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John B. Buescher heads the Voice of America's Tibetan Broadcast Service to Tibet and South Asia.

Inclou el nom: John Benedict Buescher

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Having written a paper on Dowling and Notovitch’s “Jesus in Tibet” theories for a course this spring, I was delighted to find Buescher’s book and disappointed to find it so late. Though a mere 49 pages, Buescher’s book does a clear, concise job of chronicling Levi Dowling’s elusive life and digging up sources and genres for his famous Aquarian Gospel, including spirituality, Theosophy, and the popular genre of “psychically transmitted” lives of Jesus. Dowling died at the peak of his fame, and the Aquarian empire he had built up in Southern California and beyond fell apart with his powerful personality. He had applied the same industriousness and organized vigor to his New Age propaganda as he had to evangelizing for the Disciples of Christ in his younger years.

The Aquarian Gospel is largely ignored today, though it was resurrected and republished by [[Elizabeth Clare Prophet]]. But New Agey literature still uses the term “Aquarian” all the time, and the concept of spiritual evolution of humankind, so popular in Theosophy, still persists. Buescher’s commentary on Levi’s gospel, supposedly discovered in higher realms of consciousness in the Akashic plane, applies to today’s New Agers just as much as it did 100 years ago:

“Levi Dowling, who thought, perhaps, that his Aquarian Gospel would provide a basis for a unifying, inclusive form of Christianity, beyond dogmas and creeds, would undoubtedly have been surprised at the uses to which his scripture has been put. But the unity that he envisioned required the acceptance of a conspiracy theory in which all orthodox forms of Christianity had to be subverted in favor of an esoteric form. And conspiracy theorists are hardly known for their ecumenism or tolerance …

“They should not have been surprised. To achieve a unity of culture and religion, the New Age downplays or denies the distinctive truth claims of each culture and religion it uses. Each is welcomed into a multicultural universal brotherhood as long as it appears dressed as a simplified, disembodied, and spiritualized version of itself – that is, as long as it accepts being made merely relative. Impervious particularity of form is a scandal and an affront. “ (46)
… (més)
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JDHomrighausen | Aug 12, 2013 |

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