An Easter Observation

Easter includes many levels of meaning. At its depth it expresses a very profound psycho/spiritual contention as to the problem of suffering:

IMO this following excerpt from an article on Simone Weil expresses something that curiously for me seems essentially to both appreciate the depth and root purpose of Christianity but also, I believe, unknown to a great many who refer to themselves as Christian and considered irrelevant to some others in favor of “doing” this or that. It is as though Christianity is accepted for many reasons but often not its “soul.” Yet no where is this soul more evident then on Easter.

From Simone Weil

If one understands this they also understand the book of Job but somehow considering much of what I’ve read in secular text, the essential message seems either intentionally or unintentionally overlooked. Yet I am awed by the depth of it and Jesus bringing its fruits to life on Easter.

Does her observation resonate with you at all?

Hi Nick,

A correct observation. Christmas is a re-enactment of a particular form of “light-festival” in its hysterical giddiness, and is consequently of less importance. Good Friday and Easter, on the other hand, reaches into the depth of being and asks us whether we can bear it. It is the reason for the shouting match between Jesus and Peter, it is the reason for the resignation of the Disciples on the way to Jerusalem, and of their deep disappointment and fear after Jesus had been arrested and crucified.

Suffering hasn’t been removed from the planet since Jesus, but a different perspective has been gained to cope with it. This requires, however, a faith that is quite radical – but it is something that the more radical people can grasp better. It explains the radical moves of the Apostles after Pentecost, the radical approach of Saul of Tarsus, and his trust in the small radical groups he planted. But this revolutionary approach had not a militancy, but a radical Shalom at its soul, where suffering became an expression of love.

I think that this one quote doesn’t do service to the thought behind it. It is not easy to understand how “a supernatural use of suffering” can be beneficial and has a lot to do with the acceptance of suffering as our “Way” - which is widely witnessed within scriptures. Often the indignation towards a God who challenges us with suffering in his service comes from the lack of understanding that the Christian Way isn’t to free ourselves from suffering by cutting bonds and relationships and seeking Nirvana, but finding the “inner room” where I gain the strength I need to go through “the valley of death”.

The Passion and Easter are a re-enactment of the Way of Christ, through suffering into resurrection. Lent used to be a time of fasting and increasing our awareness for the sufferings of others. Fasting in this way really requires us to give away the food that I have on my table to those who have none. Of course, in our pragmatic attempt to reduce suffering, this has been done to a large degree within our societies on a state basis. But we have taken Lent out of the seven weeks prior to Easter and only have the Easter eggs in mind. We don’t understand that the ability to go through suffering for a time of seven weeks would make us free and more able to suffer other tribulations, and gradually build up our solidarity with those less well off. As Jesus said, this is all the harder, the more I have to give away.

Of course, Job doesn’t have to suffer because he has done something wrong, but because God believes that he can take it. Not the callous “bring 'em on”, but the assuredness that the “righteous” will cling to him through the trials that the accuser brings up. Jesus too, convinced that he had to go through the oppression, conviction and execution, clings to God through it all.

Shalom

Hi Bob

I agree that where Christmas offers hope Easter refers to the profound actualization of this hope which carries a deep separate significance. Of course this significance can be appreciated on many levels and there are those, I am gratefully willing to admit, whose understanding totally dwarfs my own.

Yes,it could be seen in the sacrifice of the Christ or superficially as the controlling methods of the mother who demands blind loyalty because of “how she suffered for you.” She would argue the great love as the source of her suffering. The word is the same but they have nothing in common. The idea of suffering as an expression of love without levels of discrimination has no meaning.

How to suffer? Does one suffer as the controlling mother or as the Christ. Can one suffer as the Christ as we are or only believe so?

Simone’s understanding of affliction is utterly profound. It is ancient knowledge that is kept alive and passed along under the table so to speak but somehow it was so close to the surface within her that she didn’t need it revealed. Her purity revealed it.

The idea is that for suffering to be beneficial, it has to be in the presence of consciousness or intentional self awareness witnessing this suffering. Without it, suffering only becomes an egotistical experience, denying anything above it, and one becomes initially caught up solely in their artificially created personality. If affliction is just blindly tolerated it has no benefit. But the tendency of affliction for us is to deny consciousness since we are caught up in it. We cannot become present to it. But the idea is that the struggle to remain conscious to personal affliction, (Suffering means to receive) produces a void in ourselves since they cannot be reconciled other than through imagination. This void is like a vacuum which the Spirit comes to fill and is the supernatural use of suffering which is to invite the spirit for re-birth and the soul finding its direction is not attached to affliction. Strange as it seems, this suffering reveals the spiritual direction and the ability to progress along it with the help of the Spirit as a result of the intentional voluntary, conscious experience of this suffering…

What an important distinction so few are aware of. She speaks of the connection between conscious evolution and Love. She speaks of a quality of Love leading to the source, beyond and earthly love, that must be inwardly found since it requires getting out of our own way and its powerful seductive imagination. It reveals the direction back to the source. Through the intentional conscious experience of this suffering, the Sprit entering the void, the place of the developing soul, it can awaken to this direction.

This IMO is the supernatural use of suffering. If, as Buddhism states, suffering is natural for the universe, Christianity states that we can make use of this suffering providing we know HOW to suffer and to make use of it.

Jesus of course did just that. He had to show the path to the Way and created the void. His Crucifixion was an intentional conscious experience of suffering in the presence of conscious love

From what I’ve read the Greek word for forsaken also means abandoned and makes it easier to understand. Jesus being necessarily abandoned was allowed the void in which the Christ within, the Son, could be re-born and rise in the return towards the Father.

This supernatural use of suffering doesn’t in any way look down upon the acts of the Good Samaritan or any fine people that suffer while extend helping hands to others in stark contrast to the ones who only truly desire power and the means to manipulate others. She is referring to the esoteric or inner meaning of Christianity which is on a different level than anything earthly since it is conscious in origin which is a quality not of the reactive mechanism we call “Earth.”

Hi Nick,

I don’t know where you have suddenly jetted off to. Who is this “controlling Mother”? I don’t know anyone like this, although I could imagine there being such people. Why bring it up, unless you assume I am talking about such a figure? Why should you assume this?

If we are talking about Christ and his Good Friday sacrifice, I don’t feel the need to discriminate between him and other possibilities. I also have the feeling that you need to exalt things for some reason, incessantly producing stairways of progress or accomplishment, whereas I feel that there is only reality and illusion and only a thin veil separates the two. As sure as I may feel about being on the one side, I may awaken the next morning and find myself on the other.

Suffering as the expression of love isn’t something that we can claim, it is something we either do or do not. The expression “to suffer” has in the past also meant to allow something, as well as to tolerate, put up with, experience or endure (usually evil, injury, pain, or death). It is this willingness to “remain under” something adverse for the love of others that I mean. This is also the general description of heroes, even though most of those who lived to tell hardly saw themselves with any other real alternative to what they did.

I think that this is what is meant when those who are commended for their good deeds answer, “when or where did we do this?” It is also what is behind the left not knowing what the right does. It is a moral behaviour that seems the only thing to do, not something that I could think about – Jesus struggles in Gethsemane not because there is an alternative, but because he doubts himself. The difference in my understanding, is that Jesus shows us that God is not always the victor in the world – that is: People don’t always see the wisdom of a certain behaviour. The victory takes place in ones self and at the end of time. As triumphant as the Easter celebration is often commemorated, the biblical record shows us confusion and frustration and a mystical intuition.

The suffering that is love expressed must be able to accept this, without the prospect of showing that it was right in the end. Such suffering can last a lifetime, only seeing the dawn of the new day in dreams and visions. We are often not prepared to accept this and put some kind of triumphalism in its place.

As saintly as you would have Simone Weil, she was another human being. Perhaps her own afflictions were a source of that “experience” that is often translated as “to suffer” - I have found that in difficult times and illness, that the spiritual gain was incomparable to other times. This is probably more so for people who suffer more. I have been on my knees, crying and shouting at God, clinging to the only source of hope I had, and taken my injury as a sign of that struggle – and I have been blessed.

But I have gone on to do the same stupid things that Jakob did after Penuel. I think that we have to get things into perspective. The Saints are human beings, despite their receiving blessings and being important figures in Scripture. I don’t believe that suffering “has to be in the presence of consciousness or intentional self awareness witnessing this suffering” but that the Saints suddenly find themselves asking themselves whether they are about to run away, or whether they have nowhere to run to, other than into the arms of their God. That isn’t egotistical, it is purely an existential experience that requires an answer. It isn’t a “rung on the ladder”, but utter reality demanding my attention.

What a sweeping statement! I know of no-one able to tolerate affliction without some vision, some hope or anticipation. I know of people rejecting any kind of vision, hope or anticipation and crying out in the face of evil, injury, pain, or death – but also mute acceptance of the way ahead. I have no right to judge over these people.

I look back on years of experiencing the deaths and chronic illnesses of people and can only generalise. I look on the millions of people caught up within the power struggles of this world, and can only generalise. I see oppression in certain societies of certain groups, and can only generalise. You seem to have something particular in mind. Whether you really have an inside view is something only you can answer, but only with that inside view can you know whether those people “consented” to allow the love of God to flow or not.

Shalom

The comparison of the conscious suffering of Christ and the manipulative suffering of the controlling mother must be brought up in order to vivify the problem of language and its adverse psychological effects. This is one of the great problems of Christendom. It speaks of suffering and our nothingness in the misguided light of cultural condemnation. “You’re no good” for example. People become really paralyzed by this and it is largely because the profound meanings of these concepts are reduced to some sort of relationship to pride and or vanity.

Don’t think I was directing it at you but just pointing out how these things can be understood very differently even though people think they are referring to the same thing.

But again Jesus is appreciated differently by people anywhere from a being a purely secular figure to God himself. How can we not need to discriminate in order to understand appreciate his being and therefor his purpose?

It is true that I believe in a scale of being rather than just it being defined as existence compared to non existence. Take the idea of morality. From the point of view of Man as existing at different levels of being what we call morality can be considered as the result of conscious understanding devolving into the psych of man on earth in response to mechanical earthly influences. This creates a mid point where conscious psychological understanding meets mechanical reaction to external influences. Morality is then the mechanical result of what has been forgotten interpreted from the point of view of external earthly circumstances. This meeting of the higher and lower is strikingly different from the normal secular view of morality becoming gradually developed as a means of control. It culturally devolves to this level but the natural revulsion towards killing for example is and has always been natural for Man of a certain quality of being.

From this point of view I do exalt higher consciousness. For me it is essential to the core of Christianity. Evolution towards its direction is what attracts Man to search. What do you think is meant by the pearl of great worth? For me it is the acquired experience and acquisition of meaning and purpose through the elevation of our being to a point where our knowledge or life’s experiences could be put into a transcendent meaningful and purposeful perspective that would be truly human. For others it may appear ludicrous but everything I’ve read on it and my own experiences lead me to believe that no matter how politically incorrect it is to refer to differences, that a scale of relative being truly exists and that Man has the right and capacity to aspire towards if it is important enough to put the effort towards it.

True, and I’m not referring to anyone in particular here, but again this was Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees. Sometimes it comes as a great shock when an effort at self knowledge reveals that our real motive is self love, self importance, or the love of appearance. My own experiences have revealed to me how difficult it really is to put oneself into the position of another for any length of time without the experience of some sort of self importance.

Again, any of this only matters for those concerned with the inner man as expressed in Christianity for example. Under normal conditions, it is better that people egotistically care rather then not care at all.

Where did the idea come from that God is victor in the world? It is the realm of the Prince of Darkness. Of course the essence of Christianity is condemned since it is threatening to the satisfactions of this darkness. This is why Jesus told his disciples that they would be hated like him.

Salvation may refer to the end of an aeon but the Kingdom refers to the potential of man’s being Now.

How could there be anything other than confusion and frustration through interpretations of the conscious realm of the essence of Christianity by conditioned mechanical representatives of the Great Beast? I agree then that Christianity begins with helping oneself. In this way, from the Christian perspective, one can help others in matters beyond earthly concerns sometimes referred to as awakening.

This is another good topic called “hitting bottom.” Sometimes certain intense life experiences provoke a certain need that we have not acquired a mechanical way to react to. At this time we get beyond this conditioning and a certain awakening results. But it requires a certain emotional need that we just cannot summon at will. It is the nature of true spiritual work to help us get to this point and get out of our own way.

Saints are exceptions. The question is what we can do. Simone Weil had the capacity to voluntarily experience life in the raw while in a state of open attention. This is not something I can do. She is special but what about me. Can I at least make a little progress? Yes, but it requires efforts and the guidance of those having gone before. Originally the Church was an esoteric school teaching the development of understanding. Now it has devolved on the surface into just a blind obedience lacking understanding with everything on the same level with distinctions of quality being artificially determined by appearance.

I have no right or intention to judge others either. I just agree with what is known in esoteric Christianity and Buddhism as the binding adverse effects of attachment including to ones own suffering. Of course the freedom being referred to is not something that can be acquired overnight, but I do believe that a person willing and needing to put in the efforts of self knowledge necessary to acquire such freedom is possible.

There is a law that states that “The higher can understand the lower but the lower cannot understand the higher.” Anyone with the freedom and courage to consent and remain conscious to it is beyond me to truly understand other than theoretically so it would be foolish to try and judge. I can however see the difference and get a glimpse of the possibilities when I voluntarily try to consent to something even as trivial as remaining conscious to the experience of my normal sufferings while sitting in the dentist’s chair. Is it really that odd to get a glimpse of potential and the possibility that this potential exists as a higher quality of man’s “being” something in us, much like the need of the salmon to swim up stream, urges us to strive towards.