We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

Somewhere in Luther’s table talk, he mentioned that each of us have to do our own faith-ing, just as each of us have to do our own dying. Whatever Luther said, this will be my introduction to what I will call “aloneness,” and I will extend that word to mean “the intentional living of our solitary contemplative inquiries.”

“Contemplative inquiry” is the conscious viewing of the contents of our own consciousness. No one else can do this for us. “Contemplative inquiry” is also our thoughtfulness about these inward contents. This is essentially a solitary practice even though it can go on in group settings led by experienced persons.

For example, a contemporary Vipassana Buddhist retreat focuses strongly on a personally practiced meditation. This solitary practice entails getting used to a vibrant type of aloneness. This is quite different from a self-absorbed U.S. president rising at three in the morning to rage in his current defendedness and write tweets castigating his critics.

A Vipassana meditation practice focusses on the seemingly boring practice of carefully watching our own breathing—in-breath, pause, out-breath, pause for 45 minutes or more at a time, perhaps followed by a period of solitary walking, focusing on each step. What is going on here is an inquiry into the reality of our actual lives beyond the workings of our busy minds and beyond the always present impulses to think and do our established habits of living. This practice can be understood to be religious in the sense that it seeks to allow the happening of a realistic type of enlightenment of what it actually means to be a conscious human being. The interest that sources this practice is human authenticity. In doing this practice, we are not defending our current sense of self, we are watching those defenses come up and thereby preparing ourselves to be aware of the real me as something wondrously opposed to the self I think I am, wish I was, or hope to be.

We don’t have to invent or produce the reality of our own authenticity. Authenticity is simply Reality being Reality. It takes no effort to be authentic. It takes a sort of willing surrender not to be false. Meditation is a discipline of surrender that allows our authenticity to emerge into awareness from where it has been hidden among the replacements for authenticity that we have invented, defended, clung on to, and presented to the world.

Jesus practiced another solitary practice he called “prayer.” In Mark’s portrait of Jesus we see him going apart for hours of solitary prayer. This intense need for solitude dramatizes Jesus’ humanity, as well as our own.

Nevertheless, Jesus was not a recluse. He lived and worked with very close friends, both men and women. He was a public figure who was followed by large crowds who listened intently to his teachings. He was an organizer who sent out teams of followers to villages throughout his region, and listened carefully to the reports they brought back.

Mark’s story tells us that after Jesus’ baptismal washing by John the Baptist the spirit drives Jesus into the desert for a 40-day fast. I am guessing that this intense solitary time alone was about his vocation, his dangerous mission—whether and how to pursue his authentic calling. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all picture Jesus all alone dealing with serious temptations during these 40 days of this preparation for the rest of his life.

We can also see Jesus as an exemplar of our solitary authenticity in that intense aloneness pictured in his prayer vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane. Perhaps no other story is more vivid as an illustration of the meaning of prayer as a practice of solitary freedom in preparation for living freely within a future situation. In this story Jesus’s prayer is a solitary practice in preparation for living freely in the anticipated experiences of a trumped up trial and a probable torture to death.

Aloneness practices, whether of Buddhist description or of Christian description, is revealed as a big part of our authentic life. Whether the circumstances we face are grim or joyous requiring courage or celebration, we can envision meditation or prayer as an exercise of freedom in carving out for our ongoing nurture life enough time and enough intense time to be alone in this lonesome valley of walking the walk that nobody else can walk for us.

Solitary Discipline

Discipline is not the opposite of freedom. Discipline is an expression of freedom. Taking responsibility for each bit of food we eat, each bit of entertainment we partake, each person we hang out with, each drug we don’t take or do take, each book we read or don’t read, each movie we see or don’t see. No one else can make these choices for us. We have to take full charge of our solitary lives by ourselves. We are challenged to employ a stubborn aloneness in searching out our grounding in realism for our free choices.

Such freedom-enhanced aloneness is an empowerment for our lives. Aloneness is certainly not a deprivation or a punishment. Self-chosen solitary time can be an enablement of an otherwise wasted life. Indeed, solitude is necessary for the discovery of our spirit depths and for living out those deep truths that have graced our consciousness.

I strongly recommend a disciplined solitary practice, but I do not presume to prescribe what solitary practice is appropriate for each person. I am going to suggest three broad arenas of solitary practices that each of us can consider for our own solitary time: (1) reading contemplative-dialogue sources, (2) practicing basic mediation-type exercises, and (3) articulating our life intents.

Reading Contemplative-Dialogue Sources

A devotional classic by an acclaimed personage of spirit depth is a primary source of contemplative reading. Poets and writers from many religious traditions quality—Rumi, Lao Tzu, Jon Bernie, A. H. Almaas, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Berry, and Thomas Merton are among the many examples of devotional reading that I have found useful. Novels that were written to reveal life truths, as much or more than to entertain, also qualify as contemplative dialogue sources— Sir Walter Scott, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Powers, and many others have written such novels.

Reading Christian theology cannot be omitted from our list, if we are going to practice a Christian religion. Theologizing with the best of thinkers is a religions practice of great importance. Any of the more devotional writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are excellent. Paul Tillich’s sermons and brief books are likewise useful for a wide audience. H. Richard Niebuhr’s books are competent theology written for general readers. For our solitary nurture time, we may prefer writings of a more sermonic quality, rather than of an academic quality. Yet it is also true that we may find some sermonic material boring, and we may find some academic material gripping. For example, the hot essays and the personal biography of Rudolf Bultmann I found quite nurturing as well as exceedingly thoughtful. In addition to these context forming 20th century theologizing luminaries, scores of other theological writers of every gender and race, and almost every ethnicity, and nationality have contributed to the reemergence for our time of the Christian “good news” and to the modes of witnessing to this “good news” to our various communities of humanity.

Everything depends on who each of us is at this particular time in our journey of spirit. We need readings that push us, but we do not need to be entirely overwhelmed by materials that are too difficult for us or best read later in our lives.

Finally, a Christian solitary life is incomplete without the Bible. For Christian nurture to neglect a familiarity with these texts would be like practicing Buddhism without meditation. Both mediation and Bible reading are lifetime practices that we never finish learning how to do. It is much more difficult than commonly understood to render contemporary the ancient Christian Scriptures. Ancient literature of any sort requires a mode of metaphorical translation from that very different time and place. In spite of these difficulties, the actual poetry of the Bible can be marvelously useful for our solitary practices.

Practicing Basic Mediation-type Exercises

Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims have found deep help in a serious practice of Buddhist meditation. Hindu yogas, Tai Chi exercises, and other well-fashioned products of the East have also been working well for persons of many religious backgrounds. Native America and Africa has also provided contemplative practices that meet important needs for people across the planet. If practicing Christianity is our core practice, we also need to be aware that contemplative practices have flourished in Christian heritage as well.

Contemplative-type exercises are not the same as doing spirit readings with which we dialogue. Contemplative exercises are actions of our consciousness that exercise consciousness itself beyond the experiences of a conscious using of the mind.
Contemplative exercises are crafted to seek an aliveness that is sometime spoken of as “being out of our minds.” This does not mean a contempt for our minds or for our religious thoughtfulness. Contemplation means enlarging the primal discovery that our conscious being is deeper than our mere thinking can ever fathom or be a substitute for.

Articulating Our Life Intents

Making a list of things to do is a practical form of articulating life-intents. Items on a serious do-list are more than a useful memory device. Each item is an externalization in writing of a life intent, and thus is a prayer for some change in the future course of our lives. The word “prayer” has been understood in the heart of Christian monastic practice as a life intent. Here are four types of life intent according to that understanding:

A confessionary prayer is an intent to face up to some aspects of our life that resists exposure. This could be a failing or a wayward bit of living that you regret. It could be a hard-to-face feeling of emptiness, or overwhelm, or grueling despair that you are resisting knowing, suffering, or handling. Confession does not always entail sharing your life with someone else. Solitary confession can mean a secret solitary intent within your own private life for the sake of moving forward within an absolution you already assume.

A gratitudinal prayer in an intent that brings affirmation, vitality, and liveliness to whatever is happening. Our positive experiences require our intent of gratitude for their full enhancement. Grim times also require intents of gratitude to enhance a full bodied living of these life passages of grief, fear, despair or whatever.

Petitionary prayers are acts of preparation for receiving what you need and for enabling what you project. In a petitionary prayer we are consciously recording what we are open to receive as some blessing for our personal lives.

Intercessory prayers are acts of intent on behalf of others— acts of preparation for specifically shaping our living in readiness for our outgoing, caring, loving responses to other persons, to groups of persons, and for the broad social changes that claim our commitments.

Conclusion

Whatever solitary practices each of us choose from this large “paint pallet” of options for our solitary time, we do well to opt for our own, effective, self-initiated, solitary practices. We need a disciplined form of spirit aloneness, crafted just for ourselves and for our own life calling. Discipline is freedom. Discipline increases freedom. Also, freedom enhances the disciplines we continually reinvent for our solitary time and for our lives as a whole.

We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

The post Freedom and Aloneness first appeared on Realistic Living.

For example, we can view the first chapter of Genesis as about the goodness of nature and about the goodness of the essence of our human nature, rather than about how many days it took for the cosmos to arrive at its present state. Similarly, the virgin birth of Jesus as not about his literal biological origins, but about the quality of his relation with the Final Originator of all things, a type of “birth” that is possible for you and me as well as Jesus. As John’s gospel so clearly points out, those who can receive the truth that Jesus presents are also virgin born.

In this essay I am going to deal with a more difficult issue: what do we say to people who misunderstand the nature of science as support for their conviction that the cause-and-effect thoughtfulness so prominent in our sciences supports the notion that there is no freedom for which we could be set free by any means—by Christ, by psychology, or by the meditation practices of the Buddha?

Determined to be Freedom and Free to be Determined

Joan Tollifson, in her book Death: the end of self-improvement, tells about her father’s philosophy of life:

My father who read books about Einstein and the fourth dimension was a determinist who told me early on that the universe was an interconnected and interdependent whole in which everything was the cause-and-effect of everything else. He told me that waving his arm at just that moment was the result of infinite causes and conditions and could not be other than exactly that wave at that moment. He told me this applied to every thought, every impulse, every apparent “choice” we seemingly made and every action we seemingly initiated and carried out, big or small. He told me the sun would eventually explode, that there was no essential difference between a table and a person, that it was all a subatomic dance of energy. All of this made perfect sense to me. (Tollifson, Joan. Death:The End of Self-Improvement. Salisbury UK: New Salem, 2019. p 39)

For these words to be true for him, for Joan, or for any of us, leaves out a core truth that is absolutely essential for Christianity or any other long-standing religion. It leaves out choice. A true choice causes things to happen differently than they would have happened if that choice had not been made. But a true choice is not an effect caused by some other cause, otherwise it is not a choice. A true choice is an uncaused cause.

Of course there are many causes of our behaviors besides choices. And these ongoing conditions over which we have no control present to us the limited options for our choices. Every living animal choses between options, and these choices by animal aliveness are uncaused by anything other than the choices themselves.

Consciousness is clearly a component of living beings. This is especially obvious for animal beings. A cat is not only a complicated machine. A cat makes choices. Both cat consciousness and human consciousness are a combination of awareness and aware intentions. This consciousness in animal life surely evolved because it was an advantage to the species to be able to make aware intentions to avoid dangers and find food, sex, and whatever else optimized the liveliness of that particular living being and the survival of its species.

“Aware intentions” is another term for “choices,” and “choice-making” is another term for “freedom.” Consciousness is a complementary polarity of awareness and freedom. Awareness is the yin of consciousness, and freedom is the yang of consciousness. There is no awareness without freedom, and there is no freedom without awareness. We may not be able to ascertain the presence of consciousness by simply observing animal behaviors, but there can be no doubt about the presence of consciousness in the human, if we trust our own inward looking. Our contemplative inquiry reveals the presence of this awareness and this freedom.

We contemplating humans can notice the similarities and differences of cat and human behaviors, and can thereby guess the similarities and differences in those two types of conscious beings. We see directly only our own consciousness, but with confidence we correctly project upon all alive beings some of the elements of our own inward experience of being aware and free.

Nevertheless, Joan Tollifson’s father was right about the prominence of the concept of “cause-and-effect” in both our ordinary lives and in our physics all the way from Aristotle’s science to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Cause-and-effect is all about predictability, our ability to predict aspects of the future. For example, when we produce the cause of striking a nail with a hammer, we predict the effect of that nail sinking deeper into the wood. Or when we notice the effects of some infection in our body, we imagine the cause of a set of bacteria for which this infection is an effect. We then seek to administer the cause of some anti-bacteria treatment that might have the effect of curing the infection.

The predictive power of our cause-and-effect knowledge has value to us in many complex matters. We could not honestly live our lives without it. On large physical matters, cause-and-effect knowledge is useful for predicting the times that the sun rises in the east and the times that the sun sets in the west. It is cause and effect thinking that also figures out the truth that this rising and this setting of the sun relative to our viewing is caused by the rotation of the Earth. Indeed, cause-and-effect knowledge characterizes the whole of Newton’s science and the whole of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

So how does the truth of choice exist alongside these massive pictures built by cause- and effect science? Let us first notice that the scientific approach to truth need not be denied when we describe another approach to truth, such as our subjective or contemplative inquiry. Some physicists object to having a second approach truth because they assume that cause-and-effect thinking describes the whole of the cosmos—that is, the whole of what they mean by “reality.”

The following truth resolves this misunderstanding. Cause-and-effect is only a set of powerful ideas within the human mind that enables humans to create approximate predictions of the objective flow of reality. Reality as a whole is bigger than the predictive power of scientific knowledge can ever encompass. Why is this so? It is so, because the essence of doing science is about group observations of public objects like animal behaviors, blood flow, brain functions, chemical reactions, electrical impulses, and much more. Physics, as the science beneath all science is silent about subjectivity. The physicist knows that he or she is a conscious being with a subjectivity, and that he or she is using the powers of that subjectivity to do their science, but the rules for doing science forbid mixing the scientist’s subjectivity with his or her good science.

The scientist is a conscious being.
Conscious beings simply do not fit into the cause and effect universe.

A fully deterministic philosophy of life is even a misunderstanding of the scientific method. The process of good science is a creative and highly imaginative process initiated by the choices of human beings. The shift from Newtonian science to our post-Einstein science has involved some surprisingly creative choices made by Einstein and the physicists who followed him. This deep creativity is true even though both Newton’s and Einstein’s physics are cause-and-effect thinking. Einstein’s own life, as well as Newton’s own life, denies that the human quest for realism can restrict itself to cause-and-effect thinking.

Furthermore, if there is no such thing as uncaused conscious choices, there can be no such thing as initiative, commitment, dedication, creativity or even thoughtfulness in the sense of intending to think about conduct of our ordinary human lives.

Even a small amount of honest inquiry into our own subjectivity, tells us that we are making uncaused choices. In playing a game of solitary with cards, we choose to play or not to play a card and where to play it if there are options. Though some thinkers work very hard to deny the presence of uncaused actions, our contemplative inquiries are constantly accessing subjective phenomena that are not reachable by scientific observation. Science is only one approach to truth. Contemplative inquiry is another approach to truth.

Ken Wilber calls these two approaches the “It approach” and the “I approach.” Wilber then lines out two more approaches to truth that I am calling the “interpersonal approach” and the “social-commonality approach.” Wilber calls both or these approaches to truth a “We approach.” Wilber’s and my own clarifying ventures into these realms of thoughtfulness find that rather than having only one rational picture that has the possibly of someday containing everything, we have four independent rational pictures that are each in a state of perpetual improvement or approximation to that One Overall Mysterious Reality that is unreachable by the human mind.

We each do all four of these types of thinking, and we meld them together into our own knowledge patterns that we use to live our practical lives. We may not have noticed that we have four approaches to truth, but that is the job of philosophers like Wilber and me to point such things out for us.

Measure-ability

Here is a further limitation of the scientific quest for truth. Physics and many other sciences require that the subject matter under investigation be measurable. But there are many real experiences in our lives that are not measurable—love, hope, delusion, hate, despair. We might poetically talk about how these realities have varying intensities, but we are not able to assign inches, pounds, seconds, light years, or some other such measuring method to these parts of our lives. These aspects of our lives are not measurable, yet they are obviously real, These aspects of conscious experience are basic contents in our contemplative approach to truth.

Within our strictly contemplative experience, time itself is not measurable. There are no hours or seconds or days or years involved within our contemplative quest for truth. When we are pursuing a contemplative inquiry, time is one long experience of now. Within a contemplative approach to truth, time is a flow of happenings passing through an ever-present now. The past is just a memory in the now. The future is just an anticipation in the now. In order to measure time we have to gaze at some sort of out-there object like a clock or a sundial or the cycles of sun or moon. Temporal objectivity is the purview of both science and measurement. Contemplative inquiry is the purview of states of inner realism that are not measurable. Furthermore, the experience of the enduring now does not exist in the scientific approach to truth. In physics now is just a dot on an abstract line that separates past from future. In contemplative inquiry, however, we know the now as an enduring existing reality, certainly not nothing.

The Truth of Science

In spite of the fact that science can never produce the complete truth for the living of our lives, the truth of science is, nevertheless, quite real. However accomplished we may be as a contemplative inquirer, there would be no dinosaurs or galaxies or black holes without science. We use scientific knowledge to organize our day, cook our meals, wash our dishes, build our houses, and thousands of other taken-for-granted activities. Scientific knowledge is an inevitable part of our lives. We all share in the scientific approach to truth, however much or little we delve into the research edges of contemporary science.

We humans are all scientists, however much we resist it. For example, the ever-evolving theory of evolution is stored wisdom we have learned from our collective human experience. We have no empirical justifications for rejecting the theory of evolution. Evolution is indeed just a theory that is still changing, but all science is just a theory. Some theories are short lived. Some theories last a very long time. Also a scientific theory can be shown to be wrong or limited by only one well-documented exception. But a theory like evolution is not a truth we can dismiss. This theory has lasted for many decades and is now supported by millions of facts. The same goes for the theory of global warming, the big-bang beginning, and the expanding nature of space-time. For a theory of science to be dismissed (or even partially transcended), some objective evidence for its termination or limitation must be found.
It is also true that a transcended theory like Newtonian physics still applies well enough to a wide range of matters to remain useful knowledge for many purposes. But Newtonian science is clearly an approximation that cannot encompass the finer points of post-Einstein physics.

These considerations lead us to a truth about scientific knowledge that some of us are loath to face. All scientific knowledge is just a guess that has not yet been shown to be wrong. In science we never have a theory that is proven to the extent that it can never be shown to be wrong. In other words, all scientific knowledge is approximate truth.

So what is it that allows us to see that some bits of scientific truth are better than other bits of scientific truth? Here is a quotation about looking for a new physical law from “The Character of Physical Law,” a book by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman:

In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if the law we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. (Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge MS: MIT Press, 1967. p 156)

Feynman goes on the remark that we may need to recheck an experiment to see if it was done correctly. And he explains how this task of theory guessing is a sophisticated process, involving a knowledge of the known facts in the field of inquiry and some familiarity with the other theories already found right or wrong. But the plain truth of scientific research is spelled out in Feynman’s words above. Scientific truth is just a guess waiting to be shown wrong. And the test of right or wrong to such guesses is found in the observation of physical nature itself by a peer group of human observers.

Subjective and Objective

It is true that all our objectivity is conducted by a subjective human consciousness, but it is a leap into nonsense to claim that there can be no objectivity, because all human scientists are subjectively biased. Our subjective consciousness possess the ability to be disciplined in the use of an objective method of thoughtfulness.

Here is a much stronger doubt about the veracity of objectivity: the facts of science are creations of the human mind. Nevertheless, the mental creations that we call “facts” are deemed by humans to be factual, because they correspond very closely to what a peer group of observers can take to be self-evident. Arguments do occur about whether a specific fact is indeed self-evident; nevertheless, if ten of us see a tree fall, it is simply true that the tree fell, unless some very convincing seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling or touching is added to our group experience that can convince this group of peers to view something else as self-evident. It remains true that we humans do not get to make up our own facts. The disciplined mind of the scientist formulates statements of fact from the sensory evidence collected by a group of observers.

While our objective inputs and our subjective inputs are part of the same world of Reality, it remains true that we have two separate systems of our mind’s thoughtfulness. Our consciousness is using our mind to look outwardly and our consciousness is using our minds to look inwardly. These two quite opposite looks create two different rational systems of thoughtfulness—one “world” of objects and another “world” of subjective contents. This division in thought is inevitable.

The Oneness of Reality is another matter. That Oneness cannot be thought because our thoughtfulness is constrained to be dual—the outward and the inward. Oneness is a word or symbol for a Real Mystery that is beyond the grasp of a human mind. One consciousness encounters One Real Mystery, but must rationally report that encounter in a stereo-two-ness. Objective and subjective is not a characterization of Reality, but a characterization of human thoughtfulness.

Our contemplative thoughtfulness cannot be reduced to our scientific thoughtfulness, and our scientific thoughtfulness cannot be reduced to our contemplative thoughtfulness. These two forms of thoughtfulness can never become one rational thoughtfulness. Reality is not humanly rational. Reality is unfathomable.

Our scientific thoughtfulness and contemplative thoughtfulness are both valid approaches to truth, each seeing the other approach in its own terms. Contemplative thoughtfulness can meaningly characterize the whole of science as an abstraction from our direct experience of realism. And scientific thoughtfulness can meaningly characterize the whole of contemplative thoughtfulness as a subjectivity about which science is silent.

Nevertheless, our human consciousness is using objective and subjective methods of thoughtfulness to approach One Realty in two quite different ways. Both of these approaches to truth are partial, both of them valid, and both of them approximate guesses waiting to be contradicted.

Freedom, which is the active aspect of human consciousness, can create for our practical living on overview of insights from both our scientific and contemplative modes of thoughtfulness. These two types of thought cannot be melded into one rational system. Therefore, our overall philosophies of life are required to think about these two modes of thoughtfulness as if they were apples and oranges that have grown on separate trees. These two modes of knowing are, however, two fruits of inquiry by each human consciousness seeking understanding about the same Oneness of Absolute Mystery.

The post Science and Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

First of all, we see the Presence of Profound Reality as an encounter we can and do experience and to which we can and do respond. Our enigmatic consciousness can “see” Profound Reality, but cannot describe Profound Reality or even talk about Profound Reality in our ordinary modes of truth. Neither our quest for scientific knowledge nor our contemplative inquiry into our our inner being can reveal anything about the essence of Profound Reality or about the relation of Profound Reality to us. In order to talk about this unavoidable relation with Profound Reality we need parables, koans, myths, and other cryptic means of communicating with one another about our Profound Reality experiences.

In order to illustrate what I mean by a “parable,” I am going to reflect upon the familiar parable typically named “the prodigal son” (Luke 15:12-32). This parable is about the essence of the relation that Profound Reality takes toward us, told about in a parable. For my purposes it does not matter whether this parable came from the very mouth of Jesus, or from the creativity of the early church. This parable clearly joined the Christian scriptures in a major way and implies a major truth about the revelation brought to humanity through the event of Jesus, understood as Messiah in the sense of having shown us the full living of our human lives.

So let us set aside any attempts to make some sort of moral or ethical sense out of this parable. This old story is not about moral advice for sons and fathers, or for employers and their employees, or for slave owners and their slaves, or any thing of that sort. Instead, let is examine how this parable is about a return to Profound Reality from our trips into our grim unrealities (that is estrangements from the Real).

Let us view the “father” in this story is an allusion to Profound Reality. And let us view the two “sons” as allusions to two alternative ways of being related to Profound Reality. Viewed in this way we can see this story speaking to us of a key religious issue that arises in every century of human life. I am going to quote this parable line-by-line and then comment on the radical nature of these somewhat cryptic verses.

Once there was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father give me my share of the property that will come to me.” So he divided up his property between the two of them. Before very long, the younger son collected all his belongings and went off to a foreign land, where he squandered all his wealth in the wildest extravagance. J. B. Phillips translation

To a human father what could be more disappointing than that happening. Not only is this an affront to the father, but it is a pitiful failure on the part of this son’s character, good sense, and outright indulgence. As a parable with regard to our own Profound Reality parentage, this story refers to going away from a home in realism into a far land of unreality.

And when he had run through all his money, a terrible famine arose in that country, and he began to feel the pinch. Then he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into he fields to feed the pigs. He got to the point of longing to stuff himself with the food that the pigs were eating, and not a soul gave him anything.

This is a strong picture of the state of desperation that can ensue from fleeing Reality. We see how this state often comes to pass for an extreme drug addict. This story also applies to the state of persons who sell out to wealth and power at the expense of their integrity and common sense. Any flight from Profound Reality places us in a tension with the inescapable forces of Reality. Attempting to win a fight with Profound Reality or to flee from Profound Reality is a hopeless life project. When such flight continues to its conclusion, we end up in a state of hellish despair penetrating our whole lives.

Then he came to his senses and cried out aloud, “Why, dozens of my father’s hired men have more food than they can eat, and here I am dying of hunger. I will get up and go back to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have done wrong in the sight of Heaven and in your eyes. I don’t deserve to be called your son anymore. Please take me on as one of your hired men.”

A shift toward an honest facing of this intense guilt is taking place. So intense is this remorse that being a true son of Reality is too much to even hope for. Just a hired-hand status and some clean grub will do.

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still some distance off, his father saw him, and his heart went out to him. And he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.

In this part of Luke’s story, Jesus is playing with his listeners at a very deep level. Reality is being pictured as treating our return to Reality with remarkable enthusiasm. This son does not yet get the thoroughgoing nature of this forgiveness.

But the son said, “Father, I have done wrong in the sight of Heaven and in your eyes. I don’t deserve to be called your son anymore . . .” “Hurry!” called out his father to the servants, “fetch the best clothes and put them on him! Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and get that calf we have fattened and kill it, and we shall have a feast and a celebration! For this is my son—I thought he was dead, and he is alive again. I thought I had lost him, and he is found!” And they began to get the festivities going.

In telling this parable, what Jesus is saying about the essence of Profound Reality in relation to our crazy-making unrealism can seem completely preposterous. These sentences are like clubs beading down the last bits of human moralism. Returning to the mercy of Profound Reality means a fresh start in full sonship, or full daughter-ship, or full innocence, or full saint potential. No period of punishment is required. No apprenticeship is prescribed. Complete restoration is immediately granted by the Authority beyond all authority—Profound Reality “herself.”

The prodigal is being given far more than is being asked for by that prodigal bring. And if these sentences are not enough to get our attention, Jesus goes on to describe the offense of the elder son to this father’s response to this wayward son. Each of us may feel in our own being the feelings of this eldest son. And as we read the following words, let us keep in mind that in this is a parable in which the “father” alludes to Profound Reality.

But the elder son was out in the fields, and as he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants across to him and enquired what was the meaning of it all. “Your brother has arrived, and your father has killed the calf we fattened, because he has got him home again safe and sound.” was the reply. But he was furious and refused to go inside the house. So his father came outside and called him. Then he burst out, “Look, how many years have I slaved for you and never disobeyed a single order of yours, and yet you have never given me so much as a young goat, so that I could give my friends a dinner. But when that son of yours arrives, who has spent all your money on prostitutes, for him you kill the calf we fattened!” But the father replied, “My dear son, you have been with me all the time and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and show our joy. For this is your brother; I thought he was dead—and he’s alive. I thought he was lost—and he is found!”

The seeming unfairness of this thoroughgoing forgiveness of Profound Reality is rooted a deep moralism that can be found in us all. We expect Reality to be fair—fair by whatever rules of fairness are embedded in our own psyche. The extravagant mercy of Profound Reality rips our moralism to shreds.

The truth about forgiveness, as revealed in this parable, is essential for the full healing of the forgiven one. If Reality is not totally welcoming of us back to realism, then no such transformations are possible. We would all be stuck in an ever-descending spiral of guilt. But this is not actually true. Healing happens. The possibilities for redemption are real.

Profound Reality, according to this parable, cares nothing for being fair by the standards of any human morality—the only focus in this parable is that a truly guilty person can be restored to a fresh start in innocence. Reality is outlandishly happy that a guilty one who is self-condemned to some deadly despair is being restored to aliveness. Herein is the Eternal truth that this parable was created to reveal to individual persons and to communities of persons.

This parable does not support the notion that there is no guilt—that there is no primal human freedom that can go off the track of our Profound-Reality-supported realism. And this parable does not support the notion that everything is determined to work out just as it does, and that no one is to blame for anything. Rather, the revelation about Reality that can be seen in this parable fully acknowledges that guilt is real—that our experience of a valid self-condemnation unto despair is real, and that the experience of despair is a terrible sicknesses.

This terrible sickness can be treated, not by denying our real guilt, but by the divine treatment of total forgiveness for that all too real guilt. Forgiveness includes a defeat of unrealism and a fresh start in realism. Forgiveness does not excuse guilt; freedom transforms the meaning of guilt into a done deal in our past. Our guilt becomes a lesson in realism for our future choices. Forgiveness moves the healing person from the community of becoming ever more unreal to the community of becoming ever more real.

Our unreal state of living is a feed on the notion that our self-constructed ego gets to choose what is real and what is not real. Profound Realty alone determines what is real. This Totally Mysterious Truth is the judge of every humanly conceived truth as to whether it is true or not and to what extent it is true.

Finally, this parable does not support the notion that this total forgiveness is a type of sentimental indulgence of we untrustworthy persons—of we people who are inclined to take advantage of every leniency to be even more rebellious from Reality. Rather, Profound Reality is only forgiving of those to whom that same Profound Reality has already driven into despair—into despair over our foolish, self-inflicted flights from, and fights with, and outright rejections of Profound Reality.

Accepting forgiveness means surrendering to the rightness of our having been pushed into despair-ridden states of living. Only within a state of humiliating surrender of our commitments to unreality can we also become aware that Profound Realty has no need for revenge toward us or toward anyone. In accepting this forgiveness, life moves forward in the Here/Now of living to a fresh start in which all guilt is simply past memory. The karma of evil is broken. Freedom is restored. Aliveness is restored to full swing.

Profound Reality is stern only because Reality has to be Reality. When we return to Reality, Reality can be said to be nothing but glad, excessively glad beyond all proportion—joyous in the extreme. Such is the raw truth about Profound Reality that is revealed in this parable.

“Hurry!” called out his father to the servants, “fetch the best clothes and put them on him! Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and get that calf we have fattened and kill it, and we shall have a feast and a celebration! For this is my son—I thought he was dead, and he is alive again. I thought I had lost him, and he is found!”

The post A Return to Reality first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

Here is another way to see the meaning of “God” and “nature” and the relation between the two.

God is the Unconditional Ground of Being that MOVES in both creation and destruction of each and every conditioned being of nature.

God us the No-thing-ness out of which all things come and all things return
God is the Every-thing-ness within which all things are connected.
God is the Total Demand upon our profound consciousness that is being made by this Unconditional Ground that is confronting us and conferring upon us the freedom to be response-able in facing these encounters that meets us in every event of our lives.

The Nature of Nature?

Two very different views of “nature” also need to be kept in mind. One view is that nature is what we are told by the natural sciences—the knowledge that we use for our practical needs, our technological innovations, and our predictions of the future. A second very different view of nature is expressed in this truism: “The more we know about nature, the more we know we don’t know.”

The first view of “nature” excludes any sense of “the Unconditional” for “God as the Unconditional” is not a being of any sort, and therefore cannot be perceived by the natural sciences.

The second view of “nature” sees nature as impermanent, temporal things and processes that participate in a Permanent Final Mysteriousness that we meet in every natural thing, process, or event of nature.

Which of these two views of nature is the correct one? They are both correct, but the second is the more profound view of “nature” within which the first view of “nature” is an aspect. How can we understand this better?

The “laws of nature” are all approximations of “nature” in that second deeper sense. For example, humans have long preformed the ancient ritual of standing before the rising sun and the then again standing before the setting sun. This was something more than worshiping the sun. It involved honoring the Unconditional Mystery of it all. This daily rising and daily setting had strong symbolic meanings for the whole scope of our coming and going lives.

It was a scientific revolution to see ourselves on the surface of a great ball the surface of which was moving from west to east. Rather than viewing the sun rising and setting, we were just passing by the sun while standing on a moving surface. This bit of new understanding of the wonder of nature did not end the wonder, it even expanded the wonder.

Here is a more contemporary example of a scientific revolution that expanded the wonder. When we think about that aspect of our lives called “gravity,” we have no problem pointing to a force that pulls us back “down” after we jump “up.” We see things fall “down” from what we call “up.” But as we probe the nature of gravity further and ask how gravity works with regard to the fact that our planet is circling the sun and the moon circling the Earth we enter some clearer meanings concerning what we mean by “gravity.” Sir Isaac Newton gave us some basic mathematics on this topic. The bigger the mass of an object the bigger the force of gravity generated by that mass. And the force of Earth’s gravitation lessens with the distance from the Earth. Newton’s math tell us how fast that lesioning takes place. Newton never liked the idea that gravity was a force operating at a distance, but that was the way it seemed to him. The Earth seemed to have a big sucking power pulling on us and on every object we drop or throw.

Einstein’s law of gravity is a revolutionary view of “gravity” that fits better to all the facts of gravitational behavior. In this more accurate view of gravity, we do not have a force operating at a distance. Instead, Earth’s gravity is the result of a warp in space-time that affects the behavior of each bit of mass in each location of space/time surrounding this massive object. Don’t stop reading; you can experience this every day! You may not have been looking at your experience in the Einstein way.

Imagine yourself in a car driving at steady speed of 60 miles per hour. Then say, you need to put on the breaks and quickly reduce your speed. Everyone in the car is thrown forward against their seat belts. Loose object take flight in the direction you were going. That is an experience of gravity, not because some heavy mass is sucking you forward, but because your de-acceleration is a change in velocity with respect the fabric of space-time.

Turning is also a type of acceleration. When a jet-plane pilot turns his or her plane in a tight left turn at a high velocity, the pilot can feel a pull to the right of several g’s. (that is several times the gravity of the Earth). Acceleration through the fabric of space/time is gravity. And gravity is acceleration through the fabric of space/time.

So why do we feel gravity standing still on the surface of the Earth? Supported by the Earth is a form of acceleration in relation to this warp in space/time. Non-acceleration is what is happening in this space-time medium when you are falling from an airplane before your chute opens. When your chute opens you are yanked upward because you are making an acceleration in that warped space/time that surrounds the Earth.

So what is this space/time fabric? We are used to seeing three dimension of space that are independent from one dimension of time. What does it mean to talk about an influential relation between space and time ?

Here is a surprising example of how this connection between space and time is so. If you are in a space craft circling the Earth at the high velocity required to stay in orbit you are doing a great deal of acceleration through the space/time fabric. Time would slow down for you in relation to the time passing on the surface of the Earth. So, if you were to live several months in that state of motion and then return to Earth, you could be seconds younger according to the watch on your arm in relation to the persons and clocks that stayed on the Earth.

So why is this shift from the Newtonian universe of understandings to the Einsteinian universe of understandings important to the topic of “God” and “nature”? Answer: These are good examples of how our scientific knowledge is always an approximation of nature. The Newtonian Universe is still a good approximation. The Einsteinian universe is a better approximation. Still better approximation are possible. This is true for all aspects of all the natural sciences.

For most of our living, we can get along fine with our Newtonian approximations. We may know that both atomic energy and cell phones require some post-Newtonian science, but most of us don’t work in those technical fields. All of us do live in the same nature, however, and we may serve the same Profound Reality as our God-devotion.

To imagine experiencing a big scientific revolution, consider yourself in Einstein’s position when he was becoming clear that the Newtonian mathematics did not cover some of the signals he is getting from “nature.” He is intuiting another way of viewing the universe. He is living in a gap between the Newtonian regular physics and a post-Newtonian regular physics. That gap is an interesting witness to the nature of human knowledge.

Even after the General Theory of Relativity was fleshed out and documented with more and more facts, Einstein’s universe is still an approximation of nature. This became clear as sub-atomic physics began to use successfully a pattern of thought that violated the strict cause-and-effect types of logic that dominated both the Newtonian universe and the Relativity universe. Probability types of human conceptuality were working splendidly in understanding these tiny aspects of physical composition.

Einstein fought with this view of physics, saying at one point that he “did not believe that God played dice with the cosmos.” He was saying that this deep dive into an understanding of “nature” simply had to have a cause-and-effect explanation. But this gap in the rational structure of physics has not closed.

These revolutions in physics may have taught us something we do not want to know—that our human minds are incapable of a rational view of nature. This does not mean that what we know about nature in invalid. It just means that approximation is going to be the best that the human mind can ever do.

This awareness does not conclude that nature is not real or that we can make up whatever science we want. Nature still impacts us with support for and rejection of our theories about nature. “Nature,” however, is now being viewed as a boundless mysteriousness that will never be fully known by a human mind.

In this strange new world of nature, we humans are having fun making up alternative physics for our science fiction stories, but in our search for realism we must not believe these stories. For example, the Star Trek series of stories has had a lot of fun with the idea of “warp speed.” But there is no such thing as warp speed in the actual cosmos. On this topic, mysterious nature is telling us that one gram of matter in order to be accelerated to the mere speed of light would require the energy of the entire cosmos—which is to say that nothing substantial gets to travel at the speed of light. Only massless electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves get to travel at that speed, and even they can travel at no greater speed. Light from a very distant star can take billions of years to reach this planet.

We humans with all our powerful imagining
do not get to say what Profound Realty is.
We live in Reality. We live in nature.
We do not live in our words,
even if we think we do.

It is not our words that tell Reality what to be. It is Profound Reality that tells us what our words are to mean. We define our own words, but if these definitions are not obedient to Reality, then our words are just gibberish.

In a similar way Profound Reality is related to our whole culture—all our writings, art, mathematics, customs, roles, rules, morals, rituals, myths, and icons have meaning only to the extent that they are grounded for their meaning in Profound Reality. Otherwise, these human constructions are delusory gibberish.

We are indeed installed in our culture of thoughts, roles, and practices, but we are even more deeply installed in the wonder-filled Unconditional Profound Reality which is the source of all our meaning and realism. When we over trust our mind’s knowledge, we lose conscious contact with Profound Reality. We become stuck in some sickness of unrealism that can only be healed by the grace/love of Profound Reality restoring us to our appropriate ignorance.

The post God and Nature first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

Operating from our essential love, we are free to obey laws as well as to disobey them. Law and law obeying is actually a very important part of our real life. Social structures and norms are important gifts to any situation. Some of us are slaves to obeying whatever laws have been incorporated into our superego. Others of us are slaves to disobeying any laws that we do not like. Most of us are slaves to some of both of these common slaveries.

So how does the fully free human spirit chose what to do? We look fully into the real situation that we face, we weigh up what values might apply, we predict the consequences, we notice any principles of wisdom that might guide us, and then we leap into that Mysterious Reality called “the future” We put our being, our mind, our body, including our mouth, into motion or into no motion. That is basically the look of the realistic, response-able freedom of the Christian Holy Spirit.

Living in this Spirit presupposes a love of Mysterious Realty and a love of the reality of all that neighbors us in this moment of choice. Loving God-and-neighbor is not a law, but a commandment of realism that includes the realism of living our absolute freedom. This is the Holy Spirit. If you say that such a Spirit is impossible to do, you are correct, but you are thereby confessing that you are a victim to some slavery. “With God all things are possible”—that is, our essential freedom is possible as a gift, not a quality that can be achieved. If you are not being given your freedom, pray for it. If that prayer is answered, say “Thank you.” That is, say, “Thank you,” by living the freedom of your real life.

You might also notice that the prayer for freedom is itself an act of freedom, and that the answer to that prayer entails some sort of giving up on your part of some slavery that you have invented in times past and supposed until now that you had to keep going.

For example, we all confront the need for humanity, including our humanity, to leap into doing away with the fossil-fuel energizing of our societies and replacing those energy sources with wind and solar sources of energy. So either say. “Yes,” without resentment to showing to everyone how this is true and how to get this massive shift done, or say, “No,” without regret to continuing with our present course of “cooking up” further distress for rich and poor alike. These dread consequences will especially affect the poor and other almost powerless minorities. Yes or No! This is the Holy Spirit.

What does realism require? You will need to risk the details, but you can know what is freedom and what is not freedom. And saying “No” to this or that option comes up as often as saying “Yes” to this or that option. You can’t say, “Yes” without resentment, if you can’t say, “No,” without regret. And you can’t say, “No,” without regret, if your can’t say, “Yes,” without resentment. “Yes or No” is the nature of freedom.

But instead of saying “Yes or No” to our real options, we assume that this or that is impossible. And life does offer many serious limits, but those limits are not our options. In terms of options that we could indeed take and outcomes that we could indeed bring about, we all tend to be pessimists. The truth is that our pessimism is about 20% realism and 80% excuse making. We are all lazy slobs when it comes to realistically living our real lives in our real freedom. We all lack imagination when it comes to making a full embrace of our Yes-and-No freedom.

Returning reflection to our climate crisis options, we all lack imagination about what could be done about that prime emergency. We lack imagination about how well our society could launch the phasing out of our fossil fuels and the phasing in the solar and wind along with an infrastructure of electrical and hydrogen delivery systems. We prefer to believe the pessimists who say that we cannot do without oil or natural gas or coal or nuclear power plants or whatever already exists and is being defended by big and determined wealth-powered owners.

When we hear one of our peer-group members say that the Green New Deal is an extreme set of undoable programs, we believe that excuse for inaction before we even investigate the matter. Suppose we found out that the Green New Deal is actually a set of doable programs that get the US moving on moderating the climate without dumping the costs of this on working classes, what excuse do we build then. Some of us us use our favorite politician or news station claim that the climate crisis is a hoax. We find that excuse enough for doing nothing. Most of us are more sophisticated than that in our excuse making. Most of us simply have other things to do than figuring out what candidates to vote for and what demonstrations to attend.

Here is an all purpose excuse for avoiding figuring out our Yes-and-No freedom about anything in the realm of politics, “All politicians are corrupt, there is no difference between them.” Here is another effective excuse, “Love is about personal relations, not about changing the social structures.” There is actually no end to these somewhat effective excuses.

Just say, “Yes or No.” Just say “Yes” without resentment to doing all you can for climate change, or say “No” without excuses or regret for doing nothing on that front. Freedom can be “No” as well as “Yes” to any temporal option. Perhaps your particular life is called to saying “Yes” to something more important for your life than the climate crisis. Just say “Yes” to whatever that is. You will be guilty for doing nothing about the climate crisis, but being guilty about not doing many somethings will always be the case. Being our Yes-or-No freedom presupposes forgiveness for whatever we do or don’t do.

“No” to our Yes-or-No freedom is the only wrong path. Freedom itself is our only righteousness. This freedom carries with it a love for everybody and everything, as well as our complete trust in this path of raw realism—namely, responding with many Yes-or-No responses in each real moment to the Unbelievably Demanding Reality we face. Such freedom can be a bumpy ride for our self-absorbed ego. But for our most profound layer of consciousness Yes-or-No freedom is finding our true being.

The post Yes or No first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

Perhaps we need to use whatever modicum of Response-Ability we still have to find a good therapist who can assist us to realize more of our Response-Ability. Or perhaps we just need a religious practice, or a better religious practice. Perhaps simply setting aside 20 minutes a day for some sort of solitary practice is a response of which we are still capable.

Expanding Response-Ability is a description of spirit sanctification. Each of us are indeed a very profound essence of Response-Ability that we are not realizing at this time. Our freedom, to use another word, is being restricted by many of our patterns of unrealism. To know those patterns and to unravel them is part of accessing that primal Response-Ability and putting such “primal holiness” into play.

Shit does not just happen in our lives. We are always there with an ability to respond that is potentially boundless. Reality is on the side of Response-Ability. Let Jesus be our illustration. We are all potentially able of laying down our lives for our friends, indeed making even our enemies a type of friends whom we benefit with our responses to them and everyone. But we need to be “saved” from ourselves in order to access our deep essence of being Response-Able beings.

The word “saved” has been deeply polluted with images of escape from our real down-to-Earth challenges. Some of us may even have dreamed of voyaging to another planet. More likely, we have dreamed of a trans-cosmic realm of heavenly somewhere that we pretend to hope for to escape this vale of tears.

So a “salvation” that happens here and now in the midst of our real-Earth living can seem strange to our escape-addicted mentality. We are prone to believe that in this world shit happens, but in some next world no shit happens. And in such a set up of supposed happenings, Response-Ability has nothing to do with either of these two imagined realms.

So what does a down-to-Earth Christian salvation look like? It has these three elements:
(1) owning up to our reigning bondage-producing state of living, (2) noticing the cosmic forgiveness for our particular shit, and (3) choosing the then present fresh start in Response-Ability that is released by by accepting this forgiveness.

Perhaps you remember the story in the New Testament (Luke 19:1-10) about a tax collector named Zacchaeus. He was a short man and a rich man who had become rich as a Jewish tax collector for the Roman government. The way that that tax system worked was that the collector collected what the Roman government requested, plus a bit more for his own personal support. Such a system was open to serious corruption, and all the collectors who got rich were indeed corrupt. This short, rich Jew had been robbing his fellow Jews for some time. He was perhaps shunned for being so short and hated for being so corrupt. His whole life was clearly a public and personal mess. But he was still religious enough to be curious about this holy man who was entering his village. Since he was too short to see over the crowds, he climbed up a sycamore tree to see this man.

Jesus saw him up there, intuited his state of life, and called out for all the crowd to hear, “Come down Zacchaeus I am having lunch at your house.” So Zacchaeus climbs down, and before running off to prepare lunch comes to this holy man who had expressed such a attitude of forgiveness for him and exclaimed for all to hear, “Look sir, I will give half of my property to the poor. And if I have swindled anybody, I will pay him back four times as much.” Jesus then explained to the crowd, including you and me, that “Salvation had come to this house today.”

The post Response-Able first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

One of the arks already proposed to the Congress of the US is a design plan colorfully labeled the “Green New Deal.” This plan has a lot of pieces, but the basic idea is a several trillion dollar government jobs program focused on the jobs needed for the transition away from fossil fuel burning. The idea is to get going on this needed change without dumping the costs for doing so on the working stiffs.

Unlike Noah’s time, this coming flood is not a secret to our establishment. Our establishment is lying about what they know to be true. The coming flood is being openly denied, the need for change is being misrepresented, and our Noah-type awarenesses are being drowned out a din of lies, paid for by the fossil industries and bowed to by greed-afflicted political puppets and by way too many apathetic fools for whom any big change is too disturbing to even think about.

In spite stories about rainbows, the sternness of Profound Realty is still intact.

My ark design may have different compartments than yours, but this ark cannot be built by one family.

Though the climate crisis our biggest emergency, we are also facing many lesser, more clearly seen floods, like the one called “Unaffordable Healthcare Insurance” for over half of the population of the United States. An ark design plan has already been drawn up for the US Congress called “Medicare for All.” This is a real solution to the real problem, with only one downside: needing to entirely eliminate the cause of the problem. We face a choice between continuing with current healthcare insurance establishment or launching an entirely new system for this nation. As long as the private insurance companies are part of the healthcare insurance system, we do not have an “Affordable Healthcare” solution. Medicare for all is an ark. All the other plans do not float, even if they tread water.

Obamacare was a step forward, and we do not want to undo that step. Obamacare plus a public option for Medicare would be another step forward, but it would not be an Affordable Healthcare solution. Only Medicare for All will cut in half the untenable costs of healthcare, and cut drug costs even more than that. No part-way measure does that. This is true because no part-way measure deals with the problem—namely that the present system that pays huge salaries to health-insurance CEOs, huge profits to health-insurance investors, huge amounts of needless administrative costs and super-complicated paperwork and advertising—all to provide an inferior product that provides a little coverage as possible for the highest cost as possible. As long as this old system is part of the next plan, we do not have an ark of affordable healthcare!

Government is the administrative payer for our highway system, our post office, and our fire departments, why not for our healthcare insurance system. There is no other way to actually make affordable health care a right to every citizen.

Do we really want to pay twice as much for a totally private sector run postal service. Do we want a privately administered park service, police department, or fire department. Some things are best administered by a good democratic government. Healthcare affordability is one of those things. If we want to call that socialism, then let’s have at least this much socialism.

Having some things administered by government does not exclude having other things ordered by a private sector competitive system. But even here a democratic government must provide the rules that make a private sector competitive system truly and fairly competitive.

The only time that government is the problem is when government is run by a few of largest corporations for the sake of their super-wealthy owners. Whether we like language like “radical capitalism” or “democratic socialism” is a matter of personal thought preference. The real stuff of political choice has to do with our Noah’s arks of real solutions for the floods that threaten us most.

Shall we talk about too many assault rifles on the streets? Government, exclusion, licensing and records keeping is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

Shall we talk about rampant run-way racism? Government crack down on hate groups and home-grown terrorism is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

Shall we talk about super-biased criminal justice administration by poorly hired, trained, and paid police forces. Government rules, training, and accountability is an ark of solution for this dreadful flood.

For all these floods and others, serious government programming is the ark we need.

Dear neighbors, we who live on this North American landform are already hip deep in the waters of chaos. We need some arks, and we need them now. Noah was a rather reluctant saint. That is what we need—millions of reluctant saints. We need them now. In our case, being Noah-like saints means draining government-offices that are swamped with reactionary greed-heads, plus putting our own Noah-hood in charge of the ark building.

This is called “love” for self and neighbor in the context of a love of the overall Profound Reality that urgently confronts us.

The post Some Do Ride Out the Floods first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

The past is real, it cannot be changed, but our relationship to that past can be changed. The first change we may need to consider is our memory of that past. We have forgotten the real past. What memory we do have of the past is actually a memory of what we thought was real at the time, but our thinking was always limited—somewhat true, somewhat flawed.

But however flawed our memory is, the real past is completely gone and forgiven. A fresh start is at hand, perhaps that fresh start will include remembering more of the real past— perhaps to laugh or cry at how mistaken our views of that past have been. Cleaning up such memories may improve our lives, but not the consequence of what our lives have done. These consequences live on as part of our capacity as a human being to alter the course of history. We altered history in every moment of our past living, just as we will alter the course of history in our next action, in our next thinking about our next action. Every motion of our brain or our body alters the course of history in our lives and in the lives of all we touch and through them in the lives they touch forevermore. Such a tragic, yet wondrous karma is very real.

Nevertheless, a fresh start is open before us right now. No admission fee is required, no begging is necessary. And there no price to pay for this fresh start except the consequences of taking on this humiliating new start for our personal programing.

Our understanding of this “forgiveness for a fresh start” makes us more bold in our freedom to take on the consequences. We can make this unprecedented leap into the future, because we know that however this works out, we will be forgiven for a fresh start once again.

Forgiven does not mean excuse or permission to flee from real life or to indulge in our worse impulses, additions, and potential meanness. We will pay the consequences of whatever actions we do. We will remain in need of forgiveness for whatever we do. Believing in forgiveness means believing that there is a fresh start in realism before us, right now and always will be.

Let us also be warned that our delusory choices can become stuck ways of life for our personal being—life ways to which we cling, defend, and never own up or accept their needed forgiveness. Being stuck in unrealism is like an internal bondage or slavery in which we may have become powerless to change. We may find ourselves dependent on Reality and waiting on Reality to expose our unrealism and forgive us again.

We cannot presume that when we have lost touch with Reality, that Reality will find us again—at least not right away. We can drift down the corridor of time for quite a while before the judgement of our unrealism comes up again for review. We need to take care to not mess with Reality, or thumb our nose at Reality, or think we can get away with creating our own reality.

Consider how long the racist patterns of the U.S Confederacy have lived on in the lives of both whites and blacks and all those in between. We are all forgiven for a fresh start in a new world order in which black and white have no more horrific implications than short or long feet. Nevertheless, we cling to familiar patterns of status, privilege, mindsets, and rages, rather than be forgiven for that fresh start that fights the tragic karma of our ongoing culture.

Martin Luther King Jr. helped us find some fresh start on this unrealism, but we still cling to, or slip into backslides to, old familiar untenable patterns of delusion. Many U.S. citizens persist in fanning and fostering our racial delusions for the sake of some other delusion that Reality has not yet vanquished.

So, when and if Reality has found us again, we do well to grab hold of Reality with all its forgiveness and fresh starts before we lose our way again. The pay-out of unrealism is despair in the end, for Reality always wins. And the pay-out of realism, however costly in some ways it may be, is always on the winning side, for Reality always wins.

Lord Reality have mercy on me a sinner, may my estrangements from Thee be healed this day.

The post Forgiveness first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

The cultural transformations we do are only temporal changes we decide to support. Culture is a temporal reality and all cultural transformations are temporal. But the trip I am describing is about leaving the temporal, going to the Eternal, and then returning to the temporal after have been to the Eternal. All this takes place while our temporal body remains right here in the exact same temporal flow.

So, let me tell you more about this trip.

If you have ever experienced death, either its sure future for you or in its brushing by you in a close way, then you have experienced the Eternal. The experience of death does not fit into to any of our simply cultural experiences. Most funerals make someone else’s experience of death into a cultural interpretation. If that someone’s life was especially close to your life, you might experience that loss as an experience of death. You might even find the funeral to be a ritual for taking into your living the experience of death, for you have indeed lost part of your life. And this might be such an important part of your life that you did indeed meet the Eternal.

As an experience of the Eternal, the experience of death is not the same thing as simply dying. In fact a person can die without experiencing death or the Eternal And we can have many experiences of the Eternal without physically dying, and each of these experiences of the Eternal include some sort of departure from the temporal.

There are many temporal moments in which the breath of the Eternal passes close by and blows like a hurricane of Awe or Wonder in the space of your consciousness. This can be a very simple moment, temporally speaking—perhaps looking out the window at an electrical storm with its loud clashes of thunder. Or it might happen while reading a book that provides a new way of seeing something that has been crucial to your now defunct worldview.

Eternity might happen eating a piece of bread and taking a sip of wine in the context of knowing that bodies and blood was shed to awaken you to the Eternal, and that your own body and blood might be shed to continue this Eternal favor to someone else. Or an experience of the Eternal might happen sitting cross-legged under a shade tree and watching your breath breathe until you are watching this watcher awaken to the awesome presence of being freed form all pervious thoughts of who you thought you were.

Seeing the Dazzle

If you have experienced the Eternal in some way, you will also have the ability to understand the following bit of Christian scripture. I am going to quote from Mark’s Gospel verses 9:2-10, and after each set of sentences take note of how these sentences point to experiencing the Eternal.

Six days later, Jesus took Peter and James and John with him and led them high up on a hill-side where they were entirely alone. His whole appearance changed before their eyes, while his clothes became white, dazzling white – whiter than any earthly bleaching could make them.

What is symbolized here is the dazzle of the Eternal, the glow of Profound Reality, the shine of the Land of Mystery. And this dazzle was happening to mere peasant clothing— perhaps ragged, perhaps dingy and sweaty—worn on an ordinary peasant, Jesus.

Elijah and Moses appeared to the disciples and stood there in conversation with Jesus. Peter burst out to Jesus, “Master, it is wonderful for us to be here! Shall we put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah?”

These sentences add to the Jesus dazzle, the dazzle of Moses, the symbol of the Holy Law of Eternity, and the dazzle of Elijah, the symbol of the Prophetic proclamation of Holy Justice. What are we to imagine about the conversation that Jesus is having with Moses and Elijah? From the larger context of Mark’s narrative, we can guess that this conversation is about the road that Jesus must take—the awful path of crucifixion and its dazzling resurrection meaning. These three disciples, the most awake of the twelve, do not understand what is happening. Peter supposes this all might be captured in three religious booths.

He [Peter] really did not know what to say, for they [all three disciples] were very frightened. Then came a cloud which overshadowed them and a voice spoke out of the cloud, “This is my dearly-loved Son. Listen to him!”

A temporal cloud now becomes the voice of Eternity. Awe from the Awesome overshadows them. Jesus is proclaimed by this Awe producing event to be the “Offspring of the Eternal”—Jesus is announced to be the Word spoken by the Eternal—Jesus is his temporal life is revealing some sort of Final Realism to be listened to above all else—instructing our lives to be lived in accord with the always WAS and the always will BE the Way, the Truth, and the Life that all humans are constructed to live. This does not mean a cultural life, but an Eternal Life.

Then, quite suddenly they looked all round them and saw nobody at all with them but Jesus.

The only content available to temporal eyes and minds is temporal content—in this story the content is, let us say, a five-foot ten, black haired, sandy-faced, young man in dingy peasant garb. All the Eternal Fuss that was “seen” by these three dumbfounded truth seekers was entirely contentless of any temporal content. All the temporal words that were lodged in their temporal minds were not Eternal. Three fancy booths would not have held the Eternal either. The temporal itself was not what was dazzling. An Eternal experience, according to this wild story, was dazzling a temporal moment in three human lives.

And as they came down the hill-side, he warned them not to tell anybody what they had seen till “the Son of Man should have risen again from the dead”. They treasured this remark and tried to puzzle out among themselves what “Rising from the dead” could mean.

Indeed this story was written, told, and heard after the crucifixion, and after a revelation to some people of what “rising from the dead” could possibly mean. Also, the language here is cryptic partly because of its antiquity, and also because of its profoundness. “Son of Man” meant “Offspring of the first humans—Adam and Eve,” “Son of Adam” means humanity returned to its essence before the fall into inauthenticity. “Son of Man” also included an “end of time” imagination. In the imagination of those who wrote and treasured this strange story, essential humanity with no sin was to be risen from the dead at the end of time.

In this story, these three (the most aware disciples) had no idea what Jesus’s meant by “rising from the dead.” Later they would come to see that resurrection had indeed begun happening three days after the crucifixion of Jesus. This Eternal, end-of time arrival had begun happening to three women, then to the male disciples, then to thousands, then to Paul, then to millions, maybe it is happening to you and me.

Clearly, resurrection was not a cultural happening, even though it was told about in the cultural words of that time. Resurrection was happening to people, and those people were proclaiming this happening in wild sets of stories, icons, dramas, rituals, communal practices, and later in paintings, sculptures, and architectural buildings. Yet, resurrection was none of these cultural expressions. It was a revolutionary presence in persons. Then these persons had transformative effects in their existing cultures. These cultural effects were not the happening of resurrection; they were the humanly-created results of the resurrection. Though these effects bear witness to the resurrection having happened, only those to whom resurrection is now happening are able see the truth of this witness to the happening of resurrection in human lives

This has only been my witness to my experience of the Eternal—nothing more, nothing less. So if there are any Eternal sensitive “ears” reading these words, may those ears hear the Eternal “speaking.” Temporal ears alone hear only temporal things.

My teacher and mentor of many years, Joe Mathews, spoke about his experience of the Eternal in terms of a story he told describing a trip he made from Dallas to Houston in which he explored the unusual city of Waxahachie, Texas. The concluding line of his story was, “If you haven’t been to Waxahachie, you haven’t been to Waxahachie.” And so it is with our experience of the Eternal.

For more commentary on the Gospel of Mark see:

https://realisticliving.org/New/mark-commentary/

The post Religion and Culture first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

Cain’s worship in this brief story was a symbol for Canaanite religious practices. According to the biblical story, Reality/God favored Abel’s religious practice over Cain’s religious practice. Understanding the text here is not easy, for we may not be clear about the meaning of animal sacrifice to those ancient people. An animal that had come into human possession was viewed as a gift from God, a food source not so easily come by. So in Abel’s religious practice, we are seeing a big gift from the Grand Giver that is being given back to the Giver. This is also reflected in that story about Abraham being prepared to give back the gift of his only son Isaac to the Giver of Isaac. This is a view of “sainthood” that was also seen in the life of Jesus, whose death was seen as Jesus giving back his life to the Giver of his life: “Into thy hands I commend my consciousness.” Luke: 23:46

Cain presented as his gift to Reality works of his own hands. According to the biblical story, this was less favored by Reality. Nothing is said in the story about how anyone knew whose ritual Reality favored, but let us guess that Abel’s ritual was something like one of those truthful sermons that fill a whole room with Awe so thick that it seems we could cut that Awe with a knife. Cain’s ritual, let us suppose, was like so much of our empty talk; it called forth no Awe at all.

Somehow Cain saw that Reality favored his brother’s ritual, but rejected Cain’s ritual. At that point in the story, we find this key message being said by Reality/God to Cain:

If you practice realism, you can hold up your head,
If not, then demonic action is crouching at the door;
it is eager for you, but you must master it.
Genesis 4:7 a very slight rewording

In this old story, Cain does not master his envy, his anger, his resentments. He chooses to go with his angry resentments, rather than with his deep freedom to master such resentments and perhaps ferret out what they meant.

Cain’s overt actions follow from his primal choice. He cannot kill Reality, but he can kill Abel and he does so. In this story, Reality notices Abel’s death and says to Cain: “Where is your brother Abel?”

Cain answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s shepherd?” This was a double lie. He did know, and he was his brother’s keeper, just as we humans are all built to care about all the neighbors that God/Reality provides to us.

Reality speaks again: “What have you done? Hark! Your brother’s blood that has been shed is crying out to me from the ground.” Reality in this story goes on to spell out all the ways that Cain is now estranged from the ground that grows his food, from himself, from other people, and most of all from Reality. A mark of this estrangement is placed on Cain’s forehead.

We need to understand that Cain as well as Abel is as aspect of each of us. Cain is humanity, sustained, protected, even forgiven, yet stained with the mark of a murderous impulse.

The story ends with these poetic and sobering words: Cain went out from Reality’s presence and settled in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. The word “Nod” can be translated “Wandering.” Cain is now wandering away from the land of Mysterious Realism. He has killed Abel in himself as well as in his fellow human. He is wandering, looking for his Home Reality, his promised Land, but not finding it. He is wandering somewhere to the east of authenticity.

Cain’s story is about the European immigrants to Tasmania who killed every Tasmanian and to the European immigrants to Australia who killed most of the Aborigines of that land.

So it is with the European immigrants to North, Central, and South America who killed huge numbers of natives in that land. So it is with a German population who killed 10 million or more Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and others. This grim story continues to go on in many ways in many places. This is done by our species of life on this planet. The Mark of Cain is on our foreheads.

Both Cain and Abel are humanity. Every man and every woman is both Cain who has lost his Abel-ness, and an Abel-ness that is an offense to Cain. Jesus is such an offense from the perspective of our Cain-ness, for Jesus is Cain’s own lost Abel which Cain has killed. Our Cain-like humanity killed Jesus because our Cain-ness perceived Jesus-hood as an “enemy” who dared to expose our Cain-hood by setting before us the possibility of our Abel-hood of uncompromising realism.

It was our Cain who brought black slaves to the U.S. and continues to mistreats their descendants. It is our Cain who rejects Hispanic immigrants coming to this land for asylum.

Perhaps we can hear the blood of Abel in those Hispanic children separated from their parents who is crying out to to be heard from what is left of the Abel-ness in our common humanity.

So let us look more fully at what this strange old story has to do with our daily lives today. Let us consider our politics, as an example. Politicians who tell lies create a movement that is murderous. Politicians who tell the truth create a movement that is hated by the liars, but which opens us all to the possibilities of truthful living.

This murderous hatred arising in we liars is a strange blessing, an opportunity for our Cain-ness to master his or her envy, hatred, and resentment with the truth of our freedom to live a truthful life.

Finally, I want to rescue this ancient story of Cain and Abel from one more serious misunderstanding. This story is not about Jewish religion being better than Canaanite religion or about Christian religion being better than Jewish religion and Canaanite religion. This story is not about what I say about my religion or about your religion. It is not about what you say about my religion or about your religion.

This story is about what God says (that is, what Reality says) about my religion and your religion and everyone’ else’s religion. If we have no idea what it means to listen to what Reality is saying about my religion, or your religion, or anyone’s religion, then we have no idea about what religions is or what religion is for in human life.

The critique of religion by Reality is step one in the healing from our Cain estrangements. Step two is our mastery of our envy, hatred, and resentment with a freedom that leads to a release of our essential care for all our neighbors—for Cain and Abel.

The post Wilderness Abel and Canaanite Cain first appeared on Realistic Living.