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.
Indeed… I don’t know why many see religion as an organised racket… it’s about community, cohesion, support, etc…
…though I suppose that the 10s/100s? of 1000s of churches that have sprung up all around the planet go unregulated and may well be organised rackets… many have been.
Would such churches evoke and foster olde-religious charm of community, cohesion, support etc., or would they put on a show to draw the crowds, to bring in da money.
Haha, Comicon as the current religion for the young… so true, it’s practically a cult… albeit a fun and social one.
All those 10s of 1000s rolling up to Comicon are making the money roll in… a multi-million-Pound business… these pseudo-religions certainly aren’t cheap to belong to, but there are worse rackets that one could belong to… gangs, the drug life, criminal circles, etc…
I think that many cannot handle/live by that ^^^, just like many cannot tolerate meditating for too long for fear of where it might mentally lead to… a fear of the unknown.
One doesn’t have to be religious to follow thee path, so guiding others onto it should be simpler, but isn’t that only doable if others want to?
Have you ever been successful in helping any doubters/sceptics/heretics? I recall the odd heretic turning up to Mass, and the congregation shunning them… suffice to say, they didn’t stick around for long.
Quite… never taking anything for granted, but experiencing wondrous moments with good heart and mind.
There is a market for religion in countries where capitalism is rampant, and where such undertakings are not controlled enough. After the war in Germany, the churches took it upon themselves to show a caritative spirit and it was widespread, caring for a wide range of people needing assistance. If anything, the churches were paying into these institutions at first, but then the state noticed that the need was larger than the churches could cope with, and they brought in commercial stimuli which changed the situation. The private sector took over and the churches are struggling, closing parishes down, renting out buildings, and since the pandemic, they have a vast reduction in churchgoers, especially since the scandals became known.
I think you’ll find that only where there is a market for religion, is there money to be made. So, I think it depends on the society and its values whether churches make big money. Churches were in the years after the wars the areas where people gathered to gain some grounding, or when they were pulling together for a cause, and social cohesion had a lot to do with it. However, as the younger generations are more individually minded, community has more with having a good time together, and less with long-termed social bonding.
This has always been a problem. If you manage to undermine the bonding belief of a society, the people will gather under ideologies just to belong to something, and it may be totally bland and superficial, or even take money out of their pocket. It just needs to be internally consistent, or something that manages to form a hierarchy that rules your life from then on. Sometimes you have the feeling it goes from one extreme to the other. Look at how many people have grimacing faces tattooed onto their bodies, devils and skulls, evil mythological figures.
The church is either trustworthy, or it is dead. You can’t have an institution preach love and at the same time beat children. I can understand Emerson’s attitude when I said that the Gospel ennobled humanity, whereas the church rebuked. The Gospel shows us our potential and the church shows us our limitations.
I don’t think that everyone has the same receptivity to religion. We are all very different persons and the attempts by fundamentalist groups of whatever religion is to try to make everybody the same. I like the books of Thomas Moore because he shows a multitude of ways in which people are spiritual or mystics in their own right, even though they reject organized religion for themselves. He mentions the artists and the musicians but also the farmers and the artisans, who have a special relationship with their element, and who are wonderfully inspirational. But he also shows how the spirit of Christianity is observable in charity organisations, hospitals and clinics that are agnostic about religion.
I have always looked at people’s attitude more than whether they go to church. When I was employing people for the catholic care-home I worked for, I had some bother because I wanted to employ a wonderful woman who had gone through a divorce that had nearly destroyed her, and then found a man with whom she started to build up her life again. She wanted to re-enter nursing and I was enthralled at her approach and intelligence. My boss said I couldn’t employ her because she’d been married again. I changed my job and went the protestants, but it wasn’t much better there.
Yes, that’s quite an insider tip, if I may say so …
