A Sort of Christmas Post.

I was thinking about the bit of Zen wisdom quoted earlier, and also about the definition of ‘contentment.’ The problem, it seems to me, is that humans define it as ‘having the things we want.’ That means we see it as an outcome of favourable external factors, rather than a self-contained state.

So what of the notion that God created a material version of itself in order to experience low vibrational pleasures? It would follow that the concomitant creation of the state of wanting would be essential to the exercise. It would also follow that the route back to the Universal Godhead, or whatever you want to call it, is to learn to stop wanting things – including contentment.

As I recall, the Gospels would have us believe that Jesus preached just such an ideal. It’s one of those bits of Christian doctrine, along with such things as turning the other cheek and the meek inheriting the earth, that most Christians conveniently choose to ignore. And it’s one of the reasons why I suspect that Jesus was actually preaching a radical new approach to spirituality based on Vedic principles, and that the subsequent dilution of his message into a mere Judaic heterodoxy augmented by the concept of Redemption has meant that two thousand years of Christianity has been completely missing what he was really trying to teach.

But at least some of the carols have nice tunes. And I’m as guilty of wanting things as anybody else.