LIFE AND TEACHING OF THE MASTERS OF THE FAR EAST

I just read “Life and teaching of the masters of the Far East” by Baird Thomas Spalding. The author claimed to have visited India and other parts of the Far East in 1894 and spent some years there studying under those he called “masters of the far east”. The book is a narration of his interactions with those alleged masters.

One fact stands out in my perception of the book. The various masters he was interacting with were really not talking about Oriental religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, as they should if they were oriental religionists, but about Christianity.

The masters were talking about Christianity and were supposedly actualizing what Jesus taught and did; they replicated most of the miracles that Jesus supposedly did, such as walk on water, feed many with a few loafs of bread, heal the sick, enter into locked rooms, travel long distances instantaneously.

What the masters of the far east were doing are what one would expect Christians to do if they, in fact, lived according to the promise made to them by Jesus; Jesus had told his disciples that they would do what he did and do even more but the fact is that they do not do so.

Spalding’s masters not only have lived hundreds if not thousands of years in human bodies but also did not physically die. Apparently, they so “perfected their bodies with their Christ consciousness” that their bodies did not have to die. Some of them simply disappeared to what Spalding called the Celestial Regions and from there occasionally manifest in our world to help teach us who are in the phenomenal world what we need to do to attain Christ consciousness; apparently, they came to teach Mr. Spalding and his visiting Western travelers in the far east what to do to attain Christ consciousness.

It should be noted that there is no evidence that Mr. Spalding ever went to India at the time he claimed to have travelled to India; empirical evidence shows that he was a mining engineer in Arizona and later lived in Alaska (during the years he claimed to be in India he was working in Alaska).

No one came and told people that he was a member of the party that Spalding supposedly travelled with; that is, no one corroborated his story.

Moreover, there is no map of the areas he claimed to have traveled to in the Himalayas; the places he claimed to have visited appear to be imaginary places, perhaps, they existed only in his imagination!

Spalding’s writing does not evince knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism and did not discuss them, as his masters would have discussed them if they were truly oriental spiritual teachers!

Apparently, Mr. Spalding was a writer who wrote about what we might call New Age perspective on Christianity and projected those ideas unto what he called masters of the far east.

Reading Spalding is like reading what one read in Christian Science, Unity Church and Religious Science literature; those written in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, around the time Spalding wrote (his volume one, of six volumes, of the masters of the Far East was published in 1924).

Does that make Spalding a fiction writer and a fraud? Not at all! He probably wanted to teach his new age version of Christianity and felt that the best way to make his case was to project his ideas into the heads of imaginary far-east religious masters.

If Spalding did not know that he was projecting his thoughts to imaginary characters he was dissociating from his thoughts and did not know that he did so.

There are psychological disorders where folks dissociate from their regular egos and project their ideas to alter egos, other characters and speak and write as those characters without knowing that they are doing so. This is called multiple personality disorder.

Perhaps, Spalding had a dissociative disorder or perhaps he consciously projected his religious wishes to make belief characters that he called masters of the Far East. I have no way of ascertaining the difference for the man died a long time ago.

Spalding (his views projected into one of his masters) talked about Jesus’ resurrection from death. He said that Jesus had, while alive on earth, perfected his Christ consciousness so that he would no longer die; he now lived as a spiritual body. But instead of disappearing from the world he wanted to teach people that their bodies do not die and that there is everlasting life.

Indeed, God is in our minds. God is our highest self; the Holy Spirit is the part of our minds that act from our highest self; the ego is our lower self, the part of us that operate in the world of separated selves and does what it has to do to survive in it.

The point is that whether we are talking about God, Holy Spirit or ego we are talking about our own ideas about those supposed entities and ought to accept whatever we say as our thoughts and not deny them and project them to so-called others outside us.

Psychics play the game of denying their thoughts and projecting them to seeming disembodied spirits. Psychics are usually folks (most of them are women) with unique ideas on spirituality but do not want to take ownership of their ideas. Instead, they dissociate from their own thoughts and project them to what they call disembodied spirits, angels and spirit guides. They proceed to state their version of truth as if the so called spirit guides are doing so for them.

Psychics are not courageous enough to take ownership of their thoughts, for by projecting their thoughts to spirits and guides they give themselves the excuse of not living them; generally, they do not live their ideas of the truth.

If they do not live what they teach they can always tell themselves that they are imperfect whereas their guides are perfect; thus; they talk about love and perfection and live imperfect lives. Human beings always find excuses for not living what they preach as the truth.

Helen Schucman, for example, talked about love and human unity but there is no evidence that she concerned herself with racism and the civil rights struggles of her time; she made no actual efforts to bring about racial equality in America. Instead she lived in middle class white America and from its safety talked about human oneness. Talk on equality is cheap; those who actually try to actualize their belief in human equality often meet with obstacles, some were even killed.

Moreover, by attributing their ideas to spirits psychics like Helen do not have to see the impossibility of actualizing them in our world. For example, the logic of total forgiveness that A course in miracles teaches is that if other people do harmful things to you, you forgive them. This includes if they physically attack you, even murder you.

If other people attack to kill you, you tell you that you are not your body and therefore do not have to defend your body and ego; if they destroy your ego and body they are merely destroying your dream self not your true self.

If you adopt that attitude it follows that if Muslim Jihadists attack Christian Americans and murder them, Christian Americans would say that the Jihadists merely destroyed their dream bodies but not their true selves; they would forgive the jihadists.

If Christians were to do so then Jihadists would kill as many Christians as is possible and use terror to intimidate the rest of Americans to embrace Islam. Islam would then prevail in America and Europe (the goal of Islam is a world Islamic caliphate ruled from Mecca, Saudi Arabia).

Quantum physics tells us about the possibility of infinite universes, each operating with different dimensions of matter, time and space.

It is possible that in some of the multiverse is the world of light forms, what Spalding called the celestial regions and Hinduism calls astral world. Here, people live as we do on earth but their bodies are in light forms.

There also may be a world of pure ideas, a world that we are in each other; the whole is in the part and the part is in the whole; the world that religionists call heaven.

Both Spalding and Helen Schucman had useful religious ideas; the reader should take from them what resonates with him and ignore the attribution of their ideas to so-called disembodied spirits.

Spirits exist alright but they do not prevent one from thinking one’s own thoughts and accepting what makes sense to one.

One of the reasons why people attribute their thoughts to God and spirit guides is to make them credible and accepted by people. This is what people should do: evaluate what so-called spirits said. It should make no difference if an idea is attributed to Jesus, it should be evaluated and if found not rational dismissed.

Spirits, like all of us, do not have total information on anything and therefore there is no reason why we should accept what they say. Correct information lies only with God and to the best of my knowledge God has not spoken to any one, it is always those who claim to speak for him, who speak for their egos, that tell us what God said. We should only accept what makes sense to us.

Most of those who are into spirituality are egotistical; they have strong opinions and attribute them to what they call spirits and want you to accept them and if you do not do so they feel angry at you. These narcissistic persons have difficulty getting along with other people; they seldom have spouses and end up living alone.

What the individual should do is figure out what makes sense to him, live it and teach it by his behaviors.