For example “angels” and “devils” need no longer be pictured as literal beings but as processes of Awe and temptations to unrealism that characterize the actual lives of every human being.  Such a discovery is actually a rediscovery of what many Christians throughout the ages were actually referencing with such terms.  The ancient language can be translated into the poetry of our own times.  And the solitary and communal practices of this deep heritage can come alive again in ways that enrich our lives in the real world.

For further exploration of these topics consider these two links to books fully discussed on this web site:

2013  The Love of History and the Future of Christianity
Toward a Manifesto for a Next Christianity

1994  To Be or Not to Be a Christian
Meditations and Essays on Authentic Christian Community

The post And Why Practice a New Form of Christianity? first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solitary Discipline

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

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

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

Reading Contemplative-Dialogue Sources

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

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

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

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

Practicing Basic Mediation-type Exercises

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

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

Articulating Our Life Intents

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

The post Freedom and Aloneness first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

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

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

Determined to be Freedom and Free to be Determined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measure-ability

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

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

The Truth of Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subjective and Objective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Science and Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

The writer of the Gospel of John placed these startling words in the mouth of Jesus. In John’s stories, the statements of Jesus are about the essence of Christian faith within any human being. In the above verse, John is witnessing to the radical freedom of the Christian life in overcoming death in a way that is more radical than simply accepting death as part of our lives. The life of Christian faith includes intending our death for the causes that we alone choose to make “death ground” for the living of our lives.

So, if I am a person of faith, no ruling power of my society takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No power of nature takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No God or Goddess takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will.

This means that no oil company can take my life from me when I insist upon phasing out fossil fuels, because I am already laying down my life for the moderation of the climate catastrophe. No pharmaceutical or health insurance company can take my life from me when I insist upon a government administrated Medicare-for-All type of justice, because I am laying my life down of my own free will for an affordable healthcare provision for all persons in my society of responsibility, and also for the human species as a whole. If I make these causes my death ground, pubic health has taken on a meaning for me that no insurance company can intimidate.

The phrase “free will” as meant in the above scripture is about every human being’s essential freedom to act beyond biological impulses; beyond personality impulses; beyond sociological conditioning, beyond the norms & laws; beyond superego voices of restraint; beyond conscience ,if conscience is seen as internalized sociality.

If freedom is lost in my life, it is because I have employed my freedom in giving away my freedom. This can be a simple act of mimicry of my peers. However complicated be my loss of freedom, freedom is still my essential being, even if I cannot now recover it. Perhaps I am still free enough to pray to the Giver of freedom to restore my freedom.

When I am free to be free, I can make this free response in obedience to the Giver of my freedom and to the neighbors given to me by this All-encompassing Giver. I do this freedom alone, but I do freedom in active surrender to a cosmos of people and events.

Being my God-given freedom includes“freely giving back” to the Giver of my life all the gifts of my life, including my life itself. “No force whatsoever takes my life from me. I lay my life down of my own free will.” This is an expression of and also a definition of true Christian faith. Jesus is our exemplar. We follow him. As pictured by John in the above passage, Jesus defines our Christian faith. This is clearly the view of the writer of the Fourth Gospel. But our essential humanness is not so because John says it is so. John says it is so because this freedom is an aspect of the essence of our being human. Jesus is the Christ because he opens for us a return to our essential humanness—a human essence that includes the freedom to ”lay down our life of our own free will.”

Now of course, if I don’t lay down my life, I die anyhow. But not intending my death means that I “back into my grave” instead of “going forward” toward my grave “headfirst,” so to speak. Of course, death may grab me at any time, but death will happen to me as I am either expending my life of my own free will or as I am refusing to do so. Perhaps my whole life is about just trying not to die. Or perhaps I am dedicated to resentfully wasting away. But such passive relationships with my life and death are not necessary. Within whatever circumstances of life I am living, including my closing days, I can lay my life down of my own free will, or I can live otherwise. With whatever bits of awareness remains for me, I can intend my living with whatever powers I have left.

That is, I can lay my life down if I am experiencing my essential freedom. If I have sold my freedom into slavery, then I cannot be a person who freely lays down my life, I must serve whatever lesser values I have sold out my freedom to serve. So perhaps I cannot lay down my life of my own free will, because, at the present time, I have no free will with which to do that. Perhaps I am refusing to have my freedom because I deny the very existence of freedom, or at least my freedom. Perhaps I simply refuse the response-ability of being free. Perhaps I am so trapped in my serious addictions that my freedom would be an agony for me—an agony I do not choose to live through to the realization of my essential freedom, glory, and tranquil joy.

If I am being my freedom and indeed laying my life down of my own free will, what does this look like. It does not necessarily appear all that extraordinary. If I am president of the United States, laying down my life of my own free will basically mean doing what is expected of me—namely, using this office to serve the people rather than using this set of privileges and powers to serve myself and my narrow set of interests. Or to put this more carefully, do I let being president serve me in the context of my serving the people, or do I provide a scrap of service to the people in the context of the presidency serving me. For of course, this role of presidency does serve me, not just my support, comfort, and pleasure, but my felt need to make a contribution, to have a purpose, and other values. Are these services to myself done in the context of laying my life down for the people? Or is whatever good I grudging do for the people done in the context of my being served by this role?

Or take the more ordinary case of my having chosen to provide my own life support with a plumbing business. The same dynamics apply to plumbing as to being president. Do I do this plumbing in resentment about having to do this “dirty” work—seeing it only as “necessary” for my survival, or do I lay my life down of my own free will in the service of the plumbing needs of my community? In this latter case, I continue to learn and to improve what I do. I make an art of plumbing. I do not even call it “dirty work”—at least not any more dirty than what a politician has to put up with. It is simply my work. No one is taking my life from me: I am laying my life down of my own free will.

The Truth of Response-Ability

A core truth in both of the above illustrations is that our lives are not being freely given unless we are actually giving our lives in the exercise of freedom within the actual particulars that are being given to us by the Almighty Giver. If I view my life as an already determined drama that is destined to work out the only way it can, then there is no laying down of my life of my own free will. I am viewing myself as a complicated piece of rock, water, and air for which all my processes are being determined by a fixed fate.

Of course there are many forces impacting me—forces over which I have no control or even knowledge. But I am also an aware being, and that awareness includes not just watching, but also being response-able to a significant degree. Being a recipient of this gift of the ability for free response, I am thereby responsible for all my response-able responses.

Nikos Kazantzakis in his book-length poem entitled “The Saviors of God” provided us with words that might be viewed as the voice of Jesus on this topic of freedom unto death:

“You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms.

Which road should you take? The most craggy assent! It is the one I also take: follow me.

Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.

Learn to command, Only he who can give commands may represent me on earth.

Love responsibility. Say: “It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.” (Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Saviors of God. pages 67 & 68)

These words describe a commitment to the gift of radical freedom, and they also imply a deep guilt in my not living my free responsibility. Taking on such a radical commitment does not mean that our choices always succeed in saving the values we seek to save. Our freedom is indeed a finite power. Our power to bend the course of history is limited. We will, therefore., be guilty of failures, as well as guilty of mistakes. In addition we may even be guilty of betraying our gift of freedom through crawling back, in a cowardly fashion, into one of our well-practiced slaveries.

Nevertheless, in the practice of an authentic version of Christian faith, we can resist the temptation of the determinists and fatalists who tell us that we have no guilt, because everything works out the only way it can in accord with some overall dance in which we play no role in creating the choreography to which we dance. Instead of attempting to handle our guilt in this illusory way, we can take on a full consciousness of our guilt, when we are also taking on a full forgiveness from the Profound Reality that judges us guilty of our unrealism.

This Christian faith not only resists the notion of a totally determined existence, but also views each conscious moment as a fork in the road between being our freedom and fleeing our freedom. We have to choose which fork to take. Choosing freedom has a different quality than choosing slavery. Choosing freedom is a surrender to the gift of freedom as it is being given to us in the situation of each moment of choice. We do not accomplish freedom. We do not create freedom. We choose the freedom that is being given to us with which we at the same time are freely choosing among the options that lie before us.

On the other hand, choosing slavery is choosing an obliteration of the freedom already being given. My choosing slavery as my operating identity creates a slave version of me from which I am not empowered to escape. Choosing slavery renders a bondage of our will—a bondage of our own choosing for which we are responsible. Freedom cannot be chosen by a will that is bound in slavery to something other than realism. The will that was meant for freedom is no longer free. The will is now caged within a prison cell of a slavery that we have chosen. The restoration of our essential freedom requires that Profound Reality come to our rescue, restoring us to that deep realism that includes freedom.

The gift of freedom means that we are now free to leave the cage of slavery through enacting the gift of freedom—that is, by making specific choices with that gift of freedom. Our liberation from bondage is completed not by fate, not by cause, not by chance, but by a choice to use of our given freedom to choose freedom.

I recently viewed the film Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons. Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. 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.

This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about an ordinary human being laying down her life of her own free will. She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery. Her cool, effective freedom of action under such pressures illustrate the meaning of this text:

“No one takes my life from me, I lay my life down of my own free will.” John 10:18

Christopher Fry, in his play The Ice Man Cometh, has an alcoholic drunk pronounce the word freedom as “free-doom”—a cute, but also profound insight. Freedom is the doom of all the slaveries of spirit that we may prize. And such freedom is the aliveness, courage, and grandeur of our essential being.

The post Freedom and Death first appeared on Realistic Living.

This is just a story, but all we have about Moses is just a story. The stories we have were were first written down around 1000 BCE about an event that some modern scholars calculate happened around 1290 BCE. So a lot of oral telling took place for about 300 years before the Exodus event was put down in the written records we now see in the Bible. And the story telling about Moses and the Exodus continued to be expanded upon for several more centuries. So what really happened in a scientific sense is pretty murky. Nevertheless, what happened to this people as a revelation of lasting truth about Profound Reality is more clear, however controversial that revelation may be. Following are a couple of paragraphs on my view of some of the core truth of that revelation.

The Exodus from Egypt was not a work of the universe acting through the lives of a selection of humans; it was the vision of one solitary man put into action by sharing his burning-bush vision with others of his clan and then enacting that vision with them in the tough obstacles of real world history.

At root, Moses’ vision was about the nature of history, the nature of human life, and the nature of Profound Reality. Here are elements of that revelation that are most important to me: The life of a community of people does not unfold in some prescribed way. Social arrangements do not have to stay as they are. History itself is massively open to human agency. Such truths as these were seen by the Moses followers as more than wild-harried ideas swinging through the head of this imaginative Moses. I view Moses and his listeners as believing themselves confronted with fresh understanding about the way that historical reality actually works. The religious heritage that Moses shared with his Hebrew clan of slaves surely informed his interpretation of his “burning that did not consume.” Later writers called this a message from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With such a vision, Moses aroused his people to their freedom to live differently.

This simple but profound revelation of raw freedom has characterized the best disciples of Moses unto this day. As the old stories tell, Moses continued with his history-making free responses by laying down ten guidelines for how this wilderness society had to be conducted if they were to continue to be as a society built upon trust in this Profound Reality that gives to ordinary humans the freedom to determine the course of time. For 40 years, so the story goes, Moses made grim, but lively and realistic choices that produced a group maturity that enabled continuation after Moses’ death. Another charismatic leader, Joshua, lead this people into a wider destiny beyond this desert cradle of their social infancy. However crass the stories of Joshua may seem to our contemporary moralities, without this transition into that wider history, we would never have heard of the Exodus revelation. I see the raw essential freedom of our human essence as one of the awarenesses revealed in that Exodus event.

The Power of Human Freedom

Obviously, our human freedom is not infinite in its historical power. Human freedom is a limited power that must work within a much larger set of powers. Obedience to Reality is required to enjoy this Reality-granted freedom to change the course of human events. This Profound Reality of the biblical devotion has been said to have Infinite Freedom. And that Mysterious Power of Infinite Freedom is said to be granting to us living humans a limited, but meaningful role in choreographing the outcomes of our human dance on planet Earth. To say that what we humans face in life is just a dance of outward and inward forces about which we are only the watchers is a half truth.

We aware watchers are with that very capacity for awareness also granted (or graced with) a freedom to make history-bending choices. Also, this blessed freedom can sell itself out into patterns of bondage to the various delusions that are made possible by our big-brained minds and our advanced awareness. With our freedom we can create a “bondage of spirit” (as some have called it)—a bondage from which we have to be rescued by acts of Profound Reality. This bondage is like being a prisoner in a cell. In this cell our essential freedom is but a shadow of its fuller self. It is like being limited to walking around within four restraining walls. This estranged human also bends history, but in destructive ways. As Jesus is said to have put it, “A good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit.”

Another Story about Freedom

Years ago, I read a novel entitled “The Ronin.” It was a story about an oriental swordsman who was so skilled with his precious sword that he was able to live almost without limitations. He did a lot of arrogant killing to maintain this quality of life. The crisis of the story came about when the full horror of that chosen form of life became clear to his consciousness. He threw his sword as far away as he could fling it, crying out, “I did it, I did it all.” And henceforth he did something different with his great strength—something that was more of use to his social companions. The details of this fine novel provide much more of the raw feelings of this life journey, but even my rough outline tells the story that human life in its essence is freedom, a freedom that is not determined by any other factor than the freedom to access that essential freedom.

You and I may not have done a Moses-level revelatory action of freedom or even a big change from a useless and destructive life, but we may well have come to see that some earlier choice of vocation, or marriage, or group engagement was a wrong turn—a mistake of significant proportion. If searing guilt was not blurred by excuses, we might have been able to cry out with the Ronin, “I did it, I did it all.” In other words, we might have been graced to freely confesses this guilt, and see Reality’s forgiveness for a fresh start, and then grasped our freedom to go elsewhere with our living.

My first personal experience of such a turning point was my abandonment of my father’s plans for me to be a mathematician and physicist for which I was well qualified and become instead a novice religious student and pastor for which I was unprepared. And after I became more experienced on this new path, many other such watershed freedom discoveries and freedom enactments have come my way to be opted by me. Telling my tales of these repentance moments is very complicated and difficult to even remember accurately, but the essence of them lives on as trust in those here and now possibilities that still open in the ongoing nowness of living.

I have no doubt whatsoever that human life is at bottom nothing but freedom. I don’t actually know who I essentially am, for I am nothing at all but the becoming of what I now am not. And such becoming can be a perpetual surrender to freedom.

Living the Life of Freedom

My consciousness includes freedom. Living the life of my conscious freedom means using my mind to create deeds of freedom. My mind is not a block to freedom, but a tool of freedom—unless I am insisting on using what freedom I have to serve the stories and images of my mind.

Anti-intellectualism or any other contempt for my mind is using my freedom to serve an idea in my mind. Anti-thoughtfulness is an estranged idea in my mind created by my freedom to be a slob without the freedom of thoughtfulness. The mind, it is true, contains a host of estranged ideas created by my freedom in my mind—illusions of all sorts, excuses of all sorts, suppressions of guilt, hidings of truth, hopes for the impossible, and this list is endless. But all these unrealisms are not the fault of the mind, but the mental creations of my freedom. The mind is just a wondrous biological servant of my conscious freedom along with my heart and my fingers. All these estrangements from realism are established modes of responding made by my freedom to the possibilities of my life.

It is true that I share most of my estranging thoughts with my culture. We call this “cultural conditioning” as if the cultural did this to us. But actually, we chose to go along with our culture, or we chose not to go along with our culture. In both cases, “we did It.” We joined our culture in these cultural estrangements. And perhaps we also distanced ourselves from some of those cultural estrangements. Whatever we have done in relations with our culture, we did it. Our culture did nothing more than provide us options, plus some pressures to accept these options. We took those options. We did it. We are guilty of every estrangement we have taken from our culture. And we are responsible for any detachments from our culture that we have made in favor of something better. We did that too.

It is so easy to be estranged from our authenticity, because estrangement in every case is simply confusing some humanly created mental content with what is real. Those who argue that the rational is the real, are not noticing the truth that the real Real is forever more than our rationality has encompassed. The Real remains mysterious, no matter how well we have approximated the Real with our imaginative thoughtfulness. Our thoughtfulness is a human creation open to improvements, where improvement in our thoughtfulness means closer to the Real.

Thinking in a dog or in a human is descriptive of the Real, predictive of the Real, and an approximation of the Real. Thoughtfulness in a human is more complex than in the dog, but like the dog our thoughtfulness is essential for our survival and happiness. This thoughtful description of thoughtfulness is not a disparagements of thoughtfulness. The mind of the contents of the mind are part of what is real, but the reality held by the thoughts of the mind can never fully encompass the Real.

“Estrangement” can be defined as confusing a thoughts of the mind with the Real. And “Authenticity” can be defined as a confession of our ignorance about the Real, as well as a freedom of commitment to our partial holds on some approximate truths about the Real.

And as we enter into our ever-fuller awareness of the Real, we will always find included in this Massive Mystery of the Real an awareness of our conscious freedom as an aspect of the Real. Any denial of human freedom with thoughts about a total determinism that excludes human freedom (or even dog freedom) is an estrangement from the Real. Such deterministic thinking is a way of being lost in our minds at the expense of not experiencing the Real. Our experience of the Real includes our freedom. Any true openness to the onrushing Real includes being open to our freedom to respond to the Real.

We are, of course, determined in the sense that we are determined to be, among other things, our conscious freedom that is in itself a life-determining factor. Of course. our lives are much more than our conscious freedom. Nature determines our heart beat, our sleep, and our dreams without any assistance from our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can fight with nature about going to sleep, but sleep is by definition an absence of our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can exercise our body to increase our heart beats. And with our freedom we can recall and interpret our dreams. But only part of our lives can be called “freedom.”

Attempting to handle our guilt by denying it can be our motivation for not believing in a nature that includes our freedom. All of us may wish to deny the many delusory turns we have made with our freedom. We may wish to deny our many losses of realism to some set of addictive behaviors. But instead we could cry out, “I did it!” We could confess our guilt, open to its forgiveness, and accept a fresh start into a more realistic style of living. Indeed, a rediscovery of our freedom begins with confessing our unrealism with this cry of freedom: “I did it!”

The post I Did It! first appeared on Realistic Living.

One human being’s efforts may matter very little in the broad sweep of historical consequences. But large groups of humans, activated by significant inspiration, can matter very much. This is true both when our human “mattering” means great benefit to key human values and when our “mattering” means huge and tragic consequences. We are now experiencing an era of human history in which we experience many matters of “big time’ mattering. We see a climate crisis so immense that we can barely stand to face it. We see a drift toward authoritarian government that threatens to undo all that as been done toward a viable and vital democracy. We see much to be done in solidarity with women’s efforts to deliver themselves from second-class oppression and and to deliver all of us from patriarchy. We also see racial and cultural minorities treated with practices of suppression, contempt, and cruelty that shock our sensitivities to the very quick.

Indeed, the consequences rendered by deeds of the human species have become enormous. We live in an era of human life that some now call the “Anthropocene.” This name takes note of the fact that the once tiny human species has become a key planetary force—melting arctic ice, raising sea levels, reshaping the climate, multiplying extinctions, polluting air-water&soils, as well as uprooting the distribution fabrics of our societies. Our everyday historical experience is challenging us to do a better job with our now vast history-bending capacities.

Lessons from Biblical History

The prophet Ezekiel was called upon to do history-bending within a seemingly hopeless situation. He was a religious leader of the Mosaic-heritage people exiled in the land of Babylon—a strongly influential culture in contrast with the tiny and compromised kingdom of Judea in which Ezekiel and others lived before their exile. Many exiled groups simply melted into this creative Babylonian culture. Speaking in the voice of Yahweh (understood as the power of history itself), here are some of the “power words” of this wildly imaginative poet:

I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will watch over; I will feed them on justice. (11:16)

These words went into the bending of history. These words not only participated in preserving the Yahwist faith during forty-seven years of Babylonian exile, they prepared the way for the rise of another prominent prophet. We now refer to this figure as Second Isaiah—a prophet whose gripping poetry spoke of leaving exile and returning home to rebuild an independent national expression of the Yahwist heritage. The Persian empire was then conquering the Babylon empire and was instituting new polices for exiled people. This unnamed prophet, whose writings appear in the last part of the scroll of Isaiah, saw the Persian emperor as a servant of Yahweh come to deliver Israel. Second Isaiah also saw these historical developments as Yahweh’s call to leave exile, return to the wreckage of the old Palestinian geography, and build a new society rooted in the long memories of this people. Here is “the voice of Yahweh” according to the poetry of Second Isaiah.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her this:
that she has fulfilled her term of bondage,
that her penalty is paid. . . .

Prepare a road for Yahweh through the wilderness,
clear a highway across the desert for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up;
every mountain and hill brought down;
rough places shall be made smooth;
and mountain ranges become a plane.

Thus shall the glory of Yahweh be revealed,
and all humankind together shall see it,
for Yahweh has spoken. (40:2-5)

Bending history takes place when we use our essential freedom to do for others a Second-Isaiah-type of inspiration—to do such powerful visioning through our words, our deeds, and our presence. Let us also remain aware that historical results can be achieved by ourselves and by other humans who willfully crowd out essential freedom and act from a place of inner bondage. Adolf Hitler and company bent history, even though their dreadful acts derived from a terrible bondage of soul. Hitler’s living is judged” evil” from the perspective of the realism revealed in the Jesus, the Christ revelation, the Moses of the Exodus revelation, the Buddha of awakenment revelation, the Mohammedan Qur’an revelation, and so on. These “revelations” of Profound Reality quality realism provide us with depictions of a faithfulness that allow us to see values that are given to us by realism rather than values that are simply made up to advance our egoism or preferences.

The Pit of Evil

Adolf Hitler was an intelligent and capable man who went over to the “dark side,” as we Star Was fans might call it. His extermination spasm toward the Jewish people of Europe and his invention of a mode of “total war” that he thought could not be defeated dug a horrific ditch of evil. He showed us our human capacity for evil with a vividness toward which we still close our eyes.

Nevertheless, we remain vulnerable to enchantment by leaders who are skilled in calling forth our own rebellion against living in the real world. How has it happened in Russia that a leader can get away with poisoning his political opponents? How has it happened in the United States that a president and his cronies can get away with undermining elections, selling out to foreign interests, tearing up democratic institutions, misusing the military against peaceful protesters, and sowing confusion by lying daily as if that were an acceptable way of life. And this list of “bad doings” does not include a long list of omissions and failures to face and handle a significant list of emergencies.

Perhaps the sheer foolishness of neglecting a clear scientific way of minimizing the impact of Covid-19 pandemic will discredit this administration for all time. We have experienced a US president too inept to be compared with Hitler. We might better compare him with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who has been portrayed as the most evil U.S politician until now. We can be thankful that McCarthy was never allowed to be president. And perhaps we can also be thankful for President Trump’s gross ineptitude—even as we stand in horror of how far toward fascism someone as sociologically ignorant as Trump can take our government and a significant portion of our population.

In 1851, a century before Hitler, Herman Melville wrote a novel, Moby-Dick, that gave us a classic picture of the strange charisma of a defiantly evil human being. In this novel, the evil and “charismatic” person is Captain Ahab, a ship captain who has captivated the crewmen of a whaling vessel. “Evil” in this story is symbolized by the passion of this ship captain’s murderous hatred toward a huge white whale who had taken one of his legs in a previous encounter, making him, as he called it, “half a man.” The strength of this intentional fight with the white whale fascinates the other shipmates, who are, perhaps, open to follow him based on their own fights with whatever they aren’t able to control.

The huge white whale turns out to be a symbol for that Profound Reality that never loses. In this mythic story all but one crew member follows Ahab into his fight with an unbeatable power of nature—symbolically with our own fight with the Profound Reality we may also call “God.”

Symbolized in this story is something more inclusive even than the extreme aberration of a Hitler. In this story we see the whole of industrial society in a winless fight against the vast ocean of nature. Such an enchantment with human arrogance toward the natural planet precedes the futility of Hitler’s “total war” against all human societies. We can view the Jewish people playing the role of that white whale of personal humiliation in Hitler’s imagination. A similar role is being played today in the imagination our US white nationalist authoritarians by people of color and immigrants who might vote for democracy against the white nationalism that we see tending toward its fascist fulfillment.

This essay is about being delivered from these gloomy dead ends of human living. This delivery will require a vast bending of history in some different directions through the agency of our own essential freedom.

In addition to lawless authoritarianism, we also face a new kind of total war from our current fossil-fuel companies who are waging their un-winnable fight with the atmosphere of the planet. History is always presenting us with fresh challenges, some extremely large, some quite small.

Perhaps the reality of our true nature supports the quest for justice, but justice is a gift that must be asked for with our lives. Getting justice and keeping it requires foot movements, finger movements, telephoning, organizing, e-mails, speeches, money, voting, teaching, running for office, and this list is much longer. Social justice is a contact sport, so put on your shoulder pads, your shin guards, and come to the meetings, events, or protests with your wits about you.

True justice must be defined and brought into being by those who are accessing their profound consciousness and thereby becoming the early few who use their essential freedom to bring thought and action for justice to this time, this place, and this course of events. Each doable step can bring into play the action of an ever-larger force for some massive bending of time.

Obedient Freedom Changing History

Many Christian theologians have spoken of the origin of the cosmos as a “creation out of nothing” by that totally-free, all-powerful mysteriousness, that was anciently personalized with the name “Yahweh.” The word “God” in the phrase “Yahweh is my God” means our devotion to this all-powerfulness—that is, our loyalty, commitment, dedication, and obedience. This obedience is the obedience of freedom—the obedience of being our essential freedom and the freedom to be obedient in facing the actual response-able options available to us in our time and place.

The actions done by our essential freedom in response to Yahweh our God are also “creations out of nothing” in that these choices are not being caused by any force other than our essential freedom itself. Other forces are always playing a role in our behavior, but essential freedom is one of those forces. And this essential freedom is free indeed—no moralism or dogmatic rigidity can stand in the way of the essential creativity of this freedom.

The essential freedom of the human being differs from Yahweh’s freedom in its capacity for historical results. Yahweh’s freedom is boundless, but the essential freedom of humans is limited to initiating temporal results in accordance with the temporal powers possessed by human individuals and groups. Humans bend history, but they do not control history. We find ourselves continually surprised by the results of our own actions. Yahweh, our God is the determiner of the results of our free choices. Our free choices are like petitions pushed into the face of mystery. Final results are out of our hands.

Our essential freedom draws a great deal of its boldness from our trust in the total forgiveness of all our deeds—before, during, and after those deeds are performed. After our deeds are performed, we must release them into the imagined “hands” of Profound Reality who now clearly owns our done deeds and their consequences. We cannot take back our deeds.

In the context of this forgiveness, we can take into ourselves the guilt of all the malfunctioning of our species that has led up to our current options. The boldness to take on the guilt of the entire species is made possible by the faith that all is forgiven nd that a fresh start in realistic freedom is before us. However horrific that may sound on the surface of it, being our freedom is found to be restful, even though it is certainly not “rest” in the sense of a withdrawal from the battle of living. We rest in our activism. We do not burn out. We find that our freedom is a gift that keeps on giving energy to us from that Profound Reality that we are trusting as our forgiving God.

Alongside our amazing freedom, we notice that there are other powers already in motion—material and social forces that are producing historical results along with whatever historical power we bring into play. In most cases our own human freedom can bring to the fray only a small vector of force within that vast sea of force vectors that combine to spell out the actual results. Nevertheless, historical outcomes can be bent through the agency of our human choices—real choices that are made by our own freedom. And the choices of multitudes of individual vectors of force strategically applied to real historical situations can create a true revolution in social structures.

While a million human beings acting in some sort of coordinated response have many times more temporal power than a single person, even the power of billions of humans is severely limited in relation to the vast forces of the natural cosmos. Just as the Earth swings around the sun with massive force, so also are there forces in human historical movement that simply have to be respected and worked with rather than against.

Profound Reality is manifest towards us as an unconditional Power we cannot resist, yet part of that boundless Power has been delegated to us humans. If we include the plain fact of this delegating of power to humans and to other living beings, the power of Profound Reality can be said to remains unlimited. Both the life and the freedom of all living beings remains in the overall control of this One all-powerful Power. There is no contradiction between real human power and the All-powerful Power of that Profound Reality that can be the God we obey, honor, and serve.

These awarenesses enable us to picture a human life in dialogue with Profound Reality. If we are dedicated to consciously living within the stern yet merciful realism of a dialogue with Profound Reality, then we can say that Profound Reality has become our “God”—the “focus” of our devotion. This personal devotion allows us to symbolize Profound Reality as an Infinite “Thou.” In the light of this devotion, human history becomes the story of Thou—we—Thou—we—Thou—we— . . . Thou. “Thou” has both the initial word and the final word in each human story. Yet we humans do have a role in the choreography of this historical dance, the making of this music, the authorship of this drama.

Conclusion

The prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus, and the authors of the New Testament dared to to speak for Reality to humanity and to speak back to Reality on behalf of humanity. They wrote their poetry about living within the overview of this relentlessly all-powerful Reality. Such a God-devotion to Profound Reality includes at least these three broad themes: (1) the judgments of Reality upon our inadequate customary living—calling us to a relinquishment of our clinging to obsolete and illusory ways of living, (2) Reality showing us the openings toward whole new futures for human living, and (3) Reality’s callings to us for courageous ventures into these new possibilities well ahead of the crowds. This means that however meager be our talents or skills, we may become luminaries and exemplars who are showing forth our own unique adventure into an unknown future that many may fear, hate, and oppose, and many others may honor and join. Onward ye history benders!

The post Bending History first appeared on Realistic Living.