What Went Before

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Wherever two or three are gathered…
Is this the answer to the mystery of why so many disparate and conflicting religious systems & practices can produce the experience of the presence of God? When two or three or more humans come together with unified purpose and see their interests as identical – then God is found. That unified purpose creates the conditions for the emergence of a spiritual reality (either good or evil). If people come together unified around a particular pre-existing spiritual reality (such as in Jesus' name), that reality is made manifest between them.
There is a level of reality that is interpersonal – and in our usual divided individualized egoic state we cannot access that level. Set ego aside – see your interests as identical with your brother – and you access that level of reality. See your interests as identical with that of a higher spiritual reality (God or something like God) and you can access that level also. When multiple individuals come together with common purpose they access the interpersonal – when in the interpersonal state they can access higher spiritual realities by uniting their common purpose with that of God.
Posted by George at 12:21 PM 0 comments
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Freedom
Back after such a long silence. Last August I announced (to myself, for who else reads this) that I was finally at the first tenet. Above all else, I was determined to be free. What that's meant in practical terms is that I've been gradually sifting and letting go of all emotional attachment to the forms of religion.
[Finally recognizing that Christianity is a human creation. That all the religions are complex spiritual and cultural entities with exterior forms and interior spirits. Religions really are of God or of the devil. But then so are all other material and cultural things. Created by God, the universe – first spiritual and only then material (the words interior and exterior are inherently confusing – better rather to use primary and secondary or cause and effect – in the material world we usually assign primacy, causality to the exterior – this is the fundamental error that needs to be corrected – primacy, causality belongs to God, to Spirit, to the interior) – was created in His image. The interior of the universe, after its creation, made a fundamental error, it came to believe that it was separate from its Creator, that it was its own creation. From this error a world of separation, pain and death arose. God's answer was that the separation never happened – God's radical grace is radical forgiveness, always looking past all error and calling His creation to return in unity. So is the material universe real or illusory? Doesn't matter. God's answer it always and only to call His creation to union with its Source. Everything, material or immaterial, secular or religious, within this universe either leads away from its Source (to pain, suffering and death) or towards its Source (to unity, joy, bliss, life eternal).]
Long aside, essential saying that everything has a purpose – either leading to God or away from God. How do you tell the difference? Rest in God. Let go of everything and rest in Him. Surrender everything to Him. Say, of everything, "I do not know what this thing is for." And ask God to tell you what it's for. Make no decisions by yourself – ever. And if you ever find yourself thinking that this thing is the thing that holds the key, the answer – let it go and return to God. Rest in Him. You will be told all you need to know.
Posted by George at 9:24 AM 0 comments


Sunday, September 14, 2008

In his image he created us
God is a most troublesome being. It seems that as soon as human beings evolved the capacity to perceive, intuit or invent a transcendent reality beyond the physical, spirits and gods have multiplied. Through the centuries they have inspired incredible good, and incredible evil. Human history cannot be written without an account of our gods and how we have interacted with them, and they with us.
Down through the centuries the gods have been curiously silent and curiously loquacious. Classes of humans with special access to the gods have risen and fallen, ruled and served. The gods have spoken to ordinary human beings in whispered words and through the sublime beauty of creation itself. The gods have spoken more rarely to prophets and scribes who have written down their words in holy books that have guided and ruled.
And the gods have curiously been perennially in disagreement. Sounding often like the cultures that discovered them they have carried their supernatural battles into the realm of human relationship. God fights god and human culture fights human culture – often armed with the holy books of the prophets.
A few gods have emerged triumphant. Their capacity to adapt to evolving human culture, or to guide the evolution of human culture, led to their ascendancy. In the west the God of Israel through his Son Jesus Christ, conquered the pagans and their rulers to become the God of the rulers and of empires. In time God and his culture became thoroughly modern, and modernity savagely turned on him and consigned him to oblivion. In time, post-modernity would turn on modernity's certainty that it had discovered Truth in science and abolished the need for God. The same hunger that led the original humans to discover the gods still gnaws at us.
In one of God's curious disagreements with himself, he continued to be God of the Jews while building Christendom, then he revealed himself through a new prophet to the Arabs. One God, three religions at war. Is it any wonder that the modern world, discovering material explanations for phenomena previously only imaginable in supernatural terms would grow wearing with our disagreeable Gods and discard them?
But we have discovered that a world with only material explanations is incapable of sustaining life. Life withers into matter when the spiritual is denied. And human life withers into the animal when god is denied. The point that marked the evolution of animal into human was precisely the point at which the human animal became capable of knowing god, of being aware of spirit.
Posted by George at 9:40 AM 0 comments
Saturday, August 23, 2008

The beginning
So what if we step all the way back to the singularity? We are still in the interior of that singularity, looking around in puzzlement. Is this all there is? Is the intuition we have of an eternal ground beyond the material cosmos a mistake?
If this is not all there is – what brought the singularity into being? Did it exist from eternity to eternity and merely flourishes for a few tens of billions of years and fades to what it once was? Is it but one of a billion billion others? Did it bring itself into being? Does it possess its own will and intentionality? Did it decide where to go?
Or did the ground in which it exists possess that will and intentionality? Did the eternal dimensionless formless ground bring it into being and CAUSE all that has come to be?
If the ground is the creator did it create within itself? Did it create something outside itself? If it created outside itself then where is that creation – here, there? Can something that is dimensionless be brought into relationship with something that is by its nature governed by dimension? Or can dimension exist only in the ground of no dimension? Can something exist outside that which is the ground of all that is?
If the ground contains the cosmos, can the cosmos also contain the ground? Or are such relationships meaningless in the realm of the absolute ground?
Did something come from nothing?
Did the dimensionless absolute form the intention to enrich itself with form and in its infinite spirit created a pin-prick of matter, space and time. Eternity changed itself to create within itself the possibility of relationship. Then the pin-prick that contained a cosmos exploded into the universe we know. The ground of being becomes more complex. Relationship enters.
Or did within the dimensionless eternal already exist relationship? Is the nature of the ground both absolute non-dimensionality, non-relational, absolute oneness AND relational. The trinity intuits an aspect of the ground that makes possible the imagining of the ground deciding to create a cosmos (or many). If the nature of the ground is inherently relational (in a non-dimensional way that short-circuits our dimension bound conceptual minds) then its urge to create is inherent in its nature. And that which it creates shares in its relational nature – is in its image.
Interior/exterior stops making sense. God is not within or without. God is. We are. The fundamental attribute we share is existence/being.
Existence/being contains in itself relationship. God-creation. Creator-[created/creator]-created.
Posted by George at 7:42 AM 0 comments

What is religion for?
It seems, from what we know now, that about 14 billion years ago an event took place that led directly to the universe we now know. All of matter, time & space was contained in a single point, a singularity. The single point did not exist in time & space as it contained all time & space. It existed in eternity, the ultimate reality, without dimension as understood in terms of the material universe.
Then 14 billion years ago the singularity exploded and began a process of continual transformation and development of structures of increasing complexity that led eventually to the emergence of life, and from life to the awakening of matter's awareness of itself. The singularity developed over these billions of years the capacity to be aware of itself and to discover its origins. And it seems that all of that deep time development had direction and intention. The singularity wanted to become aware and self-reflective and did everything it could to do so. And all of matter, time and space (the cosmos) continues to exist within the non-dimensional reality that is eternity.
All of the great philosophical and religious questions now have to take this into account. All of the traditional religions must face into the reality of our deep history. When self-reflective awareness emerged in human beings, together with the capacity for language and conceptual thought, the perception of forces at work in and through nature led to the development of primitive religion. With each age, as human knowledge has advanced, so too has religious understanding. Each age brings with it technological, social, cultural, philosophical changes and the prevailing world-view is transformed. Each transformation brings the previous religious understanding into crisis, because it's account of creation and of God becomes incoherent in the newly emerging cultural language.
So now, any religious account that fails to integrate what we now know about the material origins of the universe, is incoherent because it is unable to speak about reality.
And any materialist account that fails to explore the spiritual aspect of reality – that says only "oops, there goes another accidental cosmos" – is equally incoherent because it is unable to speak about how and more importantly why things are as they are. By pretending that the why is unanswerable, the materialist becomes the other side of the religious fundamentalist's coin.
Now our task, you might say the task of religion in the 21st century, those who have had experience of the spiritual interior of this cosmos, and of the power and intelligence that is our creator and sustainer, is to develop the linguistic, philosophical and practical tools that will allow us to weather the current crisis of world-view and emerge with a new world-view that is inclusive, open to the future and capable of co-creating with the force that has been doing this all along.
Posted by George at 5:28 AM 0 comments
Friday, August 22, 2008

The 1st Tenet
A couple of days ago I got the latest Hillsong DVD from Netflix. As usual with Hillsong it's an emotionally powerful worship session. One of the most powerful moments is when one of the singers comes onto stage using oxygen and sings "Healer" – it seems like raw and naked faith – then when you watch the extra material and discover that he was dying of an aggressive form of cancer and that the song was written on the day of his diagnosis – well, the emotional punch is intensified.
Then for some reason after watching the song, I logged onto Wikipedia and read that the writer and performer was a fake. He faked cancer, faked the writing of the song, faked needing oxygen to sing the song. All fake. The story was only up there for one day – yesterday. Today it's been toned down and is much less obvious. Hillsong are removing the track from the CD and DVD.
So today it hit me with a powerful punch that I've been basing my spiritual life on what feels right to me. That's right – I've been ruled by my emotions. I would LOVE Christianity to be TRUE. I YEARN for it to be TRUE. But the trouble is I am a rational being, and for two years I have been conflicted between an emotional yearning for the Christianity of my adolescence and the rational approach of Evolutionary Enlightenment.
Over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that the emotional aspect of spirituality is the least reliable, that the context in which that emotion is interpreted is more important. Over and over again, I have set that conclusion aside and hitched onto something I hoped was true.
I HAVE HAD ENOUGH.
So, finally I arrive at the 1st Tenet of Evolutionary Enlightenment – I want to be free more than anything else.
Posted by George at 5:25 PM 0 comments
Monday, August 18, 2008

The radical openness of God
I’ve been fixating on the idea that there is a difference between the idea of God as being who creates something other than himself, and God as ground of being who’s creation is not separate from himself. So, in the latter, the interior of the Cosmos is God – Self in the ultimate sense is God. In the former, the interior of the Cosmos is separate from God (by its own choice, by its own sin) and requires redemption to be reunited with God.It’s an important distinction, but is it the ultimate distinction?In working with BG this week – he faced a resentment that he needed to do something about. Instead of just telling him to pray for the person (in the Christian way) I was able to tell him to do the Buddhist Metta meditation for the person. It works. It reminds me that God is not restricted to any particular religion. It brings me to the radical openness of God that is the foundation of divine creativity. And the whole experience of AA screams of the openness of God.You begin to see another way of understanding how religions/philosophies differ. There are approaches that emphasize the completeness of God, the finished-ness of God, the finished-ness of His creation. Then there are approaches that emphasize the openness and endless creativity of God. The former leads to rigid, rules based religions and morality (the belief that it is possible to give a complete account of God and his works), religion that is exclusive because “right”. The latter leads to an understanding of God that is constantly evolving.Perhaps the distinction between special and general revelation is useful here. Special revelation (eg the Bible) emphasizes God’s statements about himself as recorded by his prophets. If God has spoken about himself in very specific terms then those terms can be taken to be propositional statements about God that are True in the most absolute sense. This leads people to believe that the can give a complete account of God based on his own words.In contrast, general revelation finds God’s self-disclosure in his creation. It’s much harder to reach propositional statements by this route. Discovery of God through general revelation is much more of a joint effort between creation and creator. The creator reveals himself through his creation and the creature discovers God in his creation.The question then become what does it take for the creature to discover God? If the creature is seen as fallen and in need of redemption then a/the redeemer is needed. If the creature is seen as unaware then a means of awareness is needed. That’s the dichotomy west and east have reached. The truth is somewhere in between. Now that the creature has evolved to the point of awareness, the creature’s choice becomes critical. So the aware creature is capable of sin (i.e. volitional separation from God).The reality of the world we have discovered (an open, evolving universe with directionality, grounded in consciousness) stands in contrast to the world of the special revelations (the traditional religions). From this perspective we discover that what we took to be the word of God is actually God’s creature’s account of God, written using the only categories the creature was capable of knowing/understanding at the stage of development at which it was written.In my understanding, the intervention of God in the person of Jesus Christ is the hinge of history. The point at which God became human in order to redeem his creation. Now, that work is complete. The creation is now in the process of completing the work begun by Christ. And while the special revelationists insist that belief in Jesus is necessary to be saved (reconciled to God), the general revelationists insist that God’s grace is general and does not depend on belief in any particular special revelation.So by shifting the emphasis from special to general revelation, you begin to see the way in which religion and spirit moves from a fixation on the past, on what has been done, on what God has done and finished with, on what the individual has done, on what Jesus has done. Religion and spirit shift their gaze (freed from the heavy burden of the past) to the future and realize that God is still creating and that God needs us to join him in his creative efforts if we are to be fully reconciled to him.
Posted by George at 7:33 AM 0 comments
Friday, August 1, 2008

Impersonal narcissism
Individual narcissism can easily become collective narcissism, and in fact becomes harder to recognize because disguised as collectivity [or inter-subjectivity], after all don't you have to transcend narcissism to achieve inter-subjectivity? Apparently you can transcend personal narcissism by adopting collective narcissism – and the cool thing is you get to retain your self-obsession but on a bigger (and more important) scale. Who 'on the leading edge' wouldn't want to be part of the most important, revolutionary collective in the history of the evolution of consciousness? Doesn't it just make your impersonal evolutionary heart burst with pride? And once the narcissism is depersonalized and collectivized it becomes that much harder to recognize, that much harder to challenge.
It also may explain why Andrew's community while appearing to be obsessed with changing the world actually has so little engagement with the world (except in WIE – and even there the engagement is as much about validating the EE worldview by bringing the external world into dialogue with it). The chosen method for changing the world is the evolution of the community's consciousness – meaning endless internal conversation. Like an individual narcissist constantly talking to himself about himself, the community constantly talks to itself about itself.
Posted by George at 6:57 PM 0 comments

I’m not God and neither are you
A persistent theme of the new age, of occultism, of humanism – expressed in spiritual and non-spiritual terms – is that human beings are just like God. AC expresses it as the impersonal discovery that you are the energy and intelligence that created the universe. The new age teaches much the same in soppier language. The occult (being the flip side of exoteric Christianity) expounds the divine creative nature [power] of human beings. All these philosophies just can't bear the thought that human beings are creatures (creations) of God. That in the cosmic hierarchy God was first and created us. We were not there in the beginning (AC poses the question – if we were not there at the beginning where were we? Answer: not yet created.) The experience of union with the divine is mistaken for identity with the divine.
This is original sin. The mistaken belief that humanity is its own creator – that we can take the place of God. This disordered belief separated and separates us from God. How can you be in right relationship with God if you do not recognize the essential nature of God as creator, ultimately it collapses into the modern love affair with the self (for if the self is divine why wouldn't you worship it and give it everything it wants – and making the self collective rather than individual preserves the narcissistic dynamic and strengthens it by disguising it).
So, despite the strength of the spiritual resurgence that is going on in the moment, it is continually disordered by the pervasiveness of sin (by the pervasiveness of the lack of recognition of divine [=natural] hierarchy).
Posted by George at 6:41 PM 0 comments
Friday, July 18, 2008

Evolutionary enlightenment and christianity
The difference between the EE conception of the absolute and the Christian theology of the trinity can illuminate my confusion.
The conception of the absolute as void gives no explanation for the creation of the cosmos. God was bored one day so created… Or god had an impulse one day and… Either way, the void had a thought or an impulse or… In other words the void was not void, there was something in the ground of being capable of creation. The ground of being had intentionality (otherwise how could the impulse that emerged from the ground have directionality? If the cosmos is not randomly evolving, then the ground of being must have intentionality). Intentionality is of course an attribute of personhood. Intentionality, free will (in deciding to create) - we're beginning to get some of the attributes of God. Not much empty void here. Of course in meditation it's possible to have an experience of the blissful perfect peace of eternity and mistake it for emptiness.
[An aside: who was it who commented that the west has become fixated on the emptiness of the ground of being and not on the fullness within the emptiness? Is the enthusiastic embrace of an emptiness Buddhism is a reflection of western modernist nihilism? Is this a part of the western obsession with killing God and promoting humanity to divinity? The fullness of the ground is the personhood of God – that which creates.]
Then we have the evolution of the Christian doctrine of the trinity. One strand of understanding sees the concept of the trinity as expressing the essential relational nature of God - relationship in oneness, relationship in Self without Other. It's a curious doctrine, but when you see it in light of creation it makes profound sense. The relation God is fulfilling its nature by creating something other than itself, sharing in its nature, in relationship with God and with the goal of achieving union with its creator. The relational God seeks ever richer relationships (seeks to develop to greater and greater stages of complexity and integration, in integral language).
Of course, the Christian God has personhood. The EE conception does not. I'm edging towards making the point that the EE account is actually incoherent, it posits an intentionally creative God (an energy and intelligence that created) but then denies it personhood.
Rather than adopting the dehumanizing idea of impersonality is it rather not more creative to recognize that our personhood is a pale shadow of our creator's personhood?
We're beginning to reach language that can talk of evolution and Christ in the same breath without strain.
Posted by George at 3:23 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Which god is higher?
The epic journey through evolving interpretations of this same impulse is amazing to behold: from shamanism to paganism to monotheism to higher forms of nondual mysticism—from the worship of nature spirits to the worship of many gods to the worship of the one and only God to the direct awakening to God as Spirit Itself. This is the story of how our capacity for spiritual depth and cognition has slowly developed, and it is one way to understand the evolution of consciousness. We can literally witness how our perspective grows in depth and inclusiveness, as our interpretation of the Absolute takes the leap from God as spirit in nature to God as embodied superhero to God as the mythic father figure in the sky, and from there, ultimately, to the mystical realization of the transcendent oneness of consciousness itself. Andrew Cohen.

Andrew's quote this week assumes that non-dual realization is at a higher level that realization of a personal God. Is this a reasonable assumption?
In one way, yes. It certainly seems that those who hold mono- or particular-theistic beliefs tend to have a narrower perspective than non-dualists. Monotheists have difficulty with the non-dual, non-dualists have difficulty with the manifest.
Yet, the non-dual precedes and contains the dual. God is developing from non-duality to duality to unity. Unity being the eschatological goal of the creation by God of that which is apart from God. Unity is higher (because more complex) than non-duality.
Any realization of God that excludes either duality or non-duality is partial.
It is necessary perhaps in western terms to move from the particular God (who nonetheless is a partial view of the real God) to a realization of non-duality and THEN to a direct experience of the real God. The latter movement is the next stage and it cannot be achieved by relying only on one side or the other.
Posted by George at 5:53 PM 0 comments
Sunday, July 13, 2008

God meets evolution, remembers who he is
What happens when the historical God of the traditions meets evolution – when Jehovah and his followers meet Darwin and his disciples?
Firstly, God is reminded of what he has done.
Secondly, God finds out that the story he and his followers have told about what he has done is true only up to a point. The story needs to be retold if it is to be more accurate.
Thirdly, God is reminded that his work is not finished.
The historical God of the traditions is of course not a real being. It is a mythological construct that sprang from the encounter of the worldview of pre-modern people and the energy and intelligence that is creating the world. Like many cultural/mythological constructs God appeared to take on a life of his own. The story people told about him was told in the only language they knew: with a pre-scientific understanding of the cosmos; with agrarian, tribal, patriarchal socio-economic forms. And because the foundation of the story was that God was the creator God and that God was the absolute, it was found that the story about God could not be changed once it was told.
By the time this story became Christianity it had been bolstered by Platonic understanding of eternal, immutable forms, so God's ability to change was closed off. God was trapped in platonic perfection. Even worse, his story was collated and became a holy book. The holy book, word breathed by God, became immutable as God.
Jesus, who came turning water to wine, eating with whores, healing madmen and forgiving and embracing sinners with the absolute demand that they be transformed and enter the kingdom to complete the work of the Creating God (not the Creator God), was forced into the Jehovah story. Saul/Paul, steeped in the tradition, reinterpreted Jesus to fit with the tradition. His genius was to universalize rather to restrict, so Jesus the Messiah of the Jews became the savior of all mankind. But the mechanism of salvation was an uneasy tension between the recognition that Jesus' message was one of radical, free grace, and the demands of the sacrificial tradition. So Jesus (who before the crucifixion went around forgiving people thus incurring the wrath of the religious authorities who demanded sacrifice – because their God demanded sacrifice) became a symbol and continuation of the sacrificial system. Jesus, who came breaking open the tradition, was transformed into the most powerful vehicle for continuing and universalizing the system.
Fast forward a couple of millennia into the post-modern age. The historical God of the traditions has not weathered the modern age well. He comes limping into post-modernism, unsure of himself. He knows that his myth has a distant foundation in reality, but that the myth as it's told traditionally sounds like nonsense to the post-modern ear. But if he tries to reinvent himself, God finds it hard to say anything with certainty. How can he even know anything about himself to say anything – post-modernism has scrambled and undermined the epistemologies we all came to rely on, pre-modernists and modernists alike. Religious language has collapsed into a series of unverifiable phenomenological statements, interesting in so far as they go, but not something you can base a philosophy of life on.
On the other hand scientism has ruthlessly gutted the universe of anything remotely transcendent. It's irrational war of the spiritual and on the absolute (perhaps justified in the age before the religious realized their words were tentative at best, and when the religious were in charge and willing to do pretty despicable things to stay in charge), has produced the oddest of universes: a universe of breathtaking complexity and beauty, but devoid of meaning and capable only of producing despair.
So the historical God of the traditions, having no other story to tell about himself (being utterly excluded by the scientists), retrenches and insists that the myths are truths.
Then evolution steps forward. In one form evolution has become an ideology of the scientists, a foundational idea for a militant atheism that is hell-bent on draining every ounce of transcendent meaning from the world we inhabit. In this form it has also become a foundational idea in the mythical God's retrenchment, the idea that says that you have to choose between science and God.
But in another form evolution proclaims the glory of an energy and intelligence that began and guides the ongoing creation of the cosmos. In this form, the scientists are challenged to set aside the decision they made long ago (then necessary to circumvent the mythological God, but no longer necessary) to oppose God in every form. They are invited to admit of the possibility of God, to open their minds (not an unwelcome attribute in a scientist). They are welcome to say that beyond a certain metaphysical point they will not go (even if today it is a point beyond which many are happy to go to kill off God).
In this second form, the traditions are challenged as profoundly as the scientists. For if their traditions are seen in the light of evolution, of human development, then the ageless truths the traditions are based on suddenly become age specific. They suddenly find themselves living in a post-modern world with a pre-modern religious world-view. The dissonance that inevitably results can lead either to retrenchment or to reinvention and renewal. Evolution steps up to provide a new foundation. It doesn't do so easily, as if the religious will all say "Ah, evolution!" and everything will suddenly be clear. One of the messages of evolution is that we must set aside the idea of reaching final resolution. One of our new foundations must be to hold ourselves always open to the new.
So when God encounters evolution he discovers himself to be (as he had thought all along) the creator of the cosmos. He remembers however that creation has only just begun and the end product (a material universe, his creature, in full communion with its creator) is still a long way off. He remembers that in starting off the whole creation of the cosmos thing, he risked everything in forgetting himself. He remembers that for 13 or 14 billion years creation had no way of knowing its creator. Created in freedom and with a teleological impulse at its heart, the universe has evolved towards its creator and only in the past tens of thousands of years has it become capable of knowing its creator. Now, God's creation stands before him, reminding him of what he has done, and beginning however tentatively to participate in that creation.
What we are talking about here is a reinvention of God. Those outside the traditions might think (perhaps justifiably) that there isn't much worth salvaging there. But as the universe awakens to reality, there will be an upsurge in interest in spirituality. How that emergence is shaped will be in some degree determined by how the traditions are engaged. Fortunately and unfortunately there are no rules for this engagement.
Posted by George at 7:01 AM 0 comments
Thursday, April 3, 2008

All that glitters....
My last post, I was off to an amazing new job interview. Now, I'm heading for unemployment. I saw the bright shiny object (new job, fancy title, fancy salary) and ran for it without thinking. The rest is misery. Now, 4 months later, I'm leaving after descending through an anxiety-ridden, fear ridden, dark valley.What's really interesting is that when times are tough I find great comfort in more traditional christianity. When times are good I loosen my grip on theology and relax into the comfort of God's presence. I WANT GOD TO SAVE ME, is what it comes down to.Will He?If times are bad I grip hard onto Him for fear I will be destroyed. When times are good I open to His presence and relax into Love. Is the point to be so transformed and so surrendered that when times are bad I open to His presence and relax into his Love. Is that when I am able to do His will?
Posted by George at 6:10 PM 0 comments
Sunday, January 27, 2008

It's not the see-saw it's the intention
It was inevitable in a way - that the see-saw back and forward between christianity & evolutionary enlightenment would have to give way to something else. I ended the year more evolutionary than christian and began the new year more christian than evolutionary. I decided to do the Bible in 90 days thing I started last year & didn't finish. I got about 10 days in, with incredible results in terms of spiritual centeredness & then realized that - what I've kind of recognized down through the years as I've experimented with 101 forms of practice - what matters is not so much the form of practice (though it has an impact in terms of context and interpretation of experience), but intention. Duh!So I'm back to the Course Workbook. Also listening to Cynthia Bourgeault's Wisdom Jeusus. On to Jim Marion and Putting on the Mind of Christ. What is the intention? To know God.Am I going to end up a new-agey Christian Mystic with an evolutionary twist? Religion seem increasingly irrelevant as the need to live in the Kingdom takes over.
Posted by George at 7:33 PM 1 comments


Monday, October 15, 2007

The End of Religion
Only a week since I saw the COG documentary. [Big week - finished reading the 12th Step with Richard, faced one of my biggest demons and went for an interview for a new job.]Probably the most extraordinary experience has been the onoing experience of the presence of God. An astonishing wide, deep, clear, peaceful, intimate awareness of a loving God. And this God loves all of his children, so I am beginning to experience his love of all working through me. Judgement falls away.And the continuing struggle to find the true religion is at an end. Ambivalence is at an end. No religion is True (not in the way that God is True). All religion is partial, all religion tries to tie God down and stop him in his tracks. Religion (like everything else) is useful to the extent that it can express his love, and useless to the extent that it limits him and us. God's love is so limitless we cannot conceive of its beginning or end, so powerful it creates entire universes, so absolute that it creates something in God's image to share in God's glory and then invests that creation with free will so that it too could participate in the ecstacy of the triune God: God as free loving relationship. This is bliss indeed - how can any religion even come close to approximating the experience of God's child resting in his love?So everything becomes religious and nothing is religious. In the Kingdom you are just in the Kingdom. It's not a place you can slip in and out of, it's somewhere you live. And living in the Kingdom you don't go somewhere else to worship God or do his work, worship and work are in every act. Of course, we slip in and out of the Kingdom as the day progresses. We haven't quite responded to Jesus'call to leave everything and follow him. And of course, we've made the very big mistake of thiking that if we just create the perfect Religion we can usher in the Kingdom. But Jesus ushered in the Kingdom and we just need to acknowlege his rule, surrender and get on with it.
Posted by George at 11:54 AM 1 comments
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Children of God
Last night I watched Noah Thompson's documentary "Children of God" about the experience of people who grew up in COG and have now left. One of the most striking things about the documentary was the immensity of pain these young people live with as a constant in their lives. You can see in every action they take and hear in every word they speak their complete inability to know who they are in the world or how to be in the world.The true horror of what someone like Moses David does to human beings is made explicit in the despair of Ricky Rodriguez - that the only way out for him was to torture and kill his 'nanny' and then himself. Moses David was an extreme example of how religious leaders can abuse and lead their followers to hell (and Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhate, Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard are all extreme examples).At the end of the documentary I wept (I mean really wept, wailed in horror and despair). I was overwhelmed by the realization that when i joined COG 30 years ago (30 years!!!), all I wanted to do was know and serve God. There was such a rage that God put me through 30 years of confusion and pain. ALL I wanted to do was love and serve God, and for 30 years God hid from me.Psalm 131 How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;4 my enemy will say, "I have overcome him," and my foes will rejoice when I fall.5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.I still feel emotionally raw after last night, yet for the first time it feels like there is nothing standing between me and God. Last night I prayed for his forgiveness for turning from Him, and last night I realized that I do not understand why I had to experience these last 30 years, but that now I know His love in a way that I never did before.It feels like God has dashed me against the rocks and broken me open over and over just so I can reach this place where I know that whatever form His love takes, whatever way his hurting children reach him, is good. All this breaking open is to get me to the point where I can recognize that the wo/man who says "I have found the only way to God, follow me!" is mistaken. There is some purpose in this, that I am to be one who can say to someone who cannot believe in the love of God that God does in fact love us.And finally it seems that there is evil in the world. There is a force that will always seek to separate God's children from him. The deceiver will use anything, even or most especially religion to turn us from our Father. And the only thing that can overcome the evil one is the fierce burning love of God embracing all his children in their pain, anger and confusion. Fierce grace indeed!
Posted by George at 9:56 AM 0 comments
Friday, September 28, 2007

After Andrew
So last night with Andrew at the Lighthouse he was really quite amazing. He laid out the whole teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, except for the practice and his role as teacher. It was immensely clarifying. He is quite clear that in creating matter God loses awareness and only gains self-awareness as matter through human beings' capacity for self-awareness. God has no plan for the future, nothing is predestined. Human beings have to accept responsibility for creating the future, and have to transcend ego if we are to solve present problems. The unsaid part is that in Andrew's teaching ego transcendence happens through surrender to the guru. The authentic self can only take control of the vehicle when ego is transcended. Andrew's entire enterprise hangs on him as guru - but you can't say that upfront or nobody would buy it.It was strange being a room with so many of his students - there is still such a strong connection with them, yet at the same time I am stepping away from Andrew. So much of the teaching is compelling, yet ultimately it does not give a way to transcend ego without submission to the guru.As I understand things now, the old sinful self (ego) needs to be transformed (transcended) through the working of the Holy Spirit. This happens through surrender to God (not guru). Guru may represent God, but is not God.Leaving the Lighthouse after Andrew's talk last night was difficult - the atmosphere of intimacy is so seductive. Yet, as soon as I left I was wrapped in the presence of Jesus (who Andrew had just described as a myth). I've been praying for an end to this see-sawing back and forth. I probably couldn't have achieved this resolution without seeing Andrew again, without sitting right in front of him for an hour and a half, without being awed by his power and his energy and delighting in his delight of God's creative power. But at the end of the day Andrew's path is not my path.The beginning of the end for me with Andrew was that day last May when he told us that for our purposes the second face of God, that to which we must submit, was him. No-one is more surprised than me that I should instead be brought to my knees by the love of Jesus Christ.I am immensely grateful that Andrew is so forcefully setting out ONE way in which we can find a way out of post-modernism. The world desperately needs a way back to God. And Andrwe has helped me change from being a self-centered arrogant ass. Strangely enough, it was my inability to surrender to a guru that propelled me all the faster to my bottom and my surrender to God in the 3rd Step.Andrew calls for each of us to have the courage to stand in what we know to be true, and to ACT from what we know to be true. To be mature, integrated human beings who are more interested in the good of the whole than in self. He calls for us to go beyond narcissistic self-concern, in which the highest good is feeling good, and actually make a difference for good in the world. Last night he was most powerful when he called us to actually make a difference for good - for our life here on Earth to have made a positive difference.I have come to believe that God in Jesus Christ has opened a way for us to be transformed into new beings, capable of living in the way that Andrew calls us to live. Is it the only way? Probably not, but it is the way that I am being transformed.
Posted by George at 7:05 AM 0 comments
Thursday, September 27, 2007

See-saw
"You'll never be happy anyway if all you're doing is pursuing your own happiness" (Jeff Carrera)After the last post I had a week or so in which I switched from daily prayer & bible reading to the daily practice of EE - chanting and meditation. I listened to a lot of Andrew's recorded talks. I put down Christianity.My experience was that life without conscious contact with a personal God is unbearable. While chanting and meditation are astonishing practices, it is literally unbearable to be without conscious contact and relationship with God.So I returned to Christian practice. Yet again the see-saw see-saws.And tonight Andrew is in New York - I've gone from being so excited at the prospect of seeing him, to deciding not to go, then today I decided to go see him.Last night I had the most extraordinary dream in which I had surrendered completely to Andrew. There was such freedom and joy in the dream in being completely surrendered. I woke with the dream still in my mind and immediately felt the presence of Jesus, whispering that that joy will come through surrender to Him. Dreams?Andrew once said that dead guru's can't kick butt, but my experience of Jesus is of a living presence. I'm increasingly becoming conscious that the fact that I'm holding myself back from any commitment to a church or whatever is a way of holding myself back from TRUE surrender. If I am the body of Christ then why am I cutting myself off from the body?Being at Betty's memorial yesterday what was most striking is that she was a perfect example of selfless service. It's what I've been called to repeatedly and repeatedly. Is my calling to be in AA and help the next alcoholic? Not to save the world in a grand and very public manner, but one soul at a time? Not at the leading edge of evolution but in the mucky day to day mess of AA?To save myself (i.e. to stay sober) I need to center myself in AA and in the daily spiritual practice of the 12 steps. Everything else is a gift of God. Everything beyond there is extra.So, I have a profoundly transforming relationship with God through Jesus - and that makes me a christian (like it or not).I have a profound respect for the efforts of people like Andrew and the Emerging Church folks who are standing on the edge of creating looking out into the unknown ready to participate in creating what comes next.I cannot at this point think of a way of combining the two. But that is what standing on the edge looking into the unknown future is. Not knowing what the next step is."The fact that we have an emotional response to something, doesn't make it more real. It only makes it more real to us." Jeff Carrera
Posted by George at 8:29 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Truth of Impersonality
This is the tenet that has given me the most difficulty, particularly since going off into the Christian stuff over the past months. My experience of God is not of an impersonal force. Last October, when I had the epiphany in the street – when the idea that if there’s an energy and intelligence powerful enough to create a universe then there’s no reason why that energy and intelligence can’t know me as individual. TRUE. But, it’s also true that there’s no reason why that energy and intelligence should know me as an individual.I leapt from ‘it’s possible’ to ‘God is personal with a personality and everything’ and the whole Christian thing. Once I’d made the leap, I made a conscious effort to read the Bible ‘as if’ it were true. This naturally led me deeper into belief in Christianity. Praying every day, reading the Bible daily etc etc. All grounded my spiritual experience in a personal Christian interpretation. All along it FEELS like God is a loving Father, present and active in my life. It FEELS right (and we know how reliable feelings are).Then listening to Jeff & Katherine’s pod cast on Impersonality yesterday, I had the clearest experience ever of the authentic self (outside an EC type situation), a clear objective experience of being the authentic self within a vehicle that is George McAlpine (that vortex of biological, psychological and social forces and conditioning). From that perspective the authentic self is radically impersonal in the sense of not originating in the individual, but being a collective expression of consciousness. BUT the authentic self is also radically personal, in the sense that it KNOWS EVERYTHING about George in breathtaking objective clarity. It’s the difference between a top down and bottom up perspective on my own experience.Impersonal in the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is not the dictionary definition (in the OED one of the definitions is, “Not possessing or endowed with personality; not existing or manifested as a person”). The human personality exists (although most of what we think of as uniquely personal is actually conditioned and therefore impersonal). The human personality does interact with God, and if God is seen from the perspective of the human personality, God may well be experienced as personal – it will entirely depend on the intellectual and emotional interpretation the person applies to the experience. This is the bottom up perspective – always deeply personal (this also explains how a thousand and one interpretations arise from the same experience). And because emotion plays a role in the interpretation (and emotion is probably the most deeply and unconsciously conditioned aspects of the personal self), the interpretive aspect of the experience is pretty much hidden from view.Seen from the perspective of the authentic self this conditioned response to the ecstatic intimacy of God, is just that: a conditioned response. That’s impersonality – the personality is still there, it still exists, still manifests as a person, but is seen from an objective position. THAT is what makes it possible to take seriously the law of volitionality, THAT is what makes it possible to face everything and avoid nothing. And from the perpective of the authentic self it ONLY sees the good of the whole.So impersonality instead of being a cold clinical viewpoint, is actually the passion and ecstacy of the whole. Impersonality is a way of inhabiting the vehicle free of the conditioning that traps us. It is how you live as a liberated human being.What of prayer, the comfort of having a heavenly Father who knows everything and does everything. Prayer originates with the personal self, it is the cry of the separate human being (at its most basic) to have God arrange the world in the way the personal self wants. At more elevated selfless levels prayer is still the cry of the personal self to have God bless all. Prayer goes from lower to higher, so when the human being acheives enlightenment and takes the higher persepective prayer ends. Then the human being’s motivation are those of the authentic self, and there is no gap between motive and action (integrity). Then there is no need for prayer because God is active through the human vehicle.Personal spiritual practice is the collection of activities the personal self must undertake to discipline the self to create the conditions in which the authentic self can take control. Prayer may be useful at the lower levels but must inevitably give way to a single prayer of surrender [God, I offer myself to thee, to build with me and do with me what thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I might better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love and thy way of life. God, I would do thy will always]. There’s nothing personal here.
Posted by George at 8:20 AM 0 comments
Monday, September 10, 2007

Are we done or do we still have work to do?
Morality Doesn't Pre-existOnly human consciousness has the capacity to bring a higher moral dimension to the developmental process. Morality doesn't pre-exist as part of the fabric of the universe, already formed, “out there” somewhere. It's not part of the process from the very beginning; nor is it an inherent quality of the creative principle itself. If you project your pre-given notions of virtue and morality onto some mythic conception of God, you are just perpetuating a comforting illusion. Ever-greater moral capacities emerge and enter into the process only as human beings evolve.Point the Finger at YourselfThe greatest challenge for a mortal human being is to realize and take responsibility for the fact that who you are right now, in all your imperfection, is the One without a second, and that One is endeavoring to develop and become more conscious, as you. God has fallen out of the sky, but now he, she, or it is beginning to emerge as the creative impulse, which is your own Authentic Self, and is endeavoring to consciously evolve, in and through and as you. So you have to ask yourself: Do I have that much guts, that audacity of intention, that boldness of spirit—is there enough love in my heart to be willing to be the One? The answer to that question is really the answer to every important question. Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a purpose to all this? What is the fundamental nature of life? All of these questions are answered in the deepest possible way when you point the finger at yourself and say “Yes.”Andrew CohenThese quotes from Andrew really sum up the fundamental difference between the teachings of evolutionary enlightenment and a tradition like Christianity.In Christianity God is a pre-existing entity who creates something other than himself, but in his own image. God’s nature and attributes are unchanging and eternal. So the moral dimension of life, if we are created in God’s image, is the same as God’s morality (eternal, unchanging, pre-given). In Christianity Creation happened in the past and all we’re doing now is cleaning up a few odds and ends before we get to an eternal unchanging heaven.But what if God were eternal, absolute, but evolving? And if we are created in his image, then we too are evolving. So, what is it that is evolving? God evolving through humanity?The morality of the God of the Old Testament is clearly of a different (more primitive) order than the God of Jesus and the New Testament. Did God change or did human society change? What if the evolution of humanity changed God? What if the evolution of humanity and of God were inseparable?As I’ve gone deeper into Christianity, while all the time having the challenge of EE and of Faith House standing questioning everything I’m doing, I’ve returned over and over to the question of what Christianity has to do to evolve to the next level. In Wilberian terms, it has to transcend and include. Transcend the limited ethno-centric and more recent global-centric view of God and humanity. Take a truly cosmo-centric view (a God’s eye view). All the other traditions have to do so also – Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc… The extent to which they still hold onto their traditions as a way of differentiating and separating from the Other is the extent to which they are holding back evolution.It’s infinitely more comforting to be saved, to have Jesus as a real and living presence, to have a personal God who I speak to and who speaks to me, to have made it into heaven (with only a brief journey through this veil of tears with Jesus holding my hand as I go).How much more challenging, on the deepest level, to recognize that the next moment does not yet exist, that it must be created by God. And then the next, then the next.How much more challenging on the deepest level to recognize that God is not a finished being but is creating itself eternally.How much more challenging on the deepest level to recognize that God is creating itself in matter and that its awareness of itself is slowly awakening in and through human beings.What is my response to this? That salvation is illusion? That to awaken to this is to recognize that NOTHING is secure, that EVERYTHING changes, that the next moment is still to be created, and that what I DO creates the next moment?So does anything pre-exist? God... the absolute... the ground of being...And just who is creating the universe? God... is that someone/thing apart from us? or is that the force that is creating through us? And if we're creating the universe then don't we have work to do?In that old time religion God in and through Jesus accomplished everything for us - the work is complete. In the new evolutionary religion we have work to do. Now!
Posted by George at 10:17 AM 0 comments
Monday, September 3, 2007

Bloodthirsty God
29 Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites. 30 And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD : "If you give the Ammonites into my hands, 31 whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the LORD's, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering."
32 Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the LORD gave them into his hands. 33 He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.
34 When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of tambourines! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, "Oh! My daughter! You have made me miserable and wretched, because I have made a vow to the LORD that I cannot break."
36 "My father," she replied, "you have given your word to the LORD. Do to me just as you promised, now that the LORD has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. 37 But grant me this one request," she said. "Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry."
38 "You may go," he said. And he let her go for two months. She and the girls went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. 39 After the two months, she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin. From this comes the Israelite custom 40 that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite. (Judges 11:29-40)
"…and he did to her as he had vowed." Of course this means that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as an offering to God. Human sacrifice.
When you sit down to read through the Old Testament it's quite shocking how violent the action is. Israel and God engage in bloody conquest after bloody conquest: massacring armies, women and children as they go. God has a definite preference for cleansing the land of enemies and their gods before Israel move in. He's also very particular about the details of the animal sacrifices required. Occasionally, as in Jephthah's story, an almost submerges tradition of human sacrifice pops above the surface (as it does with Abraham and Isaac).
Yesterday I watched United 93. There's one scene where the plane is getting out of control and the Islamic terrorists are praying fervently, the Christian passengers are praying fervently. The film shook me to the core – what am I doing getting involved in RELIGION? Look what RELIGION does!!!
The actions of the Islamic terrorists clearly belong to the same world as the God of the Old Testament and Jephthah. "Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the LORD gave them into his hands.''
If you read the Old Testament, not as literalist history, but as the history of ISRAEL (humanity's struggle with GOD), you begin to stand on firmer ground. If you read the Old Testament in the light of Jesus' work – the end of sacrifice (as Heim argues persuasively, making visible the previously concealed scapegoating dynamic of the sacrificial system, bringing THAT way of managing the violence of society to an end), you can find there precisely the violence that Jesus came to end. And lastly if you read the Old Testament in the light of modern and postmodern rationality, with a full knowledge of evolution, you can see an evolving human society driven by its' experience of the divine struggling with that sense of Divinity.
The premodern and postmodern views seem very similar: ISRAEL, humanity struggling with God. But the postmodern view, informed by history, science and rationality, recognized that it is not just humanity that is growing and developing but God Himself. The God we have now is not the God who asked for Jephthah's daughter to be cut up and burned.
For our sensibilities we need Jephthah to have been mistaken in believing God to require his daughter's sacrifice. We need our God to be more like Jesus than the bloodthirsty LORD of the Old Testament. But the problem is that that is exactly what the God of the OT was like. And He is still active today, with the fundamentalists of the big 3 (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
This will mess with your head if you believe the Book (insert name of Holy Book of your choice) to be the true and inspired WORD of God, eternal and unchanging.
But if you take an evolutionary view, you begin to find a way out. Humanity struggling and evolving towards a fuller understanding of God, all the way trying to justify the ways of Man to God by having God give His blessing on the violent expansionism of Israel, sacrificial system etc (part of God's function in the OT is to resolve the political conflict between secular rulers of the tribes of Israel and the priests). God becomes part of the social order (created to justify and support that order, but presented as originating that order). And social orders evolve, God evolves right along with society.
If you take an evolutionary view you can begin to speak about the differences between the Islamic terrorists on United 93 as they pray fervently as they are about to murder a plane full of people, and the passengers on the plane praying fervently for the Christian God's protection (who did not protect them). You can also begin to talk about a way forward. Because finally, in the postmodern morass of relativity, you can begin to say "Some ways of talking about God are better than others".
Posted by George at 5:58 AM 1 comments
Saturday, August 18, 2007

God & Religion
Evolution becomes impossible as soon as you have decided on a list of God's attributes, as soon as the theology is already written and the creeds established. Religion, instead of being the living experience of God's revelation of itself and humanity's dynamic engagement with that revelation, becomes instead a socio-political ritual in which some aspects of our lived experience are placed carefully beyond dispute – placed so that evolution becomes impossible, so that the social structures which gave birth to those experiences are set in stone, so that those with power can worry a little less about that power being challenged. Religion becomes the meta-rule book – before which all other rules must bow, to which all innovation must apply for evaluation before acceptance.
Religions, thinking themselves owners of eternal timeless truths are inherently self-deceived. Evolution is always more powerful than religion. Because religion itself is the institutionalized form of socio-political structures, it is always vulnerable to the evolution of those structures. So when those structures are contested, or their internal contradictions begin to give way under the assault of innovation, religion is forced to evolve. Fundamentalisms are not returns to the fundamentals, they are not a movement backwards, but a creation of something quite new that could only have evolved in response to the assault of reason.
What if the primary attributes of God were openness… creativity…relationality…evolution!
What if the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, were the driving force of evolution itself!
What if surrendering to God was the surrender to the very force of creation and evolution itself. Becoming a religious person then would have nothing to do with learning a set of rules and rituals, nothing to do with finding out what IS, but everything to do with surrendering to the evolutionary impulse itself – to endless openness and creativity. Becoming a religious person would then have everything to do with learning how to be open and creative, learning how to engage in a dynamic way with our fellow humans and with God. The orientation would be to the future, to what IS NOT YET.
The temptation would be to throw the traditions out with the fossilized ideologies of the religions. But that would be a mistake, better rather to look into our traditions to see how God has progressively made Herself known through a dynamic engagement with the creatures created in her image (creative, relational, open, evolving).
Posted by George at 8:11 AM 0 comments
Saturday, August 11, 2007

The God Language Game
Historically, most of the concepts and language [most of if not all of the language games] used to describe the spiritual experience have been entirely bonded to myth. The demythologizing impulse of modernism, based on materialism and scientism, proved inadequate to describe the spiritual. It not only demythologized but also de-spiritualized the spiritual. Discovering materialist explanations of some supernatural phenomena it wrongly drew the conclusion that all supernatural phenomena were amenable to materialist explanation. Modernism threw the baby out with the bathwater.
So where does that leave us now? Postmodernism has begun to understand powerfully how myth participates in the construction of individual and social reality. But in its zeal for spotting construction and its distrust of absolutes (or inability to see absolutes in the midst of the deconstructive frenzy) postmodernism finds itself often unable to draw any conclusions about reality from the experience of the spiritual.
So what of those of us who persist in having spiritual experiences despite the efforts of modernism, and persist in experiencing the absolute despite the relativizing mania of postmodernism? Strangely, we find that some of the concepts and language of myth are perfectly adequate for describing our experience. Of course we're participating in a whole new language game here – a demythologized, rational, sophisticatedly postmodern language game.
Just because the mythological Abrahamic God (the Father with white hair and a beard and a terrible temper) has fallen from the sky (to use AC's phrase), does not mean that all explanations of God as a personal force are wrong. It takes enormous effort to hold oneself open to God always being greater than any Concept I might have. The impulse to reduce and explain and confine God is constant. But radically holding oneself open to God's ongoing revelation means that we must always be ready to have our language game evolve.
The mythological religious language games of the great western traditions were for the most part closed games. The rule book(Holy Book)s were closed. We knew what we were getting – and then along came science and told us it was false. We lost the ability to talk intelligently about religion at all. We turned for help to the East where a spirituality stripped of concepts seemed possible. But then we discovered that stripping away all those concepts stripped away everything that makes us human and makes society impossible (an awkward impasse for social animals with a highly evolved sense of individuation). So the East instead of answering our questions and giving us a new way to integrate the spiritual in our social existence led us to stop talking all together. And stopping talking altogether is not helpful given the current state of theworld.
The next religious language game must change from being the language of an already written rule book to being an open language of enquiry in which the radical possibility of God's revelation is ever present. It must be a language in which we don't know how to finish our sentences and have to look around the room to see who else has another word to carry the sentence forward. Our stance must be outwards to our fellow enquirers and upwards and inwards to God to find the Word that will constantly break open our sentences and leave us reeling, thrown back constantly into God's Spirit that sustains us as we lean forward into an uncreated future.
Posted by George at 8:43 AM 1 comments
Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Religions
Religions are the formalization of the confluence of different evolutionary streams:1. Psychological: the evolution of the individual.2. Socio-political: the evolution of society.The individual and society evolve together. The individuated human being is a relatively new phenomenon - it became possible through the evolution of language (which can only evolve socially), and the evolution of awareness (which has both social and individual aspects). The individuated human being evolved in society, i.e. was construced in and through the experience of being a part of a social structure that involves both the economic and the political. (Both individual and social evolution move from simple to complex). Although the modern individual experience himself as outside and apart from society in reality if you take away all the aspects of the individual that are socially constructed you are left with very little that is recongnizably individual (?).God is life. God is the energy and intelligence that drives evolution. But before human comes animal. Animals are primarily driven by biological instinct. Human society evolved from biologically driven forms of (animal) social organization. Into the mix throw an emerging awareness of God (only at a certain point of biological evolution does an animal become capable of self-reflective awareness and God-awareness - the two go hand-in-hand). A dynamic then comes into play in which the self-reflective animal tries to make sense of God-awareness in the only way she can (through language) and God tries to intervene by making Herself known. There is always a gap between what the human can understand and what God can express.Religion is the formalization of this evolving complex. Only with the emergence of post-modernism have human beings become sophisticated enough to understand that the meeting point of the upward evolution of humanity and the downward reach of God results in the Evolution of Truth. In the past the impulse has always been to fix Truth in a form that can be learned and maintained. The multiple functions of Religion (spiritual and socio-political) means that Religion is always implicated in the power structures of the society it evolved in. The ongoing evolution of the human-God interface means that Religion will always have to be transcended. Any Religion will try to hold onto its past, but if it is to truly usher in the Kingdom of God it must transcend itself. That will be a sign of True Religion - that it constantly lets itself be transformed by the deepening and complexifying encounter with the energy and intelligence that creates the future.
Posted by George at 7:19 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Uncertainties
Listening to Andrew from last May's retreat, talking about Wilber's description of the 3 faces of God:God as Absolute (Ground of being): EasternGod as Other: ChristianityGod as Process: Evolutionary spiritualityIn the session Andrew only mentions God as Other, as being that face of God before which the Ego surrenders. Ego can survive God as Absolute and as Process, but cannot survive God as Other. In the private meeting with Andrew and the students afterwards he made the statement that ultimately drove me away from him, that for the purposes of his students he is the second face of God before which our egos must bow.The guru is the human manifestation of God who represents God as other. How is this reconcilable with Jesus as son of God. Was Jesus just a guru? Or was he one (the one) who was born without forgetting God (i.e. born without sin).[An aside: in creating the material universe did God create something other than himself and separate from him? or did he become a form that was incapable of knowing itself as God (forgetting). In the first case it is possible to have salvation as an event: God reconciled with matter. In the second scenario matter must be transformed in a way that will allow it to know itself as an aspect of God. Event or process?Sin is the decision made by matter when it becomes aware of God, to turn from God and remain separate. Separation is the natural state of matter in the first scenario, non-awareness is the natural state of the second.]If it all comes down to epistemology - how can you know which metaphysical system is true? - then we are lost.If you take a more integral approach and look at the effects of a religious system in all 4 quadrants you begin to have firmer ground to stand on.True, Andrew delivers powerful experiences of the absolute and has compelling analysis of the process. But his position in the teachings as the second face of God (guru) is a hidden authoritarian structure.Christianity is such a massive and diverse set of beliefs, practices and institutions that it is hard to say anything meaningful that applies to the religion as a whole.To the set of statements I made in Certainty (and about which I am now Uncertain!!!), I can now add the Certainty that all religion and all theology can only present a partial picture of God:"All theologies are like straws His Sun burns to dustKnowing takes you to the threshold, but not through the DoorNothing can teach you if you don't unlearn everythingHow learned I was, before Revelation made me dumb."(From Andrew Harvey, Light Upon Light: Inspirations from Rumi)
Posted by George at 8:32 AM 0 comments
Thursday, July 19, 2007

Creation, Creativity, Evolution
Andrew Cohen talks of the Evolutionary Impulse as being identical with the energy and intelligence that created the universe (i.e. God, it is the God impulse). Now I actually begin to understand this. If God is life, and life is what makes evolution possible - then Life (God) drives evolution. Evolution's directionality (upwards towards God) is driven by God (Life).
Posted by George at 8:47 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Rapid Evolution... Evolutionary Universalism
The past few months, basically since my encounter with God in street last October, have been an extraordinary time in which my thinking has gone through so many iterations it has almost left me breathless. From Evolutionary, to ACIM, to Christian, to Evolutionary Universalist (I just made up the last name, but I like it [for now]).So lets bring the two blogs together. I mistakenly thought that by becoming a Christian again I had committed myself to an exclusive viewpoint. That somehow or other Christianity excludes other religious views. But in these months of intense reading of the Bible and so many other works I have been awed by God's insistence in being bigger than any particular religion. I probably have AA's pure spirituality (pure in the sense of not insistent on any particular religion) to thank for that. Truly understanding that no human being has or can have a complete understanding of God (as so many Christians think they have), but can only every know God partially, is ultimately liberating. It frees one from attachment to any particular form of religion. It allows you to see God's grace operating everywhere at all times.Here's what I have been posting to the other blog, that started as a journal of my Bible readings and rapidly evolved into something else:Wednesday, July 18, 2007IncarnationI have been so overwhelmed by the astonishing truth of God's incarnation in Jesus Christ that I have struggled to understand how we as human beings, as God's creation fit into this picture.Reading in Hindu writings that God is life, and God is what gives life to everything on Earth that lives, the whole evolutionary picture becomes clear. God is endless creativity. God created the Heavens and the Earth, life on Earth has evolved from the starting point of life in matter to the point where life in matter has self-reflective awareness. Life in human form is entering into relationship with it's creator, made possible through the work of Jesus who ended the period of superstition and sacrificial religion.There is a movement of life (God in matter) towards higher and higher levels of complexity and awareness. There is the movement of God the Creator towards humanity. Human awareness struggled to find God, God reached in and opened the Way. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Symbolically or factually, it doesn't really matter, the Christian story seen in the context of the great faiths is the point at which human effort and God's grace collide.Thursday, July 5, 2007HumanismIt strikes me that the impasse I thought myself into at the end of Certainty 2 results in a requirement for a humanist politics. Theocracy can never be an option because we can only interpret God through our human culture. So we have to reach agreement on basic humanist values.Certainty 2Interesting that after the last post I get to Step 7 in the 12&12 and it's focus is almost entirely on humility and faith. Humility - I can't remove my defects of character - and faith that He can & will remove them.Sitting for a while with the idea of humility I realize that I've had a very self-centered attitude to religion, prayer and worship. Unless it originates in me, my authentic words representing my authentic beliefs and ideas etc., it can't possibly be an authentic expression of praise or worship. The idea that another person's words in the form of written prayers and liturgy could be acceptable to God, to me seemed absurd.For a few weeks now I've been increasingly conscious of a desire/call to explore the liturgical side of religion - something that is pretty alien to me. Thinking back to Montserrat and the incredible sacred atmosphere of the basilica and mass, the incredible power of the black virgin statue (seemed like a battery storing up the devotions of thousands of worshippers over the centuries), it seemed then that the intention of the pilgrims and worshippers contributed in a cumulative way to the spiritual power of the place. In contrast the protestant disdain for sacred places and ritual that is so much a part of my personality seems quite sterile (although it can also be a source of purity I think).So back to humility. It takes humility to use another person's words for prayer, another person's words to approach and speak to God. Once recognized, it seems quite powerful to use the distilled wisdom of those who have gone before in this way! So I've been using Magnificat. Praying the hours in this way is a little strange, a little alien, but extraordinarily transformative.The other aspect of liturgical form that struck me last year at St Barts, was how this form could make everything sacred. By naming each day and each part of the day in relation to the sacred, it is sanctified. By changing my thinking of days and time to a liturgical view, I can come to see the entirety of life as sacred. I'm intrigued and for now hooked.I don't know if this is just another swing, another blind alley. I'm not sure. What I said in Certainty still holds.The evangelical view has no humility before God. It KNOWS who God is and what He has said. It KNOWS how to get to heaven. It KNOWS that there is no other way. Yet, the more I feel myself transformed by my encounter with God, the larger and wider and more inclusive God seems. It now seems absurd beyond belief to think that the God who created all that is could have so limited access to himself. That only a particular form of spirituality or religion, given expression in a particular culture, could be uniquely the way to God, speaks more of human tribalism than any deep appreciation of the nature of God.In the experience of meditation everything falls away. One is left simultaneously with the experience of emptiness (no form) and fullness (God). In meditation there is the experience of the Absolute beyond culture and interpretation... beyond religion. It's there and can be experienced by anyone with enough time and dedication to drop everything.But of course you have to open your eyes and get off the cushion sometime (as Andrew liked to say), and then you have to interpret the experience you've had. Traditional enlightenment discounted the material world and privileged the experience of the Absolute. In western cultures, the experience is most usually interpreted theologically. That's exactly what I've done in Certainty.But the Absolute does not sit passively waiting for us to sink into it. The Absolute is the energy and intelligence that created the universe (God), and God constantly reaches into our world. The Absolute constantly breaks through, demanding attention. Thus religion.Not sure where I'm going with this now... I feel a deep need to reconcile the experience of meditation with the experience of God's action in my life. What I'm really trying to do with that line of inquiry is to bring God into manageable and categorizable form. It's as if one needs the experience of God to be always the same. Yet, it seems illogical and unreasonable to expect the creator of everything to be reducible to less than everything.Wittgenstein points out that private language is impossible. That it is impossible to have a purely private description of experience, else how are we to know that we refer to the same thing as we referred to last week when we say God only to ourselves. That's where the language game of religion comes in, to unify our experience so we can recognize each experience when we have it again.The problem with our postmodern era is that the authority of the religious language game has broken down. We're all running around with experiences of the sacred, trying to express them in language that is designed for exclusivity rather than recognition of that which is common, and we're tortured by doubt, fear that the language is not true (because contradicted by the experience of the other). And fearing that the language is false, we fear that the experience is false.Which brings us back to Certainty. I've been floundering for years trying to find a language game that is TRUE, that speaks the truth about my experience. But that is probably not possible. One is left with uncertainty about the experience, and uncertainty about one's account of the experience.So how do I arrive at the certainties I reached in the last post? Faith? Hope?It seems rather that the response to all this uncertainty requires a radical openness to the possibility of God. KNOWING that in the past I have had deep experiences of God, being quite unable to adequately express or theorize or theologize those experiences, I am quite unsure on an intellectual level but quite Certain of what I have experienced. The problem with theologized experience is that one expects it to be the same always - one expects the experience of God to be the same next time, one expects to have a language to talk about it to oneself. But God is greater than all that is and at the point of intersection between God and humanity there is infinite experiential variety.Grounded in the certainty of God's revealing of himself to us we can be radically uncertain about our ability to talk about the experience. If we cannot even talk convincingly to ourselves about God how can we talk convincingly to another? So when someone from a different culture talks to me about a God that is unrecognizable how am I to say that they are talking about a different God from me?Friday, June 22, 2007CertaintyLooking back at my spiritual history a number of patterns leap out immediately:Since the beginning way back at the age of 12, I have had numerous deep and lasting experiences of what I will now call God.In the times in my life when I have denied that experience I have been utterly miserable.In the times in my life when I have sought to integrate that experience into my life I have relied heavily on existing religious systems/organizations and have been repeatedly disappointed and disillusioned. I have repeatedly sought the perfection of God in human forms and repeatedly found human imperfection (why this should have surprised me repeatedly is itself surprising).My most recent adventures in finding religion have been firstly Evolutionary Enlightenment as taught by Andrew Cohen, and now Christianity.With Andrew I had the profound experience of the Absolute unchanging nature of God, and the overwhelming experience of intersubjective communication beyond ego. I also had the growing realization that for a human like Andrew to place himself in the place of God (by taking on the role of unquestionable guru), is to open the door to misuse of power and denial of individual autonomy. Andrew's cosmocentric perspective is not large enough - God's perspective is larger, we cannot adopt God's perspective (only God can), we can only seek to enter a holy relationship with God. Andrew gets close... he recognizes the Eternal Absolute nature of God, he recognizes that God is source, the "energy and intelligence that created the universe", he recognizes that that energy and intelligence is what drives the evolution of the universe. After that recognition all is confusion. Andrew does not recognize the personal nature of God, recognizing only the impersonal absolute aspect of the Creator. But God is Creator of all that is.It is this last recognition, that God is Creator of ALL that is, that led to my recognition of the possibility of a personal God. After all, if God can create ALL, it's not unreasonable to believe that God can Know each of us individually. It has to be said that I did not think my way to this conclusion, rather God made himself know to me on a sunny day last October, crossing 46th Street outside my apartment. It had been raining and wet leaves covered the road. And it came to me that if God created the universe, God can know me.This was the culmination of a growing interest in Christianity. After that realization it was only a matter of time before I got sober again, and committed my life to Christ again. I have a profound feeling that it is fitting that I return to the form of faith that first led me to spiritual experience. The difficulty I have is in how I integrate the 25 plus years of seeking and experimentation. Christianity, in its many forms, often makes claims to exclusivity. Were all those years wasted years? All those other forms of spiritual practice for nothing?On one level I am as confused as ever, I still have the old pattern in seeking an organization or church that perfectly represents God. I am still seeking for Certainty in human creations. It cannot be found there.I have also been reading the Bible like crazy - and have been drawn deeply into a conversation with God through this reading. Thus the title of this blog. Initially started to be a journal of my reading with the scheduled readings from Forefront. But all along there's been a tension between my reading (particularly of the Old Testament and Mark) and orthodox christian reading. I cannot be an orthodox christian it seems, especially an evangelical. How this new found faith can be manifested between people I do not know.I've been seesawing between a wholesale adoption of a fairly evangelical understanding of Christianity and a postmodern understanding of spirituality and its cultural manifestations.I started this post with the intention of just putting down in writing what I think I can say with Certainty. In these postmodern times certainty has become less certain of itself. But I have to root myself in some FACTS that I cannot deny.So I say with certainty:God is.God created the universe as something other than Him, that would, through it's own evolution and His engagement with it, come into perfect communion with Him.God's creation fell from communion with Him, there are two opposing forces in creation - the impulse to separate from God, the impulse to join with God.God incarnated in the person of Jesus to inaugurate a new possibility for human beings to enter communion with Him.In the person of Jesus, God humbled Himself, and became as a servant, obedient even to death - demonstrating that all that separates humanity from God has been forgiven by God. God in the person of Jesus took upon himself the sins of humanity and wiped them out. Through faith in Jesus human beings can enter into communion with the Father and be empowered through the Holy Spirit to live lives like that of Jesus.While human beings persist in sin they cannot enter into relationship with God.This is not the only way to God. The actions of Jesus opened the door for all, all can enter.About everything else, I am not certain. Perhaps that's as far as one should go in terms of certainty. After faith, leave the rest to God.Wednesday, June 20, 2007“Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 2:5)Philippians 2:1-11, Psalms 119:129-136Paul's amazing hymn about the nature of Christ brings to mind immediately the sermon on the mount, especially "blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth" (Matt 5:5). In Paul's hymn God makes himself nothing "the very nature of a servant… obedient to death… therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name."It's hard to grasp but truly transformatively mind-blowing to recognize that in Jesus, as the Word, as the second person of the trinity, actually IS God. So God actually humbled himself… a servant.So when Paul exhorts us to have the same attitude as Jesus Christ, he is asking us to take on the "very nature of a servant… obedient to death"! We all want the peace and joy that comes from having a personal relationship with God but do we really want to be just like Jesus?David says, "I open my mouth and pant, longing for your commands" (v.131) and "direct my footsteps according to your word; let no sin rule over me" (v.133). There's the same passion here we've been reading about in Philippians: Paul's complete surrender to Christ, his single-minded pursuit of the goal of spreading the Gospel.Tuesday, June 19, 2007The Gospel cannot be containedLuke 5:12-16; Phillippians 1:19-30<>>Jesus heals the man with leprosy and instructs him to keep quiet about it and to go through the necessary temple purification rituals to be restored to society. But the healing and the good news cannot be contained. The crowds continue to grow.Paul has been overcome by the Gospel. He is completely given over to Christ and his joy cannot be contained.The response to the real JesusLuke 5:1-11; Phillippians 1:1-18In Luke, Simon needs a miraculous display by Jesus before he sees him for who he is truly. His first reaction is to distance himself, he's too sinful to be near Jesus. But Jesus instantly accepts him and gives him his true purpose. Simon immediately drops everything and follows Jesus.Paul too has given everything to his Lord. His only purpose is to preach the Gospel. Even in jail, where he should be miserable and suffering, he is overjoyed that so many of his jailers have had an opportunity to hear the Gospel.Seeing Jesus as who he truly is demands everything of me. Am I willing to be transformed utterly so that every situation can be seen as an opportunity to share the Gospel? (Even though I have not shared the Gospel with anyone! Preferring instead to try to be an example in the AA way).
Posted by George at 12:12 PM 2 comments
Saturday, April 28, 2007

Entropy and Evolution
The cosmos has 2 major forces – entropy and evolution.
On the one hand, long recognized by scientist and the more pessimistic theologians, the universe has a tendency to entropy – to break down, to move from complexity and organization to disorganization and less complex forms.
On the other hand, evolution appears to have directionality, moving from disorganization and simple forms to greater complexity and organization. Higher and higher levels of complexity and integration. Importantly, the evolution of matter has produced organic life and organic life has become aware. Awareness itself has evolved.
The material cosmos has become aware of itself, and in become aware of itself has also become aware of the Absolute. In becoming aware of the Absolute – the material universe has (among other things) come to question its own reality. Given the inherent perfection of the Absolute (God), it seems impossible that something so imperfect as the material world could exist.
A Course in Miracles (ACIM) sees the creation of the material universe as an illusory result of "the tiny, mad idea" that it is possible to be separate from God. In the moment that the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, God gave the answer (the Holy Spirit), and all the results of the tiny, mad idea were immediately undone. It only appears to the Son, who continues to believe in the illusion, that there is a World.
The world is the tiny-mad idea projected from the mind of God's Son (not human beings – humans are projections from the mind of God's Son). In the instant that the idea entered His mind, God gave the answer. The material world is the projection of the idea of separation, evolution is the result of the the Holy Spirit's call.
In the Course's account the projection of the tiny-mad idea is a process of fragmentation, repeatedly the idea is fragmented into smaller and smaller, apparently separate fragments. Unity to fragmentation and disorganization. Entropy.
The Atonement (the Holy Spirit's) answer calls the fragments of God's Son to reunite with Source. Fragmentation and disorganization to higher and higher levels of unity and integration. If you go a little further and throw in complexity… Evolution.
Evolutionary theory (of the spiritual variety) for the most part relies heavily on the idea that God directs evolution (and many varieties of this statement – "evolution's arrow", directionality etc etc). Basically, the idea, in contrast to traditional materialistic accounts, is that evolution has direction and intelligence – moving towards greater and greater complexity and integration. This might be seen as a "push" theory of evolution.
It might be possible to reread ACIM in an evolutionary context and find in the idea of the Holy Spirit's call to the fragmented Son of God, the call of evolution. A "pull" theory of evolution.
Posted by George at 7:00 AM 0 comments
Monday, April 23, 2007

Evolutionary Spirituality
What happens when you bring put spirituality/religion/enlightenment into an evolutionary context?Clearly evolution has been amply demonstrated by science, although the mechanisms of evolution are still at the level of theory rather than fact. The traditional faiths have experienced (and taught) the absolute as eternal and unchanging. So, in the enlightenment traditions, the experience of the absolute has been the experience of that which is eternal, unchanging, outside of space and time. In the western traditions, God is eternal, unchanging, outside of space and time but intervening in space and time.Is the aim of spirituality/religion/enlightenment to escape matter, space and time into the absolute (to escape the world and get to heaven)? If so, then the aim is to abandon the world and rest in God. Did God create the cosmos just to escape it? Or is the entire trajectory of cosmic evolution the divinization of matter and life? Did God create the cosmos so that God would become infinitely richer – an eternal unfolding and expansion of creativity and love?For the first time in human history we have the intellectual capacity to understand the material forces that have shaped the universe we live in. In the form of human beings, the universe itself (for we are not separate from the universe) looks back on its own origins and understands itself (however partial that understanding is). The universe has evolved to the point where it can be aware of itself and understand its own origins.How can the traditional faiths stand up in the face of this newly evolved capacity? The traditional myths of the creation of the universe have been foundational for those faiths. Some resort to a fundamentalist literalist understanding of our origins. Others struggle to integrate our new knowledge with the traditions. If we are not to pretend that evolution never happened then we must integrate the fact of evolution into our faiths, we must allow our traditions and myths to evolve. 100,000, 10,000 and even 1,000 years ago our predecessors did not have the capacity to know the cosmos in the way that we now have. Humanity has evolved, the cosmos has evolved. All of this evolution takes place in the ground of the absolute – evolution is grounded in God, and guided by God. With knowledge comes responsibility – that responsibility is to participate with God in the future evolution of the cosmos. This is not a utopian enterprise. The future will be different from today. We can align ourselves with God or Ego in shaping that future. Our choice. Our future.
Posted by George at 11:02 AM 0 comments