Such a question is primarily put by people who still imagine they can choose. They cannot. With most people everything just happens.
You speak of “Christian teachings.” First understand what a Christian is. A Christian is not a man who calls himself a Christian or whom others call a Christian. A Christian is one who lives according to Christ’s precepts. Such as they are, they cannot be Christians. In order to be Christians you must be able to do. Most cannot do. Christ says, “Love your enemies.” How can you love your enemies when you cannot even love your friends? Sometimes “it” loves and sometimes “it” does not love. Today one small “I” decides to forgive, tomorrow another “I” remembers the insult and strikes back, or calls the police, or runs away. The moving center does not know of the decision made by the intellectual center. It has its own habits. People have no permanent “I.” They are a multiplicity of small “I”s, each calling itself the whole and each speaking in your name for a moment. A machine cannot be a Christian. The same with the other cheek. One “I” reads the Gospel and decides, if struck, I will turn the other cheek. Then the blow comes. That “I” is not there. Another “I” is present, the one that has always struck back. Before you realize it, the reaction has already happened. Prolonged training is necessary, and even then, if the training is mechanical, it is worthless. You turn the cheek because you cannot do otherwise. That is not Christianity. You ask which teaching is most difficult? They are all equally impossible for the majority of people. Christianity number one is paganism in Christian dress. Christianity number two is emotional religion, sometimes pure, sometimes the Inquisition. Christianity number three is argument and theory. First you must wish. Then you must become able. Only then can you be. Most people stop at wishing, or they imitate. They have taken the second half “love” and forgotten that first one must be able.
Plato was an Initiate of the Mysteries who transmitted ancient esoteric wisdom (linked to Pythagoras and ultimately to Oriental sources), while Aristotle was not initiated. Aristotle was no trustworthy witness. He misrepresented Plato, and he almost caricatured the doctrines of Pythagoras. Plato’s method started from universals and descended to particulars, whereas Aristotle’s inductive approach (later reinforced by Bacon) only creeps from particulars to universals and contributed to the rise of materialism and the degeneration of the Mysteries.
Both sides of this debate are stuck in the dead letter of the Gospels and missing the esoteric/initiatory meaning drawn from the ancient Mysteries. The entire exchange is arguing over surface details of an allegorical drama of the initiate’s death-and-rebirth, the crucifixion of the lower self on the cross of matter, and the activity of the higher principles in the invisible worlds. Both the “grave only” and the “immediately with the Father” readings miss the esoteric key applied to the Gospels.
The two co-eternal poles of the Absolute Spirit (active/masculine) and Matter/Substance (passive/feminine), whose interplay is the very mechanism of manifestation.
Father-Mother (or Spirit-Matter). The masculine principle is the fructifying, conscious, positive pole. The feminine is the receptive, plastic, negative pole. Neither is superior; both are required, and in their primordial union they remain androgynous until differentiation begins.
Their interaction produces the third term of the Trinity, the Son (the manifested Universe, the Logos, or Cosmic Ideation).
The popular Christian picture of Lucifer as a purely evil being “kicked out of heaven” is a late theological distortion. The Light-Bearer whose “fall” is the necessary descent of mind and self-consciousness into embodied human life.
The word simply means “light-bringer” (Latin lux + ferre) and is the classical name for the planet Venus as the Morning Star (Greek Eosphoros/Phosphoros). Jesus Christ calls himself “the bright and morning star” in Revelation 22:16, an early pope bore the name, and the association with the Devil is late and largely due to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
It reveals evidence of unequal being. The being of two people can differ more than the being of a mineral and an animal, and that people neither understand nor wish to understand that knowledge (or the reception of truth) depends on the level of being. The truth itself is secondary, what it “exposes” is the relative degree of mechanicalness, identification, and presence (or absence) of real conscience versus mere personality.
The question is fair and the literal answers incoherent. The doctrine of vicarious atonement is illogical and demoralizing. One person’s blood cannot erase the real effects of crimes any more than belief can stop the ripples from a stone thrown in water. The Roman soldiers, the cross, and the request for forgiveness only make sense if the story is an allegory of initiation, not a unique transaction with God.
In mystery traditions the candidate must undergo the “death” of the lower nature; the agents of that trial are necessary, not enemies of salvation. The specific method of death is secondary, the same symbolic pattern appears in other traditions.
Hell and its sovereign, "the devil", are both inventions of Christianity, coeval with its accession to power and resort to tyranny. The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the Church. Earlier traditions used related symbols (the serpent, Lucifer as light-bearer) for wisdom or the adversarial aspect of mind, not a personal cosmic enemy created by God. Gehenna in the Gospels was a local metaphor, not eternal torture. The Church turned these into instruments of control, for what is the use in a Pope if there is no Devil? The real process remains karma and the inner awakening of the Christos, not an external blood payment.
"Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness."
~ Eckhart Tolle
The conflation of the Tantric left-hand path with satanism and Crowley’s stupid “secret” star.
Regardless of your level of interest in the esoteric, there is an important revelation around the middle of this thread that is relevant to all.
Please bear with me.
Theosophy is a synthesis of Science, religion, and philosophy. It's central to how it understands itself. The word theosophy (from Greek theos + sophia) means divine wisdom or knowledge of divine things, historically linked to direct insight rather than mere dogma or discursive reasoning. So in other words mysticism.
The question is a good prompt for distinguishing the temporary personality from the permanent individuality. The “real” self does not have an ordinary physical appearance. Any attempt to picture the higher Self in concrete visual terms risks anthropomorphizing what is essentially impersonal and universal, and that the proper direction of inquiry is inward (through the objective higher mind) rather than toward an external image.
Sowing the seeds. We are only in the 5th sub-race of the 5th root race. We are fast approaching the 6th sub-race which will last approximately 25k years. Then the preparations for the seventh sub-race, followed by cataclysms that destroy Europe and eventually much of the Aryan race and related lands, only then does the Sixth Root-Race appear on the Earth.
@LastingCzardd If you want to dig deeper into Kabbalah then you might look to the Zohar, or better yet the Chaldean Book of Numbers or Eastern Gupta Vidya. Blavatsky gives a good commentary on this and more in her works as well.