Simplifications, taken at face value, often throw light on current conditions. So let’s start with one.

Christianity, representing the West, is about “doing good”. Buddhism, representing the East, is about “being good”.

You might think that comes to the same thing, but there’s a universe of difference between them.

Doing good is outgoing and active and involves “care in the community”, working for the downtrodden, taking a “leadership role”.

Being good could be expressed linguistically as “being God”. It is a visceral thing involving body and mind working together, seeking alignment with the highest state of Being.

Thus, Buddhism has given rise to war-free mysticism, spirituality, mindfulness and meditation, while Christianity has spawned the many forms of socialism.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Buddhism is Right-wing (in its real sense of non-interference), Christianity is Left-wing.

Am I shocking you? I do hope so.

“Faith, hope and charity” is all about us in our physical manifestation. Buddhist “mindfulness” takes us beyond the bodily envelope to a spiritual transformation. I could express the point in dozens of ways, but I’ll stick to what popped up on this morning’s Today programme on BBC’s Radio 4.

The main interview was between the incomparable John Humphrys, who gets better with age, and an NHS baked-bean counter called David Behan*, who seems to have an “inspectorate” role in the myth-making machine known as the Health Service.

Behan might be said to be an example of the post-Christian attitude of do-goodery-becomes-mind-game on a heroic scale. He spoke in machine code, an automaton in human form.

Every complaint that’s reported to the appropriate personnel is referred to an in-house process comprising a large team of robots acting out a gigantic manual of approved practices.

Meanwhile, the sick and the elderly suffer horribly in silence — the forgotten ones on the career paths of socialist sociopaths.

Humphrys struggled in vain to reconnect him with the reality of suffering and pain and woeful neglect that is endemic in our State medical system. Behan just prattled on in the approved language of his methodology. In the circumstances, it was hard work to stay tuned.

The news that David Miliband is giving up “doing politics” came as a surge of relief to those of us who shrink from this inhuman modern manifestation of the words of Jesus of Nazareth. A man who has done nothing else in life — are you listening Labour MPs? — is not going to be very good even at “doing” his specialist subject.

The final item on today’s Today, dealt with the latest method of “brain training” (there we go again!) called Mindfulness, which is apparently taking our schools by storm and soothing the savage breasts of overwrought students.

There was no mention that mindfulness is a Buddhist practice that goes all the way back to the Mindfulness Sutra of Gautama Buddha, dating some 600 years before the word “Christianity” was invented by St. Paul to impress the Romans.

Isn’t it strange that a simple technique for “being good” is now used, without attribution, to assist in the 21st-century practice of cramming “skills” — minus knowledge — into young heads as a means of preparing them for life as servants of the State?

The tragedy is, these “kids” will never grow up to BE GOOD.

* David Behan CBE is Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission and was previously the DoH’s Director General of Social Care, Local Government and Care Partnerships.

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.

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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.

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It’s Hallowe’en, All Hallows Eve, the most mystical time of year when barriers between worlds become thin enough for anyone to pass through.

Despite its “pagan” origins — the ancient Celts to be precise — it has taken on Christian meaning as the prelude to All Saints Day.

The mystical connotation of Hallowe’en has in modern times descended into a festival of spookiness and “fun” for children. A typical tale told on this Trick or Treat night goes something like this: “The last man on Earth sat alone in his house. Suddenly the doorbell rang.”

Aside from all that Hollywood jazz, what exactly is a mystic, and would you qualify as one?

Aldous Huxley in his book Grey Eminence wrote, “The Mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion.” Moreover, “A totally unmystical world would be a world completely blind and insane.”

Clifton Wolters, an eminent Anglican priest, writer and editor, defined a mystic as one who has achieved a “deep union with God”. The Spanish founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, thought that a mystic is “a contemplative in action”, which is a neat way of putting it.

Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism and related titles, adds a characteristic flourish to her definition: “… a human being who has become a pure capacity for God and therefore a tool of divine action.”

So Kahlil Gibran’s luminous words in his magnificent book The Prophet: “Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the world.”

I would add: someone who has a spiritual life-purpose and who has tasted the fruits of mystical experience. There are as many versions of the practising mystic as there are individuals on the path.

Take Thomas Merton, for example. A Catholic priest, irresistible writer — his book The Seven Storey Mountain is a must-read — poet, hermit, and all-round bundle of energy, characteristically had his epiphany in Sri Lanka looking at a statue of the Buddha:

“…I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner cleanness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident, obvious…The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no ‘mystery’. All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with Dharmakaya [the Buddhist word for Godhead] … I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.”

What is notable about this passage is the emphasis Merton places on seeing. It is a direct seeing into the nature of existence, not felt, imagined, or experienced in dream, but visually made aware.

The last Pope, John Paul II, was taught in his youth by a Rosicrucian master. Following a car accident which nearly killed him, he had a spiritual experience which mirrored exactly what the teacher had taught him.

Such was its overwhelming power, the young mystical Pole signed up for a seminary that led all the way to his becoming Pope in Rome. He was a mystic with a big job, not such a rarity as many might think.

Last word to philosopher Rudolph Eucken: “Man is the meeting point of various stages of reality.” Very Hallowe’en!

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.

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Christianity is often thought of as quintessentially English. A country parish church or a great cathedral are so typical of our landscape that they have become deeply woven into the tapestry of British life.

We easily skip over the oddities and cultural disparities of the Bible texts because they are so familiar. But try reading Leviticus with its many pages of detailed proscriptions and “thou shalt nots”. The similarities with stern Islamic texts are immediately apparent. It might be renamed The Ten Thousand Commandments.

It is not easy-going Anglicanism where a belief in God is optional. While the New Testament is more compatible with spiritual Protestantism, the cultural and legalistic overlay of authoritarian desert tribal beliefs are still present.

In short, the full texts grate on modern British sensibilities and become more alien over time. Of course, not many churchgoers bother to read the Bible today, and the Church does its best to water down the mystical passages by attaching literal meanings to them.

And yet, the mystical bits are often superb and, properly understood, are on a par with any other spiritual traditions in world mysticism.

I’ve long trawled the Old and New Testaments, and the Gnostic Gospels, for their spiritual truths, while passing over the cultural complexities that embed them.

In our age of Middle Eastern turbulence and sickening violence — the very antithesis of religion — we in the West are turning away from the bedrock that once supported our belief system. It’s not as English as we thought.

The churches are struggling for adherents. Catholicism is buckling under the weight of sexual and mafia scandals, while the CofE seems almost alien on holy days when the clergy parades at Canterbury in full regalia.

The Rt. Rev. Peter Price, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, addressing the Church’s General Synod, claimed that “rioting can be, literally, an ecstatic, spiritual experience. Something is released in the participants which takes them out of themselves as a kind of spiritual escape”.

The words literally and ecstatic betray an abyss of ignorance: “literally” suggests exactitude, when it’s no such thing, and “ecstatic” paints an emotional element into a period of preternatural tranquility.

More pointedly, a spiritual episode is not an “escape” but an uplifting from the darkness into the light.

Clearly, His Grace has never had a spiritual experience, which is almost certainly true of the vast majority of churchmen and women. To confuse the sublime calm of individual spiritual/mystic experiences with the mass hysteria of groupthink euphoria found in riots and the so-called Toronto Blessing, is to demean his calling.

I’ve spoken to a number of CofE clergymen who think that spiritual experience is a diversion from their real work of officiating at services, running the church fete and, above all, social work in the parish.

They should read the passage in Luke’s Gospel where their saviour tells Martha that she is destined to labour and organise (as an Active), while her sister Mary is a natural Contemplative who must be excused work “for she is of the highest kind”.

Not surprisingly, the passage has been severely edited and curtailed by a fastidious Romanised hand, but the meaning survives. Moreover, this Mary of Bethany is almost certainly Mary Magdalene who has her own Gospel in the Gnostic tradition and was said to be the highest of the disciples.

Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Last Supper (see below) has a very feminine figure leaning away from Jesus on his right and forming a powerful “M” shape. Traditionally, this is John, “the Beloved Disciple”, but it’s actually Mary. Leonardo was trying to tell us something that had been suppressed by the Roman Church.

That distinction between Active and Contemplative was once prevalant and understood in the Church. Nowadays, the art of contemplation is dying out in everyday Christianity in favour of social work and political activism.

It’s not so odd then, that pagan beliefs, which Christianity attempted to stamp out, are making a strong recovery from a long near-death experience. Human beings need to believe in something, and if they stop believing in the official code they will believe in anything.

On this site I’ve been suggesting an alternative: taking the genuine mystical insights from both Christianity and Paganism — remember that Plato and Aristotle, the Buddha and Krishna, are regarded as pagan by hardline believers — and forging them into a modern, near-scientific system, minus the excessive materialism, that both fits our age and has the merit of leading directly to spiritual enlightenment.

The alternative is a world of rapidly growing cults and a slow decline of Christianity and the crumbling of our magnificent churches.

Let’s leave the quarrelsome Middle East to its own devices and reintroduce an English sensibility to our national religious life.

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.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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How strange everything is becoming. The question of whether British people are free to wear the Christian Cross is now being decided by a reading of “human rights” legislation in a foreign court at Strasbourg.

Once again, a piece of paper is being pored over to determine the outcome. It’s like that old Goon Show joke where Eccles writes down the time of day in the morning, then consults it in the afternoon when asked for the time.

What is really spooking the political classes is that if Christians have such “rights” — not age-old liberties, mark you — Muslims and others must have them too, and some faiths often go to aggressive extremes.

Thus, Christians must drop their time-honoured, inoffensive ways, which seems inexplicable in our own country.

But isn’t there more to it than that? Wonderfully, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, now calls the Cross a symbol of the “Religion Factory”. Wow, it’s cat among pigeons time!

Cue general outrage from clergy, members of the religious lobby and anyone wanting to remain suspended in time. Actually, the telling phrase Religion Factory sums up exactly what it is: an empty vessel that has been drained of true spiritual meaning.

When most people look at a cross, they see an instrument of torture used against someone they have been brought up to revere and worship. That is not its true meaning, which is that death is inevitable for us all, but is not the end of our story. The Crucifixion was a Mystery rite demonstrating everlasting life.

The problem occurs because Jesus was rebranded as “the Son of God” by ignorant, or power-seeking, followers after his death.

That is not what he himself said: “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are the children of the living Father.” Gospel of Thomas

Nothing could be plainer, we are all “children of God” but are not aware of it. Once we break away from this Religion Factory that has been manufacturing falsehoods, simplifications and misinterpretations for centuries, we will arrive at the truth, which releases us all and grants us our proper status in life. Call it “equality” if you must.

The Cross has ever been the symbol of our servitude, not our freedom. But that should not remove our ancient liberties in the matter of wearing it.

Is this a new dawn for the Church of England?

Reference: Mysticism is not religion but more like science and is the basis of both

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.

Mysticism in the Modern World is coming soon.

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