Strata
Every religion is a nuclear reactor. It powers the community and brings light to the people — but it also has to protect those people from the source of that power at all costs. It must have trained technicians who can handle the nuclear material (God, mystical experience), and keep it safely contained, keep it productive.
Kierkegaard said it memorably:
“Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
Notice that Kierkegaard is slow rolling us with this “defend itself against the Bible” line. He follows it up quickly with the real power source: “the hands of the living God.”
This is how we know that comparative religion is among the riskiest of human endeavors.
In the normal order of things, there are many walls between The Sacred and the people. The sacred is glimpsed in mystic visions; those visions turn into sermons or stories; those sermons turn into a Sacred Text; the Sacred Text generates a tradition, which generates doctrines, which generates scholarship and interpretation and exegesis.
Most interpretation goes only as far as the local Sacred Text, taking it as foundational and adding layers to it. “To ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.”
But there are levels behind even the local Sacred Texts. Layers closer to the nuclear reactor core.
Those layers are where comparative religion explores.
Comparative religious studies take many sacred texts, many mystic visions, many unfathomable accounts, and — when done properly, rather than as a toothless academic exercise — uses them to see The Sacred more clearly, from more angles.
Comparative religion is the art of seeing into the reactor core.
This kind of study is relatively new, relatively little-practiced, and encounters hate and dismissal from every angle: religious authorities, tenure committees, the sciences, the humanities. A clear view of The Sacred isn’t the kind of thing that benefits anyone’s projects.
And what could be more important than our projects?
Encounter
We may all be biological islands, but we are all floating in a shared sea of cosmic consciousness.
- Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants & Mystics
Artifact
A couple weeks ago I sat for an interview with Artem Zen, and we had a nice discussion that crossed through a lot of my big talking points: mythopoetic cognition, imaginal work, somatic resonance, and dreams.
The God given protective gap between us and the sacred. The need we have to fill in gaps. We travel the gaps without fully closing them, which keeps us alive. Otherwise we would burn or suffocate.
Fly close to the the sun