Doubt and Reassurance Volume I
(Also available in soft-cover print editions)
Dr. Don Ray
Don Ray's work published by Quantum Embrace Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 Don Ray
All rights reserved.
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About the order of the Contents:
For some of us, well, at least for me, Doubts are ill-behaved guests, unwilling to politely remain in their assigned rooms. A rabble of Doubts of heart and mind; faith and intellect; self and society meander about, egging each other on.
This renders the following attempt at a Table of Contents a somewhat contrived and arbitrary structure for corralling doubts into specific holding pens for the convenience of the reader.
But it seems proper literary etiquette to provide at least some minimal illusion of organization to material that like life and our doubts was actually generated in a wonderfully chaotic randomness.
Table of contents
Part I Why?………….Why what?………….Why everything!
No reason to dillydally in facing our doubts. Lets jump in to the biggies, why suffering, why death, why life?
Part II: The Reassuring Universe
It’s big, cold, violent, and doomed. Now what could be reassuring about this?!
If you don’t have some doubts about these, you probably didn’t pick up (or down-load) this book.
Part IV: The Joy of Cat-box Cleaning
Time to return to earth and deal with real life doubts.
Welcome to Why…..Why What?…..Why Everything!
Mystery of Darkness or Bright Mystery of Light
“The mystery” Ben eloquently called it on Sunday, this life, the Source of that life, and our relationship with it all. Ultimately, when we finally lie exhausted from our intellectual, philosophical, and theological exercises, it all does indeed come back to mystery.
It is not given us to fully solve or understand the mystery. But I believe we are empowered by virtue of our freewill consciousness to choose whether to see the mystery as dark and impenetrable, or bright and welcoming. Is it mystery because it is hidden, or is it mystery because there is no bound to its dimensions, and each step of discovery leads to ever brightening light? Is it mystery because it is inexplicable, or because none can explain it to us, leaving us each invited to discover it for ourselves as individuals?
Is the mystery cause for despair or celebration? We are fully free to choose our answers to those questions, that freedom itself being part of the Mystery. We may freely choose whether to let our heart and soul experience that which our mind cannot grasp.
Perhaps the great imprisonment wrought by modern science has been the decree that if we cannot analyze and measure something, it does not exist; this capricious and arbitrary decree leaves us in spiritual solitary confinement, all interaction, experience, and awareness limited to what can be slipped in through the bars of our physical senses and intellect. Yet even with senses satiated with experience and intellect saturated with knowledge, we still hunger. The mystery has returned.
With invocation of mathematical symbols, rigorous logic, evolutionary pragmatism, and scientific inquisitions we seek to dispel the mystery. We need but faster processing speeds and greater bandwidth, and of course expanded budgets, to conquer this impudent “mystery”.
Indeed, we are free to do so, to turn our back on mystery.
Or, with the same invocation of math, science, logic, and evolution, we can turn toward the mystery, not conquering, but exploring, children at play in bright woods and meadows without bound.
Such a subtle difference in attitude toward mystery would at first glance seem inconsequential. But in our acknowledgement of mystery we open ourselves to experiencing that which we cannot understand or explain or categorize or quantify. (Three seagulls fly over as I write! Seagulls here?! Now that is a mystery!)
The Mystery inexorably returns, however steadfastly we deny it. Dark and impenetrable, it lurks behind our conscious awareness. Or bright and promising, it welcomes us when we turn toward it and walk into the warm embrace of relationship with the incomprehensible.
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Doubt is possible only if one is thinking, if one is open, if one is wondering, questioning, and searching……
……and doubt is only possible if one is aware of something, something that prompts the wondering, the questioning, and the searching in the first place……
…….and that awareness is itself reason for Reassurance.
What Matter?
What source?…
those subtle sounds and callings,
those whisperings to the soul.
What certainty, that sense of rightness
on path through woods in pre-dawn light.
What matter, the meager scribbles and
sketches of our lives,
left strewn along our path
that others only briefly cross.
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What of the nature of this world and our nature necessitates doubt, leaving us each looking, but each seeing something different?….and might the answer to that question itself provide reassurance?
Sunrise Blindness
As I watch the sunrise each morning, at least if the sky is not blanketed with thick clouds as it was this morning, I celebrate the colors, the rays, the growing brightness on the horizon, that first flash of brilliant orange diamond as a tiny fraction of the solar disk first penetrates some geographic slot on the distant horizon.
But then I must look away.
We cannot look directly at the sun.
As we consider the diverse spectrum of religions that have come and gone through the ages, as we consider the limitations of our intellect to grasp the concepts of even our religions already simplified down for digestion by the masses, I think we see something akin to the sunrise and its aftermath.
We are not yet ready to look directly at the Source.
Of course our religions and beliefs differ, just as each sunrise and sunset differs.
If we all could look directly at the sun without obscuring and distorting atmosphere, we would of course see the same thing. But that is not possible. So we can only look toward the sun, before sunrise and after sunset. We see its light, but light refracted, reflected, and diffused, light reaching us indirectly.
Today I saw the sunrise as a slowly brightening but still dim blanket of gray.
Someone this morning saw their sunrise as a brilliant cascade of pink and orange across the entire sky.
So also in our different lives, cultures, histories, and experiences, we see different patterns of enlightenment and understanding when we look for the Source.
We, sharing 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, are not ready to directly see the Source.
The disparities among our experiences of the sunrise from different points on the globe in no way imply the sun does not exist.
The disparities in our perception of the Source in no way imply it does not exist.
Though we cannot yet look directly at the Source and Sustainer, let us at least look at the beauty of the refracted, reflected, diffused light of Source and Sustainer. Let us recognize that our view of sunrise and our view of Creation/Creator will differ from that of the other person in different place and different life. But let us acknowledge that we are all looking toward the Light, from our particular vantage points, through our particular distorting and overcast atmosphere of circumstances.
And as we grow to begin to feel the first warming rays of Source directly revealed in our lives, let us do our imperfect best to pass on that Love, that someone else may through us experience sunrise Light, indirect and distorted, but still beautiful in its promise of coming day of vision clear.
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Blinding Glare of Ignorance
How little we know.
I just read John chapter 14. What do these words of Yeshu (Jesus) mean?! I don’t know.
I listen to the announcer on the Christian radio station quote Bible verses, and then expound on what a power the verses contain. How would that announcer answer if asked to explain those verses?
In such situations don’t many of us simply recite credos and dogma and what we learned in Sunday School?…and we recite it all from rote, not really knowing the meaning of what we say. Or is that just me who does not understand, and all the other people quoting Bible verses understand them in profound and personal depth?
I just read an article on quantum loop gravity. Cool stuff! But those boys and girls inventing it don’t understand its meaning any more than most of us in the pews understand John 14.
In recent weeks (October 2008) the worldwide economy has collapsed in a messy heap, leaving the “experts” in disarray and conflict regarding what should have been done and what should be done. Sounds to me like the money gurus understand economics about as well as I understand loop quantum gravity.
As much as we hate to admit it to ourselves or to others, almost all of us don’t really understand squat about much of anything.
Of course we think we understand some things…..which is probably far more dangerous than realizing we actually do not understand.
Look at the impassioned debates people have about politics and the economy. Those debates unfold with such certainty from both sides. But obviously at the least one side in the argument must definitely be wrong. That being a given, do we really believe that the other side is absolutely right?
Our beliefs, science, economics, and faith today bear little resemblance to those dictated by general wisdom only a few years ago. And we dare to think that today’s beliefs, science, economics, and faith are right? Such silliness!
I’m reminded of some legally but not quite totally blind friends of mine who deny to others and themselves that they are almost completely blind. That allows them to accomplish some amazing things, and also leads them to some pretty impressive accidents.
Doesn’t it seem easier to just admit we are blind, be it literally, intellectually, or spiritually? That need not mean we sit in the dark security of our mental living room and never grope into the surrounding unknown. To admit our various forms of blindness simply liberates us from the dictates of our imagination that so readily fills in the unseen blanks in our understanding.
With our admission of how little we really understand, we open the door to a bright world of adventurous exploration of all that we wish to understand.
It is a step of great spiritual maturity to proclaim, “I don’t know!” ….and perhaps the wisest thing we will ever say, almost as wise as the silence of a person who attentively listens.
Of course “not understanding” causes no small distress. We desperately want to understand. The unknown is as fearsome as a dark room. We require some foundation, some reference point, some intellectual harbor from which we can launch at least the mundane activities of another day of living.
But we can focus on what we do know, what we know without words or dogma or verses, but what we know in our heart and soul. And we will find that such ineffable knowledge suffices, to a surprising degree. As we navigate through one day after another relying on heart’s faith while confessing our intellectual ignorance, we may find that what we do not understand is not essentially important after all. We may find that the knowledge of the heart and soul, though not expressible in mere theories or theology, provides a far more enduring and reliable foundation than any fleeting mental construct, trembling theory, or teetering credo.
We may find that upon turning from the glare of our insistent intellectual understanding, the ensuing darkness of our worldly ignorance makes way for another light, a light of the heart, a light soft, a light gently revealing, a light welcoming our exploration and encouraging our growth.
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What greater source of doubt than the undeniable harshness, the unrelenting savagery, and the indescribable suffering inherent in the nature of this world……
Why the Harshness of Nature?
Sitting on the back deck, I restrain ‘Tasha kitty from chasing the baby bunny that uses my yard as a daycare center. I think on how many times my PC kitty terrorized baby bunnies in years past, how I would race out the backdoor to rescue them, usually unsuccessfully.
Those little homegrown mini-melodramas of grisly violence, instigated by none other than my very own teddy bärla cuddle kitty, illustrate at only the most microscopic scale the unrelenting, brutal, harsh savagery of God’s Creation.
The fact is one would reasonably expect that as humanity developed its awareness and constructed its religions, humanity would model its institutions and beliefs on the only examples God provided, examples of merciless killing and compassionless violence.
Little wonder that bloody sacrifices, animal and/or human, became part and parcel of most religious rituals.
Instead of feeling queasy revulsion at liturgies involving buckets of blood and entrails, we should feel amazement that in the midst of still beating hearts and crucifixions, any rudimentary concepts of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness ever arose at all!
Certainly the lion, the raven, and the spider did not teach us these altruisms.
We do indeed see something miraculous and mysterious in the propagation of even crude concepts of mercy and tolerance in the face of the nature of Nature. Taken to the extreme point of view, you can almost conclude that humanity gets high credit for having conceived of humane and loving values in the face of, and in spite of, the uncompromisingly consistent examples God provides in merciless Nature.
At the very least, in light of the lessons offered by this dwarf planet on which we reside, perhaps we can be a little less judgmental and critical of our species’ proclivity for warfare, genocide, slavery, and TV wrestling. We’re just doing what we see God’s Creation do.
Well, or maybe not exactly.
The lion kills to eat, the wasp paralyzes to feed its young, my cat stalks the baby bunny (or she would if I let her) out of survival instincts.
Indeed, Nature demonstrates harshness and brutality, but not meanness and greed for their own sakes.
Of our own freewill volition we have elevated sadism to new heights, and institutionalized violence not in order to feed our families and village, but to feed our greed and lusts.
In God’s Nature we see the foundation starting points from which our lives spring. The lion cuddles its playful kittens and then mercilessly torments the wounded gazelle in order to teach those kittens how to hunt. The lion, the raven, the wasp, show us life at its Source and life in balance. But their cuddling affections and heartless killing are constrained to needs of offspring, flock, pack, pride, or colony.
We though, humanity with the potential of God and the dangers of Satan, know no such constraints. Our affections and love need not be limited to family or tribe. Our avarice and tortures extend far beyond expediencies for our own survival.
We are empowered in the image of God, profoundly free in our deeply personal Choice.
I said at the beginning that Nature offers an endless parade of savagery but little precedent for compassion and forgiveness. After more careful considerations I must recant that thesis.
No animals bear grudges. Offending members of the pack, pride, or troupe remain welcome once the argument over the remaining bone or berry is resolved. Many the time have my cats hissed and slapped at each other, only moments later to return to cuddling and exchanging grooming.
Per their God given nature, animals cuddle or kill. In their lives we are shown the departure point, a point in perfect balance, a point necessary in the very structure of Creation if we are to experience true freedom of Choice in sculpting our individual souls.
From this profound, balanced starting point that Nature provides, we each as individuals can then freely Choose in which direction we will grow, lashing out further with our greed and cruelty, or extending our embrace to encompass wider love.
In their suffering and in their play, the fauna of the loving Creation demonstrate the foundation starting point for our freedom, our Choice, and our ensuing direction of growth. From that exquisitely balanced point of departure we then create our schemes for empire, or our prayers for Paradise.
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Embracing the Terrors of Change
I long ago happily quit keeping up with celebrities, fads, and trends. I couldn’t tell you who’s hot on screen or in music, and I’m quite proud of that disciplined ignorance, a token liberation from marketers’ enslavement.
Only recently I finally also quit worrying about keeping up with changes in technology.
True, technology, morals, and entertainment change faster each year, a runaway avalanche sweeping foundations and reference points out from under our feet. Sure, at my age I find this rate of change a source of mild distress.
But compared to real change, I really cannot complain. I’ve never watched my city radically changed overnight by an earthquake or falling bombs.
I’ve never watched the TV programming change overnight to accommodate an occupying military force.
I’ve never changed my diet because of a famine.
So, change is relative, always challenging, always promoting personal growth, often to be feared, but not always. Change is simply the world reminding us it is out of our control. There’s not a bloomin’ thing we can do to avoid change, except temporarily hide from and deny it, which is surely the most dangerous response.
We do not necessarily have to embrace change. In fact, ignoring it is sometimes the most courageous course, something to keep in mind as body changes with age and health retreats before accumulated wear, tear, and toxins.
But ignoring is not denying, as my ignoring the latest media personality in no way implies I deny the influence they wield over society.
It is through change that we are forced to choose our life priorities and values.
Who and what will we sacrifice from our daily life in order to remain up to date on the latest musical hits and media technology?
To what lengths will we go to get money and food when the changes of recession and drought leave us destitute and hungry?
So let us welcome change, from irritating fads to terrifying catastrophe, because in each inescapable personal choice of priorities that change forces upon us, we enter an opportunity to freely sculpt the very essence of our being.
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Cults for Everyone
We hear about the cult, the kids, those strange people, the inexplicable behaviors, and we carefully avoid the realization that we are all members of cults. Some cults and their belief systems are just big enough to be called the norm. From where do these cults, including our own societal, national, majority, “normal” cult arise?
What of the wrenching changes in the lives of the cult members removed from their isolated compounds, forced to see the world in the light our society casts on it? And are the rest of us, in the “majority cult” of mainstream society, immune from such shocks?
How we all long for something stable, reliable, unchanging, and true!….something that absolves us of the responsibility to question, something that obviates the necessity for us to decide.
How eagerly we flock to cults and fraternal orders, how hungrily we ingest ritual and recitation.
Inerrant Bibles, holy texts, prophecies, and scriptures, at least if in our language of choice; or colored pieces of cloth raised on poles; or prophets, preachers, and presidents; these command our unquestioning allegiance.
The leader we follow gets his instructions directly from God, and such surcease and comfort is to be found in following orders and donning the uniform, whether issued by military or marketers, patriarch or popular trend.
How irritatingly inconvenient are the nagging facts that counter holy text, slanderous fictions besmirching our leader, untidy revelations toppling beloved institution.
Usually our religious faith, patriotic fervor, and zealous loyalty can trump intellect, twisting and bending our perceptions of reality in a mental contortionist circus-act that sustains our predilection for blind following and dodges the insistent demand that we pose, and worse, have to answer questions, with their implicit association of personal accountability.
But if any consistency is to be found through the course of history, it is that revelations bring not confirmation but contradiction.
Over and over and over, our various temples do get toppled, our armies do get routed, our leaders do get caught, and text and teacher leave us with questions instead of answers.
We cannot long rest complacent in our faiths and loyalties.
The God in which we would or would not believe allows us but brief times to blindly obey and believe, before wrenching revolutions of heart or circumstance place in our path the bridges we must cross and the forks at which we must choose. Our temples of certain faith and blind loyalty come tumbling down, to reveal the selves we will create by our response to the glaring light of uncertainty that brings the gift of freedom to we children created in the image of God.
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Seeing the grandiose size of the universe, the great tides of civilizations that come and go, the inexorable march of evolution, could leave one doubting the value of the individual in these great currents of time.
Meaning of the River
Humanity, as a whole and individually, is simply carried along in great tides and currents of interaction, reacting to the inputs and relationships and circumstances of the moment. Even the seemingly independent and innovative actions that seem to redirect the great currents can be found to be rooted in compiled experience and personal history of those involved.
It is only in the aggregate that tiny uncertainties of individual freewill become manifest in discernable influence.
And in this great, dynamic, unstoppable cascade of events, relentlessly and irrevocably moving per the dictates of time, does the individual droplet of humanity possess any importance whatsoever? Is it only in the great flow of events that carries us along that we find meaning?
Or conversely, is the torrent and cascade actually at the service of the individuals? Is the destiny of the river to reach that next sea, or is it actually to carry the individuals, and all Purpose and meaning is found not in the great course and flow, but in each individual, each focal point of connections, relationships, and interactions that in their sum define the very essence of the river?
We are carried by events, but carried not just to a river’s mouth, but to our own self, our essence, created in the course of the rapids and falls that shape and sculpt, or more accurately said, give us the opportunity to shape and sculpt, our souls.
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Seeking a better God
The fact is, the unremitting harshness, unrelenting suffering, and inevitable death that comprise this temporal world stand as almost insurmountable barriers to many seekers trying to discern a loving, compassionate creator.
From even my relatively gentle exposure to human suffering I can understand why Gnostics and others would indict this world and its creator as evil, or at least not particularly adept at love and compassion.
Yet we can find love in the world, in fact we can create love in the world. That fact seems all the more outrageous considering the brutal ambient in which that love must be instantiated.
Indeed, sometimes it seems this is hardly a loving world….other than the beauty we choose to see and the love we choose to create.
We can look at this world and summarily declare it harsh and brutal, along with its creator. Like the Gnostics, the aesthetics, the mystics, we can then invest our life in seeking some other higher world, in search of a more desirable creator.
Or we can surrender to the world’s nature, immersing in it, seeking to saturate our senses with at least whatever temporary, carnal pleasures we can briefly salvage.
Or, in our freedom, we can choose to do something about the nature of this world, not running from it, not immersing in it, but declaring our intent to claim our individual potential as one created in the image of God.
Nothing in this harsh world, not an evil demigod creator, not some malevolent underworld spirits, not any institutional perversion of religion, not Satan and his numberless minions, keep us from choosing to love.
Escape into pleasant meditation or immersion into exhausting debauchery, exotic spheres of spiritual transcendence or reductionist nihilism….these responses to the harsh and loveless cruelty of this world do not excuse us from loving, in whatever little sphere of influence we find ourselves, with whatever meager abilities we possess.
How dare we blame God for this loveless world! Let us not deny its harshness, but let us not deny our complicity in that harshness.
Fine, see God as heartless or non-existent, but know that in your response to that god’s, or non-god’s, world, you define yourself.
Fine, the world is merciless, God’s Creation is unremittingly cruel, but what has that to do with how you choose to shape your Youniverse?
Those that cannot believe in a loving God because they see so little love and compassion in this harsh world are simply being reasonable, rational, and observant.
But I know that even in the face of all the horrors, grief, and loneliness that fill this world, any individual who freely and defiantly chooses to compassionately love anyway will find their light illumines a dark corner; there in that dim but warming glow, they will see theirs is not the only love; and in the faces newly revealed by that individual’s waxing light will be seen the face of God, present here, in Love, when invited by our freely chosen acts of selfless compassion.
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How often do our doubts arise out of fear of the unknown, an unknown in which reassurance awaits our discovery, if we can summon the courage to look.
Apeirophobia (Fear of Infinity)
‘Tasha kitty took me for a long walk in the woods, her longest and furthest ever, by far. All the way to the ridge she went, coming over the lip to get her first shocking view of just how big the universe is, as she peered down to the road below, and for the first time beheld the summits in the far distance.
Her little kitty brain immediately overflowed with this revelation, and she promptly retreated back down, at least for the time being, to the much more constrained views of a reality bounded by nearby trees and rocks.
True, obscuring bushes and forest may hinder movement and hide the unseen predator. But perhaps even the most terrible hidden and imagined threats are preferable to that higher view into distances unimaginable, potentials incomprehensible.
Little fuzzy minds are not alone in this response to first sight of a distressingly bigger universe.
It is not mere vastness of physical distances that sends us in hasty retreat back over the edge and into our familiar comfort zone.
For us it is the concept of something profoundly greater, more powerful, unfathomable.
If in scaling the hillside of fact or faith we peer over its summit and catch glimpse of something unfamiliar and challenging to our comfortable little mental universe, our tails bush up in defensive antagonism and we turn our backs on the unwelcome grandeur, retreating to our long cherished beliefs and ignorance.
Indeed, ours may be a world of insecurities and hidden threats, but at least our associated fears and prejudices are familiar and unchallenging. Better to live in continuous readiness to counterattack whatever enemy lurks behind bush close at hand, than to grapple with concepts, revelations, and God majestic beyond our comprehension. Better to fight and claw in the trenches of our little personal universe, than to have to learn, change, grow, accept, and surrender to a greater, more majestic, awe inspiring Reality.
Hence we turn and flee from God and our own potential.
But ‘Tasha kitty’s morning was still young. Her bright-eyed spirit was not ready to long hide from the majestic expanse revealed above.
Kitty courage gradually, cautiously, overcame trepidation. She explored a different path to ridge’s edge.
At her own pace, she regained the ridge and all its views.
With cautious bravery she investigated its features, and with time gained the summit of comfort.
Eventually, there she sat, seemingly as secure as kitties ever get, soaking up warming sunshine not present in the thick bushes below.
It’s natural that upon glimpsing ideas that stretch our conceptions, when first brushing against the magnitude of Life and its Source, we run back to our little worldly cares, concrete worries and specific fears filling our mind so as to erase views of unbounded grandeur. We are merely doing as Adam and Eve, hiding from their God as S/He walked though the Garden calling for them.
But we mustn’t stay hiddk *le: …..oops….perhaps because this essay is in part about her, ‘Tasha hops into my lap, adding her editorial changes, arguably as valid as most editorial changes. Anyway, as I was saying before the fuzzy interruption, we must not stay hidden. The higher ridge and its enlightening, and challenging views of majestic grandeur await our Choice to climb. There, out of the shadowy thickets of our own construct, shines warming sun.
Like ‘Tasha, we mustn’t fear the views of revelations majestic, or the Source they reveal, a Source too large to fit in our little imaginations.
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In case you do not yet harbor doubts about a loving God, listen to the screams of a child crushed in an earthquake, look at the face of the mother trying to reach that child. Surely there is no reassurance in this scene!
God and a Child’s Terror
Those Gnostic belief systems about a “bad” god of the earth/creation and a ‘higher/good” god do have a certain logical appeal.
To condemn all physical existence as corrupt and enslaving does make a certain amount of sense.
(As I write, the sunrise wind ripples grass, leaves, and my paper. Only in recent years have I become aware of the consistency of that motion each morning at behest of sun’s first light.)
To eschew all worldly involvement and flee to ascetic isolation as a means to liberate the soul from carnal enslavement does seem not totally unreasonable. Little wonder that such beliefs appear in sects of Gnostic, Christian, Hindu, and most other religions.
Such dualistic models of gods good and gods bad, munificent and petty, seems a perfectly reasonable outgrowth of our mental and spiritual struggle to resolve the undeniable harshness of the world with our insistent longing for and instinctive belief in something beautiful, just, and eternal.
Yes, it is understandable that through the ages every belief system has spawned a subset of beliefs and sects espousing radical renunciation of this physical world created, from all appearances, by a god or gods with at least a little malicious intent.
Sure, we see the occasional sublime beauty in this world, but that can readily be explained away as seduction and delusion.
To honestly look at this world, its savage beasts, its ravaging pestilence, and its sadistic citizens, and still proclaim faith in a loving, compassionate Creator, requires either faith of monumental proportions or undiluted self-delusion. To the casual, objective observer there appears little clinical difference between the deeply faithful and the abjectly delusional mind.
Believing in the unseen is one thing. Believing in the face of unrelenting, contradictory evidence is another.
Yet believe we must, or at least some of us want to. So to excuse the good-guy- god we so fervently hope to believe in, we resort to putting the blame for atrocities and disasters on a lesser god, a mere worldly god, a petulant and almost human god….or the devil, Satan, demons, etc…..a thorn by any other name, you know.
Through the ages we have meticulously constructed belief systems to exonerate our loving supreme being from any guilt for the horrific carnage that afflicts most days on this planet, and we have provided witness for the defense that God was nowhere near the scene of the crime(s).
In that defensive role we squirm uncomfortably, and adeptly dodge, the question of how a supreme, living God could have unleashed the demigod, or devil, or demons, or Satan, who is responsible for all the bad in the world.
To this day we find it devilishly difficult to look at genocide, earthquakes, mass graves, and politics, and not feel compelled to invoke demonic forces that for a little while escaped God’s control, but will soon enough lose out in a big battle of good and evil, good triumphing of course. Then in that life to come, as we stroll streets of gold below the crystal throne, we will not even whisper the question, “why did He let us suffer through those millennia of plagues and predators, pestilence and politicians?”
Hey, I’m all for resolute faith, but I also believe real faith must have the resolve to ask the hard questions. Where is God at the moment the blade comes down, the bullet penetrates, the earthquake crushes? Where is God when the child screams in pain and the mother cries in anguish? Where is God in the moments of terror, horror, and writhing agony?
Faith, real faith, must ask those questions, and any God worthy of our worship will not deny our asking.
That God may not have given us the power to see all the forces and futures that might clarify the ‘why”. We may not have the intellect or insight to fully comprehend reasons infinite and eternal. Ultimately, all we may have is our little Youniverse of personal experience, and what we choose to do with it.
Ultimately, in each of our personal Youniverses, we choose if we will contribute to or ease the suffering of the world.
Dare we demand of God(s) an explanation for Creation’s harshness until we have made our Choice of response to that harshness?
Can we feign understanding of the world and Creation and God or pantheons of Gods, until we exercise the one certainty in our existence, our profound freedom to choose whether to multiply or mitigate the suffering within our reach?
Yes, I passionately counsel asking God the hard questions. But I fervently believe we must first ask them of ourselves. That is our power and our inescapable obligation as freewill, conscious beings created in the image of God.
Somewhere in that process of exercising our free Choice between compassion and conflict, we will better, even if not completely, come to understand the Creator, and the sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful Creation that miraculously enables that Choice.
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Doubt: Why is life so bloomin’ hard?! What’s the point of the unrelenting struggle?!
Empowered for creation of the self
I keep saying that we are empowered to create our eternal selves. But what does creation always entail?
If we create a house, a business, a work of art, a football team, all of those creations entail effort, will, and work. You don’t just sit in your lounger, think about it, and “poof”, there’s your custom car, barbequed steak, or new porch. “Creation” means making something happen that would not have happened otherwise, and that means investing some energy to change the direction of the universe in some small way.
Should we expect any less in the creation of our souls?
We’re handed all the clay. Someone else created the raw materials of our bodies, our conscious minds, and the world that sustains us. But that clay, the clay of our soul, will sit there as a lump unless we invest some effort to do something with it.
That’s why effort, if not out and out struggle, is involved in any act of personal growth.
All the autopilot, programmed behaviors just happen. The sex, the eating, the striving for money, all these reflect necessities of survival. Everything we do because it’s natural or necessary is the spiritual equivalent of the lump of clay sitting on the table and just being, well, a lump of clay. All the behaviors associated with lusts and desires and wishes are nothing more than our minds obeying their natural law programming just like the lump of clay obeys the law of gravity.
When God breathed life into the lump of clay, that did not entail merely giving a pulse to the clay. That giving of holy life, that creating by God in the image of God, did not mean simply shaping the clay into a more complex form and adding laws of survival to the law of gravity the clay had to obey.
The clay, you, was gifted with the essence of life itself, the ability to create itself.
This personal creation, as all creation, entails the conscious, chosen, freewill application of effort to make the Youniverse move in a slightly different direction from what it would otherwise.
The cruising, easy, comfortable, and natural paths are the paths of the clay lying on the table, obedient to gravity, passively unchanging. The struggles, temptations, setbacks, and challenges of life are the stuff of self-Creation, opportunities for the Choice.
The wood provides the raw material to serve the carpenter’s will, and through his/her work and sweat to become creation. The paint provides the raw material to serve the artist’s eye, and through invested time and training to become beauty. The challenges, difficulties, and opportunities of life lie on the shop floor and easel of your life, the raw materials ready for the toil of your conscious free will to create your soul.
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And after all that creation and toil and growth …..we die. Time to face the Big Doubt, what’s this death thing all about anyway?!
Healing Death
The meadow stream is running!....right near the house! I do not remember seeing that before!....at least not during these many years of extended drought.
I am taking off my wrist splint for longer periods. 'Tasha's hair has grown back. Alice asked for a hug.
Such a miracle, healing in its many forms.
Of course sometimes we do not heal, or may only partially or imperfectly heal. Yet always, as long as life endures, the body and heart try to heal, cell by cell, breath by breath.
It is as inexorable as the pull of gravity. This drive to heal, this ongoing struggle, is surely a miracle, a constant, miraculous influence of stunning proportions.
Our lives depend on this ongoing, constant, unseen, seldom recognized, healing process. No life form can long exist without the ceaseless repair, reconstruction, and maintenance of each cell and tissue.
We seldom think of the invisible healing continuously occurring at the cellular level. And when we think of healing of our visible injuries, we mainly think of it as taking too long. But I think we would feel stunned in amazement if we could watch a time lapse movie of our cut or scrape or contusion disappearing, filling in, covering over, right before our eyes. It would appear as a special effects marvel, a trick of makeup and digital manipulation.
Real and miraculous it is, even if too slow and imperfect for our tastes.
Life wants to heal!
Living systems are driven to heal, as long as life remains.
Of course equally universal is the ultimate surrender of all healing powers to inevitable mortality.
Healing..... miraculous, beautiful, and universal healing will always lose?!....surrendering in abject defeat?
What a grim and depressing end to the tale!
Or is that view too narrowly focused? Is there not more to healing than repairing physical cuts and breaks?
Hearts, souls, and spirits require healing as much as flesh, limbs, and organs.
But with healing of heart, soul, and spirit we again we face the inevitable question of ultimate outcome.
Just as cuts too deep and cancers too spread will leave our bodies scarred and disfigured, the harshest abuse and most wrenching grief will, with passing years, accrue burdens on our hearts that time cannot heal.
So is spiritual healing, like physical healing, universal but also universally doomed?
Does inevitable physical death make a cruel joke of the ceaseless healing struggle of heart and soul as well as healing processes of cell and protein?
After all, physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder that I celebrate this morning, is really only a rearguard holding action, a valiant defense of a hopelessly doomed bodily bastion
Why this prolonged defense in the face of inevitable demise? Perhaps we find the answer in the nature of that physical defense.
All that healing and repairing and curing actually involves the sacrifice of countless multitudes of living cells, blood cells white and red, collagen and epidural tissues, bone and skin, all these cells filling a momentary role, only to die and be replaced.
Such is the nature of our physical body, not a constant structure, but a form resulting from process, dynamic and vital, each cell continually in the process of being replaced.
Physical death is our constant companion, active in every cell, each cell facing imminent demise and replacement in order to sustain the ongoing dynamism of our physical life.
Yet through this all, the soul persists intact, accruing its scars and distortions, yet present still as individual identity animating that dynamic body.
Here, in sustaining spirit and soul, we find the whole purpose of all that physical healing.
The physical healing, for fleeting temporal moments, buys time for the conscious soul. The physical healing, for all its miraculous wonder, is not the purpose, but only an extension of a greater healing purpose.
It is the soul and spirit that healing ultimately serves.
But soul scarred, spirit crushed, and heart broken can only heal so far while still sustaining the assaults and insults of this worldly life.
Yet healing will not be denied the triumph due its tenacious effort. And so our bodies finally die, that our souls may be healed of their emotional scars and spiritual infirmities.
As the white blood cells die to free us from the infection, our bodies die that our souls may be freed from the compounded griefs and spiritual fractures that dim their light.
Healing is universal, and ultimately triumphant.
Inexorably the healing Spirit calls to our soul, trying to heal as best it can while in this temporal veil, beseeching us to seek those ways that bring the soul health; all the while, assuring us that spiritual scars will fade, disabled hearts can heal, and this world's grip will soon enough be loosed.
During our physical time in this temporal world, if we choose to seek spiritual growth and health we should also choose those physical behaviors and lifestyle that best heal our bodies, delaying their inevitable end.
For now, we can also choose those ways of being and believing that will best heal our hearts and spirits, but in this case not buying time before inevitable ending, but preparing for promised new beginning.
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PART 2
Reassurance: you are at the center of the universe!…..Really!
Look at the shape of the Universe from every individual’s perspective! You are at the center! You are the focus of a perfect symmetry! All time comes to you! You are the leading edge of time itself! The most distant past lies at the edge of your universe! All events through all time coalesce onto your consciousness at this moment of now! This is not poetry or allegory or religion or spirituality, this is the literal, incontrovertible fact of physics!
Welcome to The Reassuring Universe!
Reassurance: all from One, One for all
We ponder the meaning of this information age. Why are we driven to collect knowledge and then share it? Might it be because we really are all One, units of the original Source of Creation, and the most natural thing imaginable is that we drive towards the common experience, the shared knowledge, from whence we once sprang.
Infinite Implications of One
I remain fascinated by the fact that particles, waves, and energy all blend together at the smallest size scales. I thrill at the thought that at high enough temperatures all forces become one.
Consider this scientifically irrefutable testimony to the oneness of all, to one source, to individual elements and structure arising from a single Wholeness. Surely the spiritual implications of this cannot be simply ignored.
Even in our vastly expanded universe, still the physics of quantum wave functions and relativity testify that no thing is fully alone, nothing is fully separate, entities do not and cannot exist with absolute isolation.
So obvious are the implications of this that it is with greatest frustration that I face the fact that the spiritual searchers cannot understand the physics and the scientists cannot understand the spiritual aspects. I am frustrated not with them, but with myself for my inability to succinctly digest both sides to make them clear to the other.
All arises from a unified Source! Hence all remains fully part of that Source!
Even space and time do not exist as structure in and of themselves, but only in reference to other existing entities. Space and time are simply geometries that define the connections among diverse components of the Source, and those geometries we perceive as spatial and temporal separations.
The One Source allows ever-greater opportunity for existence of individual entities, hence space and time appear to expand.
In this physics resides stunning Truth and revelations for our perception of reality, revelations I suspect it will take many generations for humanity to comprehend, if ever.
The physicists do a grave disservice to themselves and the populace as a whole if they keep these wonders entombed in cold logic and grave mathematics, discouraging playful and excited exploration of their greater spiritual implications.
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Chicken Soup, Mashed Potatoes, and the Destiny of the Soul
Having propped the handle of the spoon onto the edge of the skillet, seconds later I watch that handle begin to slide to the side, then the spoon pivots around, and before I can catch it, the spoon handle has slid over the inside edge and down into the bottom of the skillet.
As I fish the handle of the now greasy spoon out of the bottom of the skillet, I experience the results of a universal law of physics, well, at least universal as far as we know.
All systems (“systems” is just a technical sounding word for anything) will try to find a way to their lowest energy state. That’s always true. It happens on Mars and in your kitchen.
What’s that mean? It means that when you drop something it goes down and wants to sit on the floor, or spread across the floor if it was liquid in a glass. It means the spoon precariously tilted up on the edge of the bowl wants to slide right or left, the spoon doesn’t care, as long as it can try to slide off the edge and into the middle of the bowl.
It means streams find a way down, even if that means crashing over a cliff and forming a water fall.
Everything’s looking for a way to get down, as low as it can, whether that means physically reaching a low location, or chemically reaching a stable configuration, or atomically decaying to stable, non-radioactive substances.
Well, if that’s the case, everything trying to get lower and lower, then eventually it seems everything should collapse into a tediously boring flatland, maybe even almost as flat as the plains around Lubbock, Texas. Mountains should erode down leaving smooth planets, and stars should fizzle out to become dark spheres of packed neutrons.
(I try to type this while a complaining ‘Tasha kitty demands my attention and hops up to drape her soft fuzziness across my left wrist. The weight now pressing my wrist onto the keyboard provides scientific evidence of matter trying to get to its lowest possible position, whether it can actually move lower or not. )
So, it appears that in something akin to a Big Bang, although its details remain in dispute, a nicely compact singularity blew itself to smithereens and became the Universe, and has spent the rest of its billions of years trying to pull everything back together, with nuclear forces on the smallest scale cobbling together hadrons to come together as nuclei, and on the largest scale gravity coercing and seducing gas and dust to come together as stars and planets.
Yet for all its efforts, always trying to pull everything back together, which we experience as things always falling down instead of up, the universe still is not even close, nor does it appear it ever will get close, to returning to its original compact source form.
In the process of blowing itself to smithereens, the Universe also came up with some laws of physics and some structures that led to things like big roomy atoms, lots and lots of space separating galaxies, and an expansion rate that works against the pull of gravity to keep the whole kit and caboodle from getting all squished back together.
All that law of gravity influence, all that universal effort to get to the lowest energy state and let the spoon handle slip over the bowl’s edge and down into the soup, does indeed help the dust of the universe come together into planets, potatoes and people, but it can’t overcome other laws of physics that keep planets in orbits so people can bake those potatoes. In fact, if that bowl with the spoon happens to be full of some of those potatoes in mashed form, even those lowly potatoes suffice to defy gravity and the universe, preventing the spoon from slipping to the bottom of the bowl.
So, that’s how the physical universe works, and why mashed potatoes are preferable to chicken soup for keeping your spoon handle dry.
“But what’s that got to do with consciousness and individual souls?” you’re probably asking. Oh, you’re not asking that? Well then, I’ll ask it for you, and even better, I’ll provide an answer.
For reasons I won’t get into here, it appears inescapable that the Universe was, and for that matter is, conscious. This conclusion arises from the degree of interconnection of all components of the Universe, and…..but I said I wouldn’t get into that, and a promise is a promise.
Anyway, at the moment of the Big Bang (and we’ll focus on that one beginning of this one local Universe, though the following analysis applies equally well to the recently postulated assemblage of countless universes that may be popping into existence like popcorn at the mall theatre) imagine a consciousness that blew itself up.
Now, we said that universal laws such as “all systems seek their lowest energy state” appear to be vestiges of the original “togetherness” of the physical Universe, and evidence of the Universe trying to get itself back together.
What if some original Consciousness is doing the same thing? What if there is a universal spiritual law, equivalent to the “seeking the lowest energy state” physical law, that says the stuff of the Universe will bounce about, coalesce, and chemically react so as to try to get back to a unified consciousness?
What if just as gravity pulls dust together to form planets, the “law of consciousness” pulls nucleic acids together to form potatoes and the conscious bipedal life forms that boil, bake, and fry those potatoes?
Yet just as galaxies, planets, and mountain lakes don’t seem destined to actually return to one big squished together black hole resembling the Universe before the Big Bang (or Big Quantum Inflation, or whatever we call it this month ) so too the One Big Honkin’ Consciousness is destined to remain instantiated through lots of little consciousnesses. ( Hmph, I’m surprised the spell checker didn’t gag on that plural form. )
Just as gravity tries to keep planets in orbit, there seems to be a universal law of spirituality that keeps pulling conscious individuals together, a law we experience in the pull to family, loved ones, and our favorite football team.
The dimensional curvatures that try to pull everything in the universe together are the remnants of the starting point before those dimensions inflated. They now exist in a perfect balance that pulls enough “stuff” together to give us a planet under our feet but still allow lots of separation to leave lots of open sky over our heads, at least in Montana. People in Manhattan are in a different universe anyway, so this doesn’t apply to them.
Likewise, an incessant call to Connection with each other, and an innate and undeniable awareness of something greater, whisper to us of One Source. Yet we exist as completely separate conscious entities.
Just as planets are all pulled together by gravity yet remain in separate orbits, so conscious souls are pulled together, not in order to dissolve individuals into an oblivion of Oneness, but to exist together, still as individuals but in Connection, Communion and Unity.
Asteroids and star clusters have little choice about obeying the laws of gravity and conservation of energy. We on the other hand are not so law abiding.
If indeed there is a universal law underlying the development of individual conscious beings, ironically our very consciousness, albeit perhaps immature, empowers us to act in contradiction to that law. We merrily hate, despise, bludgeon and obliterate our fellow conscious neighbors on the planet, quite in flagrant violation of any poorly enforced universal law that might have given birth to our consciousness in the first place.
Though it took us a few thousand years to figure out the laws of gravity and electromagnetism, they’ve proven to be rather convenient tools. It just took a few millennia of growth of intellectual and scientific awareness for us to be able to quantify such laws and start building airplanes and power plants.
Shouldn’t we ask what might happen if people began to recognize and apply in their lives a “universal consciousness” law, recognizing that our individual lives stem from One Source, and that from that Source we each experience in our yearnings the pull to bring consciousness back together.
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Planck and Einstein Wrecking Our Comfortable Foundations
Of course Space-time is too flimsy to build our reality upon it! We shouldn’t be bothered by space-time that warps. In interaction events we find immutable, reliable foundations for reality!
That’s it! Dang, I love these Eureka moments.
Relativity shows us that there is nothing sacrosanct about space-time coordinates. Two moving observers watching the same two events can even see the sequence of the events switched, one observer saying “A” happened first, the other observer with a different relativistic perspective swearing that “B” happened before “A”. (Though mind you, the speeds and distances required for such conflicting observations ensure no violation of causality. In other words, neither observer will see a ball caught before it’s thrown.)
At first these seemingly conflicting observations, time itself proving unreliable and even the sequence of events turned topsy-turvy, may seem disconcerting. But hey, if we were staking our whole foundation and security on nothing, and space-time is after all actually just about as “nothing” as you can get, we shouldn’t get too upset about discovering that in fact the flimsy network of our projected Cartesian coordinates and measurements on that “Nothing” prove fragile and unreliable.
But what are we left with? What is unyieldingly, objectively, resolutely, absolute? The event! The interaction! The time of the event, the energy released or absorbed, the momentum carried away or added, velocities, lengths, and locations, these quantified values will vary from observer to observer, being mere whims of our relativistic circumstance.
But the nature of the event itself, the collision, explosion, decay, or collapse, this the observers will agree upon, even if every measured detail about it is subject to relative disagreement.
In terms relevant to us, did the ball hit the goal? When, how fast, and with what impact, our relativistic referees may disagree on, but the fact of impact, the indentation of net, the buzzer detecting contact, the bending of the supports, that qualitative fact, if not quantitative details, all observers will agree on.
This provides profound testimony in support of the premise that interactions themselves underlie the foundations of reality. Ultimately, only the fact of interaction can be trusted. And ultimately, it is interaction events upon which all existence and reality are built.
All the queasy insecurity of quantum mechanics and the confounding twists of relativistic space-time no longer vex our perception of reality once reality is perceived as built upon interactions, with everything else, including even space-time, flexibly bending to accommodate the building of those interactions upon each other.
We have long held fast to locations, times, and outcomes of mechanical trajectories as the reference points, literal and figurative, for our framework of reality.
People’s reluctance to accept the inescapable conclusions of quantum mechanics and relativity arose in part because we lacked another firm foundation reference base to replace those dismantled by Planck and Einstein.
We need not despair, for there is in fact an immutable foundation upon which reality solid and reliable can be built, and it is the interaction events themselves. Upon those interaction events of the past, through the ongoing crystallizing network structure of ever forming new interactions, the events of the future are quite securely anchored, not left to dangle in Einstein’s space-time that twists and bends upon the slightest gravitational breeze and merest relative motion.
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Cataclysm of Reality
It becomes clear as we peer deeper and deeper into the sub-nuclear world and discover ever more forms of matter and energy and dimensional curvatures, all blending together and changing identities as conveniently as business cards exchanged at a convention, that at the quantum level we see the remarkable flexibility and variety of the very structure of existence.
It’s as if space itself is aching to give birth, the potential for virtual particles present everywhere at all times, energy impatiently putting in its appearances only to be yanked back behind the curtain not yet raised.
Matter becomes energy, energy becomes matter, virtual particles tease our detectors, quarks and gluons taunt with their “you know we’re here but you can’t get to us” game of hide and seek. Color charge remains invisible and always will, structures proven and verified still remain in fact only conjectures of hoped for symmetry.
We see in the sub-nuclear the whirling dance of Creation itself, possibilities unbounded by polite adherence to humanity’s convenient labels.
At that quantum level, energy, that ability to alter future possible states, becomes a pure thing, too boisterous and playful to sit still for long in one form or one place.
In exasperation we long for the simplicity of merely a couple of quarks, a dab of gluon between them, and some dignified electrons in stately orbit about them. Instead we get levels of ever heavier and stranger quarks (to the point we name one of them Strange), while leptons of dubious repute and mass instigate disquiet and decay by their suspected, if not always detected, fleeting presence as agent provocateur.
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