“I’m different from everyone else” and then all Hell breaks loose. Or just a bit of Hell, depending on just how special we are.

Regular commenter Llama writes recently: “Someone thought it would be funny to shit on my career plans and my plans to help other people.” This may be a baffling experience, but not all that uncommon. I know Kristi has been through this with alarming regularity as well. So this seems a great occasion to revisit the concept of the General Law which personifies as Satan.

Mouravieff is the one who calls it the General Law, a concept that is unfortunately hard to Google since the first thousand pages will probably be filled with lawyers. But it represents the force that keeps the world spiritually asleep. It can be seen at its best as a form of inertia that keeps people in place so they don’t break formation. The saint and the loony are both constrained by the same force, and it is not always easy for the casual bystander to say who is who. Whenever someone steps out of row, rocks the boat, changes course or speed compared to the world around him, the General Law kicks in. This is what it does at its best, rounds up the strays.

But when a person begins to accumulate Light, the General Law personifies as Satan (a name that means Adversary). It can adversely affect us either internally or externally. Internally it amplifies temptations, stirs up thoughts and emotions that seem to come from nowhere and ignore our attempts of control, makes us sensitive to pain and makes us feel heavy and tired. (This comes in addition to any medical conditions we may have – don’t ignore those. Life is short enough as is and the path is long.) We may even feel revulsion at the thought of spiritual exercise, a pretty clear sign that the Adversary is at work.

Externally, the Adverse element stirs up people of a suitable disposition and makes them single us out for attack. They are of course not aware who or what is controlling them, they just have a vague feeling that we are troublemakers and don’t know our place. This is indeed exactly what happens: We are leaving our place as passive pawns in society (a role that is valuable in a certain perspective, actually, but which stands in the way of Awakening). Those who act on behalf of the Adverse element will feel a deep sense of satisfaction in making trouble for us, as if from a job well done. Jesus Christ put it this way: “There will come a time when everyone who kills you think he does God a service that way.” This came to pass during the rapid expansion of early Christianity, one of the more disruptive forces of its age. It could happen again, but for most of us in this era it doesn’t go that far. It is not restricted to Christians either; this is a General Law, after all.

And yes, this means that if you are among those who sometimes take a pleasure in putting people in their place, you may at those times be the handyman of the Adversary. This could happen to anyone, but it is not something to aspire to, although someone will end up doing it. As Jesus Christ says: “Woe to the world because of snares! For there must be snares, but woe to the person who sets the snare!” The snares are there to keep people stuck in place, so they don’t leave their place in the lattice.

By now we have a pretty clear idea what is going on with our reader. He is rocking the boat, stepping out of line, having ambitions we did not tell him to have. He must be put in his place. Let the shitting commence!

This General Law is why throughout the ages, men of an esoteric bent have become hermits, unless or until they have a specific task they must do to help others. They stay hidden as long as reasonably possible. Actually this is not the first: At first they will tell everyone, but reaching a certain stage of knowledge, they tend to go underground to reduce the backlash as much as possible. To come back to my hero Jesus Christ, the gospels mention him impressing people at the age of 12, when he could kind of get away with it. Then he disappears from view until he is 30! There are innumerable legends of what he may have done during that time, but from an esoteric point of view it is overwhelmingly likely that he stayed hidden in plain sight, spending his time and energy inwardly without giving away any hints of who or what he was.

Of course, once you begin to help people, there is no hiding anymore. That’s when all that hidden preparation pays off. Or so I have been told. I, after all, am just some guy playing The Sims and eating yogurt. If you want to know the Truth, you can’t avoid going to your own heart and asking there for advice.

Water into wine. Let’s face it, if that literally happened to us, it would be scary.

Recently I read a Quora question about how believable (or not) religions are. This reminded me of two very different ways of looking at religious miracles such as those mentioned in the New Testament. There are believers who approach these stories single-mindedly in one way or the other, and some who have some of each.

As an example, let us look at the story of the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus (somewhat reluctantly) changed water into wine. To one believer, this may simply be an expression of power: Jesus had the God-power so he could do impossible things if he wanted to. Don’t mess with the guy with superpowers! But to another believer, it is a sign, a symbol: Jesus can transform something ordinary, boring and all too common (like a Monday at the job) to something precious, enjoyable and rare (like an opportunity to make others happier, learn something new and improve ourselves).

Generally the first view is common among exoteric or “outward” Christians, the second among esoteric or “inward” Christians. Other religions likewise have both of these types, because they are both needed for a religion to survive and grow large. The exoteric view is the easiest, or at least that has been the case throughout history up until now. I wonder if we are not now in an age where that balance is shifting, and it will be harder to be exoteric than it has been in the past. In times when a religion is under pressure, it is difficult to be an exoteric believer because you have to hold on to the dogma in blind faith, whereas the esoteric believer actually experiences the miracle, only in a different form. But when the religion is strong, you know that everyone around you believes the same stories, so you don’t need to defend them even to yourself. In this way, the balance between the two views varies over the course of history.

To take a more controversial miracle, the Virgin Birth – Mary, Jesus mother, was said to be a virgin who had not been with a man (in a sexual way). This continued at least until Jesus Christ was born. With this miracle, there are actually at least three facets. There is the miraculous display of divine power again, but there is also the whole “Son of God” thing, as it is important to most Christians that Jesus was literally the son of God and not literally son of man. I’ll not touch that with any shorter pole than this. But I’ll touch the esoteric meaning in our own life: That the new, divine life within us depends on there not being any other possible father. When the new life begins to show, it is important that we are not in a position where we can say: “Well, perhaps this is the power of God’s Word. Or perhaps it comes from the many self-help books I read during that time. Or perhaps it was because I got into money and moved to a better neighborhood.” If there are many such claims to fatherhood, there is no need for God to intervene and let his Word become flesh in us. This is why most Christian esoterists have first undergone a moral bankruptcy and exclaimed with the apostle: “For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, there is nothing good.”

If you look at the miracles in the Gospels, if you are an esoteric Christian you will find that they all are signs, symbols of something important to our life today. But there is no reason to think that they were meant to be only symbols. If they were, Jesus could have simply told them as a parable: “The kingdom of Heaven is like unto a wedding where they ran out of wine…” But there is no such parable. Those who wrote down the gospels, supposedly around the time the first generation of Christians began to die out, firmly believed that the miracle actually happened.

And that is probably a good thing. Because it is not really so that the inward application of the miracle is something we can easily do by ourselves. Even today, it is a miracle every time.

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Do you have a religion and want to talk about its miracles? Feel free to add your comments!

What we tend to forget is that in the end we stand as naked souls before the overwhelming Light, and there is nothing else. And not only at the end of time, but fundamentally even now, all that we rely on here on Earth is just the overflowing Light coagulating for a brief time into the forms we find comfortingly familiar.

Those who are unfamiliar with religion, often perceive it as needlessly ascetic. It is as if religious people want everyone to suffer in this life, is the impression. Is it really necessary to suffer as much as possible in this life in order to have joy in the next? Is it so that the sum of suffering in one world equals the sum of joy in the other, in some kind of karmic equation?

That is not how it works, I would say. The best explanation of how I see it is actually by Johan Oscar Smith, a Christian here in Norway, who wrote this about a century ago. (Translation by me, although I believe it is possible to buy Johan Oscar Smith’s writings in English from Brunstad Christian Church.)

“The enemies of our inner life are the forces that will distract the mind by leading the attention outward. These enemies are therefore desires of all kinds, which seek to split the concentrated mind to make it attach to outward things, things that will perish. And just in this lies perdition, that what the heart relied on ceases to exist, whereas itself as eternal being is left with the emptiness, which ought to have been filled by God himself. For this reason it is now very important for God to get the mind away from everything outward, that which shall cease to exist, and turned inward toward the source of life, that which shall continue as the soul continues, so that joy and inexpressible delight can fill us beyond the era of mortality and into the unknown eternities.”

OK, lots of commas there, but I hope you see what he says. The reason why religion begs us to not get attached to outward things is that they are perishable, whereas we are not. That is a leap of faith indeed, for our bodies are more perishable than some of the things people attach to, such as houses or gold. So the basic question of religion is whether we have eternal life, at least potentially. If we don’t, then religion does not matter all that much. And neither does anything else, for everything is fleeting, everything is subject to change and eventually destruction. If this is so, the human awareness is a cruel joke played on us by chance, and animals are better off than we are.

But now we are created with an opening to eternity in our heart. Unlike our furry friends, our minds can travel the paths of time, and not merely the horizontal timeline that goes into the past and the future, but even the vertical line that connects Heaven and Earth. Because we believe this, we do not want the heart to rely on temporary things for its happiness. For these things come and go, but the soul itself is looking toward a time and place where none of these earthly things exist anymore. If they were our sole source of happiness, then perdition would be sure. Then the best we could hope for would be to be utterly annihilated along with the things we relied on. That is not much of a hope, but some have it.

But for those whose hope goes beyond that, it makes sense to avoid attachment. I do not mean avoid using the things of the world, but avoid basing our happiness on them. Chocolate tastes delicious, but it would be pretty sad if an adult were to base all his happiness on chocolate. For a toddler, chocolate is heaven. While he enjoys the chocolate, nothing else matters.* But once we are grown up, we cannot go back to that. We know that this small enjoyment, while true, is not enough. In the same way, when we grow up spiritually, we realize that the joys of the world are not enough. It is not so much that they are not real – they are real to our senses – but they are small and temporary.

(* From my childhood, I remember a vivid fantasy I entertained for some length of time, about being able to buy a whole kiosk full of chocolates and snacks. Now I might afford to buy something like that, but it would only make me sick.)

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There is a heresy called “gnosticism”, in which the religious person believes that the world is inherently sinful. The early Christian gnostics, for instance, insisted that Christ could not possibly have been incarnated, since bodies are sinful and not fitting for an awesome person like Christ. He must have just pretended to be in the flesh. Spirit is good, matter is bad, is the theory. But we do not say that. What we say is that spirit is eternal, matter is temporary. To hang onto matter and forsake spirit is to shorten our horizon dangerously. Even in this life, things fall away. As the Buddhists say, it is sure that we will lose our youth, our health, our material possessions, our friends and loved ones, and even our life. Either we will lose them over time, one after the other, or all at once. But we will lose them. The Buddha’s final words were reported such: “All things that have form, are subject to decay. Strive diligently!” Namely, for that which has no form and is not subject to decay.

Because of our natural tendencies or animal nature, we easily attach to things in this world even when we should know better. We have to correct ourselves. Well, most of us do, at least. It may be just a fairly innocent liking for something, but may grow into a fully grown attachment, which has the form “I cannot live without you”. When we say this in our heart to anything on Earth, anything that is limited in time, then we are attached, and we are in a sense already perished. For we will have to live without all such things, at some point, whether we want to or not. Or die trying, I guess, if God is merciful and powerful enough to simply obliterate us. There are some who believe that there is no eternal suffering, because God simply destroys those who are not saved, or rather he stops perpetuating them, stops giving them life. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe this. It is a very attractive theory, and I am not sure it is wrong. But as a hope, it is pretty bleak.

The opposite of saying to someone or something on Earth: “I cannot live without you”, is to say (as is said in the psalm): “Who have I besides you in Heaven? When I have you, I desire no one (or nothing) on Earth.” The saints have it this way. Death is not a big deal for them, since there is nothing on Earth, nothing temporary, that they particularly miss. Everything they wanted was in Heaven anyway, so once they have fulfilled their tenure on Earth, off they go with a smile.

I am not a saint exactly myself. I am pretty nervous about my own transition. I don’t look forward to making account for my wasted life. But on the other hand, I can think of nothing on Earth that fills my soul to the point where I think: “No, I cannot die from that! I cannot leave that! I must go back to that!”** It would be a sad note to end a life on, don’t you think? That is how I see perdition.

But I may be wrong. You see, you hear these funny voices, in the Tower of Song… 

(** When I was much, much younger than today, I remember worrying that Christ might return before Christmas, which I thought would be a real downer. In my defense, the Norwegian word for Christmas does not actually mention Christ.)