Many teachings on wisdom spirituality assume that their audience is comprised of individuals who are ready for a revelation or breakthrough.
In fact, many are only interested in home improvement and not an entirely new living situation.
In a sense, conventional religion is something of a compromise in this regard. Somewhere in there are golden nuggets of potentially transformative insight, but which have been toned down and domesticated for mass consumption.
For the decade and a half that I was in professional Christian ministry, this domestication of Jesus’ original gospel – his “good news” of human liberation – became increasingly difficult for me to accept.
My tradition had long ago taken the protein and spice out of Jesus’ recipe for what he called New Life by the Power of God. Boiled soft and diluted with sugar water to make it more palatable, Christian orthodoxy is now a weak stew of doctrines that preserves hardly a hint of his real life and revolutionary message.
To understand how this change came about in Christianity, we need to recognize that something like it has happened – and will continue to happen – in all forms of conventional religion, as the inevitable effect of packaging and marketing truth so as to not disrupt the status quo.
Jesus and others like him were not interested in “home improvement” – that is to say, in making conventional life a little easier or adding a touch of fresh paint to the same old walls.
Conventional life is all about the roles, rules, and routines that keep everyone in their place and the social role-play rolling along its safe and familiar grooves. The rewards for doing your part and staying in line, moving up in the ranks of righteousness and then moving on to heaven when you die, are enough to make people believe they are doing their best.
Let’s take a moment to develop this picture more fully. The point I want to make is not that conventional religion is corrupt and either needs to be tossed out or replaced by something else. Instead it’s that everything conventional – religion, morality, business, and daily life – is by definition formed on the beliefs, agreements, and habits that constitute the shared world of a people.
The wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis, where Jesus numbers among the “faculty,” is focused on the path that leads out of this Great Delusion and into a more grounded, authentic, liberated and fulfilling life. What are the basic framework and design features of a conventional existence – the Great Delusion, as I’m calling it?
The key dynamic of conventional life takes hold early as a family and its larger tribe begin the process of grooming, shaping, and instructing the animal nature of their youngster with the moral rules and cultural codes for becoming a well-behaved member of society.
The primal consciousness of our body doesn’t have a natural interest in using the toilet, putting our plate in the dishwasher, or waiting our turn. Such behavior had to be conditioned into us – along with countless other examples of what a “civil order” may require.
Central to this task of domesticating an animal nature is a process called personation, referring to the gradual adoption of roles and masks (personas) that identify us to our tribe, but also identify us with specific segments of the population – with the beliefs, values, preferences, and ways of life that differentiate one subgroup from another.
This can get very specific, down to clothing and hair styles, membership and status symbols, to the esoteric credenda and rituals of secret societies.
Once this process is complete and we are fully personated, primal consciousness – or really just a very small portion of it, like dipping your bucket in a fast-flowing stream – has been coaxed, sequestered, and installed inside the suits of tribal identity, as the “I” (ego) who has this name, that address, these responsibilities, those friends and enemies.
In conventional society, from the general role-play to those exclusive groups, cults, and denominations where identity is smaller, more tightly defined and heavily guarded, it can feel as if our journey is complete.
Find your place in society and do your part. That’s it. Do a good job and you will be remembered well. Maybe you’ll be rewarded with a gold star in heaven when it’s all over.
As illustrated in the diagram above, however, our domestication to conventional society and managing an identity are just part of a larger and longer journey – a fuller human journey.
What the wisdom teachers see is what most of us suffer to learn, which is that the very formation of identity separates us from the depths of consciousness, life, and being itself. That bucket of water pulled from the living stream was isolated for the purpose of filling a suit and serving a role.
But it came at a price. Our ego is inherently insecure and vulnerable to feelings of exposure, shame, loneliness, anxiety and depression.
Now, conventional religion can help with that, with its shelter of belonging, its program of moral direction and support, the assurance that comes in believing that we know the Truth and are among the chosen saved.
It shouldn’t surprise us that conventional religion is consistently the most vocal, even violent, enemy of human enlightenment and liberation. Its job is to keep us safely inside and sufficiently preoccupied with the promises and complications of membership, not even thinking to look outside the window – or even realizing there is a window onto Something More beyond.
So, while the priests, pastors, imams and other custodians of tradition are committed to keeping us inside and in line, the wisdom teachers invite us to “get out of the house” and discover Reality.
Of course, we can work together to build a bigger house, one with vaulted sky lights and a larger floor plan to welcome (and make members of) others whom we had been excluding, neglecting, or ignoring.
The fact remains, however, that a “megachurch” is still a church, and every church is its own kind of conventional society.
Progress on our journey to enlightenment, liberation, and fulfillment does not necessarily lead outside the house as much as underneath it. Not digging through the floor, but by dropping from the center of identity (ego), into the primal consciousness of the body, and deeper still to the grounding mystery named soul.
Not “my” soul, for this mystery is not something ego owns or can ever hope to manage.
Body and soul are together the expressive and essential dimensions of our authentic Self. One is a biogenic converter of the primal lifeforce into the metabolic energy electrifying our cells, fueling our instincts, and powering our mind, connecting us to the Web of Life all around us. The other is a centripetal attractor drawing consciousness inward to its own depths and generative ground.
This inner drop from our social anchor of identity up on stage is the mystical path to communion, where body and soul are experienced as complementary aspects of the same mystery – not the warring dualism envisioned in some religions, or the crap bag and alien light as taught in others.
The communion of body and soul – or we should say, the realization and intentional cultivation of this communion on our inner journey of liberation – brings awareness into our deeper centers of sentience, life, and being, each of which corresponds to a larger horizon of participation: all sentient creatures, all living things, Mother Earth and the universal cosmic environment itself.
We might compare this path to communion with the emergence of a butterfly from its cocoon: watch as it gently unfurls, slowly exercises, and gradually finds the balance of its new wings. Perhaps we can think of body and soul as the two wings which we must learn to use in coordination: the “soul wing” finding deeper centers within ourselves, the “body wing” reaching to larger horizons of wholeness beyond us.
When we compare this fully grounded and far-reaching authentic Self to the conventional identity we once inhabited – what is often named the conditioned self, the differences are so dramatically evident as to make a comparison almost impossible.
An obedient and true-believing conformist has transformed into a courageous and truth-seeking creator. A person who daily struggled to manage life on the stage has become a free spirit, fully human and finally divine.
In the full circuit of this Spiral Path, we return home with boons for the community: the Sword of Truth, the Balm of Compassion, and the Lamp of Wisdom. Perhaps we can inspire others to get out of the house and share a bit of what we discovered on the Way.
Tracts of Revolution 