Xpiritual: Subliminal Messages in Spirituality

By Rabbi Nilton Bonder

Xpiritual is a book on a pagan controversy of our days.
Disguised as the craze for spiritual secrets what we see today is the revival of an age-old polemic: living with the hidden versus the need to seize what is hidden. Surreptitious as the glance of Lots wife, the search for secrets is the denial of the hidden and the emotional territory of the subliminal and privilege.
Equating sacred and [the search for] secrets as antonyms, Rabbi Bonder exposes forms of fetishism and idolatry in the mind-set of consumerism and individualism. This neo-spirituality is portrayed as pornographic in essence given it is based on the abuse of image and self-absortion.
Paganism is the attitude of affirming self-value by means of anthropocentric strategies that always rely either on rationalism or the esoteric. The former is manifest by indulging in self-justification and self-validation and the latter on subliminal ego messages infiltrated in the realm of the sacred.
Xpiritual is the presentation of simple and age-old wisdom with a renewed inspiration for the spiritual quest of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426938597

Rabbi Nilton Bonder

Rabbi Nilton Bonder was trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and lectures regularly in the United States. Born in Brazil, he is a best-selling author of eighteen books in Latin America. He leads one of Brazil’s most influential Jewish congregations and is active in civil rights and ecological causes.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Sacred vs. Secret

Secret of Secrets

I. You are not special

The true law of the universe

Blessings and curses

Magic and the subliminal

An adulterated God

Desire and the loss of gifts

Like seeds in abundant waters

II. The best and the most ordinary

Avoiding traps

Tents and dwellings

The goal and the path

Isolating the Balaam virus

KaBaLa vs. BaLaK

III. You don’t want more

The vicious circle

How our consciousness works

Blocking ‘more’

Asking for things with the Expanded Mind

Quantum aspects of desire

The virus of productivity

IV. The Law of Traction

Distorting reality

Who is wise?

Who is powerful?

Who is rich?

Who is respected?

V. Me? No, you!

Introduction

Sacred vs. Secret

This book draws its inspiration from a new mythology that is now emerging.

It’s hard for us to perceive an allegory when it involves the days we’re actually living in. Hindsight makes it so much easier. When we look back at days gone by, we can readily spot the fantasies and myths of each age.

The individualism we have chosen as a way of life in the West has strengthened freedom at the price of anonymity. We are not our country, we are not our tribe, and we are not even our family. We are individuals with the right to expression and to independence. And as such, we have begun constructing theses about how we fit into this universe.

Nothing seems as appropriate to our times as the effort to build a cosmos that consumes. The idea that the universe is one huge capitalist supermarket designed to supply us with goods and to promote freedom and independence as well has come to play a central role.

Religions of the individual have been the main spiritual product of our times—religions based on canonizing not a group’s relation to the universe but a single individual’s relation to it. The focus of these religions is not on the future or on an affirmation of faith through collective survival but rather on the present and on whatever it can provide to advance individual survival beyond finitude.

Within this context, the idea of a ‘secret’ lends verbal expression to part of the post-modern imagination about the relation between mortal and immortal. The word ‘secret’ underlies among other things the West’s interest in spiritual practices from the East (meditation and body attentiveness), in Kabala and its revelation of the ominous and the mysterious, in healing practices that range from spiritism to obsession with herbs and modern potions, in presenting Satan as a personal poison that can be extracted through exorcism, and in salvation through fame and notoriety.

None of these practices or methods is new. But what has prompted their revival is quite new: the radical anonymity of our age and a need for transcendence.

Replacing the notion of sacred with the notion of ‘secret’ is a way of capturing the spiritual idiosyncrasies of our day.

The only word to be used solely and exclusively within religious and spiritual contexts is the word ‘sacred’. No other area of human thought employs this word. It does not belong to philosophy, sociology, literature, the sciences, psychology, or law. It literally means that something is set apart. If something is sacred, it lies outside and separate. Like transcendental oil, what is sacred neither dissolves nor blends into the mundane. As humans, we never experience the sacred within the routine or ordinary; it comes as something isolated and distinct from all the rest.

Our perception and celebration of the sacred allows us to access the immortal and find representation within it. Even though we are not immortal, the immortal runs through us. Its proximity suffices as a form of rescue, succor, and salvation.

Yet its nature is hidden. What is sacred does not intermingle with other things and cannot be contained. It crosses our path, and we always watch its back as it moves away from us. It never shows its face.

It is no accident that the word ‘secret’ is phonetically and semantically similar to ‘sacred’. The meaning of ‘secret’, however, is deceptive. Secret refers to something hidden that can be revealed. Perhaps we shouldn’t or can’t reveal it at a given moment, but any secret contains the potential for its revelation. A secret does not mean impossibility but rather the state of something hidden that has yet to be revealed.

In this sense, the sacred and the secret are antonyms. The former is by nature hidden; the latter is hidden but may be revealed.

In our days we have seen a revival of an age-old polemic: being content with what is hidden versus the need to seize what is hidden. As surreptitious as the glance of Lot’s wife, a secret is nothing else than that which everyone will tell anyway and it stands as a denial of the hidden. The secret is the emotional territory of betrayal and privilege.

Transported from the hidden, the secret is the desire for clarity, for the manifestation of what is not manifest. Cloaked in many different guises down through the ages, today this temptation takes the form of consumerism, capitalist ideas, and individualism. This is clearly a pagan controversy of our days.

Hence my motivation to tell an ancient secret with this book, a secret about the secret, one that re-imbues what is hidden with its sacred dimension.

Secret of Secrets

From time immemorial, we humans have believed in the existence of some secret or of some universal law that will let us enjoy wealth, power, wisdom, and success. Wealth to bring the body satisfaction through comfort and pleasure; power to ensure our wishes will come true; wisdom to guarantee our supremacy; and the success that tells the world just how special we are. In other words, we believe in a secret that accounts for how some paths lead to victory and others, to loss.

So we have seen the dissemination of myriad theories of myriad flavors, all promising access to the age-old desires of our human consciousness. However, even if we assume no ulterior motives lie behind these promises, such a secret becomes the ultimate virus. This secret is all you need in order to never have access to the true secret, to the sacred: the secret of the secret.

The big problem with any system of thought or consciousness is that it contains a disguised logic that really represents other interests, passed off as being in our own best interest. This is how viruses behave in our bodies. With its own interests at heart, this genetic material spreads throughout the infected individual’s organism, circumventing the cell’s most basic defense mechanisms. When the virus is let into our body’s most private system, it gains access to the code that defends the identity and integrity of our very being. Computer viruses work the same way, intelligently meshing with the system’s intrinsic logic and forcing it to carry out the wishes not of the user but of an enslaving interloper.

Nothing is more dangerous to human consciousness than a subliminal message, that is, a meaning that finds a crevice in our thoughts and blends in with our own discernment, to the extent that it can disguise reality and blind our sense of judgment. This virus is the ‘secret’; it camouflages us from ourselves and hinders our true access to well-being.

The secret is not the key to solving problems; it is actually the source of our problems and of the greatest misconceptions to which we fall prey when we try to understand life and the reality around us.

We need to discover that there is a secret for these ‘secrets’ and that the most hidden thing is what they are trying to hide. In some mystic cultures, this virus is called the I; in psychology it is called the Ego and in religion, Satan. Quite often the novice—the initiate in the art of what lies hidden—knows the secret, and herein lies the biggest of all traps. If this person doesn’t know the secret of the secret, she will hang on to this illusion for a long time, certain she has discovered something, when in fact her mistake has simply grown entrenched; confident she has cast light on something, when it really is darker now.

A Buddhist story tells of a beloved master who passes away. The unenlightened followers shed copious tears because they have lost their esteemed leader, but the novices who have access to the tradition (to the secret), do not cry. According to Buddhist tradition, the master is in a place of light, ready to

Reviews for Xpiritual

[Jesse Moreno · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Truly the book that has showed me the truth... I am humbled by this.