Chapter One Why God?
The moment comes when the son of God lies hanging on the cross which represents the intersection of the material world and the spiritual world and alone he must face that transition in to death. In our mythos, we look up knowing that after three days this son of God shall conquer death and rise from the grave transcending man’s ultimate fear – man’s ultimate reality. The bottom line of all religious experience is the hope, the wish, sometimes called the belief that a higher power than the frail human body will empower us with the ability to also conquer death. Each of us must ultimately hang on that cross of intersection between life and death, and give up the breath that innervates us, and face the ultimate unknown. Is there life after death? Quivering in fear, we each face the crisis that makes us call out: My God what has thou deserted us and left us to make this passage alone. However, the search for God will not help in this passage. Ultimately, the theist and the atheist dies alone.
That is not the sadness. The sadness is not to die alone but to live alone and with a sense of estrangement from the divine in our lives. Rather we should ask ourselves: Is there life before death? Most people who seek after the divine in their lives do so as a form of insurance against the ultimate reality of their death and a way to diffuse the apin when a loved one dies or a major disaster strikes the planet like a devastating hurricane or toperdo or tidal wives. When life presents us with events where we feel powerless we call out: Why, God? We listen in the silence for answers that don’t seem to come. In fact, in the face of extreme confrontation with our apparent powerlessness and mortality, we even ask if there is a God and if so why has he deserted us. We face the ultimate blasphemy: Anger at a God that can be so insensitive to our suffering. Or, what is more frightening the reality that in our lives that God may not be omnipotent because a good God would not allow us to suffer. Like orphans tossed out into the world, we cry out for our dead Father forgetting for a moment that we are alone in our moments of terror. Yet when the mourning subsides, the pain lightens, the dawn comes, and for the lucky, a seed of desire for a personal experience of God still exists. For the damned that seed dies – its life gone in the searing sun of a jaded reality.
The river that flows through us, called life, can truly nourish us so that all that we do flourishes and brings joy. When the crisis and chaos that are a natural part of our existence comes, we will be strong so that we not only survive but that we prosper as we weather all the difficulties that come to humans. This is the divine gift that a personal experience with God can give us. But most of us are afraid to face ourselves much less God and we live in a world filled an undercurrent of fear and not of expectancy and growth. Afraid to look under the rocks and behind the closed doors of our minds for fear that we will find nothing or something that we will fear and hate even more than the secrets that which we do know – our fear of mortality and weakness. For some of us, we resolve this conflict by choosing to live by faith alone in some external deity that will ultimately take care of us whether promising us heaven, nirvana, or some other great happy hunting ground. We take the focus off our immediate being and focus on a dream that will come during that deep sleep or other euphemism that we use for death. We use God to avoid our reality. This does not mean that the dream will not become reality. That we will not become immortal when we die. That we are not immortal now. That God does or does not exist. The reality that we are avoiding is not death but life.
In the eastern religions, god or deity is seen as a representation of the ultimate source of all being. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition god or deity is seen as source. Personal relationships with source of all being – oour greater power – is a part of the dynamic of western theology and spiritual thought. When we don’t feel that sense of connection with the divine, we feel that we are missing something fundamental to our being. In fact, sin is seen and felt as separation from God. When we experience a feeling of estrangement we reach out to our conceptualized deity for atonement of our sins. We seek at-one-ment. To be one with God is our goal. And it is our hope that death will end our estrangement and we will finally rejoin the source of all being, God.
For many of us thinking about these issues now, we come from a primarily Judeo-Christian-Muslim ideation about God. Our symbols for the divine come from Sunday School, from Bible School, from readidng the Bible, the Koran, the Torah. For others of us, we may have branched out as our world became a global village and we explored strange new gods and goddesses seeking answers to that ultimate question of connection with the divine, Whether we looked the Tao of Physics, the Buddha along the Way, the Druidic memories of the Goddess, the teachings of the Great Spirit of our Native American ancestory, or a myriad of the masks of God as Joseph Campbell called them, we seek to see the face of Godd beneath the masks and symbols and rituals. We are looking for the transcendent intimacy of man and God. We have meditated, prayerd, tripped on LSD or other strange psychedelics, sat at the feet of gurus’s and priests, intellectualized, and desperately sought for meaning. We sought the peak experience... that spiritual orgasm where there is more question just a passionate knowing that we are one with the source. Some of us have been able to transcend the bounds of our material being and to know the divine intimately. We come back as shamans epiphany in hand trying to explain it to others and the words seem to escape us. When you become one with the infinite, it is very hard to explain it in a finite mind. We can only use metaphor, stories, and parables and that is what religion has done for mankind for as long as we have recorded time with our words and our pictures but it is still a representation – a drink of wine and a taste of bread rather than a true communion with God. However, it is thorugh the experiences of others, their stories of transcendence, that point the way to our own experience of the divine. Everyone must walk the walk alone – take a leap of faith that the path does lead somewhere. It is in the journey to God that we experience God. It is in the journey to God that we become God and that God becomes us.
We are all living in a material world. It is our expressions of our reality that allows God to experience our world. As man has evolved, so has the potential of experience with God and thus God is evolving with us. We, both man and God, are at the crossroads of our evolution. God will soon not be needed to heal the illness of man because technology will ultimately empower us with abilities that our primitive ancestors would have called god-like. For many of us we will see the day when natural disasters and acts of God (now called acts of Mother Nature now there is an evolution for you) will be potentially computer controlled bio-spheres. We have reached out and touched the stars and in time will touch other universes and realities and dimensions that we just dimly conceive at this moment in time. In Genesis, it is written that God gave man dominion over all the animals and the plants and the creatures of the earth. We are quickly gaining dominion over energy. We are gaining dominion over the ability to create new life forms. We are becoming god-like creatures. But if we were created in the image of God, we have always been god-like creatures.
That is not the sadness. The sadness is not to die alone but to live alone and with a sense of estrangement from the divine in our lives. Rather we should ask ourselves: Is there life before death? Most people who seek after the divine in their lives do so as a form of insurance against the ultimate reality of their death and a way to diffuse the apin when a loved one dies or a major disaster strikes the planet like a devastating hurricane or toperdo or tidal wives. When life presents us with events where we feel powerless we call out: Why, God? We listen in the silence for answers that don’t seem to come. In fact, in the face of extreme confrontation with our apparent powerlessness and mortality, we even ask if there is a God and if so why has he deserted us. We face the ultimate blasphemy: Anger at a God that can be so insensitive to our suffering. Or, what is more frightening the reality that in our lives that God may not be omnipotent because a good God would not allow us to suffer. Like orphans tossed out into the world, we cry out for our dead Father forgetting for a moment that we are alone in our moments of terror. Yet when the mourning subsides, the pain lightens, the dawn comes, and for the lucky, a seed of desire for a personal experience of God still exists. For the damned that seed dies – its life gone in the searing sun of a jaded reality.
The river that flows through us, called life, can truly nourish us so that all that we do flourishes and brings joy. When the crisis and chaos that are a natural part of our existence comes, we will be strong so that we not only survive but that we prosper as we weather all the difficulties that come to humans. This is the divine gift that a personal experience with God can give us. But most of us are afraid to face ourselves much less God and we live in a world filled an undercurrent of fear and not of expectancy and growth. Afraid to look under the rocks and behind the closed doors of our minds for fear that we will find nothing or something that we will fear and hate even more than the secrets that which we do know – our fear of mortality and weakness. For some of us, we resolve this conflict by choosing to live by faith alone in some external deity that will ultimately take care of us whether promising us heaven, nirvana, or some other great happy hunting ground. We take the focus off our immediate being and focus on a dream that will come during that deep sleep or other euphemism that we use for death. We use God to avoid our reality. This does not mean that the dream will not become reality. That we will not become immortal when we die. That we are not immortal now. That God does or does not exist. The reality that we are avoiding is not death but life.
In the eastern religions, god or deity is seen as a representation of the ultimate source of all being. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition god or deity is seen as source. Personal relationships with source of all being – oour greater power – is a part of the dynamic of western theology and spiritual thought. When we don’t feel that sense of connection with the divine, we feel that we are missing something fundamental to our being. In fact, sin is seen and felt as separation from God. When we experience a feeling of estrangement we reach out to our conceptualized deity for atonement of our sins. We seek at-one-ment. To be one with God is our goal. And it is our hope that death will end our estrangement and we will finally rejoin the source of all being, God.
For many of us thinking about these issues now, we come from a primarily Judeo-Christian-Muslim ideation about God. Our symbols for the divine come from Sunday School, from Bible School, from readidng the Bible, the Koran, the Torah. For others of us, we may have branched out as our world became a global village and we explored strange new gods and goddesses seeking answers to that ultimate question of connection with the divine, Whether we looked the Tao of Physics, the Buddha along the Way, the Druidic memories of the Goddess, the teachings of the Great Spirit of our Native American ancestory, or a myriad of the masks of God as Joseph Campbell called them, we seek to see the face of Godd beneath the masks and symbols and rituals. We are looking for the transcendent intimacy of man and God. We have meditated, prayerd, tripped on LSD or other strange psychedelics, sat at the feet of gurus’s and priests, intellectualized, and desperately sought for meaning. We sought the peak experience... that spiritual orgasm where there is more question just a passionate knowing that we are one with the source. Some of us have been able to transcend the bounds of our material being and to know the divine intimately. We come back as shamans epiphany in hand trying to explain it to others and the words seem to escape us. When you become one with the infinite, it is very hard to explain it in a finite mind. We can only use metaphor, stories, and parables and that is what religion has done for mankind for as long as we have recorded time with our words and our pictures but it is still a representation – a drink of wine and a taste of bread rather than a true communion with God. However, it is thorugh the experiences of others, their stories of transcendence, that point the way to our own experience of the divine. Everyone must walk the walk alone – take a leap of faith that the path does lead somewhere. It is in the journey to God that we experience God. It is in the journey to God that we become God and that God becomes us.
We are all living in a material world. It is our expressions of our reality that allows God to experience our world. As man has evolved, so has the potential of experience with God and thus God is evolving with us. We, both man and God, are at the crossroads of our evolution. God will soon not be needed to heal the illness of man because technology will ultimately empower us with abilities that our primitive ancestors would have called god-like. For many of us we will see the day when natural disasters and acts of God (now called acts of Mother Nature now there is an evolution for you) will be potentially computer controlled bio-spheres. We have reached out and touched the stars and in time will touch other universes and realities and dimensions that we just dimly conceive at this moment in time. In Genesis, it is written that God gave man dominion over all the animals and the plants and the creatures of the earth. We are quickly gaining dominion over energy. We are gaining dominion over the ability to create new life forms. We are becoming god-like creatures. But if we were created in the image of God, we have always been god-like creatures.
posted by Myriam Maytorena at
11:39 AM
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