What The Masters Taught

Sunday Talk by Josh Reeves. Spiritual living sometimes requires that we realize there is a difference between what the great spiritual masters have taught and what their followers taught about them. From Jesus to Muhammad, from sutras to psalms, from The Tao Te Ching to The Bhagavad Gita, can we discern what the masters really taught?

When we reveal their wisest truths, they can help us reveal the highest of truths that reveal our best lives.

Transcript

It's great to be here with you this morning.

The topic today,

What the masters taught.

And we've been exploring a little summer school for the soul.

Last week I was able to introduce a little spiritual arithmetic.

And today,

If okay with you,

And it better be,

I'm gonna introduce some spiritual history.

If you're up for a little spiritual history.

If it's not working out for you,

You get bored,

Just go to sleep,

And it will tell me I need to go on a different track.

Our greater denomination is called new thought.

And I like to teach that there are three pillars to new thought.

The first is the one we've already been talking about,

This interfaith pillar.

This pillar of the golden thread.

That in our teaching we don't see religions as opposed to one another,

But a mix of wonderful perspectives that we need to see the world and our lives with wholeness.

The great Houston Smith said,

If we take the world's enduring religions at their best,

We discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.

Don't leave any of it out of your life.

Welcome it all in.

Challenging to do?

Yes,

But noble and helpful.

The second pillar of new thought I call the philosophical pillar.

And the individual who's most important to that is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

America's first great intellectual,

Lived in the 19th century,

Was a Unitarian minister,

Got married and his wife passed away at a very young age.

And it caused him to go deep within himself.

And in his grief and in his focus,

He developed a philosophy of individualism and self-reliance.

He developed a greater optimism and idealism for humankind.

And he developed a deep connection of experiencing God through nature.

His first great essay was entitled,

Nature,

And it swept the country.

So many people would have the Bible and Emerson's essays at their bedside during that time.

In the essay,

Nature,

He talked about something he called the transparent eyeball.

And people had fun with this.

There was a famous early comic strip of this transcendent eyeball that was published in newspapers.

Do you want to hear the passage where he talks about it?

Okay,

Good.

Emerson shared,

Crossing a bare common in snow puddles at twilight,

Under a clouded sky,

Without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune,

I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.

I am glad to the brink of fear.

There,

I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

No disgrace,

No calamity,

Which nature cannot repair.

Standing on the bare ground,

My head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,

All mean egotism vanishes.

I become a transparent eyeball.

I am nothing.

I see all.

The currents of the universal being circulate through me.

I am part or particle of God.

And I always said I don't have any tattoos,

But if I did,

I'm going with the transparent eyeball too.

The third pillar of new thought is the healing pillar.

And there's something else that's happening in 19th century America that's really profound and powerful.

And the first is this rediscovery and this interest in this thing called the human mind.

What is it and what does it do?

And so practitioners are practicing mesmerism and hypnotism.

And this guy Sigmund Freud is coming up with this term,

The unconscious.

It's this idea,

Can we make suggestions to ourselves to make our lives better?

At the same time,

There are mystical and profound and independent types of Christianity popping up.

And so there's this new focus on prayer and knowing the spiritual truth.

And so these two things kind of come together and the theory begins to be articulated by knowing the spiritual truth.

Can I have an effect on my mind?

Can I have a healing or well-being effect on my body?

Can I have a positive impact on my life and my relationships?

And all of this gets articulated as a profound spiritual tool that we call affirmative prayer.

If you find a depth of truth within yourself and know it with full faith and without doubt,

You can apply it to your body,

Your mind,

Your relationships,

And your living for greater healing,

Success,

And well-being.

That's our tool,

Affirmative prayer.

If you see a minister here for counseling,

If you visit with one of our prayer practitioners,

That's the tool,

Affirmative prayer.

Some people ask,

You know,

What's the difference between new thought and new age?

And it's this.

It's this idea that in new thought,

We practice affirmative prayer,

And in new age,

There's a plethora of things to explore.

Crystals,

Tarot cards,

Mediums,

Or psychics,

All sorts of things.

And in our philosophy,

We're open at the top,

So we're interested in all those things.

But I would just share with you,

If you ever think there's a power that's in something else that's not in you,

Or if someone tries to tell you they have a power that you don't have,

Get out of there.

Just get out of there.

That's how people misuse faith and become cults,

By controlling.

So we are discerning,

But we love the frontier of spirituality.

And if there was a founder of the new age movement,

It was a woman named Madame Blavatsky.

Doesn't that sound cool?

Madame Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky,

She was an immigrant from Russia.

She was short,

Stout.

She loved to roll her own cigarettes,

And she had these big,

Bulging blue eyes.

So my kind of woman.

And she was,

First and foremost,

A medium.

And during the Civil War and after,

That's where this thing called spiritualism really started to develop.

So many people had lost loved ones in the war,

And so mediums and psychics would create a plethora of all sorts of stuff to communicate with the dead.

And Blavatsky was very talented at it,

And at times would be exposed for her tricks,

Like tipping tables and things like that.

But she was also deeply mystical.

And I would argue that she's probably the first person that began to see the golden thread.

She saw wisdom in Hindu traditions and Buddhist traditions and developing American traditions,

And she began to encompass all of that into something she called theosophy.

And it still exists today,

But it was very influential.

It was influential on people like Arthur Conan Doyle,

Who wrote the Sherlock Holmes book,

Or Frank Baum,

Who wrote our great American myth,

The Wizard of Oz.

It has all sorts of Blavatskyian ideas in it.

After Blavatsky died,

A woman named Annie Besant took over,

And they created this spinoff called The Order of the Star.

It actually became the most important part of their faith.

And they were wanting to bring a new religion to America,

And they said,

No,

We need a messiah.

And so they kind of adopted these two young boys from India,

And one of them was named Jiddu Krishnamurti.

And Krishnamurti was raised to be this messiah.

And when he came of age,

And it was his time to give the first speech to the Order of the Star,

Do you know what he did?

He disbanded the religion.

He ended it right there,

And he shared a famous speech in spirituality that's called,

The Truth is a Pathless Land speech.

He shares,

I maintain that truth is a pathless land,

And you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever,

By any religion,

By any sect.

That is my point of view,

And I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally.

Truth being limitless,

Unconditioned,

Unapproachable by any path whatsoever cannot be organized,

Nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path.

This is no magnificent deed because I do not want followers,

And I mean this.

The moment you follow someone,

You cease to follow truth.

I am concerning myself with only one essential thing,

To set man free.

I desire to free him from all cages,

From all fears,

And not to found religions,

New sects,

Nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

And you can guess what all the people did,

They followed him anyways.

And Christian Murti went on to be one of the great spiritual masters and teachers of the last century.

A couple of things that statement says to me that speaks and leads us into the heart of our message today.

The first is that although we teach that there's many paths to God and we honor all religious faiths,

I think that your religion can inform your path,

But it shouldn't be your path.

Your religion should not necessarily be your faith,

But it should inform your faith.

Religion and spirituality are different in this sense that no matter what religion you are,

The question I really have for you around your spirituality is what's bringing you closer to God?

What in your life is bringing you closer to God?

What are you doing in your life that's allowing God to get closer to you,

In your heart,

In your mind,

In your relationships?

That's your path,

It's no one else's path.

And that's the wonder of the spiritual life is we can take our religion,

We can take the faith of our upbringing and apply the best of it,

But at some point it's all about you and the divine within you.

The other thing that Krishnamurti's comment gets me thinking about is the simple but important recognition that there is often a difference between what the masters taught and what their followers taught about them,

Right?

There's the religion of the masters and then there's the religions about them.

And the religions about them can be really wonderful things but they require discernment because when they're not conscious and they get caught up in that power thing,

The religion that they teach about the master actually contradicts and keeps you from what the actual master was trying to teach and to say.

It's so interesting when we look at the history of spirituality,

At some point humanity worshipped gods,

The gods of myth that we know,

Worshipped nature.

And at some point in history,

We began to find individual human spiritual teachers that embodied divine qualities with messages for all of humanity.

I'll show you another interesting slide here that will come up on the screen.

And it tells you of the teaching phases of not only these great teachers that inspired our great religions but great teachers who inspired the movements of philosophy.

This is the birth in so many ways of the modern church and the modern university.

And yes,

This spans about 1,

000 years but look at that from Lao Tzu to Jesus,

It's about 500 years.

How interesting is that,

That the teachers of our great faiths,

For the most part,

Came to exist in a very short span in the time of human history?

I wonder if the answer is that when the student was ready,

That the teacher finally appeared.

I sat on that until I realized we still ain't ready for what these great masters had to teach us.

But in a sense,

There are these wonderful demonstrations of human consciousness.

And they have so much to teach us,

Not contradictory to each other,

But layers of perspective for a whole life.

Socrates teaches us how to think.

Jesus teaches us how to love.

The Buddha teaches us how to be.

Lao Tzu teaches us how to live.

Socrates tells us that the diamond of life is wisdom.

And the way to receive wisdom is to admit that you don't know,

And to explore,

And to learn,

For the unexamined life is not worth living.

Jesus tells us that the diamond of life is the kingdom of heaven.

It's closeness with God.

And we experience it through loving God with all of our heart and by loving one another as if one another are ourselves,

Because guess what?

They are.

The Buddha teaches us that if you're living a full life,

There's going to be sorrow.

Attachment leads to suffering,

And all things change and are impermanent.

And the right response to that isn't control,

It isn't fear,

It isn't superficial joy.

It's compassion,

Compassion.

And compassion gives birth to greater awakening,

Mindfulness,

And enlightenment.

Lao Tzu teaches us to stop listening to people.

Don't shut me up.

And to start listening to nature.

Listen to nature.

Learn to think like nature.

Like my friend Harold Pratt says,

Think like a river.

And if you can follow nature's course in everything that you do,

You'll learn to live in trust,

You'll learn to live in flow,

And you'll learn to be your authentic self.

These teachings and perspectives don't contradict each other,

They add to one another.

What the masters taught help us to live greater and more profound lives in all that we do.

Rabia al-Basri,

A great female Sufi mystic of the 8th century,

Shares,

In my soul there is a temple,

A shrine,

A mosque,

A church where I kneel.

Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.

Is there not a region of love where the sovereignty is a lumined nothing?

Where ecstasy gets poured into itself and becomes lost?

Where the wing is fully alive but has no mind or body?

In my soul,

There is a temple,

A shrine,

A mosque,

A church that dissolve,

That dissolve in God.

The masters never point to themselves.

One thing they all have in common is none of them point to themselves and say,

Worship me,

I'm the one.

Jesus says,

I am the way,

I am the truth,

I am the life.

But in my opinion,

He's speaking from a place of at-one-ment with the Father.

None of the masters point at themselves,

Their followers do and build religions around them and that's fine.

But ultimately,

The masters point right back to you and say,

There is a divinity and there is a good that you can nurture and realize.

And they're not here to be exceptions but examples for us to live greater and more profound lives.

Most of these masters did not mean to start churches because they knew the exclusive aspect that can come with those.

They wanted their teachings to be for everyone,

Universal for everyone.

There's two very similar stories about the Buddha and Jesus that involve these masters encountering women at wells.

The Buddha one day encounters a woman at a well and asks her for a drink of water.

And the woman replies,

You cannot ask me for a drink of water because I am an untouchable.

I am of the lower caste and I am not allowed to serve you drink.

And the Buddha replies to her,

I didn't ask you what caste you are,

I asked you for a drink of water.

What important message for the people of India and beyond to hear at that time that the truth,

The living water is for everyone.

Jesus encounters a woman at a well and also asks her for a drink.

And she shares,

Master,

You are a Judean and I am a Samaritan.

And a Samaritan for the Jews at the time wore like a lower caste.

I am not fit to serve you water.

And Jesus not only asked for water but he shares with her that he wants to share the living waters of spiritual life.

What an important message that the teaching isn't for some,

It's not for an elite,

It's for everyone.

And the better spiritual life is defined by each of us who can embody that teaching and make it manifest in all of our days.

All of the great spiritual masters speak of a higher intelligence.

God,

Father,

Buddha nature,

Tao,

Spirit,

Infinite mind.

All the great masters speak to us that the purpose of the individual is freedom,

Liberation,

The ability to live one's magnificent life.

All of the great spiritual masters tell us of the spiritual importance of being of service.

The power of serving a cause greater than yourself,

Especially in community.

It's only when we let go of our selfishness in the acts of being of service that we discover and experience who we really are.

Relationships reveal to us who we really are and when we practice humility in our service,

We experience and let that divinity get closer to who we are.

In the Bhagavad Gita,

The great spiritual work of Hinduism,

We read,

If you cannot shake yourself free from the fever of the ego,

You will become a curse on the face of the earth.

But if you can turn your back upon your own pleasure,

Profit and prestige,

And devote yourself to enriching your family,

Community,

And world,

You will become a great blessing to all.

And what Ernest Holmes,

Our founder,

Figured out is that in being willing to be a blessing to all,

You receive all the great blessings of life.

That you don't do it for,

But the byproduct of that service is greater health and well-being,

Greater prosperity,

Greater love,

A greater closeness with spirit.

Lose yourself wonderfully in the practice of service and in kindness to others.

The great spiritual masters teach us as well not to fear death.

All the great spiritual masters tell us not to fear death.

Do they have different understandings of what may or may not happen when we die?

Yes.

Jesus says that in my father's house,

There are many mansions,

Or in a recent translation,

I really love this,

In my father's house,

There are many places to rest.

Socrates,

Almost his last words to his students before being put to death,

He said,

And so I go,

I to die and you to live,

But which of us is on to better things?

God only knows.

Lausa says,

Live until you die,

And that's long enough.

In other words,

Don't worry about it.

And so we have some people who teach that our soul goes on into upper echelons of being.

We have some masters who teach that your individuality goes away and you become one with nature or the Godhead.

There are some spiritual masters that teach that we come back to this life over and over until it finally gets to us,

Until we finally learn.

Our founder,

Ernest Holmes,

Didn't speculate a lot about the afterlife,

But he believed in the power of the individual soul and he believed that we evolved and evolved into greater levels of being and becoming.

And it's perhaps best described in his what we believe statement,

Which if I can find it,

I would read it to you proudly here.

He shares,

We believe in the individualization of the spirit in us and that all people are individualizations of the one spirit.

We believe in the eternality,

The immortality,

And the continuity of the individual soul forever and ever expanding.

We believe the ultimate goal of life to be a complete freedom from all discord of every nature and that this goal is sure to be attained by all.

Words from a great spiritual master.

I know there's something contradictory in me giving a talk about what the masters taught and to beware those who are telling you what they taught.

Nonetheless,

I've tried to distill some of that collective wisdom to come up with what for me would be a daily recipe for living a great life according to what the masters taught.

And the first thing is to commune with a greater intelligence.

Daily,

Commune with a greater intelligence.

So much the spiritual life is the simple but hard recognition that there is an intelligence smarter than we are and that it can have an impact on our consciousness and on our life.

You get to choose what this looks like for you.

Does it look like prayer and meditation every day?

Does it look like hanging out in nature until you catch and feel yourself a part of that transparent eyeball?

Does it mean surrounding yourself with art that expands your consciousness,

Be it through music or reading or writing?

Whatever it is for you,

Every day,

Commune with a higher intelligence and see if you can allow it to commune with you as well.

Second,

Back to that idea of being of service.

I would put it in a different way too,

Be in community.

Be in community and be of service to others.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge in our society today.

And we hear about it all the time.

We read,

Have you read in the back of the papers,

The pandemic of loneliness.

Too many people,

Sometimes people we love,

They've unintentionally cultivated a consciousness of apathy and of isolation,

Disconnecting themselves from the world and therefore disconnecting themselves from their true self.

And we see how it shows up in our politic,

In our ramblings on social media,

In our them,

Their type of consciousness.

And so we want to end that apathy.

We want to end that isolation by being in community even with people that annoy you.

I don't know how many of those people are here at Mile High Church,

But I think that's an essential part of what Mile High Church is.

We're a place to be with other people,

People that are different than we are,

People that are like-hearted but not like-minded.

And we get to speak our truth and grow and become better because of it.

And whether you're right here in Lakewood or somewhere across the country or even in the world,

Find community somewhere.

Or at the very least,

As you're practicing your day-to-day life,

Make kindness your essential spiritual practice.

Be kind to someone to let them know that you see who they are as more value than the service that they're doing for you in that moment.

Be kind enough to pause and make the person in front of you more important than where it is that you're trying to go.

And when we practice this kindness,

It creates the ripples that all the great masters teach us that help bring forth a sense of unity,

Of charity,

Of well-being,

And peace and sanctuary for all.

This is something all of us can participate in.

Third,

A recipe for a daily life from what the masters teach us is to experience your whole life today.

You don't have to wait for an afterlife to have a sense of eternity in your everyday life today.

Too many people,

When it comes to spirituality,

They practice a check is in the mail type of consciousness.

It's going to come in one day,

And then I'll be happy,

And then I'll be thriving,

And then all my relationships will work.

No,

It's all already there,

The beauty,

The richness,

The well-being,

The whispers of truth left over from the master still reverberating in the air and in our genes and in the world today,

If we can just listen.

Every day,

Ask yourself,

Did I have that moment of awe,

That moment of reverence,

Where I experienced the whole of my life in a single moment?

And lastly,

Forgive everyone.

I'm even going to add to it,

Forgive everything.

All the great spiritual masters point out that blame will not add an hour to your life,

That judgment does nothing to the person that you're judging,

Only limits and inhibits your own being.

The SOB may be an SOB,

And you may have to spend every day for the rest of your life forgiving that SOB.

But your forgiveness at heart has nothing to do with the SOB.

SOB,

I'll say it one more time,

And then I'll end it,

Ken.

Daily forgiveness is about releasing anything that's keeping you from living your whole life.

It's about releasing anything that's keeping you from being your authentic and true self.

It's about releasing anything that's holding you back into living fully this day and tomorrow.

How do we do it?

We simply remember our values and the truth of who we are and why we're here.

We do a ritual to let things go,

Whether it's something major that happened to us a long time,

Or just an unpleasant word from someone we encountered,

Or a mistake that we made ourselves.

We release it,

And we get back to now.

And that's what forgiveness is,

And it's what helps us move forward to live that thriving life.

To close with a final word from Krishnamurti as we move into affirmative prayer today.

Those who really desire to understand,

Who are looking to find that which is eternal without beginning and without an end,

Will walk together with a greater intensity,

Will be a danger to everything that is unessential,

To unrealities,

To shadows,

And they will concentrate.

They will become the flame because they understand such a body we must create,

And that is my purpose.

So I'm inviting any of our wonderful prayer practitioners to stand if they so choose.

And for those in our Teal Sanctuary,

These incredible beings are here to speak a word of affirmative prayer with you today to uplift your life and your being.

And I,

Again,

Call us back into question,

What is bringing me closer to God?

Is it an activity?

Is it a way of listening?

Is it a way of helping someone else?

And ask again as well,

What am I doing that is allowing God to come closer to me,

To remember our at-one-ment,

And that I do not walk my path alone,

But I am surrounded by a spiritual power that the masters did not invent,

But cultivated and brought forth with a level of clarity and articulation that is available for me today to embody.

I embrace the spiritual life that the masters taught.

And as I live that life,

Their message continues to teach me.

And what I know to be true of all of us is there's a little bit of mastery in you and in me,

A little bit of mastery all within us that we can approach not with arrogance,

But with humility to allow ourselves to also be messengers of a divine truth.

What is that message of divine truth that Spirit wants us to hear today?

About who you are,

About who you love,

About who loves you,

About who you are called to be and become,

And to call yourself into a divine self-acceptance,

Perhaps like never before in this very moment,

To love yourself as you are,

Whole,

Even in feelings of incompleteness.

We allow the Spirit to rise upon us.

We allow it to be a gift to those we love around us,

And we do not hide it,

But we share it with that grand light that reminds us of the real truth of life and our oneness with one another.

And so it is.