Evolution

Edinburgh Labyrinth, photo by Di Williams

"For everything that one can tell of God or write,

no less than what one can think, of God who is more than words,

is as much lying as it is telling the truth."

~Marguerite Porete, 14th Century mystic. Burned at the stake, 1310.

When I started this blog 3 years ago, there were two major and connected things on my mind. One was how we return the sacred to the world of our senses, the real physical living world, and the other is how we deal with the fact that humanity seems hell-bent on destroying that same world. As has always been the case with all my spiritual excursions, I learn from them. I evolve. I learned from becoming a Christian back when I was one, I learned from being a Daoist when I was one. Every time I change, I learn something new. I have especially learned from being an Animist. Am I still one? Yes I am. But something has changed, and perhaps it is no longer accurate to describe my primary focus as animist.

I have and always will think that what humanity is doing to this planet is evil and monstrous. However, I no longer think of it as unnatural. It is as natural as a mosquito sucking your blood, as lemmings eating every trace of green from their surroundings, as black widows eating their mates. Horror, is natural. Evil, is natural. The incredible self-destructive stupidity of the human race, is natural. Inevitable, even. Flawlessly inevitable, arithmetically certain. Humans paving rainforests is just as natural as the parasitic flatworm Leucochloridium paradoxum taking over the brain of a snail so that it can cause the snail to behave suicidally, helping the parasite to reproduce. The actions of human beings are evil, but they are perfectly in accordance with nature. A species gaining an unequal power over its environment leading to its own destruction is as natural as the dinosaurs. Some years, the wolves eat too many rabbits, and the next year they starve. Whatever else we are, we are entirely natural. Why blame humans? Did not our Mother Earth bear us herself from her own dark womb? The same womb that bore forth the sabertooth tigers and the T Rex's of the past? We are the same as they.

So what then is this evil I speak of? Why would I assume that there even is such a thing? What is, is, right? No good or evil. Just creatures running through their same stupid instincts until they die, and something else comes along. A dance without meaning or purpose. Why call it monstrous?

And yet every particle of my being says otherwise. The very compassion for other living beings in this world that has driven my concern says otherwise. My love says otherwise. The other beings in this world, human and otherwise, are my fellow sufferers. They are my fellow afflicted. If I love my own miserable afflicted self, how could I not love them? And though I love the world, it is an afflicted world and I do not love its affliction because I am also afflicted with the same affliction. What is this affliction? What is it's nature? Greed, grasping, selfishness, ego, sin. From the tiniest insect to the largest man, we are all afflicted with this.

I mentioned in the previous post that I found something. I found "g-d," but you cannot even say "g-d" without making an error. What is this g-d? It is - - -. It is outside all rational thought. The god that is a thought in your mind, it is not that god. Why then am I even opening my mouth? Why am I applying fingers to keys? It is inherently futile. I cannot tell you what cannot be put in words.

Lets dance around the problem a bit then. In Buddhism (the Reader's Digest version,) the problem is stated that the cause of our suffering is desire, and we desire because we have an illusion of an independent self. Kill that delusion, and you kill the cause of your suffering, at least in theory.

Is this not fundamentally identical to certain understandings of Christianity? What is sin? Separation of our will from god's will. What is sinlessness? Annihilation of our will in god's will. The angels supposedly live in perfect bliss because there is not a nanosecond of separation between what god wills and what they will. They are nominally separate but functionally annihilated in god. They have no mind of their own, they have god's mind. This is the goal of the Christian mystics, to be annihilated in god. To un-Self themselves and have god be in the place their self once was. What the Catholics burned them for was the statement that they were god, which I grant you is a statement that could be taken out of context. Perhaps better stated, there is no "they" anymore if they are truly slain in god. There are many quotes in the New Testament that are very suggestive of this:

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."
~Galatians 2:20

"If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it."

~Luke 9:23-24

Much has been written, by believers and skeptics alike, about the "silence" of god. Where is god? Why doesn't he talk to us and set us straight? Why does he let horrible things happen? What is somewhat uncomfortable to think about, is that perhaps the silence is the message. In other words, he IS talking to us and the message is, "shut the hell up." ;) Shut your noise, shut your yapping, shut your pride, just STFU and listen to the silence. In the silence is the message. You cannot get there by your yapping.

In one of the Upanishads (ancient Hindu texts), I forget which one, somebody is asking all these questions about god and the guy answering only says, "It is not, it is not." It is not this, it is not that. It is not one of the ten-thousand things of dependent causal origination, nor is it anything in your mind. This is why some Buddhists and some Christian mystics speak of nothingness in relation to god. Or as the Beatles put it rather more casually,

"Lay down all thought, surrender to the Void. It is shining."

So, what is the game plan for finding a god you inherently cannot understand? That you cannot with full truthfulness even call god without half-lying? I actually have one, of a sort.

1. Repent Sinner! Or in other words, clean the window so you can see out again. 

Obviously if we have spent all our lives building up this life of separation, grasping and ego, we kind of have to work on that before we can get much else done. As Jesus said (paraphrasing,) "Get the mud out of your own eye!" Start meticulously breaking down everything you do that is bad, examine it, start hitting it with a hammer. You might not be in the sort of religion where you go confess everything to a bored priest - confess it to yourself then. Admit it. Own up to it. Everything, every little thing.

Scourge yourself. Get out that metaphorical cat O nine tails and start whipping yourself with it. Repent. Like a drug addict in withdrawal, start shaking and if necessary puking and shitting until the drug is out of you for good. Needless to say, this is lots easier to say than to do and I certainly am not finished doing it.

Your Ego. Your Self. It is dead, it always was dead, but it keeps rising up and demanding brains like a zombie. Get that chainsaw lubed up and get busy.


2. Abandon All Rational Thought.

Does this mean that when the chain on my bike breaks, I should pray about it or cast some incantation? Of course not. Look at Reason like a computer app, or a tool. When you need it, use it. Don't be a slave to it though. You wouldn't be a slave to your wrench or your laptop, would you?

Unfortunately reason is a tool of our grasping minds, our egos. You can't use that on god. God is not going to fit in one of our boxes, one of our human categories. You approach god on gods terms, not yours. Lose your faith in reason.

I notice Christian preachers and theologians often just LOVE reason. They act like they love it more than they love god. They want to give you some rational airtight case for god, which of course will never happen. It's like they think, "If I just reason it out to you, spell it out for you slowly, you'll get it. You'll convert, I'll get to save a soul (what kind of soul-saving is this?!) you will become a donating member of my church and everything is peachy." Ya, sure, that's how it works, you betcha. ;)

No, that's a bad idea. That's just them proving that they have no idea at all what they are doing.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! 

You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.

You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to."
~Matthew 23:13

3. - - -

Number 3 is a real step, but as per step #2 it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of exposition. You remember before when I was talking about the silence of god being the message? That part.

On My Own

"There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything,

I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself 

felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through

my senses. It transcends the senses."

-Mohandas Gandhi, radio speech, 1931

I'm back. I did not "go into the West," not yet. I am alive. The Source is my refuge.

I am, so far as I am aware, the only one of my kind. Of course in a sense this is not so unusual, everyone even people belonging to religious institutions all experience their gods to some degree uniquely and have their own differences even from others of their own creed. But there is a template for their landscape, there is a template from which they have their own individual variations. I am completely out on my own, there is no template for this path, and yet the road that I travel seems as old as the stars. There is a trail here, overgrown with weeds and trash it may be, long forgotten by men, but there is a trail. If there are others who walk this path, I do not know them, and perhaps practicality forbids such rare and shy creatures as us from recognizing each other on the road. As far as I know, I alone walk it: the sole human attendant of the ancient gods.

As 1 John 4 says, someone who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love their brothers that they can see is a liar. I would take that one step further: one who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love the world they can see is a liar. 

Now I am going to take that and reverse it: if you want to find and revere the invisible and indescribable, logically incomprehensible One God, you must first revere the things that you know that immediately, physically, allow you to exist at all. Love Water, love the Sun, love the Earth, put yourself beneath them as you should be. Mother Water, Father Sun, Mother Earth. Humble yourself to the dirt beneath you, humble yourself to the puddle in the rain, revere them. Only if you begin to learn to love the Earth as your own self will you ever find the one behind them all. She cannot be found any other way to my knowledge. And once you begin to find her, still revere Mother Water in the puddle and Mother Earth in the dirt. Because if you do not love them, how will you love her?

Previously I was never much concerned about any absolute gods. My focus was on what was directly with me and what gave me life in any given moment. The warmth and light from the Sun, the life-feeding decay of the Earth, the life-giving Water. I still pay my attention to these. I had no concern for any other gods, I felt that a god so abstract could be no proper concern of mine. 

I began to see things in meditation. Actually I had periodically seen them before. An energy, for lack of a better word, pervading the world. I did not see this with my eyes, I saw it with my center. It was quite as Gandhiji described in the quote above, an indefinable power that pervades all things.

I could say more but this would be beside the point now. The point being, if I did not revere Father Sun or Mother Water or Mother Earth or any of the innumerable other lights of the earthly constellation I respect, I cannot see that I would have found the Source. Maintaining as always my principles that either with my own sight or with inward sight I must see the gods I revere, and I did see her with inward sight. I saw her filling everything. 
If you are living in your head, you will not see her. You are not your rational intellect, you are a human BEing not a human THINKing. You must live from your center, what some traditions call the "heart" but that is not the word I prefer. You must love the "mortal gods" of the world, the transitory Earth, just like you love her. If you do not love the world you can see, how can you love the Source you cannot see?

And so, here I am, on my own. But not alone.