Eastern Religion for Western Gnostics

By Michael Faust

Is religion compatible with science? "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra famously attempted to draw parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. What Capra conspicuously avoided was any comparison between the Abrahamic religions and physics. These religions of faith have no scientific component.

The West has, in the last few hundred years, been the engine of scientific progress, yet the dominant religions of the West are anti-scientific. This has led to a damaging dichotomy in the Western mind.

Doesn’t the West have any enlightenment religions that might allow science and religion to find common ground? This book compares and contrasts the Gnostic religion of Illumination - the religion of the ancient secret society known as the Illuminati - with the main Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and suggests that all four religions can be brought together under one banner – Enlightenment – that may stand in united opposition to Abrahamism: knowledge against faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447888161

Michael Faust

Michael Faust invites you to explore the divine order, with its most astonishing secret - that you are part of it. You always have been. But you have forgotten. That's the nature of the created world - to make us forget that we are all the Creators. Isn't it time to remember who you truly are?

Book preview

Eastern Religion for Western Gnostics

Eastern Religion for Western Gnostics

by

Michael Faust

Published by Hyperreality Books

Copyright © Michael Faust 2011

The right of Michael Faust to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-4478-8816-1

Quotations

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere. -- Ali Ben Abu Taleb

We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all. -- Kalu Rinpoche

Table of Contents

Eastern Religion for Western Gnostics

Quotations

Table of Contents

The Illuminati

1) Hinduism

God’s Inner Struggle

What is Reincarnation?

What is Moksha?

The Dialectical Gods of Hinduism?

What is an Avatar?

What is Yoga?

What is the Hindu definition of God?

Why are there so many Gods in Hinduism?

The Evil of Karma

2) Buddhism

Anatman and Skandhas

Karma

Samsara

Nirvana

Twenty-Six Mansions of Heaven

The Four Noble Truths

Theravada and Mahayana

Dharma

Comparing and Contrasting Buddhism and Illumination

3) Taoism

Taoism as Illumination

Chinese Religion and Philosophy

Confucianism

Taoism

Wu-Wei (1)

Yin and Yang

The Tao

Ch’i

Conservation of sexual energy

Alchemy

The Afterlife

4) Shinto

5) Yoga

6) Tantra

7 ) Kamasutra

Samadhi

8) Zen Buddhism

Satori

Question: How does Satori – in Zen, a glimpse of Enlightenment – differ from Samadhi, Cosmic Consciousness in Zen?

How does Samadhi differ from Nirvana?

9) Sikhism

10) Jainism

Indra’s Net

The Illuminati

THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BOOKS outlining the religion, politics and philosophy of the ancient and controversial secret society known as the Illuminati, of which the Greek polymath Pythagoras was the first official Grand Master. The society exists to this day and the author is a member, working under a pseudonym.

The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the Demiurge; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.

If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his Chosen People, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the God of All entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then despatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s son, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.

Of course, the Chosen People of God have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?

Remember that this same God ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical believers.

Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.

Introduction

Is religion compatible with science? The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra famously attempted to draw parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. What Capra conspicuously avoided was any comparison between the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and physics. These religions of faith have no scientific component whatever. They stand in stark opposition to science. There is no middle ground, no compromise, and no basis for mutual understanding. This is a dialogue of the deaf. Neither listens to the other. But, as Capra showed so vividly, the enlightenment religions (as opposed to the faith religions) are potentially scientifically compatible.

The West has, in the last few hundred years, been the engine of scientific progress, yet the dominant religions of the West – the Abrahamic faiths – are unscientific and indeed anti-scientific. This has led to an extraordinary and damaging dichotomy in the Western mind. While science promotes atheistic materialism, religion tries to deny the findings of science or it engages in an illogical pretence that the incompatible statements of science and religion can somehow be reconciled or are complementary. It’s a kind of magic thinking or Orwellian doublethink where two contradictory ideas are held simultaneously.

But doesn’t the West have any enlightenment religions, the equivalent of the Eastern religions, that might allow science and religion to find common ground? In fact, it does, but you rarely hear about them because of the dominance of Abrahamism. The Western religions of enlightenment mostly exist only in fragments now, having suffered terminal persecution at the hands of Christians in particular.

The ancient Greek pagan religion of Orphism was an enlightenment religion as was Roman Mithraism and Celtic Druidism. Mixed in with Phoenician, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian and far-Eastern influences, they gave rise to the proliferation of sects known under the general term of Gnosticism (deriving from gnosis, the ancient Greek word for knowledge). For a time, Gnosticism provided a serious rival to Christianity and claimed to promote the authentic truth of Christianity. But the Catholic Church brooked no heretical rival and stamped out its enemy.

Gnosticism went underground and mutated into various esoteric forms such as alchemy (the forerunner of chemistry), Hermeticism, magic and the occult, and initiatory religious orders such as the Knights Templar (eventually condemned by the Catholic Church for heresy) and secret societies such as the Freemasons (condemned by the Pope as anti-Catholic).

The medieval religion of Catharism was Gnostic and met with the traditional response of the Catholic Church – it was savagely attacked by Catholic crusaders and ruthlessly subjected to the Inquisition until it was dead and buried.

The Illuminati secret society has kept the flame of Gnosticism alive down through the ages. Its particular version of Gnosticism is known as Illumination or Illuminism.

Now that Westerners are growing increasingly disillusioned with Abrahamic fanaticism and irrationality on the one hand and reductive, sterile, scientific materialism on the other, Gnosticism is ready to make a comeback.

So, what is Gnosticism? It is dedicated to the pursuit of the knowledge of the true nature of things, culminating in a transcendent, mystical epiphany where the Gnostic seeker understands everything and enters into direct communion with the Godhead, just as the followers of Eastern religions achieve union with the underlying, indefinable Oneness when they attain the state of enlightenment, called Moksha by Hindus, Nirvana by Buddhists and Tao by Taoists. The Hindus call the ultimate Oneness Brahman, the Buddhists Dharmakaya and the Taoists Tao (again).

Like the followers of Eastern religions, Gnostics are advocates of reincarnation, but they reject the linked doctrine of karma.

Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism teach that humans are victims of illusion and ignorance that blind them to the true nature of things. They will be reborn again and again until they learn to see.

Gnosticism likewise teaches that humanity is suffering from ignorance, which can only be overcome with the accumulation of advanced knowledge of how things truly are. The main source of ignorance is a being called the Demiurge (Satan) who is suffering from the greatest delusion of all – that he is God. His story is told in the Old Testament, but in the opposite manner to that espoused by the Abrahamist religions. He calls himself Yahweh (Jehovah), the Creator, but in fact he is a monster, and the author and source of evil. He must be resisted at all costs. He lures human souls into the material world then imprisons them there, and they must arduously gain the knowledge to escape to the kingdom of light where the True God resides and from which they originally came. They are fallen and lost, and now they must find themselves and rise to return home.

Illumination, the religion of the Illuminati, converts these ideas into an integrated set of highly scientific, mathematical, philosophical and psychological statements that constitute a Grand Theory of Everything and permit a complete reconciliation between religion and science based on a self-actualising, dialectical God of Evolution.

The True God does not create the universe. On the contrary, the universe creates him. He is the maximum expression of cosmic potential. Anything not forbidden is compulsory, say particle physicists. It is not forbidden for the cosmos to arrive at an evolutionary apex, hence, according to this logic, it is compulsory. This Omega Point of cosmic evolution is God.

Other books in this series deal with the scientific, mathematical and philosophical basis of Illuminism. The point of the present book is to compare and contrast Gnostic Illuminism with the main Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and to suggest that all four religions can be brought together under one banner – Enlightenment – that may stand in united opposition to Abrahamism: knowledge against faith. Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism may be criticised on numerous levels, but they nevertheless contain a powerful kernel of truth, one that is rendered with Western clarity and rigour by Illuminism.

1) Hinduism

An astonishing truth of our world is that most followers of religion have no true understanding of what it is they claim to believe. If the average Christian were drawn into a debate about the numerous ancient heresies that were stamped out one by one by the Church, he would almost certainly discover that he himself was heretical. Why? Because the heresies provided logical and devastating critiques of the central tenets of Christian theology and were never refuted in any credible manner.

A couple of examples will suffice. The Arian heresy declared that God the Son could not be the same as God the Father because, by definition, a father precedes a son. Leaving out science fiction time paradoxes, there is only one situation in which the father does not come before the son: in the Christian concept of the Trinity.

Arius was never disproved: he was simply outvoted at the Council of Nicaea, which was held for the purpose of establishing Christian orthodoxy. However, if God the Son died