[Eventually this will expand to a larger section of posts — there must be a few fairly detailed posts that essay on the thesis of this blog, which is “What Makes Seekers Different?”
But since I learn as I go, and I get bogged down and inertial if I try to do complex posts at the outset, I’m just going to list below the general characteristics of the religious and seeker types. One day I’ll come back in here and put those detailed essays up.]
The first order of business here is to identify the traits that mark those who are religious and those who are seekers. These are “ideal types” and no individual can ever express either state fully – but they allow us the opportunity to build a model of contrasts which in turn facilitates the dictum “know thyself.”
• NATURE OF GOD.
» Religious. God is external to the self, and to the world. A transcendent God who requires obedience.
» Seeker. Panentheistic; literally “all is in God.” This is communion with an immanent Divinity. What is sought is reconciliation with the Divine.
• IDENTITY.
» Religious. The religious take their identity from their participation in a group of allied individuals. Conformity is key to maintaining group affiliation.
» Seeker. Seekers base identity in autonomous self-determination and the understanding that all individuals are unique, infinite and possessed of their own Ground of Being. The early process of seeking is non-conformist, breaking ties with authority figures and institutions.
• ETHICS: IN GENERAL
» Religious. Ethics are based in exclusion; you are either in-group or out-group. As out-group you are rejected as imperfect, to varying degrees.
» Seeker. Ethics are based in acceptance, tolerance and inclusion; there is no out-group. Even those that reject the seeker must be accepted.
• ETHICS: IN THE WORLD.
» Religious. Participation in the world requires imposing God’s will, however defined, on the natural environment and its inhabitants. Here, the ends will justify most means.
» Seeker. Participation in the world requires the seeker to test the actions of oneself in the world, even against the world. But participation is defined as a process of gaining experience, and the testing of the self is based in means as all-important and ends as rarely considered.
• CONSCIENCE.
» Religious. Conscience is defined by adherence to “the law” or defined moral code.
» Seeker. Conscience rises out of the internally autonomous self, through listening to the Ground of Being, acting in concert with seeker ethics.
• TEXT.
» Religious. Scripture is understood in terms reinforcing the nature of separation of self from God. It is also interpreted in a way that upholds the authority of the institution.
» Seeker. Scripture is taken allegorically. Teachings as metaphor (or paradox) defeat the rational mind and open up the intuitive self. This in turn breaks down inner barriers to accessing one’s Ground of Being.
• DISTANCE TO GOD.
» Religious. An intercessor is often required to bridge the distance from the individual to God. This can be either an individual or a place.
» Seeker. For the seeker there is no bridge to the Divine, no intercessor. There is the realization that God was never separate and is, instead, always present with the self in the world.
• EVIL.
» Religious. Evil exists as a polarity to Good, also out of the world.
» Seeker. There is no evil; there are only the actions of individuals (and their allied groups) that rise out of fear (due to the estrangement of the self from God) rather than love.
• NEGATIVE EXPRESSION.
» Religious. Fear of death and damnation.
» Seeker. Anxiety based in guilt and meaninglessness.
• PERCEPTION.
» Religious. Mythic imagination.
» Seeker. Intuitive deduction.
These two states, religious and seeker, exist at different points along a continuum of existence. Weber suggests that the seeker is always the recessive potential of the more historically dominant religious sociological paradigm. Yet actual individuals, while they align in general with one type or the other, will to some degree exhibit traits of the opposite paradigm.
All posts that follow this one will rely on the reader understanding the distinct differences between the religious and the seeker as paradigmatic types. There are two other types in the full cycle of realization: the pre-religious and seekers who have achieved reconciliation with their Ground of Being, here listed as “united.” I use pre-religious rather than tribal because the latter is a word loaded with prejudicial baggage. As pre-religious, groups live in a world of magic and mystery, where the Divine exists both in the world and out of the world, can be interacted with, and manipulated by, specialists. The Divine has great power but little interest in humanity and so is not authoritative.
At the other end of the spectrum are those in the unity state. The thing that makes a seeker is that s/he is striving for reconciliation with his/her Ground of Being. Once this reconciliation is effected the individual understands that there is only one Ground upon which all being participates. This is the beginning of an advanced degree of mysticism and leads to unity with the Mind of God, or the Sufi state of fana, which is generally translated as annihilation, or Tillich’s idea of transparency to the ground of being. This blog is most concerned with the movement from religious to seeker states of being. The pre-religious will rarely be mentioned. The unity state will crop up from time to time, as in the posts on interpreting texts, if only to show how the seeker develops and why, as the seeker progresses, he/she begins to show some more unified traits. Each state of being leads to the next, no state exists that it does not build on what precedes it, and God is both alpha and omega in the process.
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Copyright 2012 by Kathryn Neall. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce this article in whole or part, in any form, without first obtaining written permission.
On The Path of the Adept 