Well, bugger me...

So I google - "coin flip to prove God's existence" and get:

"Now, say you flip the coin ten times and it comes up tails every time. "Surely this is evidence that God doesn't exist", some atheist idiot might claim. "At this point, this is not about your faith being tested, but the fact that there's no God that can make it land heads!"

Well, what I got to say may surprise you: In this case, God made it land tails on purpose. And that proves God. But how?

Did you know the odds of a coin landing tails ten times is astronomically impossible? For you to witness such a rare and unlikely event could only be explained as a miracle! Only God could make a coin land tails ten times in a row! Don't believe me? Start flipping again. See if you can make it land tails tens times again. Go ahead and try it....you'll be there all day.

In conclusion, all an unbeliever has to do is take out a coin and flip it to see in front of their very eyes that God is indeed real and that Jesus Christ died for their sins on the cross." (http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=68343)

So, of course I'm thinking this is nuts, so I go to my favorite random.org/coins/ and flip 10 and get:

So, I'm thinking "Well, bugger me..."

Then of course you do the math and realize that the odds of a coin landing ten times in a row = 1/1024. Not particularly staggering considering how often people win the lottery.

What is unchanging?

PIt seems that the physical world is. It also seems that every aspect of the physical world is in flux. It's all changing and all passing away. Then there is the experience of the mystic of the apparent unchangeable and in unchanging ground - consciousness itself - in which the world arises. 

Experiencing the unchanging ground now, I seem to have the same experience of the same thing that I experienced two days ago, or two decades ago for that matter. I recognize it instantly as the same - seemingly in a different way from recognizing an old friend I haven't seen for two decades - my friend seems familiar, but I have to struggle to recognize the face, to bridge the physical changes over the passage of time.

Then there's another friend who has changed little, but they've changed. You fall back into an easy familiarity and its as if the years between have never happened.

And the friend I saw yesterday. Had a haircut and changed his clothes, but has not changed in any essential way since then.

In the longer term cases, given enough exposure now, the memory of the old part of the old friend is gradually altered so that it becomes difficult to remember the two decades past version and you need a photo or video to bring that one to mind.

So is the unchanging ground so unchanging? Nothing seems to happen there, nothing in my experience has apparently changed. But how reliable are my experiences in this? I recognize it immediately and unconditionally as the same consciousness I experienced before, but how complete is my experience of it now, and my memory of the experience of it then, that I can build an entire cosmology on its unchanging nature? What I experience now, I immediately remember experiencing then, and it seems that nothing has changed. But all I can say with certainty is that I haven't noticed any change.

Essence or alignment

All these years I've been transfixed by the question of whether humans are essentially good (divine) or essentially bad (fallen and cut off from God). It's a question defined by the traditions - eastern, esoteric, and new agey vs the abrahamic monotheisms. 

It's kind of the wrong question though. For all practical purposes it's a question of how are you aligned now? Where is your attention and focus? What is your intention (in the fullest sense if will and inclination/leaning)? What fruits are you manifesting?

Jesus and Paul said that all you have to do is believe (I.e. put your attention on, turn towards, intend) and you will be saved. That turning in belief is enough to open to spirit - it's irrelevant if before that you were fallen or ignorant. The effect after that is the same. And Jesus and Paul both insist that the truly important thing is what you do on a continuing basis - there will be a judgement (the true will be retained in the kingdom, the false discarded). So what fruit is your intention bearing? Just inner bliss that is more dissociation than transformation? Or inner transformation expressed as external transformation of the effect you have in and on the world?

Andrew's apology

Another year gone…a year of processing the AC experience…a year of struggling and fighting with Christianity, EE, AA…all the totalizing thought systems that I’ve been engrossed in and possessed by my entire life (or at least since 74 and the exorcism).

And now AC himself is gone. Literally gone, resigned as guru, apologized for his ego and wandered off for a bit of a sabbatical. That short apology (on June 26th): "I’m fifty-seven years old and currently find myself facing the biggest challenge of my life. I’ve been a teacher of spiritual enlightenment for twenty-seven years. Enlightenment has always been and always will be about transcending the ego. Over the last several years, some of my closest students have tried to make it apparent to me that in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well.

"I’ve understood this simple truth—that we all have egos no matter how enlightened we may be—and even taught it to thousands of people all over the world throughout my career. But when I was being asked to face my own ego by those who were nearest and dearest to me, I resisted. And I often made their lives difficult as a result.

"I’m aware that many of my students over the years have also been affected by my lack of awareness of this part of myself. And for those of you who are reading this, I apologize. As time passes I intend to reach out and engage in a process of dialogue with those of you who would like to.

"In light of all this, for the sake of my own integrity as a spiritual teacher and as a human being, I’ve decided that I need to take some time off so I can make the effort to develop in many of the ways that I’ve asked other people to. Starting this fall, once I’ve fulfilled some prior commitments, I’m going to embark upon a sabbatical for an extended period of time. During this hiatus, I will be stepping down from the leadership of my organization, I won’t be publishing anything here on my blog, and will not be doing any public teaching. My intention is to become a better teacher, and more importantly, a better man.

"One of the most beautiful fruits of my work over the years has been the international network of people who have studied, collaborated, and trained with me for so long. They are all examples of Evolutionary Enlightenment in their own right, and I couldn’t imagine a greater community of people to carry forward this movement. I’m looking forward to working with them in a very different way in the future."

Looks like the students finally grew up and saw him for what he is, and called him to account. The recognition and impulse that caused so many of us to up and leave over the years (the recognition that Andrew was teaching not enlightenment but obedience and servitude to his ego) has finally got a hold of enough of the senior students that he could no longer stand against it.

And strangely, AC’s apology is a vindication that I saw the truth about him. That it was not a failure in me that led me to leave, but a failure in him as a teacher. His words were not true – he said he was teaching freedom, but in fact was teaching slavery to the guru.

So that leaves me with the experience itself. That profound recognition that there is a dimension of reality that grounds everything. Dress it up in a thousand concepts and religions and all you do is hide it. The advaitinis can’t see anything but the ground. The materialists can’t see the ground at all. In the middle are the religionists who know there’s a ground, who know there’s a ground, and know there’s a manifest world, and have a million explanations of how you get from ground to manifestation and back again. Some of the explanations are truer that others, but none is complete. Because all explanations are only explanations and not the experience itself. EE does not explain it all. Christianity does not explain it all. But both perspectives give ways of beginning to conceptualize what we're going through in living, and of conceptualizing the relationship between the ground of being and being.

So where does it leave me after all this drama (mostly in my mind drama)? Blown open again. No longer standing on solid ground, but grounded in the experience of consciousness that is primary and primordial and evolving and already complete.

Yesterday walking in the sunshine on 1st avenue of all places, barriers seemed to dissolve. That initial opening that happened when I heard AC’s apology, opened even more. The dynamic inherent in the way I approach spirituality became clear: the constant drive to classify, confirm, constrict, confine – to arrive at TRUTH and remain. Whereas everything that is manifest is in flux. Becoming and dissolving. The mistake of advaita is to see everything that is in flux as illusory. It is as real as the unchanging ground, but the manifest is that aspect of the ground which is relational. It is ultimately as indivisible from the ground as that aspect which is all sufficient. The ground is complete, eternal, unchanging, empty, still. The ground is loving, evolving, changing, relating, full, overflowing, moving, manifesting. The ground constantly creates other, brings it into relationship and unites with it. The ground is ultimate simplicity and oneness, but ultimately complexifying and unifying. Religion is the attempt to set all this in stone, is the attempt to make tomorrow predictable. And tomorrow can never be predictable, because the complexity that it the manifest cosmos, constantly inter-reacts/relates to produce the next moment – no human mind can contain that/comprehend. God itself cannot predict tomorrow, because it is the nature of God/ground to manifest as other – it is in the nature of God/ground to introduce unpredictability – that is the essence of creativity.

Will Andrew Cohen never go away? Sure will...

Interesting how a mean-spirited attack on Andrew Cohen (by me) in response to a mildly positive blog-posting by someone I’ve never heard of, can lead back to a re-evaluation of my time with Andrew and the five years since I left.

What was positive about the experience?

Without doubt the discipline (which I’ve mostly discarded in my spiritual life at least, but then my lack of spiritual discipline has made some relaxed space in which God can do His work).

Without doubt the experience of enlightened communication. When human beings come together with their focus and intent on what can be created between and beyond them something incredible can happen. EC as taught by Chris Parrish in the context of EE, talks of communication beyond ego, which in EE is synonymous with beyond the personal. Yet, I’ve come in my re-Christianized perspective, to believe that the image in which we are created is personal (God is personal) and the purpose and goal of spiritual growth is the divinization of the personal and the creation of the interpersonal. Andrew put a stop to EC because it was a successful practice that created an authentic free space in which he had no authority. So what would happen if EC was practiced with the engagement of the personal, not with the goal of going beyond ego, but of transforming (divinizing) the personal? What happened with EC at its most powerful, I described as a kind of Pentecost. Spirit manifest between people. How might that be brought to bear in personal transformation.

What was negative?

The absolute denial of the personal.

The absolute denial of doubt and the obsession with certainty. The systematic suppression of anything that even remotely contradicted Andrew. Interesting that a teaching that is supposed to be about creating the new is so obsessive about squashing doubt in its practitioners. (Grapple with your doubt, be ferocious with your doubt. Pull everything apart, look through the cracks, under the blankets, The abuse.

The abuse.

The abuse. You haven’t lived till you see a bunch of otherwise mature and intelligent people fall over themselves trying to please a guru who might turn on them at any time. The guru’s love is ALWAYS conditional on the student earning it. All that waiting about, in hallways, in streets, in stairwells, with groups of students waiting for the precious audience with the guru. And Andrew was ALWAYS late for meetings with his students, and always the threat that it MIGHT NOT HAPPEN. The obsessive assumption of blame for ANY FAILURE by the student. A teacher with so many failed students might be thought not to be a great teacher, but in this teaching (like in all good cults) the teacher is perfect and the students self-flagellating.

The lies – the private ridicule of Deepak Chopra – the public adulation. Amy Edelstein’s denial that Andrew ever asked students to prostrate themselves to his picture, when not one minute of practice was ever done without his blessing. I could go on, but hardly seems worthwhile.

On balance not much to say for Andrew. Hard to believe that after 25 years as absolute ruler that he's really changing his ways. The senior students are the same people who grappled their way to the top in the years of abuse. They've learned everything they know from Andrew, what are they going to do different?

I would still love to engage in EC again, but can't imagine doing it with Andrew's students (even if they were allowed to). But God's there every day now, not dependent on the will of the guru. With God there every day, there's less need to seek after those peak experiences (though they are awfully fun). Religion needs to evolve, and the evolution is in progress, just how do we engage with God in that evolution?

Coin flipping for eternity

Essentially flipped a coin (the universal decision maker) to see if God is God, creator of heaven on Earth. Seems like a totally absurd way to decide anything, but this conviction I have that Christ is the center, no matter how absurd it may feel at times to the rational mind, is after all a conviction that persists.

If God is, and if the God who exists is Cause and Creator, then there must be a way of understanding the world as it actually is and how it came to be this way that explains why God lets it be this way. And if God is powerless over how the world actually is, if he just put the universe in motion and has to hope with the rest of us that things will turn out OK, then what use is there in having a God?

If God is, and the world is the way that it actually is because humanity is in rebellion against God, then God’s sovereignty is preserved. The eschatological hope of unmediated relationship with God, includes the eschatological promise that all that is not in relationship with God will be done away with. That is the hope that justice will be done.

And if God is, how do we know about him? General vs special revelation all over again. General revelation leads you to the point at which you can say that there is some kind of order to the universe, some apparent intelligence or design. Or it might lead you to the point at which you say that the order in the universe is self-generating, and the tendency to order must be balanced with the tendency to entropy. All a meaningless ordering and disordering of essentially empty matter and energy. God’s just a reassuring emotional coping mechanism for living beings in the middle of all this.

General revelation essentially leads us nowhere fast. In pre-modern times it led categorically to belief, in modern times to atheism, in post-modern times to uncertainty. So if general revelation can never be the deciding factor are we left with the promise of continuing post-modern discomfort with certainty, a perpetual unresolved openness? If we turn instead to special revelation, we’re faced with Babel, that fundamental confusion of competing voices that’s been with humanity since the dawn of language.

Do we just need to pick a religion and go with it? Keep in mind that our particular religion (determined by culture, birth, accidents all) is just one possible? Or having picked, believe that God put us down in our particular place so that we could have all the accidents of birth etc lead us to the True Religion? How do you explain the Mormons? How do you get to Truth through special revelation? Can religion ever be anything more than an endless stream of questions?

So coin flipping for an answer from God to prove his existence. Coin flipping for eternity. 4 yeses out of 7 to prove that God is God and Jesus is his only Son. Out of 7 because we're in the middle of Stanley Cup playoffs. 4 because 3 in a row could be just chance (but let's face it 1,000,000 in a row could be just chance, just a very very small chance). What number between 3 and infinity would satisfy? Absurd and serious at the same time. From here on in, just bracket the question of is it True? Just live as if I have my answer and enjoy the comfort of salvation.

On birthing the divine human - being disturbed by Andrew Harvey

Last weekend I was more than disturbed by Andrew Harvey - "birthing the divine human" and "sacred activism".
I only stayed for the first half day of two, but will listen to the rest as I digest. Everything he said brought me back to the metanarrative at the heart of christianity. Fallen creation renewed and restored by Christ. Now what I face into is the absolute recognition of Christ as the Word, and God's constant pushing for me to break beyond the bounds of enclosed belief and enclosed christianity. The Word of God is universal and is translated into every language.

Two major approaches to spirituality:
- Escape from the world – advaita, Buddhism, forms of Christianity that look to salvation and escape
- Engage with the world from a spiritual perspective – evolutionary spiritualities, magical and esoteric forms, social Christianity and “heaven on earth” forms of religion, process theology
The latter approach also has two major approaches:
- God as separate from creation (the Genesis approach)
- Pantheism
- Panenthesim
Panenthesim in turn can have subtle distinctions:
- The eastern orthodox approach that holds God and Creation as ontologically different but not separate as it is God who sustains creation and by whom and within whom it exists
- Other approaches that blur towards pantheism
God is creator and sustainer, his creation exists in hierarchical relation to him. Christ is the Word of God in whom and through whom everything was created and by whom creation is sustained.
This opens the question of the role of humanity. Fallen and separate from God, spiritually dead – resurrected and transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ. Is it possible to experience resurrection (new birth) without conscious contact with Christ? If not, then all the other religions are delusions of life and in actuality remain in death. Or is it more likely that the resurrection of Christ was a universal event that opened the possibility of life for everyone – no matter what the route. “No man comes to the Father but by me” – Jesus isn’t insisting that we all know his name, but that he has opened the Way. In the end all will bow before Christ – because Christ is the Word of God.
So whether you regard humans as animal or divine is less important than whether you regard spiritual rebirth (resurrection) as something reserved for the few who accept a particular intellectual formulation (the Christian creeds). Can rebirth be by human effort – it seems so – people make effort to contact God/awake and it happens – is that human effort or divine effort? Impossible to tell. Even the Christian who “accepts” or “receives” Jesus – is making effort, the effort of surrender.
Do we then become co-creators with God? Do we birth the divine human? What else are we going to do? We are reborn into eternity – if that is to have any meaning it means growing into a new spiritual form. The endless creativity of God united with the creativity inherent in being both human and a spiritual being.

Andrew Harvey himself seems to recognize that the stultifying mush of the new age needs to be transcended. Just as christianity needs to get over being the exclusive bearer of truth and recognize it's just the bearer of one translation of God's Word, the new age needs to grow a brain and use some rationality to distinguish between the bullshit and truth (with a small t). Less so than Andrew H, it was the response of the audience - intensely personal and small - that was most disturbing. His call was to transcend (and include) the personal, their response was to personalize.