I recently caught Rick Warren -
The Purpose Driven Life - on Anderson Cooper. God knows why I was watching 360 in the first place - Anderson is to journalism what Butterbean is to boxing.
OK, I'm kidding - sort of. Coop actually asked Rick a very revealing question about Joseph Campbell's notion of "following your bliss" and spiritual revelation through the inner path.
Despite millions of Buddhists monks, the Dalai Lamai, Thomas Merton, Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and aesthetics of all shapes and sizes, Mr. Warren believes that the
inner path is essentially crap - the outer journey is the only viable option in his world, the pursuit of a
concrete God somewhere in the universe and all the associated hoo-hah, which as led to thousands of years of Middle Eastern violence, Crusades, Inquisitions, oppression of women, condemnation of homosexuals and anything that happens to not coincide with whatever
GOD trip your on.
Personally, I consider the notion of God, if there is one, existing somewhere out there in the great expanse of the Universe as an idea as useless and antiquated as the concept of a flat earth. Not only do I feel such an entity doesn't correspond to a considerable amount of language used in Christian texts, the life-long work of Joseph Campbell revealed to us how many of the themes we associate with Christianity were rooted in far older traditions. The flood and Virgin Birth are two excellent examples of motifs which originated long before the Bible was written. Campbell was able to find the common threads that linked all the religions of the world. He showed us that when you started to peel back the layers of the onion, all of us - aetheists, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews - were part of a World tradition. He showed that the Divine had manifested itself throughout history and in a variety of cultures, and that only our rituals and semantics separated us - each of us wearing a different mask. He examined the inner path in The Hero of a Thousand Faces. An unbelievable work of scholarly wisdom. After reading it, I began to see how pursuit of the outer path and its actuation in the real world produced what seemed like an endless series of conflicts.
There is an Eastern saying that proclaims all rivers flow to the same ocean, which has always reminded me of that line from the Bible - in my father's mansion, their are many rooms.
Neo-cons hate this kind of talk. Borders on what they consider multi-culutralist bullshit.
But I'm not interested in what they think. So, what is it Kossacks - the inner way or the pursuit of God out there?