkins — author of The God Delusion — and a fellow believer in the new religion of Scientism.

So far, only three of the programmes have stood out: Howard Jacobson’s, Michael Portillo’s, and Rageh Omaar’s thoughtfully fair view of the relationship between the West’s religion and Islam.

As an Idealist in philosophical terms, I’ve not got a lot in common with Blakemore’s viewpoint, however, he put his case engagingly and intelligently.

One highlight for me was the comparison of a cathedral with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border. This chilling aggregation of metal, electric wiring and brutalist architecture seemed straight out of the Nazi manual of “How To Subdue Human Values By Gigantism and Intimidation”.

Next up: Cherie Blair. What are we to make of that?

Quote of the Week

This is rather a good description of New Labour philosophy:

“The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

John Evans

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It is Christmas still, officially at least, so a few words on Christianity may be appropriate now. Since I am the one writing this, my own view of it will have to do.

Which proposition would you prefer?:

1. The Ineffable (name it as you will) enters every person at birth and is directly available to each, especially if the individual focuses upon it and requests access, or
2. The Ineffable entered one man 2000 years ago and his representatives on Earth today will negotiate your place in the afterlife, as long as you comply with a set of unbending principles and practices.

The first proposition is the “perennial wisdom of mankind”. The second is the view of the Christian church that arose within the last days of the Roman Empire.

In the 4th century AD the Emperor Constantine had an ulterior motive for his religious masterplan — the retention of political power at the centre. His church was therefore materialistic and authoritarian.

This is not to disparage the present-day Roman Catholic Church, or even the lacklustre Anglican version, into which I was baptized as an infant. On an individual level, many immensely spiritual people have made great contributions to human understanding from within the cupolas of their Catholic beliefs. I’ll cite just a few who appeal to me: Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross.

They do, though, have one thing in common. Each got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities because they were perceived as “mystics”. Even the saintly Francis of Assisi’s Franciscans fell foul of the stern central authority.

What is a mystic? Someone who believes … no, “knows” … that the Ineffable is available to everyone. These are “Gnostics” — knowers rather than believers. Mysticism is really the universal religion of mankind, because when a person scales its heights there is no longer any need for the simplistic stories and precepts of evangelistic religion.

As Dr Johnson put it: “Example is more efficacious than precept.”

Let’s go back then to the early Roman church, which we now know took the uncomplicated Jewish version of the many Mystery schools around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Persia, and created the Western world as we know it. It’s useful to examine what Christianity was like before Emperor Constantine made it the prevailing faith of the Empire.

Christianity — and it was certainly not called that then — began a long time before the suggested birth of Jesus around 7BC. We know this from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other recently discovered sources.

It seems to have had Egyptian origins and arose among Jews in Alexandria from a Gnostic soup of practical teachings on how to have a direct, personal relationship with the Source of all things. It’s believed to have spread into the Hebrew lands through groups like the Essenes at Qumran — a sect that had at its centre a “Teacher of Righteousness”.

The Mystery schools of the Mediterranean region, including Greece, were mystical programmes of initiation, leading up to the all-encompassing Great Death Contemplation, in which a neophyte underwent a transformation of consciousness, directly experiencing the after-death state and stripping away the tyranny of the body (the cross we all bear in life).

In our terms, Near Death Experiences, reported in many hospitals, are quite close. They are, however, essentially different from the controlled, fully-alive, glimpse of what it’s like to be totally out of the body, while conscious of everything.

The early Gnostic Gospels, such as The Gospel of Thomas give a very different version from the later compilations bolted together by bishops into the New Testament. For example, the female has an equal part to play — there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene and links to Sophia, or wisdom. The chapter in Luke which covers the visit of Jesus to Mary of Bethany is strangely cut off, and the passage where Jesus says she has a higher calling than Martha — contemplative rather than “active” — doesn’t read like the Christianity that comes down to us via Rome at all.

What began as a Jewish allegory depicting the life of Everyman (Jesus), was turned by a French bishop into an ersatz historical record of a real person. Anyone who has studied spiritual literature around the world will immediately recognize the allegorical intent of the Gospels, despite the extensive editing job.

The main aim was to attract a large, popular audience and wipe out the Gnostics, the early Christians. That suppression continued well into the medieval period. The massacre of possibly millions of Cathars in southern France, simply because they were different and were descended from an earlier version of Christianity, still resonates blackly in Church history to this day. St Bernard of Clairveaux, founder of the Catholic Cistercian movement, commented on the Cathars, “They are better Christians than we are.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his deeply religious book The Brothers Karamazov, has a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor in which he depicts Catholicism as the very opposite of the church Jesus would have created.

A good illustration of the process of historicizing allegory is to take John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and imagine Christian as a real man and the story a true one. Nothing else quite explains why the Vatican goes to such lengths to suppress any archeological find that may cast doubt on its version of events. The postwar history of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals an extraordinary attempt at censorship. The Nag Hammadi Gnostic discoveries in Egypt faced similar interference.

So where is Christianity in the 21st century? The main thrust of the churches seems aimed at keeping people adhered to a faith based on a misreading of an old allegory. The allegory itself, by contrast, offers precisely what it says on the box: “gospel” — good news.

The good news is that everyone can receive proof of their own immortality if they really want it: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within and without … seek and you shall find.” The most enlightening version of that saying appears in The Gospel of Thomas, inexplicably banned by the Church. If people don’t want direct proof, no matter, immortality is theirs anyway.

That mystical interpretation of the familiar Christian message was the original one before Rome politicized it. In reality Constantine was no saint but an early version of Mao Tse Tung.

In our democratic age we are more susceptible to the view that Christianity is available to us directly, not just through the intercession of men in robes.

Today, the Church is faltering, even dying, precisely because it won’t give up the rewriting of history that took place in its early days. Moreover, it should ask itself why so many popular books depict it as a dark, evil institution that will stop at nothing to retain its power, wealth and influence. Surely, self-preservation isn’t everything.

A return to so-called “primitive” Christianity that encouraged personal experience, not conformity, is the only way it can save itself from becoming a minor sect for a few diehards — which would be very sad given the power Christianity has for good.

The world is crying out for genuine expressions of spirituality now. Young people are embracing New Age sects in large numbers. Ominously, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.

Christians should stand against the decline of the religion and recognize it is based upon a massive untruth, especially as the original flowering of Christianity is just what the jaded West needs in these times of economic hardship and doubt.

John Evans

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Syntagma wishes our regulars and all who chance by here, a very happy Easter break.

We’re off for a few days now for a little rest and recuperation before picking up the baton again on Tuesday.

See you then.

A Review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita.

This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — which was not included in the New Testament by the politicians of the Roman Empire for being too mystical — Jesus says, “Become a disciple of your own mind”. That was probably the last time anything so Buddhist appeared in official Christian literature.

Although Zengotita doesn’t use it, the saying applies very well to his book, providing the subtext beneath (as Shakespeare might have put it), “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players”.

Zengotita begins in November 1963, when he was a student Method actor in New York. One day, a teacher entered the room and said, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” Then left.

The students took it for an exercise and started rolling their eyes, lifting their arms to heaven, keening and wailing and, presumably gnashing their teeth. As actors do. Thirty minutes later the teacher entered again. “The President just died.”

There was a stunned silence as the students realized it was really true. Then they started writhing on the floor and weeping and groaning all over again.

Zengotita draws the conclusion that this was new to our culture : extreme emotional reactions to the death of someone we didn’t know and had never met — except in the media.

He believes we have now reached the stage where we are totally immersed in media images which “mediate” all our reactions, feelings and belief systems. Instead of confronting reality directly, as Thomas’s Jesus urges us to do, we are just corks bobbing about on the choppy waters of mass media, which permeates us and drowns out our own perceptions.

This mediation has become all but total and has massive implications for the way we live. Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Message” was only the half of it. How else would we tolerate the suffocating injunctions of “political correctness” were it not for the almost total power of the media to project it into the mass mind, and therefore our own.

Psychological contagions are every bit as destructive as pathogenic epidemics. In the 1930s, Fascism spread like wildfire around the world, leading to yet another world war. It was the counter-culture to another psychic contagion, Marxism, which all but became a religion : the Radiant Way. We had been warned.

Norman Mailer puts it well, “As Mcluhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

We can become a disciple of our own mind. Zengotita’s wonderful book makes a solid contribution to our belated understanding of this eerie phenomenon.

Compared with my childhood, Christmas has almost disappeared from view.

In Britain, Birmingham City Council celebrates “Winterval” instead of the usual “Xmas”? That line is being followed up and down the country, egged on by laws emanating from central government. Is political correctness once again attacking the bedrock of our values and culture?

The answer is, yes, of course, because the PC agenda is basically Marxist and seeks to destroy every vestige of “bourgeois” existence. Western governments, particularly in Europe, are now dominated by Marxoid genuflectors whose every impulse is to root out the middle-classes and their way of life.

But is it more complex than that? Take this year as an example and using old-time language for better comparison :

In 2006 we’ve had a vicious war in the Holy Land, plus a Mahdi uprising in Mesopotamia. Sunni rebels have been fighting a bitter civil war against a dispersed Shia army in the lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, with British and American troops caught in between. Meanwhile, in a resurgent Persia, a wild dictator is building a doomsday weapon to wipe an entire nation from the face of the earth. John Buchan or the Bible, take your pick.

Why then would we want to be reminded of the Middle East during Christmas?

And yet, remember those old-fashioned Christmas cards with the three wise men in their long robes and beards? Nowadays we see them as Osama bin Laden lookalikes. The timeless Biblical scenes of our youth, once so popular, remind us of the mujahideen rather than peaceful spirituality.

All over the Western world there’s a major retreat from Christianity. In America, probably the most ardently Christian nation on earth, you’ll only hear “happy holidays” these days, with scarcely a mention of Christmas.

Is it that we are shying away from the whole Middle East ethos? Has 9/11 changed the very nature of who we think we are? It may be that we no longer see the deserts south and east of the Med as benign. They never were, of course. But where does that flight from religious romanticism leave us?

Well, we could easily develop a Christianity without a Middle-Eastern favour, if only our Church leaders and others would recognize the problem.

Many of the early Gnostics, for example, like the Essenes and the Therapeutae, were “Christians” before the time of the historical Jesus — if he was a person rather than an archetype. Their ideas derived more from ancient Egypt and Greece than what we once called the Holy Land. It was the Roman Empire that stamped an ersatz “Christianity” on the rest of us to bolster its own power.

Rather than throw out the baby Jesus with the holy bathwater by adopting contrived festivities, like Winterval, a Christianized version of the Scandinavian Yuletide would be far more preferable, with European and American traditions overlaying a Gnostic, Christian spirituality.

Of course, the merry, Dickensian, English Christmas as imported by Prince Albert is the best of the lot. It’s a subtle blend of Celtic holly and mistletoe, with a big German fir tree, ample wine and ale, and boards groaning with non-vegetarian roasts and bakes. I’ll settle for that.

A very Merry Christmas — with a bit of Gnostic nostlagia thrown in — and a Happy New Year to all Syntagma readers.