We live in a Land of Mystery.
We know nothing about it.
We don’t know where we have come from.
We don’t know where we are going.
We don’t know where we are.
We are newborn babes.
We have never been here before.
We have never seen this before.
We will never see it again.
This moment is fresh,
Unexpected,
Surprising.
As this moment moves into the past,
It cannot be fully remembered.
All memory is a creation of our minds.
And our minds cannot fathom the Land of Mystery,
much less remember it.
We experience Mystery Now
And only Now.
Any previous Now is gone forever.
Any yet-to-be Now is not yet born.
We live Now,
only Now,
in a Land of Mystery.

Denying the truth of this poem can be called “rationalism,” the notion that the real is rational or that rational is the real.  The above poem is an attempt to point out that the real is not rational.  The very best of human reasoning is never anything more than an approximation of the real.  This is another way to say that the real is a mystery.

Rationalism

Fleeing in a personal way from our awareness of a permanent mysteriousness is the most common flight from our essential freedom.  And to where do we flee?  We flee to dogmas of the mind—whether dogma of science or dogma of religion or dogma of some other kind.  We can flee to current wisdom or obsolete foolishness—any rational formation that can provide the true believer with a supposed certainty.  Standing within the full awe or wonder of this All Powerful Land of Mystery, including its freedom, is a paradoxical sort of certainty.  If we allow the uncertainty of our aware freedom to rule our living, we find that such perpetual uncertainty can be our “certainty” and our openness.

We need  approximations of the real in order to navigate our lives within our natural and social environments.  The culture in which we live is a webwork or weave of these “approximate certainties.”  We grow up in a culture of particular approximate certainties that are being lived by us as if they were fully certain.

The maturity acquired through open living includes discovering that these approximate certainties of our culture are uncertain.  The life story of Albert Einstein is a story of awakening to uncertainties in his own inherited “normal” science—the science so deeply improved by Sir Isaac Newton.  Though it is true that Einstein’s wondrous imagination gave new vision to many of those older certainties, Einstein’s life story, even in the realm of his physics, involved making one serious mistake after another.  Along with the freedom and the creativity of other physicists, it was Einstein’ own freedom and creativity that was demolishing his own older certainties.  And while physics was never the same after Einstein got through with it, physics remains a set of approximate certainties that are still vulnerable to being overturned by better approximations of what is real.

Here is another story of freedom from certainty—this time from a religious luminary.  There was a man, an accomplished thinker, a strongly religious man, a loyal Jew.  He could read and write in both Hebrew and Greek; he traveled; he taught; he had a good reputation.  Then it came to him that he was hiding from his true being in the thoughtfulness of these two cultures of learning.  So he threw into the waste basket (symbolically speaking) all that accomplished education and religious thoughtfulness.  And after a month or so living in a sort of nowhere/nobody status, he took all that wisdom out of the waste basket and put it to work assisting others to participate in his deep discovery of that freedom is at the heart of Judaism’s sense of absolute mysteriousness.  His name was Saul. After his deep discovery, he changed his name. We remember him as Paul , a man who said that Christ had set us free.

In a series of letters Paul gave witness to his deep encounter with an enduring Mystery that transcended his culture, both his cultures.  We misuse his writings when we expect  them to be rational dogmas.  He established Christian theologizing as an ongoing probe into a Mystery than never goes away.  His words can also be viewed as describing the life of a permanent outsider (neither Jew nor Greek).  Here is my 21st century definition of “the pitfall into rationalism”:

Rationalism:  Hiding from Mystery in the thoughtfulness of our culture.

Moralism

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of moralism:

Within this Land of Mystery
flows a River of Consciousness—
a flow of attention and freedom.
Consciousness is an enigma in this Land of Mystery.
Consciousness flows through body and mind like a river—
a moisture in the desert of things.
Consciousness is not our pain, pleasure, or rest;
not our desire, emotion, stillness, or passion.
These are like the rocks in the River of Consciousness
Consciousness is a flow through the body and with the body.
Consciousness is an alertness that is also
a freedom to intend and a will to do.
The mind is a tool of consciousness,
providing consciousness with the ability
to reflect upon itself.
But consciousness cannot be contained
within the images and symbols of the mind.
It is an enigma that mind
cannot comprehend – even noticing consciousness
is an act of consciousness using the mind and
flowing like a River in the Land of Mystery.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer read all of Paul’s writings.  He also studied intently those many years of interpretations of Paul’s letters.  He was especially conversant with Martin Luther’s  interpretations of Paul.  In his early twenties, Dietrich  became a prominent student and writer of edge Christian topics.  A topic that captured him deeply was the radical nature of the freedom for which, according to both Paul and Luther, Christ has set us free.  Dietrich saw that this essential freedom is our deep and given ability to respond.   We can enact a response-ability to whatever is happening in the history of our society and of our personal life.   In Dietrich’s day, Adolf Hitler was conducting total war on the world for the sake of an exaggerated grandeur of German culture—a type of nationalism that was also arising elsewhere, but seldom with Hitler’s degree of fanatic zeal.  Dietrich realized that he personally was free from Hitler’s kind of self created certainty.  In fact Dietrich could see that he was free from any kind of ethical certainty.   In his free responsibility, Dietrich and some of his close friends employed their freedom in an attempt on Hitler’s life.  They almost succeeded.  Dietrich did succeed in making a lasting cry for our essential freedom—a freedom that can be manifest in the midst of any set of cultural certainties in any moment of time.

Morality is a social process in every society and a necessity for having a workable social functioning.  Morality itself is not a pitfall for freedom.  In freedom, however, we can obey, disobey, and also improve the morality of our society.  Moralism is my name for a pitfall of freedom.  Just as ending rationalism is not a dismissal of reason, so ending moralism is not a dismissal of morality.  Moral order is the part of way that a society restrains the physical, emotional, and intellectual violences of the human being toward other human beings.  Society’s moral restraints are not moralism. Moralism means clinging absolutely or almost absolutely to some social law, norm, rule, or custom.  Social morality has never dropped-down from some divine absolute or been sourced-up from some natural ground.  Morality is invented by a social group.  Our essential freedom includes the discovery of our response-ability to create morality.  Here, then, is my 21st century definition of the “moralism” pitfall for our essential freedom:

Moralism:  Hiding from Freedom in the ethical certainties of our culture.

Determinism

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of determinism:

Within the Land of Mystery
rises a Mountain of Care –
care for self, care for others,
care for Earth, care for the cosmos,
care that we exist, care that we suffer
care that we may find rest and fulfillment,
care that we may experience our caring
and not grow numb and dead.
It takes no effort to care.
It takes effort not to care.
Care is given with the Land of Mystery.
Care is part of the Mystery of Being.
We care, we just care, we are made of care.
Care is a Mountain because care is so huge,
so challenging to embrace, to climb, to live.
Care is a demand upon us that is more humbling,
more consuming, more humiliating,
than all the authorities, laws, and obligations
of our social existence.
Care is a forced march into the dangers
and the hard work of constructing a life that
is not a passive vegetable growth
nor a wildly aggressive obsession.
Care is an inescapable given, simply there,
yet care is also an assertion of our very being.
It is compassion, devotion, love for all that is given
and for all parts of each given thing, each being.
Like Atlas, we lift the planet day-by-day,
year-by-year, love without end,
in the Land of Mystery.

In 1952, when I first met Joe Mathews, he was a confrontational seminary professor who sometimes stood on his desk and reached for a sky hook to illustrate that we do not exist in a two-story universe, but rather live down-to-Earth in the here and now.  And within this here and now destiny, he taught that human history is not set to go this way or that way.   There is no automatic progress or automatic degeneration. We face options present to our freedom.  Though there are trends for better and trends for worse, we humans face forks in the road of time where we must choose to determine the course of our own lives and how we are going to participate in bending the course of history.  Joe himself found bending the course of history within the then fabrics of doing Christian seminary education to be too confining for him.  So, he left a very successful seminary professorship to bend history within an innovative lay-theological study community for college students that was later expanded to also train the general laity and clergy.  That structure of work also became too small for his imaginative spirit.  He and others founded a religious order of families that grew to about 1100 adults and their children.  With a group of these order colleagues, he moved into a Black neighborhood where this new religious order identified with the residents and assisted about two hundred of them with their reformulation of that neglected urban community.  He next took these reformulation methods to India, and his colleagues took them to many other places.  Along the way he did some extremely deep work on Christian theologizing and on religious practices, including some intense descriptions of profound states consciousness.  He died in 1977, still bending history in directions both social and spiritual.  His life illustrates for me what it looks like not to hide from our planetary responsibility in the fear of becoming guilty.

Living our essential freedom includes risking the guilt of doing wrong things, things we regret, mistakes we don’t want to make again.  The self-condemnation we feel for our serious guilt is a grief that activist humans will experience and will need to handle.  But instead of handling guilt with an acceptance of Profound Reality’s forgiveness and a fresh start in greater realism, human beings are easily tempted to handle guilt with some form of determinism. We can falsely theorize that  we had to do whatever we did — that some natural or social force made us do it.  Some have theorized that everything is determined and that we are just an observer of the flow of time, including our own behaviors.  Here is my 21st century definition of that pitfall of falling from freedom into “determinism”:

Determinism:  Hiding from the Guilt of our planetary response-ability

Sentimentality

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of sentimentality:

In the Land of Mystery
there is a Sea of Tranquility,
a place of Rest amidst the wild waters of life.
The waves may be high, our small boat tossed about,
but there we are with a courageous heart.
It is our heart that is courageous.
We are born with this heart.
We do not achieve it.
We can simply rest within our own living heart,
our own courageous heart that opens vulnerably
to every person and all aspects of that person,
to our own self and every aspect of that self,
to life as a whole with all its terrors and joys.
This is a strange Rest, for no storm can end it,
no challenge of life defeat it,
No loss, no death, no horror of being, no fear
can touch our courageous heart.
We live, if we allow ourselves to truly live
on this wild Sea of Everything in the Tranquility
of our own indestructible courageous heart.
To manifest and fully experience this Tranquility,
we only have to give up the creations of our mind
that we have substituted for this ever-present Peace.
We have only to open to the Land of Mystery
flowing with a River of Consciousness
and containing a Mountain of Care.
Here and here alone do we find the Sea of Tranquility.
Here in the Land of Mystery that our mind
cannot comprehend, create, or control,
here beyond our deepest depth or control
is a Sea of Tranquility
in the Land of Mystery

Harriet Tubman was a Black women, a slave on a southern plantation before the Civil War.  I was deeply moved by the courage and joy of her life as depicted in Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons.  Harriet, while enacting a  plan of escape from slavery with her already freed fiancé, found that the plan had been foiled.  She chose to find her own way to the north alone, facing danger almost every step of the way.  She became a member of the Underground Railroad and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using a network of antislavery activists and safe houses.  During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.  In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.  Her magically intuitive and courageous daring never quit.  This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about how an ordinary human being might simply lay down her life of her own free will for the people she loved.  She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery as well as their spiritual bondage.  She is my model, along with Jesus, of how joy can be found in overcoming the terror of our own death.

Here is my 21st century definition of of the pitfall for our freedom that I will call “sentimentality”:

Sentimentality:  Hiding from Joy in the terror of our own personal death

These Four Pitfalls Can be Healed

While the whole human race can seem to be trapped in one or more of these escapes from freedom, the gift of essential freedom that comes with a devotion to Profound Reality is stronger than these four traps.  Our natural creation is a powerful righteousness that can accurately reveal the foolishness of all departures from realism.  And the strength of our authenticity is greater than the strength of our despair over our real circumstances.

“Rationalism,” “moralism.” “determinism,” and “sentimentalism” are words that we can use to indicate and summarize the millions of ways that human escape, hide, flee, or fight being our essential freedom.  Anti-“rationalism” does not  mean a contempt for reason, but a resistance to being separated from realism by getting lost in the word-worlds of thinking.  Anti-“moralism” does not mean a contempt for the moral structuring of human society, but a resistance to confusing essential freedom with some specific moral righteousness.  Anti-“determinism” does not mean a contempt for cause and effect science, but an affirmation of the essential truth of human capacities to bend history.  Anti-“sentimentalism” does not mean a contempt for feelings, but a refusal to replace our freedom-driven care with emotional fluff and the personal addictions that have captivated our sentiments.

Holy Spirit

The states of mystery, freedom, care, and tranquility summarized in the four poems above give elaboration to the Christian symbol “Holy Spirit.”   The “holiness” in this authentic “esprit” of realistic living manifests as an awe-filled resolve of our essential freedom to affirm the rightness of this Awesome Rightness that is powering our true lives.

The post Four Pitfalls of our Essential Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

To the extent that we are bound up with our own ego, we will also be without a long view. Even if our ego concerns seem to us better than Trump’s ego concerns, we can still be missing a long view—a view for something larger than our own selves or our own tiny concerns.

So Who Does Have a Long View?

The writers of the Old Testament had a long view. They reflected back hundreds of years and they reflected forward centuries as well—seeing their peoplehood as a servant body on behalf of all the nations of the world.

Jesus had a long view. In laying down his life for the people of Israel, he was laying down his life for the restoration of this servant people and thereby for the whole of humanity.

Paul had a long view. Augustine had a long view. Martin Luther had a long view, Paul Tillich had a long view. The priest and author, Thomas Berry, had a long view. He not only had a long view for Christianity, Berry promoted a next Christianity that has a long view for the whole of humanity. He viewed humanity as an integral part of the planet. He saw humanity as Earth’s champaign of deep awareness and joyous celebration on behalf of this wondrously unique planet that can sustain life, including human life.

The Battle of Two Regimes

We who comprise the progressive portion of the United States voters and activists need a simple and easy-to-teach narrative about where we are as a society and how the various types of Republicans and Democrats relate to some “big story” of our existing conditions and our possible futures.

Before the beginnings of the industrial revolution in about 1760, there was only one regime of governance headed by a King or perhaps by a Queen, or perhaps by a Royal Council. These high class members of the traditional caste system controlled both political and economic life. The rise of the industrial revolution assisted by colonialism enabled the accumulation of great pools of privately controlled wealth. This wealth-power had significance in both the economic and political governance over the course of events. The economist and author, Robert Heilbroner, called these pools of wealth “the regime of capital,” This second regime of governance initiated a tension with the regime of state —a fight between these two regimes of powerful governance.

As the regime of capital became more independent, the regime of royalty was weakened and social space was opened for the more democratic form of state initiated in the United States and elsewhere. The democratic state retained legal and coercive force, but the regime of capital with its powers of investments and conditions of employment also possessed a strong governing reality in the lives of people and in direct influences upon the decisions of the state.

These elemental dynamics of history are important for seeing clearly the historical options we face today in the United States and elsewhere. Here are five styles of governing that are being pursued in our world today:

option 1: This style of governing is illustrated by the Vladimir Putin type of control of both the regime of the state and the regime of capital—both regimes are in the hands of very wealthy oligarchs of which Putin is one as well as head of state. This is the option that Donald Trump and his cronies favored and still favor. They lie about their poorly hidden dictatorial direction for their governing. Lying, misinformation, and deception in order to assemble support is a characteristic of this option for governing. When taking this option, democracy becomes a social veneer that has no real power over the course of events. Option one policies seek support from the super wealthy and from the long-enduring forms of the caste system—racism, patriarchy, gender, and so on.

option 2: This style of governing is illustrated by those U.S. conservatives who are quite critical of various aspects of the reigning caste systems, but who insist that the regime of capital must manage the regime of the democratic state. The policies of this political constituency are crafted to benefit big business leaders and their corporations. They claim that “business friendly” policies benefit everyone with a “trickle down” of prosperity. Many anti-Trump Republicans hold this view. A number of Democratic Party leaders and thinkers also hold this view. The majority of the Democratic Party, however, now hold the view that the “trickle-down” of wealth is microscopic compared with the “siphon-off” going to the upper classes. Option 2 style governing persons are also typically uneasy about a “too powerful” democratic government regulating the regime of capital “too severely.” In the view of U.S. option 2 policy-makers, “small” government, which they favor in the regulations department, does not exclude, “large” outlays for the defense industry, or “large” tax give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, and other governmental perks to the existing economic powers.

option 3: This style of governing is illustrated by those who view the need for a strong regime of democratic governing that sets the rules and enforces fairly and strongly the rules that structure the economic playing field for the players of the regime of capital. Option 3 policy-makers expect the capital-owning forces to control the micro-economic choices, but they maintain that the macro-economic choices are to be made by a democratic government focused on serving all the people. The still valued regime of capital takes on a secondary role with regard to the basic ecological, economic, political, and cultural directions for the society. The regime of capital is expected to be obedient to these large-direction choices made by the representatives of a democratic government.

option 4: This style of governing is more aggressive than the option 3 style with regard to the role of democratic government in regulating the regime of capital. The option 4 style of governing applies especially to those portions of the society that are fundamental for everyone. Currently, these topics include healthcare, education, energy provision, water quality, soil quality, air quality, basic transportation, internet fairness, and the building of a whole new infrastructure designed to moderate the climate. Option 4 directions on such topics currently include specific policies like: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal projections, and the long-range energy polices that will compel oil companies to submit their business plans for how they are going to phase out their product from its current massive use to a mere trickle in the next three decades. According to option 4 voices, this huge, but necessary, energy transition cannot start someday; it must start now. Under this option, energy companies (such as oil, coal, and nuclear) would start now facing severe penalties if they do not assist rather than oppose these necessary directions of energy transition.

option 5: This style of governing is illustrated by those members of almost every society who support some form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—the style of governing that we now find manifest in China and Cuba. This option has a slim following in the United States, but we do find a significant amount of appreciation for the accomplishments of China and Cuba in their ecological policies and in their ability to sustain a solid social order that is not ruled by the regime of capital. The obvious downside of option 5 is the absence of an ever-deepening democracy. Concern for the working population does not make a dictatorship into a democracy. Even if we agree that a strong state government may have been required in China or Cuba to put a ruthless regime of capital in its subservient place and keep them there, option 5 still amounts to a revival of a strong economic caste system—a “new class” as some critics have spelled out, a new form of dictatorship that resists serious challenges to democratize.

Naming Some U.S. Names

Richard Nixon in the U.S. story might be viewed as a bridge person between options 1 and option 2 politics. While Nixon had a strong enough hold on democracy and on international affairs to remain an illustration of option 2 polices, he leaned into “the unitary executive” strongly enough to be a preview of Trump’s more thoroughgoing option 1 authoritarianism. Also, Nixon’s “southern strategy” was a move toward Trump’s more fully developed white-nationalist appeals. And, Nixon’s “tricky Dick” politics pre-stage Trump’s more incredible lack of respect for truthfulness and fair dealing.

Ronald Reagan is a good historical example of option 2 policy-making in U.S. politics. He consistently supported the regime of capital over the regime of the democratic state—viewing regulative government as a “problem” and democracy as a process that needs to be “managed” by big business experience and loyalties.

Option 3 policy-making has been given prominence by Barack and Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and in 2021 is being carried on by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Whatever be the leanings that any of these competent persons have toward Option 4 policy making, Option 4 policy-making is better represented by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ortega Cortez and an expanding “squad” of young women of color. Many other persons might be named as strong voices in one or the other of these two types of politics, but these well-known persons approximately define the trends of these two styles of policy-making.

Cooperations

Option 3 and 4 political styles can currently work together in their common love of a competent, strong, and thoroughgoing democracy—of, by, and for the people.
However passionate the differences between option 3 and 4 persons may be, they are currently able to cooperate on many measures of good government. They also cooperate well in their firm opposition to an option 1 autocracy laced with racism, patriarchy, or other forms of caste system.

The cooperation between option 1 and option 2 policy holders is much more strained than the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 policy holders. Indeed, following Trump‘s take-over of the Republican Party, those persons of option 2 leanings have become a much slimmer group of people. In fact, most option 2 Republicans are now conflicted between (1) their need for support from option 1 citizens in order to “manage democracy,” and (2) their reluctance to support option 3 and 4 lovers of a more aggressive democracy in their regulation of the regime of capital. Option 2 persons find themselves choosing between: (1) remaining a Republican voter in a Party that remains a Trump-ruled authoritarian body, and (2) choosing to become more strongly democratic, yet bringing some of their conservative leanings with them into the Democratic voting constituency.

If the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 remains strong enough to actually accomplish a large number of systemic changes, then a coalition of political power may come into being that remains in power for a very long time. However frightening large systemic changes may be to millions of people, not making these changes is becoming even more frightening to increasing millions of getting-wiser people. Also, realism in social affairs, however frightening, is also a source of joy and confidence—especially among the young, the oppressed, and the steady students of history. Reality in its Wholeness of Power is on the side of those who are living realistically. Though a tough taskmaster, Reality is producing our best case options. Fighting with Reality creates the maximization of our suffering, and realistic living, in spite of our setbacks, includes the benefits of more freedom and of simple joy.

Option 5 members within our U.S. society will, at least for now, tend to go along with options 3 and option 4 policies. But even for the long haul, I believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will continue to be viewed by most U.S. citizens as a ditch of doom—an avoidable destiny almost as grim as the Trumpian ditch of doom. I do not believe that U.S. citizens will go along with or need to go along with the option 5 route.

“Democracy rather than authoritarianism” has become our core political conflict, all across the planet. “Capitalism versus socialism” has become less severe. Everyone is a socialist now, in some ways. And everyone is a capitalist now, in some ways. All realistically thoughtful persons are drinking water from both of these fountains of economic and political discoveries and action policies. Option 5 members of our U.S. society will do well to join the consensus building going on between the option 3 and option 4 democracy lovers, and forget any dreams they may have for a working-class dictatorship.

Ecological Democracy

If ecological solutions are to be forged and carried out for the big ecological challenges, a fuller and fuller democracy is the key correction that must be made in each society on the planet. Climate moderation is the biggest of the big matters among these ecological challenges. Without a solution to the climate crisis, we face irresolvable difficulties afflicting progress in all our other challenges. We have already delayed solutions to the climate crisis so long that many catastrophes are now unavoidable. But if we are to bet our lives on the emergence of possibilities for the survival of our species, we must now put the climate crisis first on our list of challenges and see every other challenge in that context.

I understand writers and teachers who recommend that we turn our attention to accommodating to the inevitable collapse of our current societies before the impending climate impacts. But instead of any mere accommodation to the collapse of current societies, let us imagine investing trillions of dollars in the search for ways we cannot yet see to replace these collapsing societies with better ways of doing human socializing. Several years ago I began advocating “building Eco-Democracy societies.” In order to be successful, building Eco-Democracies must not wait until after the current societies finish collapsing. Rather, we can take charge now of our collapsing civilizations—transforming the energies of these societies into opportunities for designing and building societies that are substantially better.

The great transition from hunter/gather societies to civilized societies took thousands of years. The transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies took hundreds of years. We now face the opportunity, and the necessity of doing our great transition in a few decades. In the next three decades, we might get half way there. Two hundred years form now, we may still be finishing up some elements of this transition, unless, of course, we have missed the turn with our further delays. This is a “long emergency” as David Orr calls it in his book Dangerous Years. We are being challenged to exercise our freedom in the light of this living now—to form right now a long view about which we can continue to be more specific.

The post Freedom and the Long View first appeared on Realistic Living.

Imagine yourself an accomplished high school science student moving into the wonder of dating, of initiating for the first time a serious interpersonal relationship in addition to your family of origin. Your science excellences do not help you discern the challenges present in your consciousness meeting with the consciousness of another person and continuing in this tangle of relations between him or her and me.

Scientific research is about knowing the objective world. We can call science the I-it approach to truth in contrast to Buber’s I-Thou approach to truth. Another human being cannot be appropriately or fully related to as an “it”—a status friendship, a sexual conquest, or a cog in the machinery of some project of my devising. Another person is another consciousness, like myself. To relate to the encountered reality of another person as I relate to the encountered reality of an “it” is to suppress a full experience of that person and of myself.

The I-Thou approach to truth also differs from inquiry into my own being. My inquiry into the contents of my own consciousness may help me relate to others, and others may help me become more aware of the contents of my own consciousness. But the I-Thou relation itself is not simply personal inquiry. Another person is another consciousness, not my consciousness. However mature we may be in the practice of meditation or in some other method of contemplative inquiry, we enter a different world of truth when we are engaged in a realistic interpersonal relationship with another person, or group of persons.

So, what is it about an interpersonal relationship that brings us into such a different universe of truth than the universes of truth we explore with our scientific quests or our contemplative inquiries? A few times I have met a stranger whose eyes met my eyes in a way that I knew that this other human being saw me, perhaps as clearly as some of my long-time friends. Such meetings are not about physical admiration or intellectual stimulation, or romantic possibilities. Such moments have to do with my conscious person noticing another conscious person who is noticing me.

We humans are an extremely capable social species. Most of what we know has come to us through contact with other humans. A child raised by wolves or in some other way separated from other humans in early life can miss out on extremely crucial aspects of human development. We are seldom fully aware of how deep a role has been played in our development by being with other humans—honest talk, dancing, physical play, singing, creating music, touching, hugging, and so very much more.

The “I-Thou” approach to truth can also be distinguished from a fourth approach to truth that I will call the “We-They” approach to truth. This fourth approach to truth has to do with politics; with sustaining, repairing, and replacing economic systems; and with preserving and enriching the systems of knowledge, life styles, and the media of art, language, mathematics, and religious formation. I will discuss freedom in relation to these social commonality features of our lives in other essays. In this essay I will focus on how freedom interfaces with the interpersonal relations of the I-Thou.

Freedom and the Interpersonal

Freedom may be even more obviously present in interpersonal relations than in scientific research and contemplative inquiry. In our interpersonal relations we are constantly responding to the ongoing experiences of taking in these other persons. We are experiencing the need for raw creativity in each response. Habitual actions or rote words simply will not do for the pursuing of a realistic personal relationship.

Choice, freedom, invention, initiative, resonance, wildness, are words that describe an interpersonal relationship. If I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal relationship into an object of empirical science, I have lost the full reality of what is taking place.

Similarly, if I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal experience to being helped by another with my interior life, or with my helping another with their interior life, I have again lost the full reality of what is taking place. It is not that our interior lives are missing or do not add to an interpersonal experience, but an interpersonal relation is something more than an enhancement of our contemplative experiences. An interpersonal relationship is an on-going whole-body, whole-mind, whole-consciousness, whole being process that calls forth a challenge to our raw freedom that we may not notice so vividly in our scientific or contemplative quests for truth.

Response-ability for the Inter-personal

So we find ourselves engaged in a responsibility for our personal relations with other humans. We can enhance our wisdom for doing this by taking advantage of the many great books on interpersonal relations. But simply reading these resources is not good enough. We have to apply our interpersonal thoughtfulness to actual interpersonal relationships. Learning to experience our interpersonal freedom comes into play when we are actually living together with someone, working together with someone, spending time together with other human beings who are spending time with us.

There exist in our culture many therapies, workshops, and retreats that include interpersonal learning for people who want to learn these skills. It may be a responsible use of our freedom to get our body to one of these events. If you and one of your interpersonal peers are struggling with the processes of your relationship, it may be a responsible use of your freedom to get the two of you to one of these helpful events. The time and money to do this kind of interpersonal work can be well spent if the wisdom learned is actually worked into our ongoing living.

And when two or more of us are attempting to live together, we will need to set aside daily and weekly times together that are specifically directed toward our interpersonal practices. We may also find helpful a committed membership in a weekly meeting religious practice that takes interpersonal realities seriously.

A Weekly Meeting Christian Circle

Excellent theological study alone will not spawn a vital movement of Christian renewal. Nor will the addition of relevant social activism be enough. A necessary third of this particular trinity of practices is a weekly meeting circle that knows how to practice the I-Thou dynamics of interpersonal relations with a profound level of consciousness.

The sociological fabrics of such a circle consist of having no one leader, priest, guru, or any other such “holy one” in charge of the group. No one personality needs to dominate this practice. Everyone sits in a circle, and symbols of human authenticity are placed in the center of the circle. The only leader is the Christ exemplar (or whatever other model of true humanness holds for this group the essence of being human in this particular religious practice). Perhaps a coffee table has on it three candles that hold the symbolism of the Christ presence. However symbolized, our leader symbolically “sits” in the center of the circle, and every person in the group can reach into that center and embody for a moment or a period of time the overt leadership of the group.

However experienced in deep awareness any one person may be, that person’s leadership capacity is limited, and is balanced with the leadership of others. Every personality quality has limitations as well as gifts. Every self-image is an approximation of our real humanity. All states of being are passing realities. The permanent essential humanness that is potential within each human being sits in the center of the circle as our only complete leader. This complete ending of hierarchical relations, does not make everyone in a group equal in any specific way. We are just equal before God. And each person becomes more aware that each of us who is dedicated to a Christian life is continually faced with this possibility of reaching into that center of the meeting for our moments of approximate Christ leadership.

In this symbolism, I see a primary vision of the future practice of Christianity. I view all those who choose to join a weekly-meeting circle of freedom-loving Christian practices as thereby being washed with a new sort of baptism and being ordained to a new sort of priesthood. We become pastors to one another. We become a co-pastorate to the community or the bioregion where we live, and to the planet on which we dwell. Such an interpersonal intimacy of Christian “life together” is step one toward a viable and vital contemporary Christian practice of renewed religion.

The details of what any group of us do together in our Co-paster Circle can be important as an illustration, but these details should not become a prescribed pattern for all Circles. The patterns for each Circle are only correct when they are decided through a true consensus of those Circle members. And each Circle needs to design some stabilities—stabilities that nevertheless come up for review on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly.

In the circle to which I belong, we open the meeting by lighting three candles and singing a triune song to a secular tune. We end the meeting singing the same song. while extinguishing the three candles. This ritual has worked well for us. We have kept this bit of stability for many years.

The overall drama of the evening is flexible, and evaluated each quarter, but a broad pattern persists: confession, celebration, and dedication are ritual activities that are done in that order. This order of nurture is also has an “inner flow” of conscious states described by these words: humility, gratitude, and compassion.

The first hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to various exercises that provide content to the above ritual framework. These ritual components include singing, dancing, confession, absolution, celebration, and a personally grounding conversation on a small portion of poetry or scripture.

The second hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to the study of a small portion of well-suited written material. We intend to become good students and teachers of one another, using methods that help each other become personally thoughtful about some of the best written resources that are accessible to non-specialists. Study of written material is our default pattern. Occasionally we see a video and hold a spirit discussion of it. Or we may conduct a workshop, hold a celebration, or do an evaluation of the quarter. If a video is the assignment of the evening, the screen sits in the circle with us. A guest from anywhere on the planet might visit us on that screen. Perhaps a film drama visits us. Perhaps a white board sits in the circle with us, and on that white board is a chart of the material we are studying or perhaps the brainstorming of some workshop.

The word “study” has a wide spectrum of meanings, but in our circle we require of each of us to be a good study facilitator who makes our study a spirit-deepening event or an ethical prioritizing event for the living of our specific lives. Good group processes are as important as good written content that is carefully selected for this purpose.

The details of this CoPastor Circle practice matter, but they do not matter ultimately. What matters ultimately is the quality of the interpersonal contact sought in each of these specific activities of these two-hour weekly meetings. This quality has to do with accessing our profound reality—our essential reality that is never absent, though we can be absent from our essential reality. Our aim for having a meeting at all is to occasion openings within our lives toward a return from our ditches of estrangement to our essential reality, and to learn how to live such realism in the temporal flow our lives.

The specific events of return to realism will differ for each person and will differ for the group each week of this practice. What endures is the basic aim of continuing openings within each of us to the call to becoming a Christian priesthood—assisting one another toward a deep realism. By choosing to attend this Circle, we are each allowing the ongoing process of becoming Christ-quality priests or pastors for one another and for our local community. We trust in our forgiveness and in the reality of our fresh starts upon this ever-opening journey into profound consciousness.

Conclusion

This description of the realism and freedom of these interpersonal meetings is only a sketch of this deep topic, but the freedom spoken about in this essay is understood to be an essential part of this interpersonal style of Christianity. Freedom means starting where we are in allowing that ever-deeper movement into where we Eternally are in order to be more creatively real where we temporally are.

These values can also apply to other-than-Christian religious practices.

The post Freedom and the Interpersonal first appeared on Realistic Living.

If English is our home language, our knowledge of that language is approximate. And if we also know Spanish, German, and a little Urdu, we still know only a sliver of the thousands and thousands of languages that have existed. And mathematics? Even if we have moved beyond arithmetic into algebra, solid geometry, the calculus, and differential equations, the world of mathematics is much bigger. The scope of mathematics compares with the scope of all languages. Mathematics, viewed as the ordering capacities of the human mind, is almost boundless. And art? Each of us knows only a sliver of the art produced so far by the human species.

In addition, recall yourself walking through your house in the dark of a night, when you cannot see your hand in front of your face. You still have a sense of space and of time. You can still feel your way. This is a form of intelligence, a form of vivid knowing that you share with the owls, the cats, the reptiles, the dinosaurs, birds, and fish. These pre-symbol-using imagination capacities have been and still are unbelievably vast. Our language-art-&-math formed sort of awareness has only begun to probe what consciousness can know in our pre-language ways. Our knowledge of Reality in its fullness is indeed approximate, open to better approximations, and never complete.

Nevertheless, the Profound Reality that we are approximating can happen to us, can encounter us in its Mysterious Wholeness as a calling to be open to ever-better approximations. This admitted uncertainty in our knowledge is both a negation and an affirmation. It is a negation, for we are all security addicts, who are especially committed to being secure in our current opinions. If, however, we trust Profound Reality enough to be curious about being more realistic in our living, we are volunteering to be insecure in all of our opinions.

In spite of this ultimate insecurity, Profound Reality is also supporting whatever degree of approximations of Reality that we currently enjoy. Herein is the positive side of approximate knowledge: it is an approximation of Profound Reality. This enigmatic awareness of having valid approximations of Reality is an affirmation of support for humanity’s disciplines of learning. Though these disciplines of learning are journeys toward truth, rather than the “end-of-the-road” of truth, they are “journeys toward truth.”

In other essays I have illustrated how even the rather exact nature of the discipline of physics remains approximate, open to further probings of Profound Reality. In this essay I am going to illustrate further what I mean by approximate knowledge within the discipline of learning we call “biology.”

Biological Approximation

I have held in my hand the breast bone of a chicken. Some of we humans call this a wish bone, referring to a game we play with it. But the chicken did not use this bone for wishing, but for breathing. It is an amazingly flexible construction of bone, as well as amazingly strong bone for its very light weight. This bone was well adapted for flying, which chickens gave up some time back.

This particular type of bone was being evolved, perhaps 100,000 years ago, in the lives of the dinosaurs. We can suppose that its light-weight-to-strength characteristics were useful for enabling some needed agileness in the lives of the gigantic members of the dinosaur development.

To me, one of the most amazing facts about this bone is that it is a dead structure that was once part of a living being. It was at one time surrounded inside with living marrow and outside with living muscle. By these living cells it was grown to its current size. It is a wonder to me that such functionally dead devices (along with others like finger nails) are right now parts of our own living bodies. Tree trunks and tree barks are a similar dead construction. The living part of the tree is in the leaves and that thin layer of activity going on between the outer bark and inner wood. The living and the un-living exist together intimately.

So what is it that makes those living parts of our bodies so different from the non-living parts. What is it that makes a beetle so different from a rock? A living cat can tell the difference between a beetle and a rock. So can we humans. A beetle presents to cats and humans an initiative for action not found in a rock. We living creatures recognize that initiative, because we can directly experience that initiative of consciousness within our own beings. This capacity for awareness and aware initiative we commonly call “consciousness.” Let us call the aware-initiative aspect of consciousness “freedom.” In so far as an alive being has a level of consciousness, that being also has a level of freedom. This freedom, I am guessing, evolved in living beings because it enhanced their survival and quality of aliveness.

We humans recognize this freedom in the lives of other animals. We command our cats not to jump up on the table, presuming that these companions in aliveness are free to choose not to do this. We may identify closely with most forms of mammalian life, for we share with these species a wondrous capacity for what I will call “feeling intelligence” or “a capacity for emotional bonding.” Such a powerful extent of feeling intelligence is not found in the turtles, snakes, lizards and other reptiles that we experience. But with these living reptile beings, we also share a quality of consciousness that is described in reflections that arose in India under a heading they called “chakra three,” the gut chakra, a swirl of consciousness that seems to be located in the soar plexus of the human body. This basic quality of conscious assertiveness, however we describe it, we share with the reptiles.

So what is life? What is this aliveness in which consciousness is such an important feature? And what is consciousness? How is it that we are able to build our bones unconsciously and then consciously command our muscles to move those bones?

The scientific approach to truth has taught us much about about living beings; their biochemical constructions, their living processes, their evolution on planet Earth, the interactions of the various species of life to form an eco-system. This knowledge has become amazingly extensive. No one human being can know all the knowledge that the scientific communities of biology have assembled. Yet all of that scientific knowledge does not tell us what we can each know by merely looking inside our own beings. Indeed, we only know aliveness directly through our contemplative inquires into our own inner beings of being alive.

A biology that limits its explorations to the type of inquiry for truth that we apply to physics produces an incomplete grasp of aliveness. Our cat or dog is not merely a chemical and mechanical wonder work, but an aliveness that the scientific approach to truth cannot fathom, Our contemplative approach to the truth cannot fathom aliveness either, but with the contemplative approach to biological reality, we do know aspects of biological reality that our strictly scientific inquiries do not reach.

If we look closely, we can see that even science-emphasizing biologists tend to use their contemplative awarenesses about being living beings into their scientific-theory designing. They then attempt to prove these contemplative-wrought theories with their objective data derived from external observations. This can produce interesting associations, but no explanation of what life is. Nor can we know using physics methods whether life can be derived from physical realities or whether life is in an additional natural reality, as real a gravity, but not in any way accessible with a use of the outward or physical methods of observation.

The above discussion means to me that biology requires two approaches to truth: the “It-approach” of the scientific method and the “I-approach” of contemplative inquiry. Such an awareness has not always been fully applied to our classical theories of evolution. We have been led to think that the process of biological evolution is limited to the cause-and-effect dynamics of environmental adaption and to the accidental probabilities of genetic mutations. We tend to ignore the truth that each of these living beings is making choices all day long, every day of their lives, we are leaving out of consideration how this huge numbers of choices have also been causal factors in the story of evolution.

For example, the birds of a specific species, in choosing a specific habitat and what to eat in that habitat, have thereby added causes to the evolutionary story that resulted over time in the shape of those bird’s beaks. Recognizing these choosing factors does not deny the role of environmental survival factors or accidental mutation factors, but the choices made by living animals add additional causal factors to the course of evolution. There is an objective truth in Thomas Berry’s quip that the gene pool of pre-horses become horses, rather than bison, from their love of galloping.

Denying the power of free choices in all animal life results in a demeaning of the nature of our once-living fossils and of our now-living ameba, worms, fish, turtles, birds, cats, dogs, horses, whales, and so much more. We tend to view these now-living creatures and their evolutionary origins in a too mechanical manner—a manner that omits the conscious awareness and freedom of our choice-making companions in aliveness. Ancient societies of humans, in spite of the superstitious qualities found in their sciences, did do better than we modern cultures do with their seeing and respecting the aware and choosing essence of their animal companions.

Aware humans can also notice that their unique form of consciousness has some extended powers beyond the other mammals due to the advent in our species of language, art, and mathematics. These “symbol-using” means of intelligence have given humans an enhanced predictive power, intuitive awareness, and expanded freedom to manage the circumstances of their lives. This power can be and has been used by we humans to serve our companion creatures, and this power can be and has been used by we humans to oppressively control and disrespect other forms of life and also of the planetary systems of life in which we share. These significant choices made by we humans is an operation of our freedom and thus of both our compassion and our guilt.

When in classical times, religious documents like the Bible took note of this power of humans to dominate the other forms of life, this was taking note of something that was already known for thousands of years. We must not blame the Jewish and Christian scripture writers for inventing human dominance over the other forms of life or for the misuses of that power. Humans have been driving other species into extinction with a reckless use of their advanced powers for at least the last 30 thousand years. Also, when modern Bible lovers use verses about humans dominating other forms of life to justify our vast contemporary misuse of nature, they are not reading the whole Bible. There are many passages in the Psalms and elsewhere that express an awe and respect for the natural world.

And if those verses that refer to this human domination of other forms of life are viewed as simply speaking of the natural power of the human form of consciousness, then Profound Reality has indeed given humans a dominating power over the other forms of life. This plain truth can be used to call our attention to our responsibility for using this “God-given” power to care for this planet, rather than permission to devastate it.

Thomas Berry in his many beautifully written essays has emphasized our need for meaningful narratives that illuminate those huge scopes of facts that make up our physical and biological sciences as well as our human history. For example, instead of using the word “cosmos” suggesting a static reality, Berry has coined the word “cosmogenesis,” thereby suggesting that we see the truth that the natural world has been and still is a progression of eras of emergence quite different than the eras that precede each new era of the natural world.

Within this viewpoint Berry sees the dawn of life on planet Earth as an entirely new form of emergence—“evolution” as compared with the formation of galaxies of stars and planets and the structures of molecular and atomic constituencies. The dawn of the human form of awareness and humanity’s deeper potential for freedom belong to a third new form of cosmic emergence—the cultural, economic, and political history of human social formations. Though the time spans and physical scopes of these three eras of emergence differ greatly, the quality of these shifts is so vast that these three eras compose a meaningful narrative for understanding ourselves as response-able members within this vast cosmogenesis.

Within the story of evolution, Berry also sees some sub-eras of emergence. He claims that in our current time of Earth history, we are experiencing huge changes larger in scope than anything that has happened since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The humans of industrial civilization have made such a huge footprint on this planet that we have bought to an end the Cenozoic Era in which birds, mammals, and finally, humans flourished. We humans are now response-able to choose between two basic qualities for the next era for living forms on this planet. Berry describes this fork in the road of “history” as a choice between creating: (1) a Technozoic Era is which the current trends of industrial civilization continue to destroy the once-flourishing liveliness of this planet or (2) an Ecozoic Era in which we create human societies composed of cultural, economic, and political processes that honor first of all the maintenance of a flourishing planet Earth that provides optimal possibilities for the survival and flourishing of humanity and many other animal companions. Our free devotion to Profound Reality also includes a creative obedience toward maintaining the physical and biological wonders of our Earth.

Approximate Knowledge Perfection

This freedom to have approximate knowledge and only approximate knowledge of Profound Reality applies to all the disciplines of learning. Our learning never arrives at perfection. This is a witness to the limitation of our finite mind and to the finite time we have to educate ourselves. But our approximations of Profound Reality are also our gifts and our glory. There is no use longing for perfect knowledge or for a perfect life. This is it. So let us do our best, however approximate that may be. Living fully this imperfect life is our only perfection.

The post The Freedom to be Approximate 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.

The “you” in the above paragraph is a universal “you.” This “you” also means a universal “we” that includes every “me.” We humans are all tempted to deny our freedom, to flee from our ability to respond to our encounters. In many ways, we typically flee our ability to make free choices of response. We are all already guilty of such flight from freedom.

This freedom of which I speak is not license; it is an obedience to the way life truly is. Yet freedom is not an accomplishment. It is a gift of Profound Reality. To embrace this gift is primal sort of obedience to take on the gift of freedom. And living in obedience to this radical freedom is in its own way more demanding than obedience to any law, norm, or custom.

Lack of freedom is our accomplishment. It is we who have used our freedom to sell our own freedom into slavery, into some addiction, into some fight with our encounters with Reality—that is, we flee from our response-ability to freely respond. To the extent we have fled freedom, we are trapped in a form of slavery to that unreality. We no longer have the freedom to be free. Whenever we stand aside from making serious commitments, we may also be standing aside from accepting our freedom to do so.

Embracing our freedom means risking uncertain commitments. No mate is perfect. No religion is the last word. No cause is more important that many other causes. Any finite value requires a leap of choice. As the baseball philosopher Yogi Berra once put it, “If you came to a Y in the road, take it.” We are always at some Y in the road, some set of roads, all of which cannot be taken. I had enough mathematical talent to be a mathematician, but I did not take that road. I may of had enough musical sensibility to be a professional musician, but I did not take that road. I will never know for sure if those intuitions are true, for I did not risk those roads. I took other roads.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the theologian who convinced me of the primacy of freedom in my understanding of human life. Here are some memorable sentences from pages 248 and 249 of Bonhoeffer’s book that was entitled simply “Ethics.” The following is taken from a translation published in paperback by The MacMillan Company in 1955.

Responsibility and freedom are corresponding concepts. Factually, though not chronologically, responsibility presupposes freedom and freedom can consist only in responsibility. Responsibility is the freedom of men which is given only in the obligation to God and to our neighbor.

In this paragraph Bonhoeffer distinguishes freedom from license. Spirit freedom does not imply being unrestrained or unlimited. Freedom does not mean being released from obligations. It does not mean that our actions are done in independence from the demands and needs of our neighboring beings. It does not mean that our actions are done in independence from the overarching requirement to be realistic—that is, to obey that Profound Reality from which all of us, deluded by our reductionistic egos, attempt to flee. Bonhoeffer is saying that freedom is part of what being realistic means. Any realistic response to God-and-neighbor presupposes freedom. Bonhoeffer’s God is met only in our human neighbors and in all our other neighboring forces. So response to neighbor is response to God.

So what does “God and neighbor” mean? “God,” for Bonhoeffer, means the fullness of Reality when that Reality is understood as “good.” “Neighbor” means the specific human beings in their actual arrangements of encounter with the responding person. “Neighbor” can be expanded to include social fabrics. And “neighbor” can be further expanded to include ecological regions and the Earth as a whole. In other words, God is the Universal Neighbor who is neighboring us in and through all the specific neighboring beings that comprise our actual lives. Realism means noticing that all human actions are responses to this Universal Reality in all the specific impingements upon the responding person. In other words “God-and-neighbor” is one hyphenated word.

In this next paragraph Bonhoeffer begins by describing how freedom is an aspect of our actual decision making. I am going to break down this long paragraph into segments.

The responsible man acts in the freedom of his own self, without the support of men, circumstances or principles, but with a due consideration for the given human and general conditions and for the relevant questions of principle.

The above sentence challenges every mode of finding moral certainty by referring to externals as a justification for our decisions. By “men” Bonhoeffer means every person in our lives to whom we might go for advice or support for our choices. Bonhoeffer supports us in giving consideration to all these other persons, but we must ourselves decide how much consideration is due. Even if we decide that very much consideration is due, we are still the one making the decision. Our advisors cannot be blamed. Our advisors provide no excuse or support for the choices we make.

Similarly, the circumstances within which and about which we are deciding do not support our decision. Though in our responsible freedom we will give those circumstances consideration, we will choose how much consideration and what kind of consideration is due. For example, let us suppose that we are deciding about being a whistle blower on some illegal practice of the company we work for. Let us suppose that our considerations include the high probability of losing our job if we do this. Let us suppose that our considerations include discerning whether the law being violated is a good law and whether the action of the company is highly or marginally destructive. Freedom means making this decision without support of the fact that we may lose our job. Freedom means making this decision without support of the fact that our family may be without financial support. Freedom means making this decision without support of the fact that we may feel dirty working for this company if its bad practices are not corrected. Freedom means making this decision without support of the fact that the law being violated is imperfect and the damages being done are felt by some people to be excusable. Freedom means making this decision without support of any kind. Freedom means that we and we alone are responsible for this choice.

Further, we make this decision in due consideration of relevant principles but without support of those principles. Many principles might apply in the above example. “Financially provide for your family.” “Don’t collude with corruption.” “Don’t lie.” “Obey the law.” “Protect your superiors.” “Tell the truth.” “Preserve the natural environment.” “Improve society.” “Make the world a better place.”

Not only do these principles conflict with one another, none of them may be completely appropriate for this particular situation. Freedom means choosing without support of these and any other principles. Freedom also means giving such principles due consideration and deciding how much consideration is due.

Instead of making such free decisions we often react out of the principles embedded in our superego or in what we sometimes call our “conscience.” The responsible person acts in the freedom of his or her own self without support of conscience or superego.

When we actually experience what this freedom feels like, we become aware that freedom is a profound actuality in our essential makeup. We may become aware of how rarely we embody this freedom. So how do we even know when we are living our essential freedom? Bonhoeffer answers:

The proof of his freedom is the fact that nothing can answer for him, nothing can exonerate him, except his own deed and his own self.

Here is the proof that we are not free: some external person or circumstance or principle is answering for us, is making the decision for us, is telling us that we are certainly doing the right thing. Uncertainty with regard to all these external measures is the proof that we are acting in freedom. Freedom is a leap into the sheer mystery of time. beyond all our approximate certainties. Bonhoeffer continues:

It is he himself who must observe, judge, weigh up, decide and act. It is man himself who must examine the motives, the prospects, the value, and the purpose of his action.

Bonhoeffer has listed the elements that an ethical thinker might use to justify a decision. The responsible person does not simply close his or her eyes and leap. No, the responsible person observes, looks at the inward and outward factors, makes judgments about what is seen, weighs up the various values, and only then selects the course of action and then actually carry out that action.

In responsibility we are examining inward motives, outward prospects, various values, and purposes. But do our “good” motives make the action right? Do out “good” prospects make it right? Does some value end all debate about this decision? Is there some purpose that, when followed, makes every attempt to achieve that purpose a good choice? “No!” is Bonhoeffer’s answer.

But neither the purity of the motivation, nor the opportune circumstances, nor the value, nor the significant purpose of an intended undertaking can become the governing law of his action, a law to which he can withdraw, to which he can appeal as an authority, and by which he can be exculpated and acquitted. For in that case he would no longer be truly free.

With these sentences Bonhoeffer has completed the first part of this paragraph, which has to do with the responsible person. He has said that the responsible person acts in the freedom of his or her own self, and he means that radically. Freedom does not exist if that person claims certainty on the basis of any of the considerations that he or she makes. The Bible, the law of the land, one’s own conscience, nothing can answer for the vulnerable, fragile, uncertain, risking self of radical freedom.

In the remainder of this paragraph, Bonhoeffer speaks of the action of the responsible person.

The action of the responsible man is performed in the obligation which alone gives freedom and which gives entire freedom, the obligation to God and to our neighbor as they confront us in Jesus Christ.

What does it mean for an obligation to give freedom, or for an obligation not to give freedom? The obligation to one’s nation does not give entire freedom. The well-being of one nation conflicts with the well-being of other nations. If the boundary of our obligated-ness is our own nation, we are not free in all cases to do what is appropriate for the well-being of other nations or of humanity as a whole. A similar sort of limitation of our freedom is in place when we make our family the boundary of our obligated-ness. Bonhoeffer says that only one obligation gives us entire freedom—God-and-neighbor. What he means by “God-and-neighbor” I have already commented on above. To say that “God-and-neighbor confront us in Jesus Christ” means that this Inclusive Reality and all its specific components confront us in the perspective won for us by Jesus who was signified as the Messiah. What is that perspective? It is the vision that living the Inclusive Reality is good for us, that this Inclusive Reality is like a loving and loyal Parent that is operating for our highest and deepest well-being.

This revelation is not a set of sentences that drop into our rational mind. This revelation is a opportunity for full aliveness that we can opt for with our radical freedom. Faith is a deed of commitment, not a set of beliefs.

Obligated freedom before God-and-neighbor is a calling to action for our own good and for the good of all humanity and nature. Such and obligation to freedom is worth our deepest obedience. So what does that obedience look like? Bonhoeffer’s “obedience” can also be described as “freedom.” And what is freedom? Bonhoeffer has already told us that freedom means deciding on our own without support of humans, principles, or circumstances.

Bonhoeffer continues to talk about the qualities of the action of the responsible person.

At the same time it is performed wholly within in the domain of relativity, wholly in the twilight which the historical situation spreads over good and evil; it is performed in the midst of the innumerable perspectives in which every given phenomenon appears. It has not to decide simply between right and wrong and between good and evil, but between right and right and between wrong and wrong. As Aeschylus said, “right strives with right.”

These may be the most plainspoken sentences in the entire paragraph. Every actual decision we make in the real world is made in the twilight. No decision is as clear as day. No decision is as dark as night. We have some guiding light from our centuries of living and the memories that our traditions preserve for us, but our actual situation is new, unprecedented, without absolutely clear parallels with any other moment. There are many ways to view our situation, not one of which can claim exclusive validity. So Bonhoeffer can go on to say:

Precisely in this respect responsible action is a free venture; it is not justified by any law; it is performed without any claim to an ultimate valid knowledge of good and evil.

Can we ever know if our actions are ultimately good or ultimately evil? No, such knowledge is forbidden to the human species. We act in ignorance. We act in uncertainty. We might keenly desire ethical certainty, but having such certainty is an illusion. And illusions of every sort might be said to be “forbidden” by Reality. Herein is the meaning of the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The tree, the fruit of which original humanity was and is forbidden to eat, was named “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It was not the tree of knowledge. It was not the tree of curiosity. It was the tree of moral certainty. It was the tree of knowing what was right and what was wrong. It was the tree of having an ultimate valid knowledge of good and evil.

So whenever human beings think they have such knowledge, they are committing the original estrangement from Reality. Indeed, knowing good and evil looks good to eat. Such certainty might be deeply desired. As the tempter in that story said, “We could be wise like God.” Yet, we cannot. The knowledge of good and evil is forbidden by Reality. In order to be authentic, we must live “beyond good and evil.” We must live in freedom.

Bonhoeffer concludes this paragraph with a sentence on what good action means when we are living beyond good and evil.

Good, as what is responsible, is performed in the ignorance of good and in the surrender to God of the deed which has become necessary and which is nevertheless, or for that very reason, free; for it is God who sees the heart, who weighs up the deed, and who directs the course of history.

The good of responsible action is performed in ignorance of any ultimate good or any ultimate evil. It is not necessary for us to know ultimate good and evil, for we are surrendering the deed to God. What does this mean? We might note that “God” already has our deeds. Just try to get a deed back. You can’t. So you might as well surrender it. Why do we cling to our deeds? We cling to them in order to pat ourselves on the back for our good deeds or to beat ourselves over the head for our bad deeds. Surrendering our deeds means accepting God’s judgment and forgiveness for them.

The meaning of “forgiveness” is letting God have our deeds to judge them and use them in whatever way. That is Reality already has our done deeds, we don’t get to take them back. So “God” as Inclusive Reality can be said to view the full truth of the heart out of which these deeds have come and can render the only true judgment of their worth. And “God” as the Power of Time Unfoldment that is determining the consequences of those done deeds in the outcomes of history.

The next paragraph of Bonhoeffer’s thought begins with these sentences:

With this, there is disclosed to us a deep secret of history in general. The man who acts in the freedom of his own most personal responsibility is precisely the man who sees his action finally committed to the guidance of God.

Here is a fresh view of what “the guidance of God” means. It is not that God shares some principles of judgment with the minds of humans. Rather God requires freedom. If freedom is rendered, one is following the guidance of God. If freedom is not rendered, then one is in bondage to some lesser loyalty than God. We are either living in obedient freedom or we are a slave of our ego, superego, the culture in which one lives, the personality habits that we have developed, the panic to be correct in one’s action, or perhaps the sheer arrogance of having to know that we are right. There is an endless list of such ungodly commitments. To be committed to the guidance of God is freedom. To act in freedom is to be committed to the guidance of God.

The free venture knows itself as divine necessity.

Such a perspective fosters a boldness and a confidence and a certainty that makes all our moral certainties appear as petty as they are. Freedom is our human essence. We need not settle for something less.

Finally, we have to freely live our freedom or we lose our freedom in becoming a flight from freedom into some false world of our own making. This false self and its false world will face the impact of Reality. Our fight with Reality will reveal itself as a hopeless estrangement which goes by the name of “despair.” The truth of freedom casts out despair and gives us a fresh start in the righteousness of freedom.

As Paul charges the faithful in his letter to the Galatians, “Plant your feet firmly therefore within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery.” Galatians 5:1 J. B. Phillips

The post Commitment to Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

Evolution is more complicated than cause or chance explanations can fathom. Choice is another human explanation that must take its place alongside cause and chance explanations. The myth that cause and effect can be the whole explanation for the doings of nature is incomplete. The myth that probability explanations can completely fill the gaps that cause explanations cannot handle is also incomplete. The human explanation called “choice” is also required to handle our experience of this ever-more mysterious actuality we call “nature,” or perhaps “Final Reality.”

Watching our cat choose or not choose to jump up on the table is another bit of data for my master view of thoughtfulness about nature. This choice is being made by this cat who knows it would be easy and fun to do this and who also knows that I strongly disapprove of this behavior. This cat is not using my language and mathematical skills to make this choice. His mental mechanisms are composed of more primitive multi-sensory reruns that I call “images,” rather then “symbols.” But these mental processes, that I also use, are good enough for cat consciousness to make all sorts of choices that make cat life what cat life is.

I am blessed with a power of consciousness that uses art, language, and mathematical symbols to make choices no cat has the power to make. Even a worm has a level of consciousness, and worm consciousness also makes choices. “Nature” we might say waits to “work out” what the future will be until each worm, cat, and human decides what his or her gift of consciousness will choose to add to the history-making process.

Herein is my description of what consciousness is: attention and intention—taking in reality and putting forth reality-bending acts. We also call these two dynamics “awareness and freedom.” In all levels of its intensity, consciousness is both of these dynamics. Consciousness is always both awareness and freedom.

As a human being, I am not only determined by millions of causally understood forces, but I am also myself a determining force—a freedom sourced in the essence of my human consciousness. My choices make a difference in the course of time. Nature as a whole waits to decide what the future will be until I decide what I will be and do now.

Let us notice that the explanation “choice” points to a truth about nature that differs infinitely from the explanations of “cause” or “chance.” Choice means opting for an option based on no cause and no chance. In this sense, every choice is a choice out of nothing except choice itself. If there is some cause for a choice, then it is not a choice. If there is some probability for a choice then it is not a choice. Choice is a third overall explanation of events that differs completely from cause and chance explanations. So let us look more closely to these three ways of interpreting events.

Cause

Is “cause and effect” a pattern of nature, a pattern of the human mind, or both. It is both, but it exists in nature as something different than how it exists in the human mind. In nature “cause and effect” means an approximation of the workings of nature. In the human mind “cause and effect” means a creation of the human consciousness using the human mind. What is not true is that cause-and-effect explanations can explain everything. Yes, Reality is one huge connectedness, but that connected wholeness is more complex than a cause-and -effect network of reasoning. Nature is mysterious beyond all our cause-and-effect interpretations. The truth about nature is more complex than “causes we have not yet discovered.” Nature breaths a Mysteriousness or a Profound Reality that no finite mind (horse, cat, or human) may never be able to fathom. A thousand years from now humans will fathom more, but will that be all? As far as you and I are concerned, the answer to this questions is currently unfathomable. I am not standing aside from this questions. I am guessing our knowledge will always be limited by the finitude for the human mind.

Chance

Chance or probability is another creation of the human mind that can also be an approximation of nature. We use it all the time. When we throw a six-sided dice that is carefully carved and well balanced, each side has an approximately equal chance of landing upward. You might be able to explain that side coming up with a few thousand tiny causes, but you cannot measure them, so probability is a type of explanation we use quite frequently. The whole of what we call “statistics” uses a probability type of mathematics. And probability explanations differ profoundly from cause and effect explanations.

In the super-microscopic realm of sub-atomic processes of tiny discrete energy quanta we find our situation to be somewhat like throwing dice. The mathematics of probability serves us very well in this realm. The attempt to measure causes and their effects is rendered impossible by the fact that our measuring beams significantly change what we are attempting to measure. In this realm of nature we also run into the strange truth that every distinguishable item turns out to be a ripple in an energy field that spans the universe. This means that every entity in this realm of physical reality can be visualized as both a discrete particle and a wave in a comic-wide field. I will not attempt to describe those complexities further in this essay. For now, I only want to note for our overall thinking that the truth about nature has been expanded by the chance/probability mode of careful thoughtfulness, right alongside cause and effect explanations. We can arrive at wonderfully accurate approximations about the goings-on in the sub-atomic realm using probability thoughtfulness. We don’t need to know the minute causes.

Einstein, you may recall, complained about having to stop with these probability explanations with the comment that he “did not believe God played dice with the universe.” I take this to mean that Einstein preferred rendering the truth of every natural process in terms of a mathematics of the cause-and-effect type of thinking.

Choice

If this conflict between probability explanations and cause-and-effect explanations gives a lurch to our hope of having a “rational view” of Reality, the explanation we call “choice” further frustrates any hope of creating a rational view of the every-thing-ness of our lives. Yet, we find ourselves using the choice interpretation all the time. For example, in playing a game of cards we not only use probability to predict the next card we draw and cause and effect to explain moving a card in our hand to the table, but we also use choice to describe playing our queen rather than our ace in that often-faced crossroads in the game of bridge.

Also, we expect our cat to make the choice to remain on the floor or in a chair rather than jump up on the table. We commonly assume that even grasshoppers (with a consciousness more limited than cats) make choices. When a grasshopper in my garden becomes aware of my presence, she (perhaps he) moves to the opposite side or the stem on which she is clinging and apparently assumes a readiness to leap off in an opposite direction from me if she is further observed or threatened.

I am willing to hypothesize that all living forms have a level of consciousness, and that all these levels of consciousness manifest both of these two dynamics of consciousness: awareness and choice, attentionality and intentionality, presence and freedom.

So what is a choice? Some have attempted to show that every choice is so conditioned by cultural influences, peer-group expectations, personality patterns, and other near invisible causes that a choice is actually nothing more than a figment of our imagination, or that choice is an after-thought about our totally determined actions. In other words, that living beings are an unbroken system of causes. To say this means that we are guessing that human consciousness does not actually intend anything; it simply watches.

But no creative artist actually believes that their consciousness simply watches. A poet, a novelist, a painter, a composer, a choreographer experiences their own consciousness creating something new out of the many products, trends, and influences that surround them. This bit of newness comes from nowhere other than that conscious being’s consciousness. It comes from human freedom being freedom. It comes from choice being choice. “Choice” we might say is an uncaused cause bending the course of history alongside many other causes.

Humans are especially gifted in being benders of history. Thousands of other forces condition history to be its actual outcomes, but human freedom adds a cause to all these other causes. Or to put all this in another metaphor: we humans are response-able. We are able to respond to the cosmos of realities approaching us in history. I am going to accuse most people who deny this response-ability that they are hoping to handle their guilt by denying the existence of guilt. The courage to confess guilt and trust its forgiveness is how guilt is handled in most of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thoughtfulness.

We spirit descendants of Abraham have commonly spoken of confronting Profound Reality and of responding to this encounter. We have not meant that as an illusory reflection, but as a prime agony in the now of living. Life has been described as a process of dialogue: Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou-I-Thou. “Thou” gets the first and the last word in this dialogue, but the human also speaks back to this Thou-of-Total-Reality and then this Thou-of-Total-Reality speaks back to the “I” of human consciousness. This is metaphorical talk, but it is artful talk about the actual historical flow of time as lived by a human being.

Spirit Freedom

“Spirit Freedom” can be defined as human consciousness operating beyond the rational expressions of art, language, and mathematics. Of course we can point to causes that are functioning in all the performances of our bodies and psyches, but Spirit Freedom is NOT CAUSED by any other factor than our own consciousness consciously intending a contribution to some specific action of our being.

This understanding of freedom is a Western interpretation of the existential meaning of the Buddhist “no self” awareness. We can agree with the East that our human self image or ego is merely an idea created by the human. Such a self-created “self” is nowhere to be found in our actual experience. What we can find, however, is this NOTHINGNESS of UNCAUSED SPIRIT FREEDOM.

Consider the life of a research scientist who is seeking to create a better causal explanations for the events of nature. His or her act of creating a whole new theory of science is not itself caused by some causal conditioning. The scientist with his or her own Spirit Freedom creates that new theory that then proves it to be a better approximation of the causal factors of some specific set of natural processes. Scientific research is a super-rational process of thoughtfulness that is, nevertheless, at its creative core irrational inventiveness. Or if you wish, scientific research is trans-rational; it dips into a creative freedom that we sometimes call “intuition.” “Intuition” is a word that we use for a sort of thoughtfulness for which we have no causal explanation. “Sprit Freedom” names this intending side of whatever the word “intuition” is indicating on the awareness side of our profound consciousness.

It is understandable that the poetry of Christian theology calls both intuition and Spirit Freedom “Holy Spirit” and views “Holy Spirit” as a “wind” breathed from the mouth of that Final Source or Profound Reality that is the God-devotion of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus—Sarah, Deborah, and Mary—and perhaps you and me.

The post The Choices of Horses first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

Cats

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

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

Humans

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

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

Religion

India has also illuminated for us two more swirls of consciousness— chakras six and seven. Chakra six is located in the center of the forehead, commonly called the third eye consciousness. Therapists often call this ability “the third ear.” It actually has nothing to do with a literal eye or ear. Chakra six has to do with a direct seeing and a hearing by our human consciousness in ways that reach beyond the reach of art, language, and mathematics. Strange as it can seem to the common mind, consciousness can reach into a larger than rational Reality. We sometimes call this swirl of consciousness “intuition.” There is no way to properly understand “religion” if this aspect of consciousness is ignored.

The seventh chakra or swirl of consciousness that India observed was located at the crown of the head. Chakra seven is pictured as the most rapid spin of conscious awareness. We might even say that this swirl is swirling beyond the head, thereby connecting the crowns of the human to the entire cosmos. We find a discussion of this aspect of our human essence in Paul Tillich’s use of the word “Unconditional.” Tillich contrasts our conscious experiences of the Unconditional with our consciousness of conditional realities—realities that are impermanent, like moments, days, human bodies, planets, stars, electromagnetic radiation, feelings, pains, pleasures, thoughts, and impulses—everything that comes into being stays a while and passes back into the abyss.

We can only talk about our relationship with the Unconditional using mythic forms of language. For example, the first verse of the Bible uses a mythic form of human talk. Here is a restatement of that mythic verse in the symbols of Tillich’s vocabulary.

In the beginning was the Unconditional from which all conditional things and processes came to be and continue coming to be.

This is still mythic talk, for saying “In the beginning was” is to speak of a “time” before time began—a time before temporality or impermanence came into process. Any speech about our consciousness being directed toward the Unconditional will be mythic speech. Religion depends on mythic talk—cryptic language of some sort, such as enlightenment, resurrection, virgin birth, and hundreds of other cryptic symbols.

The Antiquity of Religion

Our symbol-using human consciousness began among some ancient upright-walking chimpanzees over a million years ago. Symbol using began with very elemental mental forms that evolved into art, language, and mathematics. We can ask ourselves which of these symbolic forms was the oldest, the most ancient, and in that sense the most basic to the structures of human consciousness.

Many linguists would say that language is older than mathematics and that poetic language is older than prose language. Based on my current intuition as well as a bit of outward data from archeological digs, I intuit that dance and sculpture are even older than poetic language. Just as the more abstract symbols of mathematics formed later than language, so the symbols of language formed later than these pre-linguistic arts. Sculpture is surely older than painting. Dance is surely older than music.

It may be true that those first sculptures were also icons used to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. It may also be true that those first dances were also rituals used to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. If that be true, then icon and ritual are religious forms that are older than language.

I have just done some informed guesses about very ancient origins. Let us notice some implications of these guess. A special sort of religion is being viewed as more basic to human consciousness than language or mathematics. Ritual, icon, and eventually myth have long been used by hominid species to direct human consciousness toward the Unconditional. Therefore, such Unconditional-oriented religion is a foundation of the human form of consciousness. So we can view religion, when so understood, as a basic practice taking place at or near the origin of the chakra-five uniquely human mode of consciousness.

Therefore, any thoroughgoing reinvigoration of any religion—Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.—requires a deep dive into this essential nature of religion that directs us toward the Unconditional—in order for there to be any valid sort of reinvention or reformation of that religion. This also means that any religion that is validly religious in this Unconditional-referencing manner can be viewed as an example of an essential social process alongside art, language, mathematics, education, politics, and sewage disposal.

Like all manifest social processes, a specific expression of religion can become obsolete or corrupt. But religion, as the directing of human consciousness toward the Unconditional, is an essential social process, a healthy social form that we cannot do without. We have discovered here an axiom of thought for fostering the good of the entire scope of social health. Such “good” religion is foundational for a healthy society.  Religion, so understood, is not an option, but a necessity.

This thread of consideration will be continued in 2020.

The post Cats, Humans, and Religion 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.

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.