That’s right. The Bible and other traditions take up this condition and puts it into a story, which was the standard way of trying to understand it. They also go on to suggest well tested ways out of the dilemma in which our consciousness puts us. We can function without consciousness, not as well as with, but basically function to do the standard things in life. This is proven by people who, through illness, lose that capacity. In such a condition many problems we have with existence do not arise.
Unfortunately, I don’t think of it as a cycle, except perhaps that one generation learns, the next generation forgets and (at best) has to learn again. Sometimes it takes several generations to re-learn, which is due to the loss of the tradition that instructed earlier generations. In the OT there is such an instance after the Babylonian imprisonment.
It think that our main problem in this age is that we are in a similar situation. We have difficulty re-connecting. Psychology can be a way to re-connect with tradition and stories that give us a guide line, given that the traditions were using archetypical figures. It isn’t so much about hate and love superseding each other in a cycle, but remembering such tradition. The modern attempts to form stories that describe our dilemma often present a redeemer who has super powers or is in some way more than human. The older traditions were much more human, which made it easier to connect, even if we regard them as archaic. The alternatives show our sentiments to be superficial.
There was no Fall of Man. Rather there was a fall into mind, an evolution into the “I” that must see this and that as separate in order to eat and procreate. What is difficult for mind is to envision the Oneness of all that is. The result of that vision of One is an experience of belonging, which, IMHO, is what religions should teach. Western philosophy is stuck at dualism.
The concept of God evolved from the event of self-consciousness. It evolved though social and family memes. This does not mean there is no God who could not have evolved with our increased understanding. It means there is a God who is in our genes from our beginning, and who reminds us as we mature that we are One.
Whether or not there was a “fall” rather depends on your standpoint. I would also see Mankind’s development as a rise to consciousness, rather than a fall into sin. It is not uncommon though for ancient traditions to see mankind pushed out of Eden, or wherever, after reaching this new awareness. The “fall” in the development of consciousness could be seen to be the rising awareness that whatever hurts me, will also hurt my enemy. Thereby malevolence plays a part that it hadn’t before.
The spirit that is metaphorically blown into the nostrils of mankind and made us “living spirits” could be seen to be the step in evolution that ensured consciousness was in our genes, as you put it. Thereby, the rise of Godheads in human history was not so much an association with experienced occurrences (e.g. lightning) but realising the dilemma of a conscious state in an otherwise non-conscious world.
I agree Bob, but I would add that the actual fall is the fall for the idea of dearth or belief as preached by the Rev. Malthus that there is not going to be enough of necessities to go around. It is a belief that continues in the West to establish haves and have nots. It is the mentality of I’ve got mine, you get yours. Yet it is only a belief, a belief that proves to be a lie when people get together in spirit and in hope.
Should the other/the approacher not be more intuitive, and read the signs accordingly? To approach or not to approach? as it is they who are entering another’s personal space and thoughts.
Seems like quite a level approach, to me… the App would prefer that you refer and turn to the Christian god for all these things… and more, but it evidently doesn’t have to be so, from your case in point.
So being fully sentient/present, brings on all the problems that being fully conscious entails… a sound reason for the existence of a religion to ground and in-still morals and such in burgeoning communities and society, as a whole.
I do personally think that growing up within the boundaries and confines of a religion, made the process easier and probably more bearable, as life was shrouded in routine, and church, and studies, and Community activities and seasonal events and showcases, and so buffering its congregations from the harsh realities of life… I think I’ve taken that for granted and as a given.
That may be why even though I am a non-practising RC, I still attend and enjoy Services with family, as it’s a chance to all congregate together and catch up and be a whole family unit again… memories rekindled of all growing up together.
I guess that being indoctrinated from birth, really does mean that that religion will always be in our hearts, and in our minds, and in our very being… regardless of whether we want it there or not… it is part of our very make up that made us up during the most formative years of our life. What would we have been without it? I always wonder…
The concept of dualism was unknown… within a religious upbringing, and is therefore an alien concept that is not even thought about… let alone considered, as a thing.
Religion, like meditation, forms the mind and changes it’s processes… forever.
It is definitely felt on a genetic level, that it is wired into our psyche, and therefore into our very being… it is inescapable on a neural and psychological level, and so becomes a permanent buffer to external stimuli… over time. Once we’re baptised and confirmed, there’s no going back!
This is the way that many of us grew up. We don’t recognise the help we’ve had until it is gone. Consciousness doesn’t only bring problems, it put us into an existential dilemma. This is something that the Ancients addressed in stories, whether as myths or allegories, and properly read they can help us today. You see the dilemma at large when young people see their lives as pointless, or when gangs create their own “mythology” and round up the young people looking for purpose. You see it in people who go to the Scifi meetings, or Comicon. They’re trying to put meaning into their lives, often because the mythology our society is based on has disappointed them.
The problem is that we only see the positive after contact with negative. We don’t have to go so far that people die, if only we could mentally go through experiences and learn from them. The problem with a lot of pseudo-religious stories is that they are only stories and they don’t leave you asking what it meant. Therefore you don’t engage with them in the way the old traditions would have you do. I used to teach that the OT stories are a vehicle for people to get in and travel with until they get the meaning. In that way you become part of the story in the same way as you might if you enacted the story. It helps you see that you have both a benevolent and malevolent side in you. You discover your shadow, which we always fail to take into account.
The divine is in all those things that we can’t take for granted. The divine is what we should align to, so that the power of the divine channels through us. God is love, when aligned to that love it increases. The same goes for all of those gifts of the spirit. It works when you know that you can only ensure that these gifts are around you if you stay conscious and alert to your potential. Confession is necessary because we do fail, but it is only effective if you know your shadow.
I think what you experience with your family at such occasions is that spirit of love and wholesomeness. It feels timeless. It feels right. But it must be worked for, and each of us has to find a way to practise our religion so that it doesn’t degenerate into a meaningless procedure.
I see it rather as a fall after the rise to consciousness. It is what man became after becoming conscious that the story in Genesis is portraying. When Mankind was able to realise past and future, good and bad, he became responsible for his actions and immediately fell to evil. In all that occurred before the flood is this degeneration, expressed in the statement that God regrets having made Mankind. This is Mankind that has emerged from the animal state, and still acted like the animals, except one difference: He was aware of what he was doing when he killed his own brother. There was no excuse and he had no way to return to the state of mind of the animals. Then that led to a proud culture developing, but it posed a dilemma. How can you be proud if you kill your brother? These cultures became very aware of the quandary.
When we start philosophising as a generation, we are struggling with our own duality, knowing that there is a shadow that lurks but denying it is part of us. Oneness of all has to take our own duality seriously, just as we become aware that the Oneness is Yin and Yang. It is Brother and Sister. It is night and day, but still one creation. Religion has to show us our dilemma and provide a way to cope with it. The most basic question is, “Why do I suffer?”
Brahman and Atman, Father and Son who are one. Both express this oneness, and as we look at consciousness, it becomes obvious that it makes the difference. Therefore it comes from within, rather than from without. At the same time, this universe has this potential for consciousness written into it. How can that be? Is God external and internal?
Bob,
To the question is God external and internal I would simply say yes. I like the saying of certain American natives:“All my relatives” which includes the rocks and the trees.
If we’re going to talk about the love of God, we need to have this perspective as well. It was mentioned earlier in this thread that Mysticism has to be included in any discussion. Here we have an example of it.
I think that Merton is saying that the Love of God, which is selfless, is at work gathering people up so that they can all be one in Christ and motivated by that Love. The more people align to what that love is doing, the more we allow Christ in us to do his work. It cannot be done by locking oneself away permanently, nor by being party animals, but by finding the necessary balance between contemplation (listening to God) and engaging with others in the world. It is a bit like Buddhists should, by observing the Noble Eightfold Path, allow their Buddha nature to grow. Only in God, we have one who is actively seeking and gathering us, whereas in Buddhism you have the feeling that you have to do everything yourself.
MagsJ,
Apparently at-one-ness is a message/goal from Eastern Philosophers and Western mystics. As Woody Allen joked, “I came to find that I am at two with Nature”. That seems to express the Western way of thinking about the universe and the relative as Other.
I have much much more of a problem with keeping my chi aligned, than I ever have with any issues of duality, unsynchronicity, or the shadow-self.
I’d say that yesterday was my first full day of remaining aligned, since 2016, which was when I fell prey to some jab injuries… so a very long while, for me.
Is there anything worse than dying, thinking that you were never loved?
An obscure benevolent love, would be preferable in that circumstance, I’d imagine.
We cannot be there for All… heck! we cannot even be there for Ourselves at times… and even when we are loved, it might be from such a small minority that it becomes insignificant, outweighed by the capricious malevolence of the masses/Yakshas.
_
Those who deny that a moral consensus exists, obviously don’t want a moral consensus to exist… medical professionals that kill patients or divisive/psychotic people, come to mind.
Wanting to hurt/harm/kill the annoying/unconscientious/derisive is one thing, doing it… another thing altogether. Leaving people be, is so under-rated these days… good formal manners seem to be a thing of the past i.e… etiquette not abounding.
I share your sentiment. One aspect of organised religion that threw me, after having taken up nursing (at 38!) because of a feeling I was called to it by faith, was the callousness that I found present in opinions in and around the church, and of course reading history, where it became clear where the church I was attending came from, and what it had done in the past. I couldn’t understand (I still can’t) how a message of love could be misconstrued to want to kill people for not having the right faith.
In the end, I realised it was about minorities standing up for values that make the world a better place. I remember starting in nursing in a class that professed to have that in mind and additionally took to greeting people in the street with a smile, tipping waiters, helping elderly people, and of course making nursing about caring. When I retired, I realised that many of the younger generation didn’t share my aspirations, and I, along with others that thought similarly, was a bit of freak.
At no time did I think of myself as something better, but as one representative of a mindset that anyone could identify with - if they wanted to. In fact, it was sometimes annoying to hear people say I was different to others in the trade, since I had many people agree with me, but then apparently many went and acted differently. I had to leave in the end because the financial technocrats moved in looking for profit, and my mindset was of a lower priority.
None of us are able to keep this behaviour up all the time, and every one of us has a bad day. But in Christianity, that is why forgiveness plays such a role, because we have to forgive others if we expect forgiveness ourselves. But if you don’t care, you leave forgiveness out of the equation. That seems to be where we are now. Too many are narrow-minded and egocentrical, and suffering in others is just an eyesore to be done away with, not attended to.
I think the immediate answer is “my mother”, which generally is the person we equate with love – at least in the beginning of life. I started to see love in my father, although it was much different to my mother, and I started feeling an affinity to my brothers, then my sister (who came along much later), but it spread to my cousins, my grandmother, and other members of the larger family. With time the idea of love became a little paradox and gradually it became erotic, which was a big change.
The idea of divine love came to me much later, and again, something far different from what I had experienced as affinity to my family. Divine love is almost an idea of great empathy, and a suffering at seeing where mankind has brought itself. In a way, I have always thought that God has failed, and suffers knowing that, seeking ways of redemption. That is why the symbol of the Christian God is the suffering saviour.
There was a time when I would always turn to women that I knew, and with whom I could talk about almost everything. I wasn’t a particularly man-orientated man. It changed from the general to the particular when I married, and since then my wife is my point of reference and we have learnt to make ourselves our own benchmark, which is probably why we have been together for 45 years.
Sit down and meditate. Then do some heart-searching and after that seek a conversation
I can identify with anyone who has misgivings about religion, especially when you see the hypocrisy and perversion that has gone on through the centuries, millennia, even up until our times, when we like to imagine ourselves as progressive, sophisticated people, who think they are above those things. But here we are, do we resign ourselves to our condition?
As a species, we have struggled with our duality, and all the despair that arises from it in multiple ways. We have even fought wars to end wars, and still the next one comes along. Religion of all kinds has been the ground where this contradictory behaviour has been investigated and the mystery of love has risen to become a hope that shines like a guiding star, but like all stars at night, they vanish over the daytime, and we are left waiting for the next night sky.
Following the lead of very much cleverer and wiser people than myself, looking for a holistic explanation for all of this, drawing from experience, knowledge and meditation, I think that I have gained an insight that puts me a little better at peace with the world, even though I have no means to change it. The first thing I found was that the nature of religion depends upon the way we habitually contemplate and consider our situation, or behaviour, and how we react accordingly. There are times when parts of humanity have been shining beacons of compassion, and other times when we have been ogres, cruel and deadly. Simplistic answers will not do.
Looking back over time, guided by the way people communicate, what they have communicated, and how this has been received in our times, I discover that the old languages themselves were different. The Semitic languages, where Judaism, Christianity and Islam come from, have a structure that allows a parallel reading of meanings that are implicit in the words. This is not just dual meanings, but multiple meanings that flow next to each other (I have addressed this in my topic). This means that people were thinking differently to the way we do today, and we would think of it as complicated, but another way to think of it would be as something deep and mystical.
Looking to neuroscience, asking ourselves how this could be, Iain McGilchrist has discovered multiple indications that we do indeed have this capacity, as is shown in poetry, for example, in which experience is described as a multi-layered event, where so many things are happening at the same time, but which we can’t bring together in prose (or film for that matter). We need another means of expression than a linear description of an experience, which sophisticated poetry can provide. One important subject of poetry is, of course, love.
What McGilchrist has also discovered in the experiments of neuroscience is the fact that, especially today, we tend to habitually use the left hemisphere of the brain and fail to use the right hemisphere fully. A simplistic explanation is that the right hemisphere is for the initial perception of the senses, taking in the wider picture, whereas the left hemisphere has a reduced vision so that it can identify (using concepts and words) things, which it would normally give back to the right hemisphere to incorporate into the larger picture. This function seems to have been interrupted at time in our history, and we have lost our way, narrow-mindedly focussed on particulars and forgetting the larger picture, and love.
It is only by enlarging our perceptual ability, using our conceptions to understand, but then returning to the meaning of that knowledge in the wider sense, that we can value the ideals such as love. Then love may even have a divine aspect, like it did for the ancients. Love then had connotations with the womb, with compassion and warmth that can pour out from our depths, and the roots of the Hebrew word suggest a radiating forth of light and heat from an interior place. But there was also another word for love, which suggested kindling a fire from something easily set ablaze. The figurative understanding of these meanings can help us realise our potential, and perhaps trust the poetic frame of mind more.
