Reclusland

Because as you systematize the understanding of truth, at least a pathway to it, those who would not otherwise be able to find are now able to find it.

I believe that the degeneracy of spiritual traditions are a self-protecting mechanism of truth/god/divinity/christ-conciousness/enlightenment/whatever.

As Nietzsche and Christ say, goodness, virtue, honesty, etc, whatever, all those things that we normally think of as tests we must pass in order to be worthy of truth/beauty/goodness, are actual attributes of people who have attained truth/goodness/beauty.  It’s not that grace is taken away because we are evil, but that “evil” behavior is behavior that blocks grace.

Think of it as a heat source in the middle of a labyrinth mde of ice.  Granted, this metaphor will only extend so far, but it works for these limited purposes.  Someone moust go into the labyrinth of thought, and turn the heat source of life back on.  This creates a source of warmth in the labyrinth of thought and begins melting the walls of ice/thought.  People are freed, more joy can be expressed, happiness ensues.   Of course, you have to find your way through the labyrinth to the warm area, and this is why traditions are needed.

However, as more and more people come into the heated area, as the heated area grows, it grows out away from the hear source.  Eventually, people will come close to the source, but not all the way to it, and they will build a wall of ice/thought, blocking the heat from where they are.  They think they have attained the heat and can keep it, but they only do so by blocking others (and therefore themselves) from it.   Blocking the heat from anybody is a way of burying it again.

Eventually, the heat is more and more blocked, the labyrinth around it gets more and more complex, and people forget where it is.  They hide behind a wall of ice that has previously shielded the heat source, but which it no longer rests behind.

The other important thing is that the heat sourced must be cared for, or another way of saying it is that they move and need to be followed.  This is where the metaphor breaks down a bit, but the overall picture remains the same.  People forget the heat source and go back into the labyrinth, or the heat source moves and people step away from it.

Of course, it is a heat source and labyrinth that is inside eveyone of us, repeated holographically ad infinitum.  In this way are we mirrors/sources/fonts for the divine.

Another, slightly different metaphor would be water and earth, instead of heat and ice.  But the pattern and movement of it would remain the same.

We are lenses, diamonds, ice cubes, in a river.

We should be spherical, flawless, like a clear pane of glass.  An empty mirror.

Instead, we usually (always? Who knows for sure?) have flaws, scratches, imperfections.  As these are imperfections in our self, we have difficulty seeing them objectively (and in fact, when we do manage to see them objectively, when we go into them and understand them, they disappear).  Often, in order to see these imperfections, we have  to strive for an objective understanding of reality, and compare it to the image of reality we hold in our mind.

It is like seeing heat-lines rising off of a sunbaked sidewalk, or imperfections in a pane of glass.  You have to follow the edge of reality, and see where is is bent by the flaw in your own perception.

This is one facet of illusion.