Quoting from EA n. 21, Mattam interjects his remark “

“These beautiful ideas are immediately put in shackles… given the nature of the functioning of the Roman dicasteries, and their closed mentality, their being in charge of this process is the death knell of this venture; whatever Rome is not familiar, the author is punished, without freedom there is no possibility of a creative theology from the East.

“We know how many of the decisions and recommendations were rejected by the authorities in Rome. For instance the fate of the so-called Indian rite and later proposals. Each Church has to be autonomous with regard to its liturgical needs…. It is beyond my comprehension why Rome insists on the right to approve a Gujarati text over which they have no authority and competence? This dependence on Rome has really dampened the spirit… Rome cannot recognize as valid anything that they are not used to…. There are many similar statements [in EA] which are questionable…. Another escapist attitude is seen in the following statement, ‘The Holy Spirit is the prime agent of the inculturation of the Christian Faith in Asia’. Therefore, for the absence of inculturation all these centuries is He responsible?… The word of God has an inherent power to touch the hearts of people [EA n. 22]… But at a larger level, can we talk of the Word having an automatic power to change lives?” writes Fr. Mattam. [137, 138]

“The document [EA] emphasizes fidelity to the Bible literature… The Jews claimed to be a chosen people… Even the New Testament has limitations. The first generation of Christians had no way of understanding Jesus except on the background of the Jewish Bible. They saw Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies Yahweh had made to the Jews; so they spoke of Him as the Messiah and Christ… primarily it is that designation that gains ascendancy in the early Church. Are we bound by that today?” he asks. [140]

“We shall meet around and in TAT which is highly real and only real: TAT which Christians name the Father of Jesus Christ, whom the Buddhists call Nirvana, Hindus Brahman, the Chinese Tao, the zenith of all religions.”

“We are on the point of rediscovering something of the all-including vision of the ‘Perennial Philosophy of yore, and to interpret this vision in the light of religion as well as science in our days.” [104] New Age!

“Brother Martin showed very convincingly how Vedantic wisdom can be applied to understand and enliven the message of Christianity and how human beings in their search for God can only come to the experience of truth when they find liberation from all outer forms of religion, ritual or church tradition. When we realize that our true self is essentially one with God, we no longer need to look for outer ways to find him,” she says. [131]

He maintains that Abhishiktananda’s “emphasis is in harmony with Advaita-Vedanta, the philosophy of strict non-dualism,” [169] and explains the state of true sannyas in terms of tantrism and Kriya Yoga. Every monk “must in some sense begin as an advaitin. But the monk matures as a tantrist.” [170] [see pages 7, 15, 49, 55, 58, 96]

“When I entered the first hall of the temple, I was overwhelmed by a sense of enormous psychic power and of an alien presence in the place. I tried to concentrate… but fear kept rushing up at me, and with it the sense of having wandered into a different world, where I was definitely out of place and out of my depth… We came at last to the holy of holies. In this windowless chamber was the lingam… A young priest uttered a prayer before the lingam, honoring it with a camphor flame in a dish; then he offered us ashes from the dish to place on our foreheads in three horizontal stripes, signifying the three saktis or energies of Shiva… At the lingam chamber the odor of incense and of oily smoke nauseated me. I did not put the ash on my forehead.

“I quickly went outside and leaned against a wall… The religion of the temple on Ayermalai is alien not only because it is ‘non-Christian’ but also because it is a religion of hereditary priesthood.

“A sannyasi is not a priest; a brahmin who takes sannyasa renounces his priesthood… The meaning of my priesthood bears only a tenuous analogy to that of the brahmins of Ayermalai. So I had no business in that temple, and in a way I have no business in any temple.” [170-172]

“ ‘The living mystery of Arunachala ’ [Abhishiktananda’s words]… was for Sri Ramana and his fellow Hindus personified as Shiva, India’s primordial divinity…” [178, 179] [Arunachala= “Immobile Dawn”]

“The Maharshi was no longer there, and any desire to return to Tiruvannamalai at once left me,” said Le Saux. But return he did, exclaiming, “If Ramana was indeed great, how much more so must be this Arunachala which drew Ramana to himself” [178]. Note that Le Saux speaks of Arunachala as a living entity [:‘himself’].

“The following is drawn from the book, Breakthrough - Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation - Introduction and Commentaries by the excommunicated Dominican priest Matthew Fox, [see pages 6, 55, 59, 60, 63, 76] author of Original Blessing, the foundation of his teachings on Creation Spirituality. [Readers will note that Fox wrote the Foreword for Bede’s 1976 work Return to the Centre].

“Read it carefully and see if you can pick up the thread of this theology in regard to the authentic mystical theology of Avila and Saint John of the Cross that connects itself, and manifests itself in the New Age philosophies we are dealing with through the Christian Meditation teachings. Eckhart seems to be the link that allows them to claim an early Christian tradition of meditation. The Eastern connection allows the introduction of Yoga etc. in our current situation. “Matthew Fox says ‘Eckhart was condemned posthumously by a Papal Decree issued on March 27th 1329. His profoundly, this-worldly spirituality, went underground where it fed many of the most significant movements of Western cultural and intellectual history. In Germany, his disciples and brother Dominicans Henry Suso and John Tauler drew extensively from his thinking even after his condemnation. Nicholas of Cusa* in the 15th century commented on Meister Eckhart's works, and Martin Luther in the 16th century, drew heavily on Eckhart by way of John Tauler, whom, as Hoffman points out, Luther admired unwaveringly from his youth to his final days. Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme [1575-1629] owed much to Eckhart, as did the radical mystic-politician Thomas Munzer, who was born in the same German province as both Eckhart and Luther. In England, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing as well as Walter Hilton and especially Julian of Norwich, demonstrate a significant debt to Eckhart. The work of the 17th century Polish mystic-poet Angelus Silesius has been called a seventeenth-century edition of Eckhart and, the 14th century Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck was influenced by him’.

“Fox continues: ‘We can be sure, says scholar Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, that through the intermediary of Flemish mystics, Eckhart's thought had anonymously found its way even into Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. Likewise, Marxist scholars like Erich Fromm* and Bloch invoke Eckhart as a forerunner of the spirit of Karl Marx’.

“Asian scholars like Dr. D. T. Suzuki* speak of the ‘closeness of Meister Eckhart's way of thinking to that of Mahayana Buddhism, especially of Zen Buddhism’, and Professor S. Ueda in Kyoto, Japan, says that Eckhart breaks ‘the sound barrier of the normal intellectual world of Christianity and thereby enters into the world of Zen.’

“Catholic monk, Thomas Merton* [see pages 54, 55, 82] agrees, saying that, ‘whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart’.” Fox continues, Merton confesses to having been "entranced" by Meister Eckhart, and it can be documented that his conversion from being a romantic, dualistic, and Augustinian-minded monk in the 1950's to being a prophetic Christian in the 1960's occurred while he was studying Zen and Meister Eckhart. “Hindu scholar, Ananda Coomaraswamy compares Eckhart to Vedantist traditions.

“Quaker mystic, Rufus Jones acknowledges a debt to Eckhart as well he should, Matthew Fox says. For Quaker founder George Fox is in many ways Eckhartian-influenced. For example, his notion of the ‘spark of the soul’ seems more than coincidentally like [Matthew] Fox's ‘inner light’.

“To sum up Fox's attitude in defence of Eckhart and his own doctrines in rebellion to Church teaching, the following is again quoted from Fox: 'Creation-centered spirituality, the spiritual tradition that is the most Jewish, the most biblical, the most prophetic, and the most like the kind Jesus of Nazareth preached and lived, has been almost lost in the West since Eckhart's condemnation. In place of this spirituality of blessing and of passing on a blessing to others by way of justice and compassion, we have often been fed introverted, anti-artistic, anti-intellectual, apolitical, sentimental, dualistic, ascetic, and in many ways masochistic spirituality parading as Christian spirituality'.”

“Psychologist C.G. Jung confessed that Eckhart offered him the ‘key’ to opening the way to grasp what liberation means in a psychological context. Jung wrote: ‘The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key to opening the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering'.”

In Living with Hindus, Vandana quotes Eckhart [pages xv and 62]. Why she asks, has he always been ‘suspect’?

On page 42 of that book, she also quotes the words of Nicholas of Cusa.

The Vatican Document says that Jung is New Age influencer no. 2. [For transpersonal psychology see page 56].

“Jung’s psychology was not scientifically neutral,” says Catholic evangelist Eddie Russell [see pages 6, 39, 72].

“He included all sorts of pagan religions in his writings relating to what he called the Collective Unconscious [see page 48]. But we'll let Jung speak for himself: ‘What is so special about Christ, that he should be the motivational force? Why not another model - Paul or Buddha or Confucius or Zoroaster?’ ‘I am for those who are out of the Church,’ Jung wrote in a letter to Joland Jacobi when he heard she had become a Catholic. In a letter to Freud: ‘I think we must give [psychoanalysis] time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal’.

“In his 1912 book, New Paths in Psychology, Jung wrote that the only way to overthrow the neuroses inducing Judeo-Christian religion and its ‘sex-fixated ethics’ was to establish a new religion-the religion of psychoanalysis.

Jung's drive to formulate a ‘better’ religion, was the result of his trying to justify his own sins. What Jung was increasingly concerned with was justifying sexual libertinism, and his efforts extended not merely to reviving the lost gods of paganism, but in transforming Christ and Christianity to serve his own purposes. His search was for a ‘scientific’ justification for incest, patricide, sodomy, sun-worship and phallus worship; and what support he could not find in the works of his contemporary neopagan archaeologists, he sought to find by plumbing the unconscious through Eastern meditation techniques and ancient pagan rituals. Jung appreciated faith and ritual, but only of the occult variety: hypnotism, spiritism, séances, cults of Mithras and Dionysus, ‘liturgies’ that unlocked the powers of darkness.

“In 1912 he announced that he could no longer be a Christian, and that only the ‘new’ science of psychoanalysis- as he defined it through ‘Jungiansism’ -could offer personal and cultural renewal and rebirth. For Jung, honoring God meant honoring the libido. It is truly amazing that Carl Gustav Jung, dedicated to the destruction of the Catholic Church and the establishment of an anti-Church based on psychoanalysis, has become the premier spiritual guide of Catholics. One cannot, however, be both ‘Catholic’ and ‘Jungian’. They are mutually exclusive adjectives.”

“Jung helped me find Sophia, God's feminine nature [see pp 17-18]. As a man, I was able to feel truly loved by God for real and for the first time,” says Catholic priest Fr. Thomas Ryan, Csp of Unitas, an ecumenical centre for spirituality and Christian meditation, formerly the Benedictine Priory of Montreal founded by Fr. John Main OSB.