Dear surreptitious75,
I can understand your stance and appreciate your openness. I think you’ll find that you have more in common with JBP than you think. To begin with he is using the religious texts that are best known in the western hemisphere to illustrate some practical aspects of life. He started out, much as I did, trying to make sense of the Bible. Being well read after the example of CG Jung, he found the archetypal portrayal of key subjects that have dumbfounded thinking people for millennia. He explained (as did Jung) that often when struggling with such existential subjects, in ones sleep, the mind uses all kinds of symbolism in dreams. These dreams were written down and used to explain the deep questions of existence metaphorically. Over millennia, many people in many cultures found the stories so truthful, that they survived so long.
Our problem lies in the way we read such stories, rationally one presumes, but the stories are not about historical facts, but metaphysical symbolism that give us feelings rather than logical answers. However, we are creatures who also learn via feelings, as long as we don’t rule it out. Much damage was done by assuming the Bible was antiquated, just because we tried to read it differently than how it was written. JBP is opening the Bible back up for a great deal of people who watched his Maps of Meaning and Biblical videos. Of course, they are finding answers that the pious may not want to entertain. He says, for example, that he acts as if there were a God. That means, he acts from a metaphysical perspective, as though he could see through divine eyes. That is also what the scriptures do as well.
JBP refers to a spirit in much the same way as Socrates had a daimon. In what way a particular God actually exists is a question of how it reaches us. There has been a lot of thought regarding the Brahman/Atman version of the divine, in which Atman is in each of us but is a part of Brahman, and which is then said to be consciousness. Alan Watts dreamed up a “puppeteer God” who, inside everyone of us, he is looking for himself. But seriously, is God out there, or in here? Must God be the totality of all that exists including that which existed in the past and that which will exist in the future, or could it be the collective memory, that Jung put forward?
A God without a gender is difficult to talk to, but not impossible. I believe it is this idea of God being within that led people to anthropomorphism and omnipotency. It is a god “out there” that is omniscient or omnibenevolent and has metaphysical or supernatural capabilities, This is where I believe the Church went down a difficult road.
As you can see, there is a way to join scripture with rational thinking, even though the Mystery of our existence is still around and the question how intelligence and consciousness developed out of the chaos of energy we see in the universe. Where does it come from?