My Philosophical Evolution
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A WONDERING WANDERER, WANDERING WONDERER 2
Evolvement of Living with Open Hands 2
BALANCING ACCEPTANCE AND SKEPTICISM 8
THEOLOGY AS A HUMAN CONSTRUCT 8
KNOWING MY TRUE SELF VERSUS MY CONCEPTUAL SELF 9
FOUNDATIONAL: A CHILDHOOD WHERE I WAS SAFE AND VALUED 10
A GROWING COGNITIVE DISSONANCE 12
WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 13
SILENCE AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE 15
FROM COGNITIVE DISSONANCE TO CREATIVE ANGST 16
IF I LOOSE MY GRIP… WILL I TAKE FLIGHT??? 17
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE AND WORDS 20
OUR DRIVE TOWARD OUR HIGHEST POTENTIAL 26
The following is an disorderly flow of inner insurgency that happened during my writer's block, after 12 years of writing Living with Open Hands 1.0. It is some of the mental chaos that was happening for a year between blogs, before I created Living with Open Hands 2.0 in 2019.
It is a bit incoherent but it was the gist of what we happening within. I didn't want to lose my "philosophical revolution" but I knew it would not fit in to the 1.0 blog because of how disruptive it would be for many of my friends that read that blog but just are not at a place in life to do such deep and painful prodding. Somehow, a few people from a local Free Thought group of skeptics, atheists, agnostics, and humanists that I knew found out about the direction of my blog and wanted to hear more about it. It made for a tremendous dialogue. I'm still not sure how I had the courage to do that, but it was the impetus I needed to figure out how I'm going to take the next steps. Basically, this is how the idea of Living with Open Hands 2.0 was created. I was intrigued to keep writing and probing and exploring wherever it is that I needed to go to follow my truth within my interior landscape.
So this is sort of an overview of my thoughts that I was trying to keep track of before I had the proper container within which to store such inner insurgency. Most of what is here has since been turned into blog posts in Living with Open Hands 2.0, which did not exist at that time. It has truly been a fascinating process of mostly unintentionally disruptive transformation.
CONFLICTED AND UNSURE
I’m unsure about telling my story.
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Why does my story matter?
I ask myself over and over.
Of course it matters to me.
But why would it matter to YOU?
Our lives are but a blink,
a whiff of smoke in the nostrils,
a wisp of wind in the hair,
a gong in the ear;
and once gonged by death,
we are no more.
So why does my story matter?
None of us gets out of this thing alive.
But why would my story matter?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A WONDERING WANDERER, WANDERING WONDERER
Stuck by Awe and Wonderment in the Face of such Pervasive Mystery.
A Surrender to Wonder. A full and complete Fruition of Letting Go.
What happens when I fully realize and live out what I understand to be true?
EVOLVEMENT OF LIVING WITH OPEN HANDS
I feel like I’m undergoing
An Evolutionary Revolution
A Revolutionary Evolution
Of Mind, Heart, and Will.
Nothing left unturned, undisturbed, unshaken, untroubled.
Nothing left standing that I thought should stand.
Change often comes incrementally, little by little,
But for me it has been disruptive, decisive, and unforgiving.
Nothing that I have chosen,
Something that has chosen me.
A ONCE-TOLD TALE
“Only by exploring and sharing my autobiography can I witness my discoveries of the sacred. My story is not normative. I am under no illusions that I am a saint, a hero, or a model for anyone. I do not write in order to say: Here is the map for you to follow. I only share some of the twists and turns of my journey in order to encourage you to take your own story seriously. Examine the sacred text of your own experience, reconstruct the events and relationships that went into the creation of your being, re-collect memories, and form them into a narrative that makes your life a once-told tale.” (Sam Keen)
“Even the longest, most detailed, and most expressive obituaries always omit the essence of a life: the history of a person’s heart. How many of us wish we had asked more questions of someone we loved, not about what happened and when but about the inner experience of being that person? About hopes and fulfillments, failures and regrets? About moments of despair and moments of meaning?” (Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy)
Keep this in mind: We can argue with each others’ beliefs but we cannot argue with each others’ stories.
Stories are for expressing ourselves and asking questions. They are not for finding answers. You have not lived my life anymore than I have lived your life. Answers come from within. My answers will always be different than yours just as my perspective will differ from yours. But maybe, just maybe, my story will stimulate a new question, a new insight, a new perspective as you live out your story.
Funny thing, although my belief system has been totally uprooted and overturned, my values are still rock solid. So maybe being human is more about how we live out our lives than it is about what we think we know.
THE POWER OF STORIES
“When we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed from our isolation and loneliness. Strange as it may seem, self knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don't know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and an open heart.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xviii)
"I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So... I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me." (Carl Jung)
We are sense-making, storytelling creatures. This is our power and yet our weakness.
How did this scrawny creature called the human being end up ruling the world?
Since the beginning of homo sapiens, stories have bound us together and driven us apart. Cave drawings were a convention for telling stories to bind together a tribe. And tribal beliefs and territories drove us to war. Now it is our fine arts and books that tell our story. It is stories that have banded us together, giving us the power to eventually rule the earth. That is the one distinguishing feature of the human race; we can imagine, put our imaginations into words, tell stories to others about those imaginations, and then choose to believe or not, individually or collectively. This is the process that allows countries, companies, governments, and religions to be formed out of nothing but imagination and vision.
Stories are foundational to culture and society.
Stories are foundational to countries and governments.
Stories are foundational to business and the free market.
Stores are foundational to religion and spirituality.
There is reality.
Then there are fictions.
We create and believe fictions to facilitate us working together for the common good.
We create and believe fictions to mitigate the fear of death.
We create and believe fictions to overcome our limitations as human beings.
We create and believe fictions to garnish power over others.
We create and believe fictions to dominate (preserve or destroy) the earth.
We create and believe fictions to give us our civil and human rights.
We create and believe fictions to find meaning and purpose.
We create and believe fictions to become, in our minds, eternal beings.
What is a fiction?
It is that which is not real.
It exists only in our heads.
It is a story we tell ourselves
About what we think is real.
Fiction is created by thought.
Thought creates our world.
… and we believe it.
A uniquely human phenomenon:
~ “How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
~ “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
~ “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
~ “Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (paraphrase). All of mythology is summed up with this: There is a plane of existence where we live. It is tangible, visible, temporal. But behind it is a plane of existence that is invisible, eternal, intangible, and yet, metaphorical. This metaphorical plane supports the temporal plane. This is what our myths (stories) tell us. This is how storytelling creatures make sense of the world; giving it meaning and purpose.
See also, David Bohm on the Implicate / Explicate Order in quantum physics.
NO JOURNEY
“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge
“Meister Eckhart radically revises the whole notion of spiritual programs. He says that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If a little shocking, this is refreshing. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep. It would be a swerve into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence. The wisdom here is so consoling. You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home — within you.” (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: a Book of Celtic Wisdom)
I needed to start peeling back the layers to see what is under the surface.
I needed to pop the hood and take a look underneath to see what’s driving things..
I needed to keep drilling down until the truth began to bubble up from the center of my world.
Follow the truth,
no matter where it may lead.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Seek the truth
no matter where it takes us;
no matter how it looks,
we must always face the truth.
~ David Bohm
TWO UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS
(Basic understandings that are fundamentally, foundationally, continually changing me)
DIALOGUE
Being open to all (Living with open hands)
Learning to understand more than to be understood
Are we listening or constructing a response?
Being “right is as extreme a view as being wrong”. Both stances block innate wisdom. (Pema Chodron)
Bohmian Dialogue (David Bohm, On Dialogue and Dialogue, A Proposal)
Becoming aware of our assumptions (the stories in our heads)
Suspending assumptions so that we may learn to understand more than to be understood or to convince.
Observing the movement of thought
Metaphor of the fire versus ping pong
“What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is, in short, the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of a common meaning.” (David Bohm)
https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/chapter-19-dialogue/
https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/living-in-a-spirit-of-dialogue/
Quaker “Worship Sharing” ( a form of dialogue that )
Reach as deeply as you can into the sacred center of your life.
Speak out of the silence, and leave a period of silence between speakers.
Speak from your own experience, about your own experience. Concentrate on feelings and changes rather than on thoughts or theories.
Do not respond to what anyone else has said, either to praise or to refute.
Listen carefully and deeply to what is spoken.
Expect to speak only once, until everyone has had a chance to speak.
Respect the confidentiality of what is shared.
SHIFT OF AUTHORITY
Past authority: external (gods, holy books, prophets and priests, kings and queens, etc)
Present authority: liberalism, internal (politics, spiritual, economics, education, etc)
Future authority: algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves
Merging of infotech with biotech
Religion (answers, destination, outcomes) versus spirituality (questions, journey, process )
Yuval Noah Harari: the future of authority and reality versus the fictions we tell ourselves (religion, politics, nations, organizations, hierarchy, power, money, being right or wrong, etc)
The most powerful things on earth are fictions, stories in our minds, myths.
Jiddu Krishnamurti says that we must deny all external authority in order to follow inner truth. He also talks extensively about how confusing the inner voice is and the need for discernment between a deep resonating truth and conditioning (the “truth” we have been told).
"If we can understand the compulsion behind our desire to dominate or to be dominated, then perhaps we can be free from the crippling effects of authority. We crave to be certain, to be right, to be successful, to know; and this desire for certainty, for permanence, builds up within ourselves the authority of personal experience, while outwardly it creates the authority of society, of the family, of religion, and so on. But merely to ignore authority, to shake off its outward symbols, is of very little significance. To break away from one tradition and conform to another, to leave this leader and follow that, is but a superficial gesture. If we are to be aware of the whole process of authority, if we are to see the inwardness of it, if we are to understand and transcend the desire for certainty, then we must have extensive awareness and insight, we must be free, not at the end, but at the beginning."
- Krishnamurti, J. The Book of Life
Quakers use a process called the Clearness Committee to assist a person to discern a truth, or a leading. A group of trusted Friends gather around a “focus” person and ask honest, open ended questions. No convincing, no leading statements are allowed. The purpose is to help a person access their inner teacher, inner light, and draw out the person’s truth. “No fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting each other straight.”
PARADIGM SHIFTS THAT HAVE UPROOTED ME
Paradigms that opened me up to see things differently
THE OPEN HAND
An expression of an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. How do I live my life? Grasping for what I want, long for, desire? Tightly gripping what I have or had? Groping for satisfaction, answers, and meaning out there somewhere?
Living with Open Hands is realizing that we are exactly where we are meant to be, lacking nothing, living in a world of abundance.
Living with Open Hands is recognizing that nothing is permanent, everything is temporal, and that everything and every person is with us temporarily. Nothing is MINE. Everything belongs to all of us.
Living with Open Hands means that we allow the good and the bad to come and go and appreciate it when there is a pause and a connection is made.
Living with Open Hands is to nurture things and others with a life-giving, unconditional touch of gentleness without expectation rather than grasp or grip things or others which suffocates and destroys them.
Living with Open Hands is realizing that whenever we hold on or cling to things or others, we are succumbing to a fiction, a false story that says that this is mine.
Living with Open Hands is seeing the mystery of life with wonder and awe; embracing uncertainty, seeing that certainty is a fiction, a story in the mind trying to convince that we can know things for sure.
Living with Open Hands is knowing that material possessions will never satisfy; but rather that life itself is our satisfaction.
LIVE THE QUESTIONS
“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Also see, A Page of Lost Questions
GODS OF THE AGE
Comfort, Security, Certainty?
Personal Peace and Affluence?
BALANCING ACCEPTANCE AND SKEPTICISM
Learning to accept and digest, listen and seek understanding, AND question and doubt everything. Nothing is certain. Everything is temporal.
THEOLOGY AS A HUMAN CONSTRUCT
See, Theological Noncognitivism or Ignosticism
My nickname in college and for the following 15 years was Rev. Ron. And at times when my buddies felt a need to wax formal, it became, The Divine Reverend Irvine. After 4.5 years in college to receive a bachelor of arts degree in Religion, Greek, and Bible, and then after another 25 years of living, it struck me that all of these “ideas” about God, whether systematic theology or just people’s experience, are human constructs. I realized that this is how we think and this is how we communicate. Our thoughts and conversations are constructed with words that are never their own reality but are signs and symbols pointing to our perception of reality… an approximation.
Words are the substance of the stories in our heads that make sense out of life. Philosophically they give life meaning, pragmatically they make life work, they keep us going. Language itself is the reason that theology can only be a human construct. Again, because words are only signs and symbols that point to reality, they can never be the reality itself. Because our thoughts are words, it is impossible to put god in our head or in a book. When we do, we end up with an anthropomorphic god that is of necessity created in our image. We project what we can understand onto something that we can’t understand and then call it god, and call it good; end of the matter. Even according to the Bible, that is idolatry. We end up stuck in our own anthropomorphic ideations full of personifications and projections because we want, we crave “certainty”; which is really what we worship. We have to understand; and therefore we create that which we can understand to define what is really mystery (“uncertainty”).
Even great faith leaders recognized this and expressed this frustration.
St. Augustine has this to say: “What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if thou hast been able to understand what thou wouldest say, it is not God. If thou hast been able to comprehend it, thou hast comprehended something else instead of God. If thou hast been able to comprehend him as thou thinkest, by so thinking thou hast deceived thyself. This then is not God, if thou hast comprehended it; but if this be God, thou has not comprehended it.”
And Thomas Merton has this to say: “If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.” (Thomas Merton in Seeds of Contemplation, p. 131)
KNOWING MY TRUE SELF VERSUS MY CONCEPTUAL SELF
Knowing these things for so many years, I was still determined to hang on to my concept of God, especially when I was in trouble and needed a savior to cry out to. It finally started to crumble when I turned 50, or should I say that I finally began to see that there was nothing left to hang on to. It was all dust in the wind, ashes in my hand. But even then, I clung to mysticism as a way of holding on to my faith without compromising my integrity and my intellectual understandings of the problem of language and words, stories and myths. I was creating new stories, new fictions, that would allow me to be the religious person that I still longed to be. Even though I was learning to let go of certainty, and other ways of thinking, it was my deeply ingrained longings and desires that I could not deny or let go of. I felt like that was my identity because it had been for so long. But what is identity besides language and words, stories and myths? I began to see that I was not losing myself, I was losing my concepts of myself. Shifting or switching my story is very different than losing myself. I can redefine my myths and stories without losing my identity and purpose, my values and beliefs. The more I can anchor these things in concrete realities, and less in abstractions, the more I can be true to me.
KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING
The shift from needing to know to unknowing. How do I know that I know what I know?
SECOND HAND PERSON
“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.
“If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority. You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction. So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a secondhand human being.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known)
MY STORY
FOUNDATIONAL: A CHILDHOOD WHERE I WAS SAFE AND VALUED
I couldn’t have asked for a better start or better parents. I was loved and knew it every day. I was raised to follow my own career path without any coercion to follow the path of my parents.
I was raised to believe in the American Dream and raised in the faith
God (of Christianity)
Family (both wife and kids)
Career (with retirement)
Home Ownership (mortgage is paid off before retirement)
Little did I know that these dreams are all fictions, stories in our heads, that if we are privileged enough, and believe enough, and get lucky enough, they just might become real. My luck ran out before I got started.
My parents and grandparents lived the American dream
Grew old as best friends
My parents were present at the death of all four of my grandparents.
Mom was always there to meet me at the front door after school
Parents were at every band competition and sports game
We were never yelled at. (Example 1: After us kids were grown and out of the house, my parents joked about a time they had an argument. When they walked through the house afterward, they found their toy poodle scared and shaking under the dining room table. Example 2: On my first overnighter as a 5 year old with a friend, his parents got in an argument and were yelling at each other. I was so scared that I started crying and did not stop until my parents picked me up and we went home.)
Disciplined with compassion. When we were spanked, dad would tell us what it was for and how many wacks with a paddle we would get. Afterward he would give us 10 minutes or so to calm down and then he would come in and hug us and talk to us about what he wanted us to learn.
They nurtured me to be what I was meant to be; to find and follow my vocation, not theirs.
No divorce in my family (both sides) before me…
Retired as best buddies as they rode off into the sunset (my parents and both of their parents). This is what I knew. This all I knew. This is what life is all about. I knew it because I saw it. This is all I knew. Then I began to see that life experience and role modeling is no guarantee for me.
“Reconstruct the physical setting of your childhood and you may recover the flavor of the family in which your psyche was first marinated.” (Anne Valley-Fox, Sam Keen in Your Mythic Journey)
I was born in a very small trailer in the back of a very small lot in a very small town named Reed City. Eventually my parents bought an oil well shed / office (25 x 48) and moved it on the lot and fixed it up as our home, a very small house. When I was 8, I moved into a bigger home on a bigger lot just outside the city. It was an old school house over 100 years old that had been turned into a home. I thought it was beautiful and so huge (it wasn’t) but it did have knotty pine paneling throughout the dining room and living room. I loved that. All three of us kids shared a bedroom until dad was able to finish off the attic into a bedroom for my brother and me.
I have very few specific memories of childhood except that it was calm and safe and loving. No yelling or any other forms of violence ever; overt or subtle. I think that I had few specific memories because nothing stood out. Just peace and quiet. I felt safe.
We had a constant wood pile that was for us to use as we were inspired. Boredom was a thing of the mind, so I never felt bored because if it did, I knew it was on me. Boredom was in my mind, a story in my head that I knew I did not have to choose. We had woods we could walk to in any direction and trees we could spend hours climbing including the “crooked tree” in the backwoods where one tree had been bent over and tied to the base of another forming an arch to mark the way, supposedly of native americans that had lived there many years before, at least that is the lore.
I grew up in the church. My hero was our youth pastor in high school; a very big strong guy that had played football in college. When I was 8, I “walked the isle” to be born again, then baptized, immersed, a year later or so. For several years after that, I would mimic the evangelist prayer with peers like my neighbor buddy insisting that he would go to hell if he didn’t say the prayer.
Last time I saw my brother, not long ago, 5 years younger, he said that he knew that his older brother must be ok when, in high school summers, he (meaning me) worked until 11pm and then read the Bible for three hours before going to sleep, every night. It was rather shocking to me to hear someone’s perspective that lived with me, slept in the same room with me, and that knew me more than any others besides maybe my parents. That is what he remembered about me as a high schooler. It touches me deeply that he remembers and honors that about me. I think it was sheer determination to understand life and give it meaning. I thought it was to be found outside of myself, in a holy book and preacher’s words.
I was a loner at home and in school. I had one friend in the neighborhood, a guy that was two years younger and not very likeable. His parents beat him often so he acted out his anger often, but not on me. He appreciated having a friend. In school, I wasn’t wise or mature enough to understand or see through the cliques, popularity contests, and athletic competitiveness but I was there and took note of the many facades, having no interest in being a part of it. Instead of going on my senior trip to somewhere, two other quiet friends of mine that didn’t really fit in went on our own senior trip; camping under the stars on Leelanau Peninsula, playing on the sand dunes and swimming in the great lake. We went to see Jaws premier at the drive in theater and were awoken to a racoon raiding our food four feet from where I was sleeping.
In college, I continued to be a loner using the excuse that I had to study so that I could avoid the social milieu, which seemed very similar to high school and its facades. To some extent that excuse was real though. I made it through high school without ever taking a book home to study so college totally overwhelmed me with the amount of work that each class demanded. I did have two adventures though, with friends that really didn’t fit in and questioned everything along with me. I went on a evangelistic trip to visit a mission in New York City Manhattan Bible Church and walked the streets with evangelist Tom Mahairis (http://www.citivision.org/biotom) and his church members leading people to Christ, saying the prayer to be born again. Then leaving them on their own and never seeing them again. It felt rather off to me. Then I went to Chicago to visit Jesus People USA (https://jpusa.org/) to see how a hippy commune leads people to Christ. At least it was through relationships, living together, sharing all things in common, and feeding and clothing the poor… I watch people lead people to Christ but I couldn’t do it myself. Something didn’t feel right down deep.
After this I always felt guilty for never leading anyone to Christ, to say the prayer. That was my Christian duty. But I couldn’t do it. Something was direly wrong with this scenario that I was living, although it would take another 40 years for me to figure it out and find the words to express what was stirring deep within.
A GROWING COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Backing up a little: Like any good religious young man, I decided to follow my religious teachings, beliefs, and aspirations to college. Growing up in Reed City (a town of 2400 people), I had no career aspirations, exploration, or even exposure except for the youth pastor of our church that was really big and used to play football. The high school guidance counselor recommended that I be an electrician because I was in advanced math class and was on track to complete 5 years of math in 4 years with straight As. Well… I took choir during my senior year instead because math was more boring than choir. So Grand Rapids Baptist College it was. My dad went there for a year and my church recommended it. Bachelor of Arts Degree in Religion, Bible, and Greek (the original language of the new testament). They made an exception for me to take Greek as a Freshman (instead of a Junior) because I had taken two years of Spanish and two years of French in high school. I loved languages because I love people, but I didn’t know that then. My main educational charge was to leave college with my very own “world and life view” that I could use to convert poor lost souls.
From here… the only direction was down.
A DOWNWARD JOURNEY
From this point on, this becomes a developmental journey of my own deconditioning, my own unraveling, and eventually after 40 years my own deconversion..
A story of my UNLEARNING.
Life assaulted me with fury as an adult. I wasn’t at all prepared for the pain of divorce (two times); the first one at age 30, then again at age 50. I was not at all prepared for life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like an earthquake that crumbles foundations,
Like a tornado that overturns everything standing upright,
Like an avalanche totally deconstructing the landscape,
Like a hurricane ripping and flinging destruction everywhere,
Like the final tsunami crashing in and washing all traces away… Nothing left I dreamed of, nothing left to cling to, nothing left...
“The Blizzard, the Blizzard of the world,
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul.”
(Leonard Cohen)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1988 First divorce: never dreamed a person could experience so much pain.
But I always knew that God was there walking beside me and carrying me when I needed it. (Footprints in the sand). I became a single father for 5 years with no assistance or visitation from my ex-wife although my parents were, as always, very quick to be there for me.
2008 Second divorce: the foundation started to crumble.
This time was different. There was no healing. Open wounds. Constant bleeding. Month after month, year after year. I kept trying to be a good Christian; going to church more, reading the Bible more, praying more. I was desperate for healing, desperate for God. But nothing more than silence and invisibility.
IF this is the answer, then I have to make it work. But it did not work… I tried and tried for many years...
IF IT WORKED, I WOULD STILL BE A TRUE BELIEVER. I WOULD HAVE HAD NO REASON AT ALL TO GO DEEPER, SEEKING THE TRUTH WHEREVER IT MIGHT LEAD. I COME FROM A LONG LINE OF NORMALCY. EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY SHOULD HAVE SAVED ME. IT COULD HAVE SAVED ME. BUT IT DID NOT. I CRIED OUT. I CRIED OUT. I BEGGED. I HOPED. I DREAMED. I PRAYED. I WORSHIPED. I READ THE BIBLE. BUT HEALING CAN BE SO ELUSIVE, SO UNCTUOUS, SO EXCLUSIVE. SOMETHING’s BROKEN, SOMETHING’s LOST. SOMETHING’s GONE.
“But in the same measure the myth gives us security and identity, it also creates selective blindness, narrowness, and rigidity because it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow the Faith of our Fathers, to hold to the time-honored truth, to imitate the way of the heros, to repeat the formulas and rituals in exactly the same way that they were done in the good old days. As long as no radical change is necessary for survival, the status quo remains sacred, the myth and ritual are unquestioned, and the patterns of life, like the seasons of the year, repeat themselves. But when crisis comes -- a natural catastrophe, the military defeat, the introduction of a new technology -- the mythic mind is at a loss to deal with novelty. As Marshall McLuhan said, it tries to ‘walk into the future looking through a rear view mirror.’” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiii)
WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
I had begun writing. Here are some basic reasons:
Inherently, subconsciously, I knew I had to go
Beyond religion and beliefs
Beyond God
To a deeper human connection
Blog stats (over 66,000 hits from over 150 countries)
Experiences with coffee and conversation
I realized that using “God” in my writing is divisive and tends to block connections with people due to so many preconceived and diverse ideas of God. I began to realize that God is created in our own image. I started to see that the real questions and real answers were not dependent on God; they were human. And they were real only if we did not define anything.
More and more cognitive dissonance, growing over 20 years.
I don’t write because I “know”. I write because I don’t know.
I don’t write because I understand, I write in order to understand, to verbalize my questions and doubts; to face what I don’t know.
2008: My wife finalized our marriage of 14 years, I lost my kids half time (10 and 12), they were my life, my job was downsized, I foreclosed on our home of 14 years, enveloped in clinical depression, turned 50, all during the spring of 2008.
Shook me to the core. Unraveled, uprooted, and overturned everything.
My story became subversive; an insurgency, an insurrection, an overturning of the established order.
“The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul” (Leonard Cohen)American Dream gone.
“Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.” (W. B. Yeats - 1865-1939)
I could do the math…
I believe that if I hadn’t gone through the Dark Night of the Soul, I’d still be content believing what I had been taught all my life.... BECAUSE IT WORKS (FOR SOME)
If it is not broken, don’t fix it.
But for me, it was broken… it was gone...
I kept writing through the pain, the confusion, and the darkness because I had to write.
Here are some of the themes (questions) that were emerging from somewhere within.
I was losing myself. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I going to do about it?
Identity, meaning, and purpose
Using gifts to create meaning
Integrity: writing forced me to speak with an open mind, open heart, and open will; a more tentative language was necessary. No absolutes. No dogma.
All American Trinity came into view early in my writing.
Gods of Comfort, Security, Certainty
Extent and power of conditioning (the herd)
Power and oppression. Once I looked beyond and below, I could no longer not see it.
Pervasiveness of complacency. Everywhere. Everyone.
Necessity of outrage. Nothing trustworthy. Nothing certain. Nothing secure.
Real love and indifference
Knowing and freedom from the known
Unlearning and relearning
Answers versus questions. Questions that refused to be answered. Answers that crushed the questioning, the questing, the Quest.
Mystery and unknowing
“If I already know… I can no longer learn”
Seeing more deeply
Going beneath the surface
Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship
2009 Buddhist Priest and Shambhala Meditation practice: “There is a mirkiness within you. You must let go of the past with its loss and pain. The only way to do that is through meditation.”
SILENCE AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE
Mindfulness and Presence
Sitting with cognitive dissonance
Silence continued to stir up the dissonance
Holding the tension of opposites
Paradox
Observing thought
Conditioning
Heaven and hell; eternal game of chess? What a waste!
Didn't make sense to me
Didn't even appeal to me
Saving souls
The Way, Truth, Life
It is sort of like all I had to do is look at those things that are causing cognitive dissonance, and they would crumble. Like facing fears or monsters.
Conditioning sustains itself through its own invisibility.
Being fully alive, fully present, aware, mindful (that’s all meditation is)
From silence of the womb we come and to silence of the grave we return and yet we resist silence while alive. Why is that? Is it our fear of the silence of death?
From darkness of the womb we come and to darkness of the grave we return and yet we resist darkness while alive. Why is that? Is it our fear of the darkness of death?
2010: For 5 years, I worshiped in silence, as a Quaker.
I was also drawn to Contemplative Prayer of the desert monks and, as mentioned before, Shambhala Meditation.
Contrasting silences: Presence and Present
Shambhala Meditation was a personal, intimate, internal silence. Being fully present.
Quaker worship and Contemplative prayer were a waiting silence where I was listening for a still small voice but without expectation. Being in the Presence.
Never really heard anything… But I sensed it. Magical Thinking???
Presencing: https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/presence-living-from-the-source/
Bedouin Guide: “Why do you rush around so? When you hurry, you lose things. But when we slow down, things come to you.” (Deborah Wickering, a friend and a Friend)
There is a stillness in the center of things where all things come to be; the birthplace of...
"With silence, problems appear in a less somber light, in their real dimensions, and seem wholly tractable. Daily worries lose their force, until they appear banal. Hurrying makes no sense. To where am I running, you ask yourself, and why am I running so? Anguish does not exist here anymore. All is in its place and will be faced calmly, in good time." (Melodia)
Presencing requires that we:
Come to the realization that every time we encounter another human being, they (and we) cannot walk away unchanged. They (and we) leave changed; for the better or for the worse. We are all connected.
Realize that the only thing we have power over and are responsible for is the present moment; here and now.
Our whole life comes to bear and comes to fruition in the NOW; in the present moment.
The past is unchangeable, although it has created this present moment.
The future is untouchable, although it is created by this present moment.
See the body of work by Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer. Research coming out of the world of management
What is the opposite of being fully present? Notice your thoughts. They totally exist in the past or in the future. Regret and worry. None of them are here and now.
FROM COGNITIVE DISSONANCE TO CREATIVE ANGST
As my cognitive dissonance become more and more resolved through letting go of download thinking, conditioning, I have been feeling a growing creative angst.
Cognitive Dissonance has been growing since college (1980 or so) when I kept trying to define my world and life view and feeling a very distinct sense that things just aren’t fitting together. My ideals say one thing, Reality is saying another. And I began to see the myriad of influences that underlie the surface of consciousness, of the artifacts of culture. These were the tip of the iceberg. But my beliefs were so entrenched, I was so deeply dependent on them, that I could not see straight, I could not see through, I could not see beneath the surface to what was really going on. Silence and Writing, learning to Live the Questions, embracing mystery, I began to see things that I could not longer unsee. As I was able to lay to see through much of the cognitive beliefs, the myths that drive my unconscious and preconscious story, I could one by one lay them to rest. But I never really laid them to rest, I’d tuck them away in the back of my mind, looking for better understanding so that I could pull them out again. It was quite a roller coaster ride that ended up with tucking them away and pulling them out for the next 30 years. I gravitated toward hanging out with church people because I was taught these are the good people. So my social life strongly reinforced my conditioning and beliefs. I trapped myself in my Christian bubble; until I started writing and listening to the silence.
Creative Angst began to replace Cognitive Dissonance. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t understand the uneasiness inside for several years, until I began to see that all of life is uncertain. Everything is temporal. And there is no ground to stand on...
IF I LOOSE MY GRIP… WILL I TAKE FLIGHT???
Following the truth, wherever it may lead...
An ongoing and pervasive sense of lostness... groundlessness. So freeing!
Becoming intimate with the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender.
“It takes some training to equate complete letting go with comfort. But in fact, ‘nothing to hold on to’ is the root of happiness. There’s a sense of freedom when we accept that we’re not in control. Pointing ourselves toward what we would most like to avoid makes our barriers and shields permeable.
“This may lead to a don’t-know-what-to-do kind of feeling, a sense of being caught in-between. On the one hand, we’re completely fed up with seeking comfort from what we can eat, drink, smoke, or couple with. We’re also fed up with beliefs, ideas, and “isms” of all kinds. But on the other hand, we wish it were true that outer comfort could bring lasting happiness.
“Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid. Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what’s happening, we begin to access our inner strength.
“Yet it seems reasonable to want some kind of relief. If we can make the situation right or wrong, if we can pin it down in any way, then we are on familiar ground. But something has shaken up our habitual patterns and frequently they no longer work. Staying with volatile energy gradually becomes more comfortable than acting it out or repressing it. This open-ended tender place is called bodhichitta. Staying with it is what heals. It allows us to let go of our self-importance. It’s how the warrior learns to love.
“For the warrior, “right” is as extreme a view as “wrong.” They both block our innate wisdom. When we stand at the crossroads, not knowing which way to go, we abide…”
https://tricycle.org/magazine/pema-chodron-teachings/
ONGOING PARADIGM SHIFTS
MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness comes from the word to remind or to remember. Re-Mind. Re-Member.
In order to re-member, we begin by forgetting everything we have been told, thereby setting aside all of the assumptions we have about ourselves and about truth. It is at that point that we can begin to remember who we are in relation to others. Our own truth can only be known as we affirm our deep truth. And when we deny the truth of another, we deny our own truth, we lose a part of ourselves. Too easily we lose ourselves when we are told what to think, told who we are, told who to be. But we must forget whatever we are told so that we can remember who we are. Mindfulness is taking the time to observe ourselves and our reactions and ask, is it mine? Or has it been given to us by external forces, usurping my real self?
Prophetic Praxis: anytime we are not speaking our truth, we are living in our past, stuck. Prophecy is not about the future, it is about the Now.
Radical = root
Original = origin
LEARNING TO SEE
"Awareness of what presents itself to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange.
"Each time I approach a strange object, person, or event, I have a tendency to let my present needs, past experience, or expectations for the future determine what I will see...
"Without this discipline each present moment is only the repetition of something already seen or experienced. In order for genuine novelty to emerge, for the unique presence of things, persons, or events to take root in me, I must undergo a decentralization of the ego.” (Sam Keen, “To a Dancing God”)
https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/seeing/
Through writing and silence, I began to see
TRUTH AS DEEP RESONANCE
AS ANCIENT KNOWING
I think there is this sense of ancient knowing in a couple of ways.
Much of life is remembering what we already know. Truth and wisdom for me are those things that resonate in my bones. Yet I rarely know from where they have come. If I can identify from where a "truth" comes, then it is suspect and subject to much discernment.
There is another sense of ancient knowing that relates to people.
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition." — John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)
"It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing." — John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)
“When is the last time you had a great conversation? A conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation in this culture. When have you had a great conversation in which: you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew; you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you had thought you had lost; you and your partner ascended to a different plane; memories of the exchange continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterward?” (John O’Donohue) https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/great-conversation/
THE NATURE OF THOUGHT
An idea (or belief)
is simply thought.
Thought is not a fact.
It is always fiction.
Thought is not the thing itself.
Thought is made up of words.
Words are never reality.
They are signs and symbols
That can only point to that which is real.
We create an idea of God to be
Sure & Certain,
Secure & Undisturbed,
Permanent & Petrified.
Yet it is still a thought, an idea,
A story in our head, a fiction
Made up of words.
And we are still only human.
COLLECTIVE THOUGHT
Jonathan: As I've been fishing around in my mind so to speak I get little fragments from other times, places and people. I don't hold on to them too hard and let them move on. (He was wondering about past lives but it also made me think of collective thought, deja vu)
Me: I think there is a very powerful body of collective thought that is ancient, cumulative, and universal. It is seen in cultural evolution and in conditioning. Collective thought though is nothing miraculous, magical, or supernatural. It is very much integrated into who we are as human beings throughout history.
“The psyche is not of today; it's ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season.” (Carl G. Jung)
Does this simply refer to thought as a system of reflexes anchored in our conditioning that combine with other ideas or memes to create a sort of culture of thought? Something greater than the individual and much more powerful in a good or bad way (like group think)???
Don’t believe everything you think...
“Thought creates the world, and then says, “I didn’t do it.” (David Bohm)
THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE AND THOUGHT
Just as genes are the DNA of biological life,
Memes are the DNA of Culture and Thought.
Survival of the fittest determines which life forms will survive.
Survival of the fittest also determines which ideas, values, beliefs will survive.
This includes the myths, the stories that we cling to and believe, that we use to bind us together and give us power. Money is perhaps the greatest and most believed myth or fiction that we have created and chosen to believe.
Genes and Memes MUST replicate themselves until they are competitively eliminated by something more fit.
A NEW ORGANIZING MYTH
But what happens when our organizing, sustaining myth, or story, or dama is no longer meaningful. We have grown beyond the stories of 2000 to 4000 years ago and need to create a new myth about a people that are creating a world that works for all, that includes each and every person, that believes in each and every person, that believes that each person comes here as a gift and full of gifts, and that for every gift there is a place that needs that gift; an organizing myth that teaches that when each person uses the simplest of gifts in a context that accepts and appreciates those gifts, then THAT is a meaningful life. A myth that acknowledges that being right and making others wrong is not what life is about. It is not a matter of being right but living right so that the life we lead makes an impact and leaves this life better.
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE AND WORDS
Language is something of a miracle from my perspective. No other creature on earth can create meaningful exchanges with others and gain some sort of successive approximation to a common understanding like we humans can, especially when we consider how language works. Language is either nonverbal or verbal. Most of interpersonal communication is nonverbal. Our nonverbal expressions infuse meaning into the words we use; and sets the context between those communicating. But whenever we need to convey complex ideas and feelings to one another, this communication is verbal and depends on words. BUT often we forget that words are not the reality itself. We think that truth can be contained in words or boxed up in a book, so we spout off our “truth” to others. But words are only signs and symbols pointing to reality, and never the reality itself. So if “truth” is real, then it is anchored in reality, and words can simply point to it as signs and symbols; each word is a story in our head interpreting our perception of reality or truth. And as we use words, we hope that the other person has the same story behind the words that we are using, but often your meanings behind your words are very different from my meanings behind my words. Because your experiences are different than mine, your stories are different than mine. See? This is why I call language a miracle. Too often we take it for granted. But we must remember that there is a difference between words, language, and stories in our heads (which are all fictions); and the reality itself.
But no matter, we are story-telling creatures. We can’t help it. We tell ourselves stories so that we can understand things that we can’t understand. We believe stories that others tell us so that we can not be confused by that which we do not understand. We infuse words with meanings based on the stories we choose and want to believe. And we have come to dominate the world by telling ourselves stories collectively and deciding to believe them collectively so that we can create order, law, education, politics, and religion. All of this story-telling is the way we create meaning and purpose, order (society and civilization) and power. We need our stories, our myths, to survive. But too easily we forget that all of this story-telling is just that; stories in our heads pointing toward truth; but not actual reality or truth.
“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.” (Yuval Noah Harrari)
WHOLENESS & THE IMPLICATE ORDER
.
Bohm believes that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces, maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considers that what we take for reality are "surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order". That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.[3]
In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders (Bohm 1980, p. xv).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order
THE POWER OF MYTH
All of mythology is summed up with this: There is a plane of existence where we live. It is tangible, visible, temporal. But behind it is a plane of existence that is invisible, eternal, intangible. This plane supports the temporal plane.
“Every god, every mythology, every religion is true in this sense: it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. He who thinks he knows doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know knows.” (Joseph Campbell)
“When we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed from our isolation and loneliness. Strange as it may seem, self knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don't know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and an open heart.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xviii)
"I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So... I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me." (Carl Jung)
"Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." (Rumi)
“The entire legacy and burden of culture and family myth comes to rest on the individual. Each person is a repository of stories. To the degree that any of us reaches toward autonomy, we must begin a process of sorting through the trash and treasures you have been given, keeping some and rejecting others. We gain the full dignity and power of our persons only when we create a narrative account of our lives, dramatize our existence, and forge a coherent personal myth that combines elements of our cultural myth and family myth with unique stories that come from our experience. As my friend David Steere once pointed out to me, the common root of ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’ tells us a great deal about power. Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions. We gain personal authority and power in the measure that we question the myth that is upheld by ‘the authorities’ and discover and create a personal myth that illuminates and informs us.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiv)
Moyers: Can we develop new models (to live by?)
Campbell: They are already here, in the religions. All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it… Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation. (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
We are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time -- it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.” (Thomas Berry)
“Whenever the social structure of the unconscious is dissolved, the individual has to take a heroic journey within to find new forms. The biblical tradition, which provided the structuring myth for Western culture, is largely ineffective … So there must be a new quest.”
(Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Sam Keen, in “Man & Myth: A Conversation with Joseph Campbell,” Psychology Today, July 1971)
We have outgrown our traditional myths.
How do we create a myth that has meaning for us?
“[W]hat we really need right now in this increasingly divisive world is a new unifying myth. I mean ‘myth’ as a story that defines a culture. So, what is the myth that will define the culture of the 21st century? It has to be a myth of our species, not about any particular belief system or political party. How can we possibly do that? Well, we can do that using astronomy, using what we have learned from other worlds, to position ourselves and say, ‘Look, folks, this is not about tribal allegiance, this is about us as a species on a very specific planet that will go on with us—or without us.'” (Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physics professor at Dartmouth and this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize)
“Myth basically serves four functions.
The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe in the face of this mystery....
The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through....
The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date....
But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
I think what Campbell means by this is that we must
First, we must do the inner work necessary to first SEE the myths that we have adopted whether consciously or subconsciously.
Second, we must learn to discern the veracity of those myths that have gripped us over the years. We must recognize that veracity and the lack of veracity. We must see what is gripping us. And we must discern what to let go of and what to embrace. And what must be created anew.
Third, we must create a new world of myths, a mythology of meaning, that we can live by; with others and with integrity… a sustainable world and life view.
Concept of God
We believe that God and our concept of God is the God we have created in our own image. Our conditioning, our organizing dramas and myths create stories in our heads that shape our conceptions of God. There was a time that we as humans believed in Mother Earth, Zeus, Apollo, Ares, or Mars, etc. These are images or stories in our heads. It made a huge difference in societies as our gods shift from the ancient female mother goddesses to the male warrior gods. For example:
Goddess to God
The mother god (female) creates a very different culture from the warrior god (male).
We are separate from our ground of being (male) in the same way that the male child has to be separated by ritual from dependence on mother to become a real man; hunter and provider.
We are birthed from our ground of being (female)
Nature nurtures our being. We are one with the earth and dependent upon her. (female)
Nature is dominated by our existence. Nature exists for our use and abuse. (male)
Shared basic assumption: Unity. We are all one. (female)
Shared basic assumption: Duality. Light and dark. Friend and Foe. Predator and victim. Right and wrong. Male and female. Power and oppression. (male)
THE DENIAL OF DEATH
A Cornerstone for Survival. (Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)
Religion has always been a way to create immortality and banish the fear of death. If my soul is eternal, then why fear death. This is a worldwide phenomenon.
Our urge for immortality manifests itself in creativity, therefore our urge to build, our urge to make a mark in the world, to show that we’ve been here, you know, carve our name in a tree, just to let it be known that we are here and that we mattered.
Culture as a whole is an inexhaustible survey of immortality symbols. The law makes you feel that culture is stable and will last forever. Architecture -- we build monuments, we build religious buildings out of what, historically, have been the most enduring materials known to human beings. American Utopianism at the moment tends to be consumer utopia. It is associated with money and the ability to command the wills of other people by paying them something, which, in effect, is magnifying your own self, it’s magnifying your own strength. If you can potentially make anyone in the world do your own bidding because of your checkbook then, in effect, you have everyone in the world extending your power. You have millions of hands and arms. (Kirby Farrell, Professor of English, University of MA, Amherst)
Poverty is sort of social death. Powerless, helpless, invisible; often worse than physical death. Violence is an expression of helplessness.
What happens when our symbols fail? We experience a sort of symbolic death.
Striving for immortality through cultural means should be a good thing.
But this ambition for immortality can become dominance and power over others, oppression. Those that are different with different beliefs than my immortality beliefs, become a threat. We must convert them. We must eliminate the threat at all costs.
Humanity at the Crossroads | Sheldon Solomon | TEDxSkidmoreCollege
What happens when you have two death-denying ideologies: communism and capitalism?
When this clash of ideologies happen, we cope with them through:
Derogation,
Assimilation,
Accommodation,
Annihilation.
Death Denying Illusions
Capitalism
Communism
Culture
All religions
Terror Management Theory
Over 150 studies
It has been called a science of evil.
We create the greatest evil by trying to destroy evil.
Our fear of death has had a tremendous death toll,
which makes us ask the question, are we a viable form of life?
We must learn to use our death anxiety to live more intensely.
Keep death on your left shoulder. (Sam Keen)
You don’t conquer the anxiety of dying. You meet it with courage. (Paul Tillich)
(Flight from Death, documentary)
“It is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged. When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality. The realization that oneself and all one’s loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying, and this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety-reducing ideas, like ones that offer a never-ending afterlife. But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.
“Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or “cultural software,” that is running on the brain’s hardware. Esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett insightfully described how ideas can control minds when he said, “The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” In this regard, it is often not the brain that controls the mind, but the memes that compose the mind that control the brain. This is especially the case when the meme is a religion.
“One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.
“In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call “magical thinking,” which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can’t survive, nor can it replicate itself.
“We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.”
LIFE BEYOND LIFE?
Is there a soul?
Must be one of two things:
The soul is something rooted in the ground of being or deep within the implicate order that unfolds in each moment and enfolds between expressions of the explicate order
If so, does it continue through multiple lives toward full maturity and bliss?
Journey of Souls (wishful thinking?)
The soul is simply consciousness or awareness or a light within that increases throughout life and then fades away when physical life fades.
The illusion of dualism drives us and divides us; body/soul, body/mind, medical/psychological, good/evil, light/dark, etc. Maybe we need to see through the illusion to our Hidden Wholeness.
OUR DRIVE TOWARD OUR HIGHEST POTENTIAL
The Power of the Human Spirit
If not soul, then what???
If not god, then what???
Synchronicity, power of intention, power of attraction, the will of god, holy spirit?
There is something within me that guides me toward reality or truth or wisdom. A hunger for meaning and purpose anchored in my identity.
To me, this consciousness or awareness is static.
But that which drives and sustains us is dynamic.
Three questions underly my writing and my silence:
Who Am I? (my Identity)
Why Am I here? (my Purpose)
What Am I going to do about it? (my Mission)
SYNCHRONICITY
"Synchronicity illustrates that leadership is about the release of human possibilities, about enabling others to break free of limits-created organizationally or self-imposed. Although this book describes the author's personal journey, it contains profound messages about organizational learning and effectiveness." (Joseph Jaworski)
The experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and every time period. Synchronicity examines the evidence for the human influence on the meaningfulness of events, and the way the modern computational model of the mind predicts how we create meaning.
It demonstrates that these events, based on the activity of the mind, are caused by the person who perceives them.
Synchronicity will show you how you already create events around you, and make you a conscious co-creator of your reality. Dr. Surprise describes the miracles of your brain's processes, merging the worlds of modern physics and ancient mysticism to reveal abilities you have always possessed, but which were not fully understood--until now.
C.G. Jung was intrigued from early in his career with coincidences, especially those surprising juxtapositions that scientific rationality could not adequately explain. He discussed these ideas with Albert Einstein before World War I, but first used the term "synchronicity" in a 1930 lecture, in reference to the unusual psychological insights generated from consulting the I Ching. A long correspondence and friendship with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli stimulated a final, mature statement of Jung's thinking on synchronicity, originally published in 1952 and reproduced here. Together with a wealth of historical and contemporary material, this essay describes an astrological experiment Jung conducted to test his theory. Synchronicity reveals the full extent of Jung's research into a wide range of psychic phenomena.
Synchronicity: the uncanny and fortuitous timing of events that seems to go beyond pure chance. Synchronicity can act as a guide along our life path, helping us through challenging times and nudging us toward self-fulfillment.
Psychologist Chris Mackey offers astounding case studies, alongside a lucid explanation of the brain science underlying synchronicity and many practical suggestions for working with it, from journaling and symbol analysis to dream interpretation and ideas for accessing flow. He is convinced that synchronicity has a crucial role to play in helping us “go within” and tap into our intuitive and spiritual selves.
LAW OF ATTRACTION
Simply put, the Law of Attraction is the ability to attract into our lives whatever we are focusing on. It is believed that regardless of age, nationality or religious belief, we are all susceptible to the laws which govern the Universe, including the Law of Attraction. It is the Law of Attraction which uses the power of the mind to translate whatever is in our thoughts and materialize them into reality. In basic terms, all thoughts turn into things eventually. If you focus on negative doom and gloom you will remain under that cloud. If you focus on positive thoughts and have goals that you aim to achieve you will find a way to achieve them with massive action.
http://www.thelawofattraction.com/what-is-the-law-of-attraction/
THE POWER OF INTENTION
Dyer has another term for the concept behind the Law of Attraction. He calls it the Power of Intention. His philosophy is pure and simple, “The law of attraction is this: You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”
According to Dyer, the process of allowing, just being and embracing this heightened level of consciousness, goes back not to attracting what you want, but attracting what you are.
“You have to just be. You have to let go. You have to allow. You have to be free and make this your consciousness.” He continues, “Basically, what you would see is a frequency (of energy) that manifests itself through the process of giving, of allowing, of offering and of serving. It asks nothing back.”
Dyer illustrates the concept of giving without expectations by quoting the great poet Hafiz: “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth ‘you owe me.’”
Excitement and energy permeate the room as Dyer finishes his thought, “Just think of what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world.” https://www.drwaynedyer.com/press/power-intention/
THE SPACE BETWEEN
What if? What if the power of intention, the law of attraction, synchronicity, cosmic consciousness is the very stuff that quantum physics is saying has been there all the time filling the “space between” that we thought was empty with real, tangible, palpable energy and force and intelligence which is the stuff that sustains the universe, holds it together, and keeps it all from flying apart? The Life Force that we all sense is there.
I believe there is a sacredness within us and between us and among us that also makes us one with each other and with the universe. What if this is the stuff that has been there all along? What if, because of our drive to define and label, this is what we started naming as God? And as we continued to refine and contain our understanding of “that which is greater,” we defined that greatness into oblivion by creating God in our own image. Anthropomorphism and personification are very natural and deeply ingrained human tendencies. So is labeling and defining something that we have done to create a bit of certainty in this world of seeming chaos and endless mystery?
“The question Christianity, as well as every religious tradition, puts to men and women yesterday and today is: Do I find my fulfillment in asserting my will to power over myself and others, or in surrendering to myself and others in a spirit of empathy and compassion? And if I can only be myself by surrendering, to what, to whom do I surrender?” (Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly–on being a man, p. 102)
Philip Simmons wrote that “living at the edge is not so extraordinary as it may sound”:
“We all have within us this capacity for wonder, this ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal and unchanging.
“Deep within the recesses of our very being, we are held . . . known . . . treasured . . . not ‘out there’ somewhere, but in the very Wonder of Love . . . in the very seat of the Heart . . . in the very core of the Soul.
“The more we live in the Wonder and welcome our placement in this very heart of Love, the easier it is to trust . . . to ‘release our fears’ . . . to live without proclaiming certainties . . . to settle into this very core we can only call Love.”
(Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, Bantam Books: 2000, 2003)
“What we long to surrender to is not an ideal or a safety net, but Wonder itself. . . . [We] have held on to the concept of Wonder as a guiding concept . . . a way to focus our attention in these days when life is so uncertain.” (Shelley Chapin Drake, “What We Treasure about Wonder,” January 20, 2019)
Here’s to the crazy ones
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
INCIDENTAL ONGOING EPIPHANIES OR REVELATIONS
Consumer Society (Abundant Community)
Structural Inequality (BASIC Institute)
Power and Oppression (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
Quakers (Discernment Committees, SPICES, Silent Worship, Group Sharing)
Theory of the human race:
Many levels, many needs.
Each of us seek what we need to do to survive.
Lamb and Lion
Sheep and Wolves
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