“What, in God’s Name, is Christ Consciousness?” (Part 2) by Seán ÓLaoire
Jesus told many parables whose purpose, I believe, was to help the listeners differentiate between the ego and the soul. For example, he tells of a rich man who, before he went away on a long trip, set a manager in charge of his property and workers. The rich man delayed in coming back, so the manager figured he had gotten lost or had died. So, he began to regard the property and the workers as his own – and started to get drunk and abuse them. How to interpret this? I don’t think that the rich man was God and that the manager represented the typical sinful human, whom God would punish. Rather, I believe, that the rich man represents the soul and the manager represents the ego. Very often, we mistake our egos for our souls and neglect our incarnational missions.
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“Infallibility and Its Errors, Part 3: The Infallibility of the Bible” by Seán ÓLaoire
The infallibility of the Bible
And the fourth shock to my hopes for some bastion of infallibility came as I studied the Bible. It, too, for all its wisdom and insights, has been filtered, edited, redacted and massaged by hundreds of generations of priests, translators and, yes, even emperors.
I have learned lots from newspapers, from theology, from science and from the Bible, but I am duty bound to separate truth from tactic, and fact from fiction; to recognize metaphor and allegory and distinguish those from historical data.
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“Original Sin and Karma” by Seán ÓLaoire
Introduction: In the play, Hamlet, an officer in the Palace Guard famously opined, “Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.” If he had been more aware of the human condition in general, he might have said, “Something is rotten in the state of the world.” And, indeed, it is. This issue of human vicissitude is probably the most oft-treated theme in world literature. The writers of all scriptures get into it; so do the philosophers, metaphysicians, psychologists, playwrights, novelists – and Calvin and Hobbes. And I’ve had a shot at it myself. I’ve looked at it through the twin lenses of karma and original sin, in these four brief essays.
“The Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Religion” by Seán ÓLaoire (Transcript and Video)
In the summer of 1963, in between the end of my junior year in high school and the beginning of my senior year in high school I spent seven months in a little village in West Cork called Cloghroe. Cloghroe is an area in which Gaelic is still the mother tongue. I spent the summer visiting all of the older people in the village and collecting proverbs from them. At the end of the summer I collected 432 proverbs that got published in the school as the little booklet of proverbs. What I learned then was that stories are the archived wisdom of any culture. You want to go to the wisdom of any culture, listen to their stories, their mythology, and if you want to get the the essential distillation of the stories go to the proverbs — these extraordinary one-liners.
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" by Father Seán ÓLaoire
In early 1995, I was invited to give a series of seven lectures at the Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto. I titled the series, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?” During the preparation period for the series, while I was meditating one day, I had a very powerful vision of Jesus. Before the meditation began, I had been reading the famous passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the father except through me.” So, now that I had him “in person”, I asked him, “Did you really say that?” He replied, “Yes, I did. Because the only way is love; the deepest truth is love; and the whole point of life is love. Anybody who wants to find the father needs to walk only in love.” And then, without any prompting from me, he went on to say, “And the Buddha is the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the father except through the Buddha. Because the only way is compassion; the deepest truth is compassion; and the whole point of life is compassion. Anybody who wants to find the father needs to walk only in compassion.”
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