Most organized religions were formed during times when people were largely illiterate and lived simple lives. They often did not travel more than one hundred miles from where they were born and knew only those who lived in their small village or community. So spiritual teachers had to conceive of strategies to teach their sanghas (Sanskrit for spiritual community), explaining mysterious and abstruse concepts to simple labouring folk.
They devised ways of revealing mystic truths through ritual, fables and metaphors. Often the people in their religious fervour came to believe these fables to be literally true and embraced them in a fundamental, factual way. For example, the great teacher Christ, knowing that he was soon to be captured and executed by the powerful elite of his day, devised a way to consul his disciples. At the Last Supper ,he held up the bread which he was eating and said, in today’s terms, “Do not miss me when I am gone. Every time you eat, remember you are eating the All and I am part of the All.” He performed the same reminder with the wine which his gathering was drinking. This was a very powerful teaching metaphor which was not meant to be taken literally i.e. when we eat bread in a sacred way the bread turns into the flesh of a man who died two thousand years ago. But it is a profound universal truth that each time we eat, drink or even breathe; we are taking in the All. He demonstrated in a very concrete way the truth of the interconnectiveness of all being.
Many conflicts today in the religious world, not the spiritual world, stem from this identification with the metaphor. In Zen terms, the practitioners mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. Another lovely teaching metaphor! It behoves each one of us to seek for the truth beneath these metaphors, to see what lies beneath the exoteric teachings and experience the esoteric truth. Then religious conflicts would disappear.
Let’s not let a few pronouns and nouns get in the way of understanding each other! Religions give us a multitude of sometimes confusing metaphors. It is up to each individual to choose which metaphors are positive and using these as guides, strive to live as competent, spiritual, compassionate individuals.
Metaphors like to masquerade. Dionysus can become Christ, The Virgin Mary can become the Earth Mother, Lakshmi can become Green Tara. It is the next step in our evolution to unmask the metaphor and embrace the mystery behind these stories.
This is the wonder of our times.
Try This!
1) Take a religious story or personage from a tradition different from the one you were raised in. Or, if you were raised without religious catechism, take a metaphor from a tradition which fascinates you in some way.
2) Familiarize yourself with the full story of this metaphor. Research, ask people of that tradition to explain what it means to them. Study the similarities or differences to other religious figures or stories you know already.
3) Now for yourself, ponder, what is the universal meaning of this metaphor? Explore how it acts in your life. Embrace how you can expand its guidance within your being and daily life.
4) Now enjoy the beauty and illumination of the story.
