2.11 The paramount importance of forgiveness

The next advance in the evolutionary development of Western consciousness lay with Christianity. The original Christian model of reality offered the opportunity to transcend the reactive nature of karma. Christianity introduced into Western consciousness an awareness of the paramount importance of forgiveness.

Through a genuine act of forgiveness, you can transcend, and so leave behind you, an accumulated weight of negative karma: this truth is expressed as religious implicate technology in the magnificently designed Lord’s Prayer, and it is expressed as secular implicate technology in chapter 6 of The beginner’s guide to enlightenment. The great contribution of Christianity to the evolution of Western cultural consciousness lay in

its introduction of a teaching on the need for detachment from the instinctive response of ‘an eye for an eye’. The ethical teachings of Christianity have had a far-reaching effect on the evolution of Western culture, as it moves slowly and painfully across the centuries towards a civilisation based on a fully-developed understanding of the spiritual nature of reality.

Christianity teaches the omnipresent nature of the kingdom of heaven, a realm whose nature cannot be communicated directly, only through parables. The original teaching of Jesus was structured to convey the experience of enlightenment to a simple, uneducated and temperamentally devout people. The experience of the ultimate nature of reality, which Jesus taught as the kingdom of heaven, finds its twentieth century equivalent in the Implicate Technology teaching that that can only be understood through direct experience, and cannot be conveyed in words.

The Graeco-Roman model of reality expressed a fragmented and divisive consciousness of this. The Jewish model, through a basic understanding of the reactive nature of karma, expressed a unified view of reality. The Christian model of reality, through the revelation that forgiveness can transcend the reactive nature of karma, reflected an advance in the level of Western consciousness.

The Implicate Technology meditative techniques taught in this book offer you the opportunity to take another evolutionary step forward in understanding the nature of reality. This teaching of the clear setting face to face with reality enables you to detach yourself from stimuli, your response to which binds you to the karmically reactive level of reality. Through becoming detached from stimuli in the midst of conditions, you learn to participate in the harmonious evolutionary flow of reality with the clear consciousness of the person whose mind has transcended the influence of karma.