Category Archives: Realistic Pointers 2019

Cats, Humans, and Religion

Contemporary Religion, Realistic Pointers 2019

Our cat and I communicate fine without benefit of language, mathematics, or art. If he is already in the house when I get up in the morning, he will typically rub his black and white sides against my leg to indicate that he wants me to dish his breakfast. If I am delayed, he will try staring at me and making one short squeak. In this non-verbal way we carry out many communications. We use signs not symbols. If I use words, they are only signs to him. These signs don’t stand for things, they just indicate potential situations.

Our cat and I are both skilled at using signs. We share this very old mode of consciousness. Signs, as I distinguish them from symbols, are expressive of an inner multi-sensory-rerun form of mental products composed of memories of whole body sensory experiences. All animal life has this level of intelligence. You and I also run a large portion of our lives with this multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence.

Cats

Our cat is clearly a conscious being who joins me is sharing this muti-sensory-rerun form of consciousness. I, however, also spend many hours of my life fully engaged in my symbol-using art, language, and mathematics. A cat does not have the biological supports for that level of consciousness. We humans do share with cats the drive for survival that ancient India called charka one—a swirl of consciousness they located at the base of the human spin. Slightly further up the spine they located a swirl of consciousness they associated with pain and pleasure, including sex. All we animals share that swirl of consciousness as well. Near the belly or solar-plexus, they located a swirl of consciousness that has to do with the capacity for purpose and planning that I introduced above as the multi-sensory-rerun form of intelligence. Animal life also shares that form of consciousness.

The above are conclusions that are easily made with our interior sensibilities as we watch the behaviors of cats, dogs, horses, turtles, even grasshoppers. In addition to those first three swirls of consciousness, we mammals share an emotional intelligence that is only minimally present in the reptiles and birds. India located that fourth swirl of human consciousness in the heart or chest area.

Humans

In the throat or speech area of the human body, India located the symbol-using swirl of consciousness. That swirl, chakra five, is only present among living species in the human. This intensity of human consciousness uses art, language, and mathematics to construct our amazing detachments and engagements in living. A few other primates can be taught by humans possible fragments of this intelligence, but a three-year old child has a facility with symbol-using consciousness that no other species can match.

This fifth mode of consciousness is so prominent in human life that we often identify the word “consciousness” with this mode of consciousness and call “instincts” those first four modes of consciousness that we share with the other animals. This limited view of consciousness can result in a demeaning of our emotional consciousness and our multi-sensory-rerun-using consciousness, both of which are very important for our best thinking and living. We may also hold our pain-and-pleasure consciousness in contempt. Even our survival-affirming consciousness can lose its appropriate power in our lives when we attempt to make art, language, and mathematics the whole scope of our conscious aliveness. The first four chakras of consciousness are foundational for our symbol-using human consciousness. Our fifth chakra thinking is weakened when we hold these first four aspects of being conscious in weak regard.

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God and Nature

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

I will start this meditation with a slight rephrasing of the New English translation of part of Psalm 139—verses 13-18.

It was You who fashioned my inward parts;
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise You, because You fill me with Awe.
You are wonder-full, and so are Your works.
You know me, through and through;
my body is no mystery to You,
or how I was secretly kneaded into shape
and patterned in the depths of the Earth.
You saw my limbs yet unformed in the womb
and in Your records they were all recorded,
day-by-day they were fashioned,
not one limb was late in growing.
How deep I find Your thoughtfulness, O my God!
How inexhaustible are Your topics!
Can I count them? They outnumber the grains of sand!
To finish the count my years would have to equal Yours!

This poem gives us a sense of how it is can be true that our relation with the nature of our own bodies can also be a relation with the Unconditional Reality that conditions all things that have conditions, such as our bodies. The Unconditional can only be spoken of in poetry or religions symbols. “You” (we sometimes say “Thou”) in the above poem is such a religious symbol. This symbol includes the meaning that we can relate to the Unconditional in a personal manner, as we might relate to parents, friends, lovers, spouses, children, and yes to our own body.

I recently noticed an often ignored feature of my own body. I found myself saying, “How fortunate that is. How glad I am to have it that way. I wonder how many million years of animal lives and deaths it took to evolve that.” Such awareness of our bodily nature, according to this Psalm, is also an awareness of God.

So is nature God?
Or is our God nature?

Unraveling such questions depends upon how we understand the word “nature” and how we understand the word “God.” Here are two ways that “God” is commonly misunderstood.
God is an object or process within nature.
God is a process or a being in some non-temporal realm, implying a minimizing of the temporal/material realm of nature.

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Yes or No

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

Jesus said, “Let your speech be Yes or No.” Matthew 5:37

Saying “Yes” without resentment, and saying “No” without regret is what Christian freedom looks like. Such freedom is beyond the law, as Paul and Luther so clearly point out. In other words, when we are acting from love, there is no law we must feel regret for breaking. And when we are acting from love, there is no law we need to feel resentment for obeying. In truth we need not moderate our “Yes” or “No” in order to fit in or not fit in—or in order to play it safe or not play it safe. All real options are permitted to Christian freedom.

Of course the laws are guidelines, often reflecting centuries of wisdom, but for your or my personal responses in each moment of our 21st century living, we have no absolute obligation to obey any law. We need to feel no resentment for obeying any law, or have regret in not obeying any law. We can be open to our essential freedom.

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Response-Able

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

When we flub up, do something odd, make a serious duff, or perhaps find ourselves being uncharacteristically mean, we somethings excuse such behavior with this familiar explanation, “Shit happens.” But shit never just happens. There was always some degree of Response-Ability involved in our behavior.

It is always true that our access of our Response-Ability is capable of much improvement—that is, much expansion in our ability to respond. Nevertheless, until we are dead, there is always some degree of Response Ability in play.

Simply paying closer attention to our shit is an improvement in Response-Ability. Yes, it is true that the personality patterns we constructed for our lives by age five, are still doing its original survival patterns. But we can now as adults pay closer attention to our personality’s actions. We also have a degree of power to moderate that old tool for our survival. Our personality is a friend as well as an enemy. Our personality got us here. We did survive. Our personality still has some survival potentials. But times have changed since age five. Our personality is ill adapted for many, if not most, of our contemporary challenges. And fortunately, we still have some ability to respond beyond the boundaries of our very own personality.

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Some Do Ride Out the Floods

Bible Interpretation, Existential Ethics, Realistic Pointers 2019

The story of Cain and Abel is followed by an overlapping set of stories about a mammoth flood that only a boatload of the old ecology lived through. The story begins with tales of such extreme estrangements from Profound Reality that Profound Reality, poetically speaking, is said to have become sorry to have created the human species.

However, one family and its leader, Noah, had continued to love realism just enough to get Reality’s attention. So Reality shared with this small group a secret: prepare a big boat, for a flood of chaos is arriving to wash away the whole landscape as you know it. So Noah, the original outsider, built a boat on dry land to the consternation (even scorn) of all his peers.

This is a symbolic story. We don’t need to go looking for a fragment of the true ark. This is a parable about the operation of history itself—our own history as well as happenings long ago. Profound Reality eventually floods unreality with a washing that is only anticipated by our various dunkings in our own personal River Jordans. Sometimes, our unrealistic living stores up geography-wide cultural establishments of estrangement from Profound Reality that are so great that they reach serious reckonings. Noah and family is a symbol of the truth that we are still “here” in spite of all those historical downers.

For example, looking toward our own future in 2019, we can already see forerunners of the impending consequences of our huge fossil-fuel burning. A Reality-baed reckoning is coming our way. Ark building is the realistic command, if we love having a viable planet for our and many other species.

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Forgiveness

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

There is One Truth:
Forgiveness.

And Truth is One:
Forgiveness.

The righteous and the wicked
both vanish into one
overall humiliation:
Forgiveness.

The friend and the enemy
both melt into one
all encompassing affirmation:
Forgiveness.

The best and the worst
play their roles
in one grand drama:
Forgiveness.

Blaming someone,
blaming one’s self,
blaming something,
blaming everything,
is not the Truth.

There is one Truth:
Forgiveness.

When the Truth of forgiveness dawns
all life philosophies crumble
like a tall building
into a heap of dust.

The Truth of forgiveness
is a scandal to the moralist
and sheer foolishness to the thinker.

But whoever steps off the cliff
of moral and intellectual certitude
into trusting the Truth of forgiveness
becomes mighty and golden,
becomes both servant leader
and wise follower,
seeing the whole picture
with compassion for all.

Forgiveness is not too hard to understand, but it is surprisingly easy to misunderstand.

Forgiveness is not something you have to accomplish or deserve. Forgiveness is always present. It is part of the cosmic face that each Real moment offers each of us—a fresh start. It is always true no matter what has happened, is happening, or might happen. An option for fresh start is being offered to you and me and everyone in this living moment.

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Religion and Culture

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

Does your religious practice assist you to transcend your culture? Do we even want such a religious practice? Do we know that Christianity in its early centuries understood membership is the Kingdom of God to mean washing the Kingdom of Rome out of your hair, your thinking, your loyalties?

These first Christians understood themselves to be “called out” of this world in order to be send back to this same world as transformers of this world. At first their focus was on transforming individual lives, but as soon as their numbers were great enough, they also took on transforming the social structures of this world as well.

Some current forms of Christian practice have been nothing more than support groups for living within the status quo of the existing culture. True religion, Christian or otherwise, assists us to leave our culture and move into our deep awareness—not just our minds, but into some essential realizations about being human. In order for this to happen we inwardly wash away our culture, sit a while in Eternity, and then come back to our same location in the history of human culture, as a transformer of culture. Such an inward trip is somewhat like taking an outward trip from Kansas to India and then returning to Kansas. Such trips have living consequences.

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Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain

Bible Interpretation, Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2019

The Genesis story about Cain and Abel has often been interpreted as a story about sibling jealousy and questionable parenting, but the actual biblical text is about the conflict of two modes of relating to Reality—Reality with a capital “R”—that absolutely Mysterious All-Powerfulness that meets us in every event of our lives.

Every Abel and every Cain is closer to this Mysterious Reality than to his or her own breathing. The truth that Reality is infinitely beyond us does not change the truth that Reality is also infinitely close to us. This is true for women as well men. Abel and Cain are two different relationships with Reality for any he or she.

Abel’s mode of worship is a symbol of that obedience to the Moses style of realism that was carved out in 40 years of wilderness practices. After this Moses-trained, One-Reality-loving community of people conquered a place for themselves in that more fertile land of promise, a deep religions conflict took place between the Moses monotheism and the Canaanite diversity of devotions that celebrated the many different powers of being human.

In this story, Cain’s mode of worship was a devotion to these many aspects of human life. His many gods and goddesses represent different aspects of our humanity. These were and still are real powers in our lives, worthy of some access and care, but no one of these devotions, nor all of them together, is a devotion to that One Reality that creates and destroys all aspects of our humanity. So the Canaanite relationship with that One Reality was a flight from that One Reality into a devotion to the various aspects of being human. This put Canaanite humanism in severe conflict with a devotion to that One Truth of that One Awesome Reality of Moses.

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Freedom

Contemporary Religion, Political, Realistic Pointers 2019

How Does the Essential Freedom of the Human Spirit
Differ from Political Freedom?

Political freedom is something granted by a human government to its citizens. Essential freedom is something granted by an “Eternal Government” to its human beings. This is a big difference.

Political freedom is created by human beings. It is the gift of a human creation—the governments that we humans create. But our essential freedom is provided by the Profound Reality that we confront in every event of our lives. We typically flee from this freedom and get stuck to the places to which we have fled. Nevertheless, the miracle of being restored to our essential freedom remains a possibility. We don’t have to create or achieve this essential freedom. We don’t have to do anything to have it. We only have to surrender to the essential freedom as given to us in the events of our lives.

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