Our Religious Wave

The notion that somebody literally made the world─ that is what is known as artificialism. It is the child’s way of thinking: the table is made, so somebody made the table. The world is here, so somebody must have made it.

There is another point of view involving emanation and precipitation without personification. A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth─ and that’s how the world becomes.

The whole universe is included in this first sound, this vibration, which then commits all things to fragmentation in the field of time. In this view, there is not someone outside who said, “Let it happen.”

Joseph Campbell shared those thoughts with Bill Moyers and then wrote them in his book The Power of the Myth. We do make God in our image. Then we say, he made our world and everything in it. He made the universe and all universes, but we don’t really understand the how and the why of all those makings. God is the be all and do all in our two-thousand-year-old religious wave. If we buck the wave, we buck God. God didn’t say that. Our religious leaders said it for him, her or it.

We talk to God in prayers and with our positive intentions, but God doesn’t always give us the answer we expect. We don’t usually expect much since our religious wave has us covered in sin. Sin is another myth made by men who profess to know what God wants. Obviously God doesn’t want. He has made everything according to our religious wave.

But, as Campbell points out, all this fuss about God is just that. The makings, the fixings and the sin are all man-made myths to make the wave hit the shore of artificialism. There is a better definition of God. God is the eternal expansion of awareness through individual consciousness. Every form of consciousness is expanding in awareness. The universe, the world, man, animals, insects, the air, space and so on. Everything is and has consciousness. Consciousness is the infinite energy within energy. The religious wave has hit the shore of artificialism, but it is in the process of expanding the awareness of its individual consciousness.

The Nest Of Angels

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew away out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

He learned more each day. He learned that a stream-lined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean; he no longer needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. He learned to sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the same inner control, he flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed above them into dazzling clear skies . . . in the very times when every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist and rain. He learned to ride the high winds far inland, to dine there on delicate insects.

What he had once hoped for the flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly and was not sorry for the price he had paid. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom, fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.

Richard Bach opened the eyes of readers back in 1970 when Jonathan Livingston Seagull was published. Opening our eyes and seeing is a morning task that starts another day, but we rarely see the beauty of within that task. We are so immersed in the influences and associations of previous days we fail to fly solo as we wake and address each new day. Our sense of beauty is a diluted form of reality where conformity covers our inner awareness.

Paying attention to the creative act of opening our eyes can start a process of knowing that usually waits between the dark shadows of fear. If we pull ourselves out of our fixated bed and wash the cobwebs of objective intoxication from our thoughts, we begin to sense the art of flying. We fly solo into the far reaches of consciousness and we intermingle with clouds of wisdom. We see and sense what we never see as we open our eyes each morning.

Absorbing that wisdom is our birthright. It is our badge of connected individuality. It is the birthplace of the soul and the nest of angels.

The Consciousness Of No Mind

Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect. Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things, a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of consciousness and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness and sufficiency.

That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends to emphasize the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes this more than anything else in the whole process of spiritual revolution, and in this respect Zen makes use of phraseology belonging to the sciences of speculative philosophy.

D.T. Suzuki in his book, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction is explaining Zen in terms we Westerners can understand. The word Zen is used to describe all sorts of acts, things and situations these days, but most of us don’t really understand what Zen really is or how it works. Suzuki spent his lifetime teaching Buddhist philosophy, and is still regarded as the 20th century's most knowledgeable professors of Zen Doctrine. He called his some of his work "The Doctrine of No Mind.”

We all have Zen and the qualities that display its energy. In fact, Zen is creative energy. The Western word for Zen is consciousness or in religious terms, the soul. Consciousness encompasses all things, so Zen is in all things. When we allow the ego to blend with our subjective consciousness, we are in the state of Zen. However, Zen is not a state; it is the awareness of being one with all things.

The dilemma we face is how do we achieve the blending of our ego and our subjective consciousness or soul? Mediation has been used for centuries to achieve this euphoric awareness, but meditation is not the only way to sense the wholeness of Zen. The main way we can be in the zone of wholeness is to allow consciousness to express itself through the ego.

Our consciousness is energy, and it is always expanding. Zen is the creative action of the soul. There is no mind and no ego in Zen; we do without doing. Do without doing means, there is only the energy of creative oneness in our physical actions.

Conscious Objects

Some people look at their lives and think something like this: "Oh God, what did I live for? Isn't it terrible that I'm going to die? Life was black when it started, bleak when I was here, and it's going to be black again when life ends! What's it all for?" In my view, this blackness and despair has been designed into God's system.

We may not completely believe or even remember this design in this moment, but we have actually created all of it. The "me" that created it is not the person, the personality that identifies itself as Fred, or Martha, or Sam- that's not that person I am speaking about. It's the greater essence of "I," this deeper presence, the working of consciousness itself that is in me, in you, in everyone. That I, working through this body, is the same I that is reflected in the archetypal images of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Krishna, all of whom remind us, and continue to remind us, of our true essence. These beings are reflections or representations of our own identification with our greater, deeper I self.

Fred Alan Wolf wrote those thoughts in his book Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas. He has a point. We bring negativity into our lives in order to learn from it. Without contrast, there would be no growth. We do live in a self-created reality filled with duplicity of consciousness. Everything in this reality is measured in the consciousness of time. Time is the duration of objects. Without the consciousness of time, there would be no objects. Objects must be surrounded by the consciousness of space to exist in this reality. Time and objects become one consciousness just like the self that creates and the self that experiences.

We create the life we experience to expand the consciousness of our soul or the “I” Dr. Wolf uses as a reference. We create conscious objects that conflict in order to achieve expansion. Sameness in religion, spirituality, and blended preferences are ego-driven attempts to override the intentions of the “I.” In order to expand our consciousness and the consciousness that exists around us, we must express the highs and the lows of being human. The only perfection is the non-perfection and constant expansion of the consciousness we call our internal “I.”

Eternal Wizardry

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows a little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory, libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christians?

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance shakes the cobwebs out of our over-the-top mind quest to have more and to be more. We believe that our beliefs are the only thoughts that count in our ascension to the unknown land of eternal wizardry. We fail to see the eternal wizardry of being content in the moment. We cast our ego into the storm of materialistic chauvinistic racism. >br>
Our politicians flounder in a sea of narrow-minded righteousness, and our religious gurus continue to battle the Satan created by their separatist teachings. We float in a mass of soggy mental seaweed, and can’t sense the floor of knowing that the seaweed uses for nourishment. We blame others for sickness and criticize the system for holding us captive in a senseless dream we created for ourselves.

All this self-created contrast justifies our existence. All the pain we inflict on our self and others verifies our search for awareness. All the hatred we fling on the tips of our verbal arrows becomes boomerangs for the non-physical energy. Non-physical energy is creative activity, and it expands from the experiences of its counterparts. As a counterpart of non-physical energy, emotionally experience in order to sense the eternal expansion of consciousness.

The Merry-Go-Round Of Objectively Painted Circumstances

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume does make us sit up and take notice of what we really do all day long. We fill our lives with perceptions that stem from beliefs, associations, and influences. One perception leads to another. We find our self on a merry-go-round of objectively painted circumstances that scream for some attention. Soothing our desire to function as taught, we sift through our circumstances and color them with a judgmental brush.

That judgmental brush is filled with the separatism that lurks under the covers of our religious righteousness. For the last two thousand years, we have experienced a religious wave, which infiltrates every fiber of our ego. We battle each other in the name of an almighty being that we created in our likeness. The battle rips us into segmented apostles that claim victory while we impose pain on those who do the same to us.

The merry-go-round of our circumstances is showing us that religion, as we know it, is reinventing itself. Religion in the very near future will not be a separated perception where the just kill the just. It will be a unified enabler. Our faith in the supreme will be accented by our self-awareness, and our perceptions of life will change. That change will not be just about religion, politics and values. It will be first and foremost about the nature of our consciousness.

A Carp Scientist

When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.

I wondered what would happen if I could reach down and grab a carp scientist and lift it up into hyperspace. I thought what a wondrous story the scientist would tell the others! The carp would babble on about unbelievable new laws of physics: beings who could move without fins; beings who could breathe without gills; beings who could emit sounds without bubbles. I then wondered: how would a carp scientist know about our existence? One day it rained, and I saw the raindrops forming gentle ripples on the surface of the pond. Then I understood.

The carp could see rippling shadows on the surface of the pond. The third dimension would be invisible to them, but vibrations in the third dimensions would be clearly visible. These ripples might even be felt by the carp, who would invent a silly concept to describe this, called “force.” They might even give these “forces” cute names, such as light and gravity. We would laugh at them, because, of course, we know there is no “force” at all, just the rippling of the water.

Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen uni- verses hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions; confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their “ripples” can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light. The theory of hyperspace, however, languished for many decades for lack of any physical proof or application. But the theory, once considered the province of eccentrics and mystics, is being revived for a simple reason: it may hold the key to the greatest theory of all time, the Theory of Everything.

Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in the String Theory. He also teaches at NYU and the City College of New York. Kaku’s carp story is food for thought. He opens a door of possibilities, and we step into it. We find ourselves up to our waist in questions, but we are scared to answer them. We use our familiar life-line of beliefs to reassure us that Kaku and others like him are crossing into sacred territory without a permit. But, when we think outside of our religious beliefs, we realize there’s nothing sacred about our quest to know what life means and how we function in spite of our ignorance.

Our ritualistic blinders are tight. We pull the covers of religion over our heads and hope the talk of other universes and realities goes away. The best, we want to offer our inquisitive mind, is faith. The faith that God will stand firm and show us his truth. The interesting fact, we all miss, is God does show us his truth every time we expand or tweak our beliefs. In the awareness of that expansion, lies the face of God. God’s face is our face expanding in the experience of living in the magnification of our pond of beliefs.