Christian Yoga - Love God with All Your Strength and Your Neighbor as Yourself: The Gospels Enlightened - for Me

By Harry Holloway

THREE GREAT THINKERS HAVE PROPOUNDED
THE FOLLOWING:-
DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS PROPOUNDED THE CONCEPT OF THERE BEING
ONE SPIRIT BEHIND EACH RELIGION WHICH HE CALLED,
THE UNIVERSAL MAN.
TEILLHARD DE CHARDIN HAD A VISION OF THE MAIN STREAMS
OF THE MAJOR RELIGIONS COMING TOGETHER, COALESCING
INTO ONE, IN THE COURSE OF TIME.
TOLSTOY SPEAKS OF WHAT COMES FROM GOD AS RAIN FALLING ON A
ROOF. WHAT COMES FROM THE SEPARATE GUTTERS
AROUND THE ROOF BEING THE VARIUS VERSIONS GIVEN
BY THE MAJOR RELIGIONS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462810192

Harry Holloway

Harry Holloway, an Australian/British Quaker, from being involved in high technology in Western Industry came to realize the perils this posed to the planet and tried to raise awareness. He also applied efforts explaining the economic system to those of the poor impoverished by it. In the process over years in India, many interpretations of phrases and parts of the Gospels came to him. Some are no doubt not new to many persons, but a few of those interpretations recorded here, may possibly be useful. The highly speculative later imaginings might encourage contemplation on future development. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published:- “Chains” by H. Holloway - a treatise for villagers to understand how the economic system affects them. “Yoga of Compassion to Others” - a translation from the Tamil of St Ramalingam’s Philosophy - by Professor J. Pragasam M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D., assisted by H. Holloway.

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CHRISTIAN YOGA—Love God With All Your Strength and Your Neighbor

as Yourself

The Gospels ENLIGHTENED—For Me

Harry Holloway

Copyright © 2009 by Harry Holloway.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Foreword

Appendix Introduction To Bede Griffiths

Introduction

Prologue

Part i)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part ii)

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part iii)

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part iv)

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part (v)

Chapter 20

Part (vi)

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Part (vii)

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Appendix Yoga Of Compassion To Others

Appendix To Yoga Of Compassion To Others

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Dedicated to

Our Inner Teacher God/Christ

&

The Memory of

Dom Bede Griffiths[1]

To the memory of my Parents,

struggling in near poverty but

instilling valuable characteristics in me

which have served me well in life.

NOTE:-

Abhishiktananda gave up the embryo Ashram he had started, leaving Dom Bede Griffiths to continue its development. They now lie in graves alongside one another at Anand Ashram, Shantivanam. (See Bede Griffiths by Peter Spink in Appendix)

When he (Abhishiktanada) sacrificed everything at the Ashram to go on a Hindu pilgrimage along and up the Ganges to its source, he said I am committed to life in the way of Christ, yet I am convinced the Hindu commitment to searching for God within is a fundamental truth. A bridge is needed between the two.

A Pointer:-

Extract from Contemplating Creation—Jyotibhai’s Journal

"At one time I had heard that voice as I dwelt in the midst of confusion and I had undertaken a long, long journey in search of its author. It would be hard to say what that voice had meant to me at that time, but it had come as a challenge to go deeper, to see if there was a different way of being in the world. I could hear that this voice arose out of a certain inner silence, and so I had become silent too, and in that silence I saw that a lot of what I was accustomed to thinking was on the outside, was actually on the inside. It was the first insight, the first veil of illusion had been drawn back. It was such a revelation to get even a little way beneath the surface, and such a joy, that I wanted to dig deeper, to find out more. It was the first step on the path of self-discovery.

from the very beginning it has now become clear

there was a force working giving form to matter

the simple became complex without losing simplicity

the part is of the whole and the whole is in the part

consciousness was also there it was waiting to appear

and in man it has finally come to know of itself

but for quite some time now we have sought to explain

the higher by the lower all things brought back to earth

in the very near future there will be a collapse

but out of that will come a new way of living

for in the world of today there is a change going on

and people are rediscovering what we all once knew

all religions have taught it in their different ways

each one has revealed an aspect of the truth

but now the inner the outer both the male and female

the rational and intuitive must be brought into harmony

to reach our full potential we have to leave division

and enter into the unity that underlies all reality

there nothing will be lost we will have found ourselves

and be in total communion with the incommunicable

everybody has this capacity to reach beyond themselves

and in the age to come we may rise to new life

let us now offer prayer for the grace of the spirit

to guide each one of us to the fulfillment of life"

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.—Romans 12:2 NRSV

The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls, are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though divers liveries they wear here, make them strangers.

William Penn.

Do you work gladly with other religious groups in the pursuit of common goals? While remaining faithful to insights of your religion, do you try to enter imaginatively into the life and witness of other communities of faith, creating together the bonds of friendship?

Advice—Quaker Advices And Queries.

The work of the Benedictine Monk, Dom Bede Griffiths, in South India,[2] bridging the gap between Christianity and Hinduism, developed over the decades, typified by his early book Marriage of East and West, was given the approval of Rome before his demise in 1991.

With many thanks to those who demonstrated love in action, in supporting me at numerous times in my travels, to those whose words, often spontaneous, have led me on to greater understanding, and to those who have enlightened me intentionally, I both thank, and look up to, for their dedication. This work has been edited for publishing by long time Friend and at times confidant, Cecil Bethell. I gratefully thank and am forever in his debt for that improvement in the script.

Foreword

Three great thinkers have propounded the following:-

Dom Bede Griffiths propounded the concept of there being one Spirit behind each religion which he called, The Universal Man.

Teillhard de Chardin had a vision of the main streams of the major religions coming together, coalescing into one, in the course of time.

Tolstoy speaks of what comes from God as rain falling on a roof. What comes from the separate gutters around the roof being the various versions given by the major religions.

The Gospels Enlightened—For Me tries to explore how such concepts work in the physical realm in which we exist.

Appendix "INTRODUCTION TO

Bede Griffiths"

The Universal Christ

DAILY READINGS WITH

BEDE GRIFFITHS

Introduced and edited by

Peter Spink

Note: Taken from The Universal Christ published and copyright 1964 by Darton Longman and Todd Ltd., London, and used by permission of the publishers.

Introduction

I first met Bede Griffiths on a bleak November day in the kitchen of a South London vicarage. It was an incongruous picture. Clad in his saffron robe this one-time Prinknash monk was inspecting the curry specialty prepared by the vicar’s wife for this distinguished visitor from India.

The meeting was brief. Nevertheless, in the halfhour shared together after the meal, we quickly found ourselves on common ground: India, where I too had spent some years as a missionary, and the ‘perennial philosophy’ which he passionately believed could be found at the heart of all the great religions.

For me this was, to say the least, a significant encounter, an affirmation of my own spiritual pilgrimage and ministry. I knew that we must meet again.

It was several years before this was to happen and this time in his monastery or ashram in southern India. In the meantime my daughter, who had been born in India, had written the biography of this Roman Catholic monk-cum-sanyasi and I had read and heard a great deal about his life and work.

Approaching the ashram for the first time one might be forgiven for mistaking it for a Hindu temple. Here there was no imposition of signs and symbols alien to the culture of India. The carvings of the temple tower were those of familiar Christian saints, yet their appearance was almost identical to that of the innumerable gods and goddesses that adorn a typical southern Indian temple.

The central act of daily worship at the ashram is the Mass, its outward form an expression through symbols familiar to every Hindu—fire, incense, holy water and oils. Yet the eucharistic action, the offering up of all creation to the Father through the Son was crystal clear. Without doubt this remarkable man’s lifelong struggle to bring about a ‘marriage of East and West’ had been achieved in worship. How had all this been achieved and what were the influences that had combined to give birth to this vision?

Alan Richard Griffiths, the youngest of four children, was born in December 1906 in the south of England. His father has been described as a ‘middle-class failed businessman’ who, having lost all his money, seems to have faded early into not very great significance in Alan’s life. By his own account, described in his book The Golden String, Alan received little or no religious instruction from his parents, who were respectable Church of England. Perhaps surprisingly, his father was very fond of singing the hymns of the then fashionable evangelists Sankey and Moody. But beyond the ethics inherent in a conventional English and Anglican background, formal religion appears to have played little part in Alan’s childhood.

An ever-probing mind wedded to a deep inner response to the mystery of creation led Alan during his adolescence at Christ’s Hospital into avid and wide reading. From Thomas Hardy he gleaned an acute awareness of the rhythm of nature and a sense of the tragedy of human existence. Coupled with his study of Greek classical tragedy this deepened a growing conviction that it is through tragedy that the deepest human values are revealed.

During his last term at Christ’s Hospital before going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, he had an experience so profound that he later spoke of this as one of the decisive events of his life. Walking alone in the country at sunset, his senses became acutely sharpened. The sound of birdsong came to him as he had never heard it before, a hawthorn tree, the sun setting over the playing-fields, a lark singing on the wing and the veil of dusk descending upon all, overwhelmed him with an ‘awful’ (aweful?) sense of the divine presence. That evening his consciousness had been awakened to another dimension of existence.

In the language of the nature mystic, the path of ‘extrovertive mysticism’ was opening up before him. Already it was becoming clear that what Hinduism describes as ‘God-realization’ was for him to be through an awareness of the divine reality behind the outer forms of creation. He was penetrating the mystery of the cosmos. Unconsciously at this stage he had found ‘the end of Blake’s Golden String’ . . .

I give you the end of a golden string. Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

At Oxford his mind feasted on the classics. At the same time he was intuitively drawn towards Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Blake. Through them his awareness of the inscrutable mystery behind nature was powerfully increased.

It is clear from his biography, The Golden String, that a two-way creative relationship developed between Alan and his tutor, C. S. Lewis. By this time Lewis had passed through atheism and had reached the stage of belief in a universal Spirit, though he would not yet call this Spirit God. It was a conception which appealed strongly to Alan and one which was for ever afterwards at the heart of his understanding of ultimate reality.

Conscious and personal faith in Christ was to come much later when he disciplined himself to ‘search the Scriptures’ in a systematic way. The day was soon to come when the Epistles of St. Paul with their insistence upon God’s love for us, God’s gift of love, were to speak directly to his heart, so bringing him to Christian faith and giving him a rationale for his inner journey. This step-by-step probing and praying, coupled with an underlying search for order in all things led him almost inexorably into the Roman Catholic Church and soon after into ordination and the life of the Benedictines. There through their monastic disciplines he became Father Bede. In 1955 began his momentous ministry in southern India.

Many of the visitors to my own community in England had visited the Saccidananda ashram, and during visits to Australia and New Zealand I found myself again and again asked the questions: ‘Do you know Bede Griffiths?’ and ‘What do you think of his books?’ The questioners came from a great variety of backgrounds: practicing Catholics; many who had left the Church and were seeking a way back which they could take with integrity; ‘New Age’ seekers and agnostics of every variety.

Clearly the ashram was not only a place of pilgrimage, particularly for the young of many countries, but a place where people representing a great diversity of beliefs were experiencing an essential unity in Christ. It was this which so strongly attracted me and clearly this was the magnetic pull which today draws thousands to this powerhouse of meditation and prayer in a remote part of southern India.

The whole atmosphere of the ashram, as in every place where prayer is the central activity, is that of ‘creative stillness’ where not even what in the West is called ‘spiritual reading’ is allowed to intrude. For although the ashram has an extensive library, in the centre set apart for meditation is a notice: ‘Reading is not permitted here’.

For over thirty years Bede Griffiths has laboured to communicate his understanding of the marriage of East and West which he has likened to the bringing together of the faculties of reason and intuition, the active and the passive, the male and the female. This is at the heart both of his spirituality and of his interpretation of Christianity through the myths and symbols of Hinduism.

What is this spirituality which has such a universal appeal today? It is perhaps important to begin with what it is not. Quite clearly it is not synchronistic, that is, an attempt to intermesh Christianity and Hinduism into one amorphous and in some way ‘super’ religion.

Never does Father Bede pretend that at the level of doctrine and belief, there are not very great differences between Hinduism and Christianity. Indeed, he believes fervently in the necessity of the growth of understanding between the religions, and has himself spent much time and energy in advancing the cause of interfaith dialogue. Yet he is equally clear that this is not the level at which real unity is to be discovered. And here the word ‘discovered’ is important for Bede’s understanding. For the unity which has preoccupied his thinking and energized his ministry is that unity which the mystics of all religions have always known, and shared. It is the unity of the opened heart.

What comes through with great clarity from all his writings is that diversity and division exist and, will always exist at the level of beliefs but that experientially, in the knowledge of the heart, we find a profound sharing in the mystery of godliness.

His perspectives are those of a new ecumenism where the discovery of oneness is the same in kind as that discovered by ‘divided’ Christians when less than half a century ago they began to pray together.

Bede has no doubt that this unity is ‘Christcentred’ and it is here that his understanding of the Cosmic Christ is so important. There is certainly nothing ‘heretical’ nor even novel about this. It is thoroughly Pauline and biblical. Writing to the Christians at Corinth, St. Paul refers to the super-natural food and drink which the Israelites found in the wilderness.

This food and drink he declared ‘was Christ’ (I Corinthians 11). So whilst he sees Christ as perfectly revealed in Jesus and takes no issue with orthodox definitions of Christology, he is equally insistent that this same Christ is active at every stage of history and in the hearts of human beings, regardless of religious boundaries. The authentic signs of Christ’s presence are the fruits of the Spirit. This is the Christ who, as the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of the Christian revelation, embraces all time and space and gives meaning and purpose to all creation.

It is this recognition of the Christ who ‘fills all things’ which gives Bede such a powerful rapport with many young people who have clearly entered into a valid experience of the grace of God outside of the structures of the Christian Church in our day.

In this sense Bede’s spirituality is very much a contemporary spirituality. For whilst it can be articulated and expressed without reservation in terms of the Christian faith it gives sympathetic expression to what has been described as ‘the new consciousness’ in religion.

What is this new consciousness? Today there is much evidence in the Western world of a new awakening to that which Hinduism has always emphasized: the divine Immanence or indwelling. In Christian terms this may be seen as a consciousness of the indwelling Christ, so central to the Pauline Epistles yet so absent in any developed form of traditional Christian spirituality in the West.

The spirituality which emerges clearly through Bede’s writings hinges all the time on this indwelling of the Divine. Yet this is not an isolated nor individual God-consciousness. Bede sees it not only in relationship to the human being but in all creation. Yet this is much more than the current ecological concern which, clothed in a religious dress, is often incorrectly described as creation spirituality. For Bede creation is never an end in itself. All creation is shot through with consciousness. Furthermore this consciousness which is always evolving finds its apex in the human being. Here he relates closely to the Indian philosopher Shri Aurobindo and to the Jesuit priest-scientist Teilhard de Chardin.

For Bede ‘the Body of Christ’ can never be confined to the visible Church, still less to one ecclesiastical tradition. Neither can it be thought of as excluding all creation. ‘Every religion’, he declares, ‘has contributed to its growth.’ It is constituted of all those who, in the language of Hinduism, have in some measure ‘realized the Self’ within the depths of their being.

In this bringing together of the Hindu experience of God’s Immanence and the revealed Christian ‘mystery’ of the Christ within, who, declares St. Paul, is our ‘hope of glory’, Bede sees both as relating to the true Self. This is the one Self which may be described as the Cosmic Being or Man. Its final manifestation is the parousia or ‘second coming’ of Christ.

Like many pioneers and prophets before him Bede has suffered misunderstanding and calumny from those elements within the Church who have felt fearful and threatened by his insistence upon a Christ who ‘fills all things’. His ministry has the hallmark of one who at whatever cost has followed the path which the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, has opened before him. For him it may be said ‘there are no boundaries, only horizons’.

In this breadth of vision and comprehension Bede is aware of great movements of convergence. Science, mysticism, the holistic movement within Western medicine and the awakening concern for the future of the planet: all these constitute essential elements of his spiritual perceptions. He frequently refers to ‘a new vision of reality’ which is now manifesting itself in Western physics, where the mechanistic view of creation as perceived by Newton is giving way to a creation seen as one organic whole, and where increasingly it is recognized that the scientist himself as the observer must be taken into account if we are to understand the nature of what is being observed. So the mystical awareness that ‘the observed and the observer are one’ is now finding an affirmation (albeit reluctant) from within the scientific disciplines.

Yet with all this breadth of vision and depth of insight Bede is ever a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church into which he was received over fifty years ago. The Benedictine monastic tradition operates deep within his psyche and it is from the foundation of a thorough training in philosophy and theology that his ever-probing and speculative mind continues to inquire.

Undoubtedly it is this combination of deep roots and openness of mind and heart, which at eighty-three gives Father Bede Griffiths such a strong appeal to the young who still pour into his ashram from the Western world. Yet in spite of his own deep appreciation of and indebtedness to Hindu philosophy and spirituality, he is quite clear the the way forward for those ‘searchers after God’ is to return to the West and there in the context (of) their own history and culture to work out and apply the deep insights they have gained into nature of truth.

Father Bede has no time for those uncritical imitations of Hinduism, the adopting of forms and rituals which so characterized much of the pseudo-spirituality of the young in the 1960s and 1970’s. His is no easy spirituality. For him God-consciousness, self-realization, a Christ-centred life are the fruits of disciplines continuously practised. Yet these disciplines must never be the imposition of an asceticism which smothers and represses the emotional and psychic elements which are all part of a fully developed human being.

Human beings are tripartite, that is, body, soul and spirit. No philosophy of life which fails to take all these dimensions into account is adequate for human beings, whether Eastern or Western, if they are to evolve to their full potential at the end of the twentieth century.

Now into his eighties, Bede travels little. He does not expect to leave India again. The dynamism which has operated so manifestly through his dedication to the marriage of East and West is undiminished, for it relates powerfully to the questions which are being posed so widely today.

Father Bede stands at a point of intersection between the old and the new, between East and West, between the deposit of faith as received by the Roman Catholic Church and the essential unity of all mystics. His message transcends all boundaries of culture and religion. It is that of ‘knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection’.

PETER SPINK

Prologue

The Experiences giving rise to this work are not fiction, they actually occurred, no matter how this work is classified. The earlier part consists of these experiences together with interpretations to which I felt led. There are then numbers of existing ideas, some even marginal, included because they seem to make a whole. Persevering with this writing of experiences arising, was later somewhat confirmed by a reading from Our daily Bread:-

Our Daily Bread is a small booklet, giving a Bible reading for each day, encouraging all using it to contemplate the same Bible reading on any one day. This extract from the reading was encouraging one not to give up because of being a Senior.

[From Psalm 92:-

"The righteous will flourish like a palm tree,

they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon;

planted in the house of the Lord,

they will flourish in the the courts of our God.

They will still bear fruits in old age,

they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming,

"The Lord is upright, he is my Rock

and there is no wickedness in him."

A familiar saying goes something like this: Old age is a matter of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Each of us have a responsibility to God, as long as He gives us physical and mental strength, to work heartily as to the Lord (Colossians 3:23). We are never called to retire from life and coast home to heaven.

The psalmist said that the righteous shall still bear fruit in old age (Psalm 92:14). For