Richard Dawkins, the sage of Darwinism, was comprehensively squashed this week on the Today programme by an unlikely assailant — that old Leftie cleric, Canon Giles Fraser, comforter of the Occupy movement. Here’s how it went:

Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.
Dawkins: Yes I could.
Fraser: Go on then.
Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…uh…with, oh God!, [laughs], On the Origin of Species … There is a subtitle with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

We can all perhaps sympathise. The title is a bit like a 21-gun salute — it seems to go on forever, especially if you are trying to recall it from memory on live radio. The full 21 words are: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

One thing’s for sure, it wouldn’t get past the thought police if it were newly published today. But then there was always something nasty in the Darwinists’ woodpile.

Dawkins’s notion of God — who doesn’t exist, naturally — is similar to Michelangelo’s muscular chap with a beard looking down on us from the heavens in the Vatican. I’ve always thought there was a distinct likeness to Charlton Heston.

Dawkins complains that many people claiming to be Christians don’t believe that Jesus was God or read the Bible. It’s true that most modern Christians don’t believe in the simplistic children’s story of the virgin birth in a manger and a miraculous resurrection. Why should they when it confounds their sense of reality?

I have tried to describe the most likely version in The real truth about The Da Vinci Code.

Leaving aside the Trinity, there are two aspects of God from a human point of view. Hindu tradition speaks of the “Supreme Personality of Godhead”, Krishna, for example (etymologically close to “Christ”) and there have been others. The word Avatar is frequently used.

The West would think in terms of Jesus; the Far East of Bodhisattvas, such as the Buddha — someone who embodies godlike qualities and is sent to teach those who have ears to hear the real truth.

Godhead, a term used by Meister Eckhart, the 13th-century German Catholic mystic, is Being itself, Consciousness or Spirit. We all exist within the realm of consciousness but are mostly unaware of it, while drowning in thoughts.

Consciousness/Spirit is so close to us, it’s possible to stumble through life without ever knowing it exists. This is the base human condition, ignorance.

If you are a natural mystic — or like me, a life-long student of mysticism — Consciousness/Spirit is very real indeed and all manner of wonders precipitate out from it at certain peak moments in life. Science is mainly ignorant of this vital living “stuff” underpinning the universe, with some honourable exceptions.

The Dawkins crowd don’t believe it even exists. Darwinian evolution is a totally mechanical function of operability: survival of the fittest or Natural Selection. Not a hint or a drop of free choosing ever passes its lips.

The fact that Darwinism has prospered in our modern world illustrates the vast ocean of ignorance upon which our scientific age has been built.

In many ways science has been playing God all along. Its practical arm, technology, uses the universe’s flexible facilities to build walls around us, separating us from the Divine. Modern transport, mobile communications, television, they all do what God was thought to do in earlier times. Indeed, to some, including Dawkins, science is divinity itself and has taken on religious overtones as “Scientism”.

But there is a difference between God and the usage of God’s infinitely malleable Spirit to sub-create the world. A franchise is not identical with its founder; intellect not co-terminous with the truth.

Some scientists — thankfully rare — have begun using apocalyptic language to describe what they do, almost as if they were the god they don’t believe in. One might think of the priests of antiquity who kept their kings under control with their sorcery.

Delusional but harmless, perhaps? Some senior scientists now believe that human science is well on the way to destroying us all, like Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. The physicist Stephen Hawking gives us 200 years at best.

Even when science is apparently benevolent, as when inventing technologies to increase food production, it does harm over generations by expanding the human population — the principal reason the planet seems to be in such a parlous state.

Until we recognise the functional difference between ourselves and the Godhead, Consciousness/Spirit, and begin listening carefully to those who know it as intimately as a human can, we will surely perish as a failed experiment of life. The last of the Darwinists will then proclaim the rite of Natural Deselection over a growing pile of corpses.

However, the study of mysticism reveals the continuation of consciousness after physical death, so whatever the world throws at us, we will survive — in one form or another.

A higher world awaits, once we have gone through the apprenticeship of this one.

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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A few years ago I was asked to write a review of the book and film, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. As usual, I got rather carried away and the final version was far too long for the slot available. I filed it away and forgot all about it. Now, after a rummage through old drawers and files, it’s popped up again. And here is part of it:

Bellini’s depiction of Mary presenting Jesus to the Temple

Now we have the movie of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Professor of Symbology at Harvard University. Has anyone ever met a Professor of Symbology? No, neither have I. But it is fiction … isn’t it?

It depends what you mean by fiction. Fiction often contains more essential truth than factual accounts of the same sequence of events. In Da Vinci, the chances are we’re looking at a mosaic of ideas, some nearer the truth than others.

Here’s my attempt at an answer to the Da Vinci puzzle, based on many years of research in this fascinating field. It may not be conclusive, but I believe it to be closer to the truth than either Henry Lincoln’s inferences in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or the Church’s desperate attempts to defend its patrimony.

I’m going to break it down into two strands: the bloodline question, and the Holy Grail. That’s to say, the physical aspects, and then the spiritual.

Preamble
Human history comes down to us like a dream. Events get out of synch. Facts mingle with fantasy to produce myths with great psychological force. Jung called them Archetypes. History is full of them.

However, many of the myths of humanity have been proved to be true by archeology and science. Agamemnon’s Mycenae (Minoan civilization) was unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans on Crete. Homer’s Troy was discovered in Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann. Many Old Testament sites have been found in modern Israel. Myths can’t just be tidied away as foolish wish-fulfilment fantasies.

The Bloodline
I believe the question of the bloodline of Jesus is true but garbled by time. It’s a long story, so I’ll cut it back to the essentials.

“Christianity” began a long time before the historical Jesus was born. It began in Egypt as a mystery religion which spread across the Near East and into Europe, especially Greece. It was based on a virgin birth and a later resurrection. The mother was Isis and the son was Horus, often portrayed as a hawk, no doubt because of something in his character.

Her husband, Osiris was murdered and sliced up by the mysterious Seth. Isis tracked down his remains and put them together again in a miraculous resurrection. This is a classic Mystery Rite aimed at proving the existence of consciousness after death. People of the time understood the ritual nature of resurrection and didn’t take it to mean a physical “rising again”. To this day, the Freemasons have a similar ceremony, but it tends to be empty of real substance and is just a distant echo of long-forgotten events.

The mystery sect established itself in Alexandria, with a contemplative outpost in Palestine at Qumran. This was the base of the famous Essenes, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls, many dated hundreds of years before Jesus, describe a “Teacher of Righteousness”, causing many to believe this was Jesus himself. It was a title only, taken by many over the years, including probably James, the brother of Jesus.

Jesus then was a travelling holy man, with strong links to the Essenes and therefore to Egyptian spirituality. The basic story of his birth is a folk echo of real events at the time.

Priests at the Temple in Jerusalem were of a brahminic bloodline (the House of David). They all had the name (or title) of Cohen. To preserve the bloodline they would take young girls of suitable birth into the Temple and impregnate them at the age of twelve or so. They would then return them to their families, who would bring up the children as their own, counting it a great honour.

See the picture above and note the knowing looks of the Temple staff. Bellini is obviously trying to tell us something as were other Renaissance artists in their work.

The Jesus story is a garbled version of that. Joseph and Mary had a son fathered by a Cohen, an almost godlike figure in their culture. Jesus therefore was special, and was treated as such all his life.

When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD70, the priests dispersed to many points, no doubt with impressive retinues. Many ended up in Europe, where one married into an aristocratic family and founded the Merovingian dynasty of France. Others came to Britain and did likewise.

These became the secretive Rex Deus, the Divine Kings, the ancestors of all the Royal lines in Europe, including the British Monarchy. The Knights Templar (or Knights of the Temple) were an essential part of this whole movement from the 12th to the 14th centuries, when they were all but destroyed. They subsequently reinvented themselves in Scotland as the Freemasons.

The thread of history is becoming clear now. Everything traces back to the Temple, burned by Rome, and the mysterious priesthood, the Cohens, heirs to the spirituality of ancient Egypt.

So, the bloodline in question was not Jesus’s specifically, but that of the Cohens of whom Jesus was but one. The secret, kept for centuries, was that the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem had spread their seed across Europe into the ruling families, who became titular Cohens. It may have been just a bit of spin that Jesus was said to be the founder of the bloodline rather than the Jewish priests. It’s only half a lie because Jesus was actually one of them.

When Henry Lincoln hit upon the story of the priest, Berenger Sauniere, at Rennes-Le-Chateau, he made certain inferences from the data that were remarkably close to the truth. Sauniere’s discoveries made him rich. He undoubtedly discovered some secret, rather than a treasure hoard, and was richly rewarded to keep it to himself. That secret was the fact that the Royal bloodline in France and many ruling families, especially in the Languedoc region in the south, were descended from a Jewish priesthood. The Catholic Church wouldn’t have wanted that information made public. Given the anti-semitism in Europe then, it was explosive information.

The Spiritual
The spiritual strand of Christianity is by far the more interesting one, and the one the Church finds hardest to refute. Again it’s a long story, so I’ll be brief.

Jesus was a wandering holy man, born of the Cohens, with links to the spiritual Essenes — his brother James may well have been the Teacher of Righteousness.

The original themes of Christianity were those of Jesus himself, and were expressed in the “Gnostic” scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. These were Gospels not included in the New Testament by Bishop Irenaeus, acting for Rome in the 4th century.

We know that some interpreters of Cathar ideas believed the Holy Grail to be a book: The Gospel of Thomas, perhaps. I believe it to be “Nirvanic experience”, a mystic state that proves the continuation of consciousness after death. All the mystery religions have this at their heart, even today’s Freemasonry, now just a shell of distant memories.

So-called “primitive” Christianity was reinterpreted and translated into Greek so that Paul could take it to the gentiles (Westerners). This version was a very different one to the first Christian books and was expressed in the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Rome took the whole thing over and Christianity became part of the glue of the Roman empire. A version of the old Osiris story, depicted in a materialist way, was bolted on to make it miraculous, and Christ put on an immense pedestal. The Cohen connection was lost.

Some other sects which descended from the original Christianity, as described by the Gnostics and by the Gospel of John, developed an alternative form of the religion. The Cathars, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Coptic Christians all derived from this strand. They were ruthlessly annihilated by Rome wherever it could find them.

So, where does that leave The Da Vinci Code? Such was the secrecy of these original Christian groups — mainly to protect themselves against the power of Rome — that they almost certainly used codes and ciphers to convey essential meanings. Codes then are not out of the question.

We’ve also seen that a bloodline was preserved in Europe, linked to the Merovingian Kings. But it was not directly Jesus’s or Mary Magdalene’s, which may have been used to cover up the Jewish connection.

Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene (Mary of Bethany)? Was the Wedding at Caana, where Jesus supplied the wine, an account of his own marriage to Mary? We may never know, but the chances that he was married are strong. We’ve seen how the Cohens were keen to preserve their bloodline in other respects.

Is Da Vinci right or wrong? Mostly right, I’d say, but with a lot of false trails followed.

Is the Catholic Church culpable of cover-up? Partly, but much of it is probably down to ignorance. There was no CNN, Internet or daily newspapers in those days.

Constantine and Irenaeus seem to have started a movement that was forced in the opposite direction of its founder’s teachings by the very logic of its connection with the source of temporal power: Rome. Dostoievsky got it right in the Grand Inquisitor chapter of his great novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Finally, I believe a document may exist in the Vatican Library dated AD37 which shows that Joseph of Arimathea really did come to Britain to buy tin. In the process he set up the first national church of Christ in the world. Mary (which one?) was said to have travelled with him.

Then there’s the ancient legend of England, echoed by William Blake’s poem Jerusalem, of the young Jesus coming to Glastonbury with Joseph on one of his many trips as a trader. As we’ve seen, legends are often a garbled form of the truth.

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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David Cameron has made an audacious speech by today’s standards, daring to support the claims of Christianity as an active element in British society. It was deftly done.

Archbishop Rowan Williams — Old Beardie, as he is known by a number of irreverent commentators — has distinctly leftwing views which might be termed, Old Labour. He is seen to be a poor defender of Britain’s core religious experience, preferring to campaign on political side-issues, such as Government “cuts”, Greenham Common, and appeasing the out-of-control looters of last summer’s riots.

The Prime Minister let fly in a speech in Oxford to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James edition of the Bible, a landmark text that still reverberates through English literature and language.

We should not be ashamed of calling the United Kingdom a Christian country, he said. Its values are our values, not the fashionable moral relativism of the bien pensant crowd in upmarket London and the BBC. Notting Hill, for now, seems to be exempt.

Where then has it all gone wrong? Why have we come to this pass? Largely, I suspect, because most people were so confident in the stability of England and the rest of Great Britain that they tolerated a growing retreat from these values without thinking about it.

The Anglican Church itself is part of the problem. It was never set up as a proselytising body, but as an emollient comfort blanket to hold the nation together in Tudor times. And so it remains.

For an older generation that is how it should be — making a fuss is unEnglish. Ancient hymns, prayers that are pleas for favours rather than mystical pathways beyond time and space, and the unmatchable grandeur of church buildings, convey the sense that all is well and endlessly familiar.

A younger generation has been emerging, though, mainly influenced by scientific discoveries that are seen as man-made, not at all spiritual in nature. Quantum physics has spotted that the world is just empty space held together by a string of energies. It has no spiritual force, nor any meaning, we are told.

A backlash has now set in against both the church with its tepid message and the dead universe of science zealots. A new spirituality is arising.

Asked in polls how they would describe their beliefs, most people now tick the box marked “Spiritual”, not “CofE” or any of the other religious streams. “Atheist” is low on the list too, below “Agnostic”, as are non-Christian faiths, although some are gaining ground.

The pity of all this is that the Church has a wonderfully spiritual past that it is now almost ashamed to voice in public. Rowan himself has written books about Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila, in which he correctly spots that Teresa’s famous “Four Stages of Watering a Garden”, metaphors for spiritual experience, are really three stages. Has he had these experiences himself? He doesn’t say, although from his tone I would guess not, or maybe not all of them. It would be good to know. Witness is a powerful tool in Christian expression.

The reactions I get from my mystical pieces on this website tell me that most people are open to such ideas and experience. In America there are whole movements seeking to blend science and spirituality. It’s not difficult once you get round the mechanistic block against an intelligent universe.

Scientists who see the emptiness of the atom and fail to link it with the “emptiness” of the mystics’ plenum void, which is full of conscious intelligence, are letting a whole generation down. They are rapidly becoming the future dinosaurs of the 21st century.

Surely, a newly confident Church should move onto this territory, asserting that it was right all along?

For that is nothing but the absolute truth.

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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A few people have questioned my comparison of the first stage of spiritual enlightment — the Divine Light — with “the Comforter” in John’s Gospel (see here).

It is no surprise to me because many Christians will not allow any crossover between what they think of as Christianity and other forms of mysticism. Their grounds are that, 1) their religion is not mystical, and 2) other religions are Pagan and therefore untrue.

Clearly, they have not read many of the great documents of their faith. Mystical Theology has been an established part of Christianity since a book of the same title was written in the 5th century by that chap with the mystifying name: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I can assure you he was no pseud, but took an earlier more famous monk’s name as was common practice at the time.

So let’s take a look at the Comforter and then compare it with some personal descriptions of the Divine Light experience.

The Comforter
To a large extent all religions converge towards a single point the higher up an aspirant climbs the ladder of perfection. This is because mysticism is the highest religion (or religious experience), which encompasses all others. While the mystic inhabits the mountaintop, institutional religions represent the diversity of paths to the summit.

Chapters 14, 15, 16 and 17 of John’s Gospel are the purest distillation of mysticism. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit which drops down into those who are ready for higher things. After Jesus’s death, he tells his disciples, another will come to show them the way:

I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it sees him not, neither knows him: but you know him; for he dwells with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

To the world with its physical comforts it remains dark, but the Spirit of truth will show them the unity of all being, and the subordination of the things of this world:

The Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatever I have said to you. … The Spirit of Truth shall testify of me. But not all will be chosen, and those that are will be judged by their level of attainment (their fruits): I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that bears not fruit he takes away: and every branch that bears fruit, he purges it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

One could easily translate these passages into the language of Mahayana Buddhism with its Bodhisattvas returning to earth to bring others to enlightenment.

There will be a “presentation” of the truth, and the truth will “sanctify” them. They are nevertheless to remain in the world, but at a higher state than before. Jesus is showing them, and by implication other contemplatives, the way to live and, once chosen (for there is no other way), he stresses again and again that they are not of this world.

The Divine Light
Let’s now have the experiences of two mystics of that first stage of spiritual enlightenment, often known as the Divine Light.

First, here is the testimony of the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and an empty cup
On the marble table top.

As on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Now here is my own description of the same experience over the course of a month:

In the summer of 1992, I was living in the south of Spain writing a book on mystical experiences. As an escape from writing, I had taken up a kind of walking meditation. The aim was partly exercise, but also to give my mind a rest from constant thought.

One day, completely out of the blue, I became aware of a subtle alteration in consciousness. It was as if a grip had been taken on my mind, pleasantly it should be said, and was drawing it back into an area of increasing stillness.

As this rather strange quietness built, it became more and more tangible, like a distinct presence. It wasn’t physical, as far as I could tell; it resembled a warm, yellowish light, a golden glow, even a tingling florescence all around and within me. This supremely-benign condition continued for about half an hour, then mysteriously faded.

Over the next month or so, the state returned virtually every day at varying levels of intensity. At times I found I could induce it at will merely by walking rhythmically. It was a very welcome presence and I came to look forward to its characteristic onset.

The experiences reached a peak one Sunday morning. Unusually I was seated in an armchair reading a book. After a while, the words began to take on a heightened significance and my thought processes slowed right down. I was aware that this was a much deeper experience than anything hitherto.

Reading was now difficult, although not impossible. … I was enjoying this spiritual immersion, which was how it seemed, and after half an hour it left me for good.

The presence was with me continuously for about a month, with my consciousness of it rising and falling in unpredictable ways. It was partly of the body but also external to it in a way I had not knowingly experienced before.

This light is all around us at all times, but is filtered out by the physical brain. When we are opened up to it, a Comforter removes all the cares and woes of physical existence. We get a glimpse of eternity.

Descriptions of mystical states usually differ in quirky ways, but the congruity between the three versions given here is unmistakeable and, in my view, conclusive. The Comforter is the Christian carrier of the Divine Light, a golden glow that brings divinity into the heart of those who are ready for it.

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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Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? wrote poet Alexander Pope about the use of overwhelming force against a defenceless person.

Everyday life often seems like that, especially for the elderly and infirm facing an implacable death in the not too distant future.

In this piece I want to discuss reincarnation, the re-emergence of the butterfly from the wheel of life; in particular as applied to possibly the most charming and attractive figures in all world literature: the bodhisattvas.

The word can be rendered in English as enlightening being. They are found liberally sprinkled through the pages of Mahayana Buddhist texts. Here’s a description from the radiant Flower Garland Sutra:

Some appear in the form of mendicants, some in the
form of priests … some in the form of scholars, scientists,
doctors; some in the form of ascetics, some in the form of
entertainers, some in the form of pietists, some in the form
of bearers of all kinds of arts and crafts — they are seen to
have come, in their various guises, to all villages, cities,
towns, communities, districts and nations … They are
lamps shedding light on the knowledge of all beings … for
the purpose of leading people to perfection.

They can be of either sex, and are definitely ranked among the good guys.

Bodhisattvas are said to be trained in their previous lives for higher states of being but, out of universal compassion, they choose to return to this world to help all beings to the enlightened state.

In the text, there does seem to be rather a lot of them. But bear in mind that this is a celestial overview. In practice, they are thin on the ground. If you have one in your street, you are very fortunate, although it’s doubtful you would know unless you have the “all-seeing eye” of knowledge. Not many people have.

All spiritual literature is full of examples of, and speculations about reincarnation. Early Christians believed in it until it was razed from the record by politically-motivated priests and bishops. Christian politicians have a bad record of burning books they didn’t like or threatened their powerbase.

India still accepts its reality, which is burnt into the culture, as do many eastern countries. Tibet even picks its leader, the Dalai Lama, on the basis of the reincarnation of the last one.

The essential idea is that in any one life we have the opportunity to develop our portion of consciousness into a vehicle capable of lifting us to a higher plane of being after death. If we fail to make the effort, or are not ready for it, we simply return to this life in a different identity until we reach escape velocity, so to speak.

Some advanced beings come back to help us make the transition. They are the bodhisattvas, the enlightening beings. Consider this further excerpt on the work they do:

He saw countless enlightening beings on the
promenades or sitting on their seats, engaged in
various activities. Some were walking around, some
were doing spiritual exercises, some were practising
observation, some were projecting universal compassion,
some were working on various sciences having to do with
the welfare of the world, some were instructing, some
were reciting, some were writing, some were asking
questions, some were engaged in ripening conduct,
concentration, and knowledge …

In the Flower Garland Sutra, the whole universe, with its teams of enlightening beings busy within it, is a vast workshop where everyone is brought to enlightenment in one way or another.

The diversity is immense as befits the adornments of the Universal Consciousness, whose concentration maintains it. But the small details and individual acts of kindness and compassion are no less important, for, in the magnificent Flower Garland vision, each minute grain of sand contains the universe without end.

The world, the supernal manifestation of the Great One, constantly brings into itself countless clouds of forms and sentient beings, each with its own distinctness; but not even the most insignificant speck is refused participation in the vibrant life of the cosmic consciousness.

Within this framework, the enlightening being, who may appear as anything from a doctor to a wandering mendicant, is shown as the progenitor of change and the catalyst of enlightenment:

Then the Buddha extended his right hand, rubbed my head,
and revealed to me a teaching called universal eye, which
is the sphere of all Buddhas, revealing the practice
of enlightening beings, showing the differentiation of the
planes of all universes … communicating to all beings in
accord with their mentalities …

Unfortunately, our western science and materialistic metropolitan existence knows little of this, despite a mass of subtle hints and steers contained in our own spiritual literature. As a culture we have lost touch with the most powerful form of storytelling ever developed: the allegory.

Many of our most famous books exist on two levels: as a simple story, plainly told with a literal meaning, and as an allegorical tale disguising a mystical thread with immortality as its inner core. Much of Renaissance religious art conceals a preoccupation with an afterlife and a strong sense of upward movement.

The butterfly on the wheel has two choices: be broken and fall back to earth, or lift up the head and stretch the wings and soar into eternity.

The bodhisattvas exist to serve that purpose.

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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