Also by Eric Butterworth
Spiritual Economics
Discover the Power Within You
In the Flow of Life
Unity: A Quest for Truth
Celebrate Yourself! And Other Inspirational Essays
Life Is for Living
Life Is for Loving
The Concentric Perspective: What’s in It From Me
The Universe Is Calling: Opening to the Divine Through Prayer
Breaking the Ten Commandments
Softcover Edition 2011
Copyright © 1988 by Unity School of Christianity, Unity Village, MO 64065. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews or in the newsletters and lesson plans of licensed Unity teachers and ministers. For information, write to Unity Books, 1901 NW Blue Parkway, Unity Village, MO 64065-0001.
Unity Books titles are available at special discounts for bulk purchases for study groups, book clubs, sales promotions, books signings or fundraising. To place an order, call the Unity Customer Care Department at 1-866-236-3571 or email wholesaleaccts@unityonline.org.
Breaking the Ten Commandments was originally published by Unity School of Christianity under the title MetaMorality: A Metaphysical Approach to the Ten Commandments. (This book was formerly published by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., under the title How to Break the Ten Commandments.)
Acknowledgment is made to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and to Faber and Faber Ltd., publishers of The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, for permission to reprint lines from The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot.
The Bible references, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Revised Standard Version, copyright 1946 (renewed 1973), 1952 and © 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
Cover design: Mark Szymanski, Senior Multimedia Artist, Unity
Interior design: The Covington Group, Kansas City, Missouri
Library of Congress Control Number: 87-82241
ISBN: 978-0-87159-339-9
ISBN: 9780871597809
Canada BN 13252 9033 RT
To Olga, my beautiful helpmate for her loving support and indispensable collaboration of the Spirit
“No man-made law is strong enough, or true enough, or exact enough to be a permanent guide for anyone.”
—Charles Fillmore, The Twelve Powers
CONTENTS
Foreword by Tom Thorpe
Introduction
The First Commandment
The Second Commandment
The Third Commandment
The Fourth Commandment
The Fifth Commandment
The Sixth Commandment
The Seventh Commandment
The Eighth Commandment
The Ninth Commandment
The Tenth Commandment
About the Author
FOREWORD
I was introduced to the writing of Eric Butterworth early in my career as a Truth student. His books influenced me more powerfully than those of any other writer. Tape recordings of his lectures played constantly on my car stereo. I listened to Butterworth tapes as I drove cross country in a rented truck loaded with all my worldly goods to begin preparing for ordination as a Unity minister.
Years later I would meet Butterworth when he attended a seminar I presented at a Unity conference about computer software for Bible study. I enjoyed meeting with him in his office at the Unity Center, and addressing his congregation at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. I still reference the notes I made when, for two days in the late 1990s, he addressed the ministerial students at Unity Institute®, where I serve as a member of the faculty. Now, as the host of Discovering Eric Butterworth on Unity Online Radio, it’s my privilege to introduce Butterworth and his work to a new generation of Truth students, and to help some of his former students rediscover the work of this great teacher, author and Unity minister.
This book first drew my attention with the unusual title of its first edition: How to Break the Ten Commandments. Leave it to Eric Butterworth, I thought, to come up with a new perspective on one of the most ancient teachings of Western religion. Even people outside the Judeo-Christian tradition are aware of the Ten Commandments. Many of us learned about them in Sunday School and wondered why teachers never offered a clear answer when we asked what “committing adultery” and “coveting” meant. We learned all the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots,” and that was about it. When asked how the Ten Commandments can serve as an effective guide for people in today’s world, how many of us can offer an explanation that makes sense?
Butterworth would very likely agree with a description of his spiritual insights as iconoclastic, or “image-breaking.” He had little use for outer forms, considering them barriers to deeper understanding. About the Ten Commandments, he writes: “If we could break through the crystallized shell of the Decalogue, we would discover some marvelous guidelines for the integrated life.” In Breaking the Ten Commandments: Discover the Deeper Meaning, Butterworth really does “break through” the archaic language we find in traditional presentations of the Ten Commandments. With daring insight, he leads the reader to the essence—literally the “beingness,” the vital energy—that has always been waiting to be discovered within this ancient teaching.
Here, as in his other works, Butterworth focuses on you, the reader, on your life, your concerns, your spiritual evolution. In Breaking the Ten Commandments: Discover the Deeper Meaning, you’ll find provocative questions like:
• Do you believe in God? Or do you think that by saying you believe in God you really believe?
• What are some of the “graven images” we hold in place of true God awareness today?
• How often do we “take God’s name in vain” and not even realize we’re doing it?
• What is good?
• What is the Sabbath day and how can we keep it holy?
• How can we “honor our father and mother” if our relationship with our parents has been difficult or painful?
• How can we honor the spirit of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” in a world where we witness so much violence?
• Whenever we see less than the Christ in another or in ourselves, we commit adultery. Does this thought surprise you?
• What is, in the long run, the only way to overcome the tendency or even the temptation to look for shortcuts to acquisition or achievement?
• Why is it true that we are actually incapable of “bearing false witness”?
• How can we reclaim the energy we have tied up in “covetousness” or envying others’ possessions and achievements, and use that energy in a positive way?
As I read Breaking the Ten Commandments: Discover the Deeper Meaning again in preparing to write this foreword, I reconnected with some of my favorite “Butterworthisms.” I recognized that I had first discovered many of the stories, illustrations and Truth insights I’ve used again and again in my own speaking and teaching in this powerful book. I pray, affirming that you, whether you’re opening this volume for the first time or well beyond the hundredth time, will find both inspiration and practical guidance as you continue on your spiritual path.
Namaskar!
Tom Thorpe
Unity Minister and Instructor and Subject Matter
Expert in Unity Institute
Unity Village, Missouri
August 30, 2010
INTRODUCTION
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
These lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence” are both sobering and heartening as a perspective for viewing the contemporary world. They seem to say that the world we live in is about as big as we are, and the problems of the world come from our own limited faith and ideals.
But she also points to the Truth that we are never further away from transcendental solutions than the thought of God. We may be worried about the morality of our society and the integrity of people; but it is not a godless society, and the integrating power of God is within every person as the key to growth and change.
In a day that has produced Watergate and Iran-Contra debacles in our nation’s capital, and insider trading scandals on Wall Street, it is not uncommon to hear the call to get back to religion, back to God. I am not sure I know what this means. If it means getting back to moralistic preaching and piously professing clichés, I am less than enthusiastic. But if it means a renewed effort to “split the sky in two, and let the face of God shine through” within each person is an awareness that not only improves conduct and changes character, but also modifies consciousness, then I say, “Amen!”
A letter to the editor of the local paper touches on the theme, “If people would just live by the Ten Commandments, we would have honesty and integrity in business and personal relationships and peace in the world.” Certainly the Ten Commandments of the Judeo-Christian Bible form the backbone of the religion of hundreds of millions of people. Unquestionably the Ten Commandments have influenced the development of modern civil law in the Western world. But who knows them, or actually lives by them?
The phrase “The Ten Commandments” has become the “great cliché” of Western religion. Often it is used as an excuse for noninvolvement with the religious establishment: “Oh, I don’t go to church. I just live by the Ten Commandments. What more can one do?” Yet how many persons who parrot the cliché could repeat even five of the commandments? Or locate them in the Bible? Or even have a Bible in their homes?
We have been taught to keep the commandments, and we have kept them all too well. We have enshrined them like religious relics in sealed containers on the altar. Thus, it could be said that one lives by the commandments in much the same way as many persons live by a neighbor, never learning his name, let alone having any understanding communication with him.
If Jesus was anything, he was an iconoclast, breaking with the traditions of the past, and giving emphasis to the “practice of the Presence” in the present. He sets a tone that clearly indicates his belief in the need for every individual to break down the tablets of stone so as to find in them a workable formula for victorious living. He said: Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time … but I say unto you … (Mt. 5:21, ASV).
Undoubtedly, a widespread commitment to the Truth of the Ten Commandments could touch off a great spiritual renaissance in the world today. But this could happen only if there were a mass commitment to the breakup of what Gilbert and Sullivan call “platitudes in stained-glass attitudes.” If we could break through the crystallized shell of the Decalogue, we would discover some marvelous guidelines for the integrated life. How great is the need in our society for spiritually integrated people!
The religious world is rife with clichés. The Ten Commandments is only one. Michelangelo’s master-work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has helped to create another. It is the stereotype of God as a man. True, it is a big man, a powerful man, a majestic and wise figure of a man, but still a man, with all the possibilities of wrath and capriciousness. Cecil B. DeMille made skillful use of this cliché in the motion picture The Ten Commandments, which is thus a grossly misleading caricature. For though we do not actually see the big man “out there,” we hear the booming voice of wrath and we see the “work of his hands.”
Paradoxically, the commandments themselves are intended to turn us from this very kind of distorted imagery. The hand of God etching the commandments on tablets of stone is cinematography at its best and communication at its worst. For it completely misses the symbolism that is so important to understand the narrative of Moses’ spiritual experience. It totally misses the full meaning of Mt. Sinai.
For generations Bible researchers have tried in vain to locate Mt. Sinai, the high mountain on which Moses is supposed to have received the tablets of stone from God. Perhaps they have been looking in the wrong place. Charles Fillmore defines Sinai metaphysically as a “high or exalted state of consciousness.” Because of the cliché of the big man “out there,” we repeatedly lose the sense of infinite Mind “in whom we live and move and have our being.” In the account of Moses’ wilderness experience, he seems to say, “You don’t have to go anywhere to get into infinite Mind.” For at the burning bush, he records hearing a voice from within, saying: “Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).
It is important to recall that Moses came to Mt. Sinai after many years of spiritual development in the wilderness of Horeb. During this period there evolved within him a strong awareness of the omnipresence of God, and of man’s oneness with “the One.” All else in the Sinai story must be seen against this backdrop. In his inner search for ways to help his people to find their freedom, he perceived that the causes of their suffering were in their attitudes and sense of values. His goal was to bring them into an awareness of “the Lord our God is One” (the Jewish Shema). These were undeveloped people, thus, in an experience of cosmic perception (Mt. Sinai), he evolved a set of guidelines that were designed to meet their needs at the level of their ability to comprehend.
Look carefully at the commandments. It appears that they are restrictive laws set down by fiat of the divine dictator. Surely they seem to be careful lines of conduct by which the Israelites must live. However, law is not coercive but supportive. The commandments were (and are) fences to keep the undeveloped ones from wandering. Children need fences, and teenagers may need curfews and times of “grounding.” But there must come a time when they “put away childish things” and move on toward maturity and self-reliance.
When dealing with gravity, a child must be told, “Don’t lean out the window; don’t get too close to the well.” As he matures, he understands gravity’s inexorable function, and so the parent’s commandment ceases to be coercive and punitive. For gravity is supportive, holding him in his chair as he sits, enabling him to walk and run and jump and play. Thus, abiding on the right side of the law of gravity becomes second nature to him as he goes about the business of living.
The Ten Commandments are usually considered to be the basis for morality. However, morality deals not with spiritual law, but with “accepted rightness.” Recent history has revealed dramatically that it is a short step to the rationalization that “everyone is doing it.” The great need of every person is to understand his inherent spiritual nature, and thus that it is not a matter of what is being done, but what is the very best he can do. It is not enough to be superior to other persons; we should strive to be superior to our former selves. Beyond morality is a whole new dimension of metamorality. It is the deeper meaning in the Ten Commandments.
Religious institutions often engage in image-making. The emphasis is on the good reputation, or moral uprightness, which may be equated with being seen going to church, kneeling or standing at the correct moment in the service, joining in the public recitation of the commandments and other religious codes by rote. Religion might achieve a new public acceptance if the “good life” were to be measured not by the way we conform to religious codes, but by the degree to which we live by what Thornton Wilder calls “the incredible standard of excellence.” This is what metamorality is all about. It is what this book is about.
Religious education has made great strides in recent years. However, all too often it still consists of rote-learning of custom-made convictions. Parents want Johnny to have a “good religious background.” He is sent off regularly to “school” where he learns the Ten Commandments and an assortment of creeds under rigid discipline and holy threats of eternal punishment. All this is directed toward the important time of confirmation or bar mitzvah. There is a great occasion of joy and celebration and a collective sigh of relief. Now Johnny is a card-carrying member of the religious community, which he proves not necessarily by attendance at services, but always by stating the great cliché, “I live by the Ten Commandments.”
This is not to denigrate the fundamental Truths that inhere in all the great religions of the world, or the need to build lives on laws of living such as outlined in the Ten Commandments. However, man is not a plaything of the gods, nor even of God. Man is a spiritual being, alive and living within a universal system that is constantly supportive. The idea of keeping God’s commandments to honor Him, and thus to accept certain restraints set down “for some inscrutable reason of His own,” may be extremely confusing to most persons.
The goal of this book is not to herald the Ten Commandments in their literal or crystallized form, but rather to break them down, one by one, to their underlying esoteric meaning. I am confident that you will discover some understandable spiritual fundamentals that will open new vistas of growth and unfoldment for you.
Perhaps I should emphasize that each commandment deals with a spiritual insight relatable to life on many levels. You may want to come back to specific chapters again and again, using the ideas as a basis for meditation. The object is to break through the limited states of consciousness that may have held you in bondage, like the Israelites of old. May this book be as a Moses unto you to help you go forward, through your own wilderness of spiritual growth, into your Promised Land of spiritual fulfillment and human achievement.
Metamorality is an idea whose time has come. It could be a powerful instrument in bringing light and effectiveness into all the many well-meaning attempts to create a moral climate in our schools, our business community, and in our political system. Don’t be bashful in bringing its message to the world. But keep a balance by remembering, “Let there be peace (integrity, honesty, fair play) on earth, and let it (them) begin with me.”
The
FIRST
Commandment
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me (Ex. 20:2-3).
The first commandment presents us with an immediate crisis of understanding. For if we view these words as religious tradition has interpreted them, the mind runs inescapably toward billowy clouds, a regal throne, a majestic figure with a long, white beard and a booming voice calling out, “I am the one, and you had better believe it!”
Let me forewarn you. Unless you can break out of this shell of ignorance and let go the belief in the big man “out there,” then the rest of this book will be of little meaning to you. This first chapter is the great test. Unless you can successfully break open this first commandment, the remaining nine will remain inviolable.
Shocking as it may seem, the “God of our fathers” is no longer adequate. Life in the space age calls for a larger thought of God. Ralph Waldo Emerson realized this many years ago when he startled audiences with the suggestion that when we break with our God of tradition and cease from the God of our intellect, God will fire the heart with His presence.