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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Yes or No first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Response-Able first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Truth is One:
Forgiveness.

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

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

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

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

There is one Truth:
Forgiveness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Forgiveness first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

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

So, let me tell you more about this trip.

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

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

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

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

Seeing the Dazzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more commentary on the Gospel of Mark see:

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

The post Religion and Culture first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essential Freedom

Essential freedom comes to us as a package deal with an essential trust in Profound Reality and an essential type of love (the agape that Paul says is the greatest gift). Ultimate Trust, Total Affirmation, and Complete Freedom come to us as an enigmatic wind—blowing through our fragile lives. Christians have called this package-deal “Holy Spirit.”

“Holy Spirit” is Christian vocabulary, but Christians do not own the real Holy Spirit. This Trust, Love, and Freedom is our human essence—accessible to persons practicing an other-than-Christian religion, or no religion at all.

In order to manifest our essential or Holy Spirit freedom we have to relinquish our flight from freedom—our fatalistic excuses; our compulsive addictions; our clinging to self-justifying moralisms, beliefs, delusory safety, and raw cowardice.

To understand the reality of Spirit freedom we need a deeper view of the word “Reality.” This capitalized word “Realty” or “Profound Reality” points to the Eternal Governing of all events. Such Governing is providing to humans their limited, but real freedom. Such freedom is itself awesome and downright terrifying because it entails uncaused choices, raw responses of our primal “response-ability.” The only justification for our free deeds is freedom itself. To manifest this essential freedom, we have to embrace forgiveness for all our un-freedom, and for all the consequences of our unfree deeds and even of our free deeds. To live in such an obedience of free responses to Reality requires trust in the forgiveness of Reality before, during ,and after each action.

Living within this Eternal Governance is opening to the reality of a perpetual fresh start on the other side of all our choices that were well or poorly conceived, well or poorly enacted. We never arrive at a state different than the one indicated by this phrase: “sinners saved by grace.” Such humility is the nature of the obedience of being our Spirit freedom.

Political Freedom

A human government does not grant Spirit freedom, and a human government cannot prevent Spirit freedom no matter how hard it strives to oppose it. So what sort of freedom can a human government grant? It can grant freedom to participate in the processes of governing, freedom of participation in the fruits of social living, and the freedom to quest for truth and to live by the truth we find.

Government can grant us the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government can grant us the right to own property that is our very own. Government can grant us the right to share in common properties such a air, water, parks, streets, buildings, transportation systems, economic systems, healthy environments, safety, protection from harm, etc. All these granted rights or freedoms are limited by definitions that protect such rights for other people and that promote the stability of the society to grant rights to anyone. “Justice” is a word that is used to indicate appropriate distribution of these freedoms to all people.

So how is the Eternally-Granted Freedom related to
these Human-Government-Granted Freedoms

Citizens of a democratic government are entrusted to use their Eternally-granted Spirit freedom to create and maintain the human-government-granted freedoms. The imperfections in the citizens access to their essential freedom limits the success of the democratic vision. Also, those citizens who choose to see themselves as elites who rule over rather than with and on behalf of all the other citizens, limit democracy or openly oppose democracy in favor of a more authoritarian, or even totalitarian form of society.

So democracy is always a work in progress. Democracy is never complete, even when a democracy has moved from democracy for male property owners to an inclusion of black former slaves; an inclusion of women voters; and on safety-nets for the struggling, the old, and the disabled. More democracy can also be about who is empowered politically and who is and is not given economic opportunities.

The idea that society must be a monopoly-game competition in which there are huge winners and big-time losers is an anti-democratic notion. A fully democratic society of citizen freedoms will manifest a balance between cooperation and competition, between empathy and personal striving, between personal power and personal benevolence.

Such an understanding of a perpetually improving, freedom-granting democracy is more revolutionary than our typical pessimism can easily embrace.

Pampering aristocracies while controlling commoners is not the only possibility for a sociological mode for human societies. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were beginners—escaping from total tyranny to a bare beginning of democracy for a some white, Protestant, male, property owners—a freedom that did not trickle-down, but had to to be fought for on behalf of both slaves and women, and it is still being fought for descendants of both these two groups and many other groups.

The expansion of democracy is a battle not yet over, and a fuller democracy is strongly opposed by powerful authoritarian forces. No one can openly watch the current news without seeing that a fight needs to be won for Muslims, for Hispanic immigrants, and for a huge number of unemployed, underemployed, and underpaid citizens. How can we revere the earlier victories for democracy and still let the U.S nation coast into a reactionary-white-nationalist authoritarianism?

So how is our Eternally-granted Spirit freedom related to our government-granted political freedom? It takes the exercise of our Spirit freedom to insist upon a political freedom for ourselves and for all others who neighbor us. If this sounds like Biblical scripture, it is because it is. Such activism is part of what was once called “being the people of God.”

How a practitioner of Christianity can combine their so-called Christianity with being in a hate group is just plain weird. If we do not want for all human beings the political freedom we want for ourselves, we have lost sight of the fact that God-and-neighbor is a hyphenated phrase in Christian scripture. If we do not care for the neighbors we see, we do not care trust, obey, or care for the unseen Profound Reality that is confronting us in the provision of these neighbors. So-called Christians who claim that their religion is separate from their politics have overlooked the very essence of Christian faith.

The post Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.