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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom and the Interpersonal

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

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

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

Response-ability for the Inter-personal

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

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

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

A Weekly Meeting Christian Circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biological Approximation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Approximate Knowledge Perfection

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

The post The Freedom to be Approximate first appeared on Realistic Living.

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.

This simple poetic prayer was taught to me as a pre-schooler. I prayed it at bed time. With my 88-year-old memory, I have forgotten many things, but I have not forgotten that prayer. It may be living in me unconsciously even now when I allow myself to sleep, trusting that all will be well.

It was not my college-professor parents who taught me this prayer. When my sister and I were preschoolers, we had a live-in maid. Mrs. Rush was a our caretaker most of the time. She was an avid Nazarene church member. She read us stories from Hurlburt’s Stories of the Bible. It must have been her who taught me that prayer..

In the religious culture of the Nazarene church, as well as the more liberal Methodist church that I attended, this little prayer existed within a master myth about soul and body— a sensory-rich mortal body substance and a ghostly, enigmatic immortal soul substance. As a modern adult, I no longer dwell within that two-substance way of describing my being. Nevertheless, this old prayer hangs around with meanings that do not presuppose that ancient worldview. I need a new view of soul

After much contemplative inquiry, “soul” now mean for me my enigmatic consciousness of awareness and freedom. This awareness is temporal: it is limited and changing, it rests during my sleeping, This freedom to met challenges, choose options, and make history is limited freedom within a limited awareness of an immense cosmos of mystery and surprises. So this soul of awareness and freedom is a temporal reality. that does not survive my death. Nevertheless, this enigmatic awareness and freedom is distinguishable from what I interiorly experience as “mind” or exteriorly experience as “brain” or nervous system. My consciousness or “soul” is an active agent that uses my mind for conducting my thoughtfulness, moving my body, accomplishing my purposes. I am guessing that somewhat less expanded form of consciousness (awareness and freedom) is a factor in the dynamics of aliveness in all animal life.

I am guessing that animal consciousness evolved as a survival benefit. The more conscious life forms became, the more adequately they could anticipate future events, avoid dangers, and engage in alternative outcomes to their benefit. As wondrous as this is, there is no need to believe that the souls of animals or humans are immortal. Consciousness or “living soul” can be viewed as one of the many strange forces in the cosmos—along with gravity, electromagnetic radiation, and others. Aliveness is one of those counter-currents to the massive processes of a cosmic running-down from heat to cold, from organized to disorganized. When death takes over a living body, every aspect of its organization begins to disorganize. Bones can last the longest, but even they will become powder over time.

Humans, with our capacity for art, language, and mathematics, are equipped with an intensity of consciousness that no cat, dog, or horse possesses. These other animals are obviously conscious with layers of consciousness that are similar to layers of my own consciousness. But I also possess in my art, language, and mathematics an enhanced layer of conscious with which no cat is troubled. I face options for living that no horse needs to confront. Not all my behaviors are a result of my aware choices, but these aware choices also take place, alongside all the determined factors in my overall operation. Some of my determined behaviors are also chosen. Some of my determined behaviors are restricted and altered by my choices. Choice-making is an aspect of my consciousness, and this consciousness, this awareness and freedom is my “soul.”

So in my currently operating vocabulary, the word “soul” indicates this ongoing process of being aware with an awareness that is an agent choice making, a freedom that is granted by Eternity, but whose responses to Eternity and all my temporal encounters are initiated by freedom itself. This “soul” of freedom and awareness is not a static substance but an ongoing process of change. “Who I am?” is never set in stone. I am a becoming. I am freedom. Awareness and freedom comprise my soul.

My childhood prayer about laying down my soul to sleep can now be viewed as laying done of my highly enriched human consciousness to rest from its controlling role in my living. Sleep is an out-of-control state similar to death. Sleep can be feared in the ways death can be feared, for we do not know if we shall wake from our sleep. Waking is like a fresh gift of consciousness—a starting over with a new short-time lease on living consciously.

So, in my pre-school existing, I probably used that simple prayer to opt for a trust in the Power that runs the cosmos of events to care for me and to awaken me again from this “little death” of sleep. Such simple trust in the Radical Allness that I confront is a description of a profound sort of living that can apply to child and adult. I need not entirely dismiss this little prayer simply because its surrounding mythology is now out of date for me. Rather, I can translate the existential meanings of this prayer into a fresh set of myth meanings and overall thoughtfulness that can govern my adult life in century 21. Let this be an analogy for dealing with Christian scripture.

Scripture Interpretation

Similar to interpreting this childhood prayer, my method of interpreting Christian scripture and other church traditions requires some translation from old to new form of thinking. The very old religious resources of the Christian Bible were created within a now obsolete mythology, but their existential intent and the capacities for lively meanings are as powerful today as they ever were. There is no recovery, however, of these resources for a viable and vital Christian practice without a mode of thought form translation. The fact that these writings were written by finite, time-bound persons living in a very different cultural settings is not a barrier, but a factor in doing accurate interpretation. Gone is the notions that these writings dropped down from some super-space into the passive temporal minds of the biblical writers. And these humanly created writings require a humanly created means of seeing their truth.

A helpful unraveling of Christian scripture meanings can begin with a translation for our century of these two Old Testament words for God: “Yahweh” and “Elohim.”

“Yahweh” in the vocabulary of biblical writers may date back to at least 950 BCE and oral use of that name for an ultimate devotion may date back to the Exodus happening some claim took place around 1390 BCE. That would for 400 years before Yahweh was written down in book Genesis. When this long enduring community of writing was living in exile in Babylon 400 years after the beginnings of these Genesis texts , the name Yahweh was still in use. The Genesis story-teller we meet in Genesis 2 claims that Yahweh was the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, and others long before the Exodus. The migrations from the Euphrates river city of Ur that Abraham is symbolizes took place as early as 1800 BCE. So Yahweh is supposed by the biblical writers to be a very enduring object of devotion.

Indeed, the biblical writers view Yahweh as that unchanging Mysteriousness, that Unknown Master Power that is always being met by humans in the past, present, and future. Yahweh is an ever-surprising Awesomeness that is experienced in both horror and glory, as the giver of both birth and death, the source of all gifts for living and their limitations. Yahweh is a symbol for that active Truth and Power that is other than and yet in or behind each and every event that happens to everybody and to every society in every era. Yahweh is the enigmatic All-in-All Oneness that we can also call “Profound Reality” present in all passing temporal realities. Yahweh can be absent from our consciousness, but is never absent from all the realities we experience.

The biblical word “Elohim” has many meanings, but in contrast to “Yahweh” the word “Elohim” had meanings in the direction of “a divine devotion.” We can speak of many Elohim, not just one. All the Canaanite Gods and Goddesses were Elohim—objects of devotion such as the temporal powers that we still worship today in both limited and ultimate ways: love, war, wisdom, sex, procreation, etc. So the statement. “Yahweh is my Elohim,” can mean, “The All-in-All Reality is my core devotion.”

This understanding may have been present in the name that was taken by the prophet Elijah. who was considered the grandfather of the great prophets. “Eli” means “my God” and “jah” is short for “Yahweh.” So it is likely the case that the prophet Elijah took for his name, “My God is Yahweh.”

However that ma be, this singular devotion to Yahweh is clearly present in Psalm 90. I am going to restate this Psalm with a few minor word changes to aid us in seeing more clearly the lasting human meanings that were meant in this old piece of poetry as well as in all the other Psalms:

Yahweh You have been our fortress
from generation to generation.
Before the mountains were raised up
or Earth and cosmos were born in travail,
from everlasting to everlasting You are the One Lasting Power.

You turn humans back into dust.
“Turn back” You command the offspring of Adam;
from Your perspective a thousand years are as yesterday;
a night watch passes and You have cut off each human being,
They are like a dream at daybreak,
they fade like grass that springs up in the morning
but when evening comes is parched and withered.

So we are each brought to an end by Your negating power.
In mid-speech, we are silenced by Your fury.
You lay bare our illusions in the full light of Your Presence.
Each day goes by under the shadow of Your furious realism.
Our years die away like a mummer.
Seventy years is the span of our life,
eighty if our strength holds;
the hurrying years are labor and sorrow,
so quickly they pass and are forgotten.

Who can feel the power of Your negations,
who can feel Your fury like those who are devoted to You?

So teach us to count our days,
that we may enter the gate of wisdom.

This same Yahweh was seen as the overarching historical actor in the events lived by Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2nd Isaiah. And this is this same Yahweh is the One Jesus calls “abba” or papa. Jesus announces that papa Yahweh is bringing forth a restored humanity in Jesus’ own living presence, in Jesus’ aggressive ministry, and in lives of those who are responding to the living of his message. This fresh blossoming of our essential humanity is seen as a new Adam and Eve—the kingdom of Yahweh replacing the kingdom of Rome and the then sickened people of Israel.

With these clarifications about Yahweh, the whole Bible begins to come alive with the sort of truth that is still happening to us. Yahweh is still acting in history Exodus-wise, Exile-wise, return from Exile-wise, and Jesus-wise in our lives today, and will do so forevermore. The Bible, a human book, reveals the forevermore. Such a recovery of the Bible is essential for the continuation of a viable and vital next Christian practice.

For more on these topics I want to announce the release of my new book:

The Thinking Christian

Wipf and Stock has placed on Amazon.com the opening chapters of this book.
Simply go to Amazon.com, then books, and then search for:
The Thinking Christian by Gene W. Marshall.

The post The Soul of Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

While reading in one of A.H. Almaas’ books about the psychology of personality, I recalled those piles of Pick-Up-Sticks. According to that psychology, our personality is a complex of “object-relations.” In other words, our personality is a stack of habits, each tiny habit referred to as an “object relation.” Each object-relation is an ongoing dialogue between some object and the “I” of that person.

If I picture each object-relation as like one of those pick-up-sticks, I can view one end of each stick as a memory of another person or thing and the other end as a memory of a unique “I” in dialogue with that person or thing. Each of these sticks represents a habit of operation—one dialogue habit in a pile of habits that form my personality. Such object relations might be: I—nipple, I—mother, I—father, I—sister, I—best friend, and scores of ever-more complicated object relations laid in on the top of the earliest ones forming my unique, complex habit structure that define the meaning of the word “personality.”

So at least for the purpose of this essay, let “personality” mean such a complex pile of habitual thoughts, feelings, memories, default operations and basic dramas built up over a unique life history. Some of these object-relations rehearse powerful dramas that have had big impacts upon the whole personality pile of habits. Perhaps an early relationship with father or mother still stirs up significant drama in the psyche. Perhaps some huge trauma plays this role. Perhaps some especially meaningful time plays a big role. Very early dramas often have a good deal of unconscious influence over more recent dramas.

No one is fully conscious of his or her entire personality pile of habits, but good therapies can help us become more aware of our personality fabric and thus more capable of being more intentional in our relations with our personality. Perhaps we can compensate for it, live somewhat beyond it, or discover a level of freedom we can have that is not simply a robotic acting out of our personality karma. We can discover that personality can be a prison in which we are unconsciously trapped.

Nevertheless, we would not want to be without our personality; it serves as the default pattern for large portions of our living. We would not want to learn all of those useful ways of relating afresh in every moment. Habits can be good. I am content for a lot of my personality to operate without my conscious attention. At the same time, I can become aware that some aspects of my personality produce difficulties that interfere with the optimal living of my current life. My life in this current here/now of conscious living can become more aware of these personality forces and, with that awareness, be more decisive in adding or subtracting from these largely automatic personality operations. With awareness comes more freedom.

Personality and Freedom

How does our grasp of such personality wisdom inform our spirit journey into our ever-deeper awareness and thereby into the full depths of our essential freedom? A personality can act as both an enabler of living and as a prison that restrains our essential freedom. A personality operates somewhat like a container in which I live. Like a prison cell, our personality container provides room within its boundaries for our essential freedom to move around. At the same time, the cell of personality has walls that restrain our freedom. And we may not even know that we are restrained until some challenge we are unable to handle brings our personality traps into awareness.

So how is it that I become free to move into that wider “space” of awareness and freedom that is my essential nature and my deeper potential? To move into wider spaces, we need to become aware of our traps. Here is the basic structure of a trap. You have come to think you know who you are. This view is built from your past experiences, but it is just a view that you have built. Perhaps you have heard yourself say, “Oh, I could never do that.” But then one day, you actually do what you said you could never do. Such moments let you see that you cling very strongly to who you think you are.

It may be deeply frightening to learn that you do not know who you are, and that you never will know who your are. You are always more than you think, and different than you think you are. You are a vast mystery, even to yourself. Your essential freedom means that you are not anything solid or stationary, but alway in process. In its full essence, freedom is raw creation—rendering acts that are caused by nothing other than freedom itself. Freedom is not an identity you can put to thought, but a process of choosing. We might say that freedom is a nothingness—a nothingness that creates somethings.

And while our personality was built of the genetic and social materials provided, our specific personality was built by our own mysterious radical freedom. Our genetic and social materials are just materials, not causes that explain this “living being” we are calling “personality.” My choices from infancy onward built this prison of habits that form my personality. I did not build my personality to be a prison; I built it to survive. And I did survive. I don’t want to be without my personality: it is my default pattern of operation. Yet as I become more aware of my freedom, I become aware that my personality is also functioning as a prison, a prison from which I can want to escape and from which I can move into a wider being of my being.

Even if my acts are fated by a personality that I cannot escape, I and my personality are still guilty of those acts. That guilt cannot be handled by arguments blaming fate for my acts, rather than myself. I myself am to blame for what I cannot correct and for all the continuing consequences of my various habits. My only help for my guilt is the forgiveness of Profound Reality, and a fresh start in realism.

Even after a fresh start, I have a limited ability to modify my personality. I can compensate for my personality establishment. I can, however, make limited alterations in my personality, and I have possibilities for acting beyond my personality patterns. Even though my long-established personality patterns will continue as default learnings, I have no excuse to be a mere slave of this interior personality establishment. If I want realism in my living and authenticity in my person, response-able freedom comes as part of my overall package of human authenticity and realism.

My essential freedom is not an accomplishment. Freedom is a gift, and my recovering of that gift is also a gift. I never get to take credit for being my freedom, but I do get credit for not being my freedom. Being my freedom is a 100% surrender to the way my life is—that is, to the way my life actually is beneath all the layers of unfreedom that I have substituted for my freedom. Willingly being my freedom is an undoing of unfreedom, rather than an adding of freedom to my essential being. Freedom is my core self, and I have no other core except freedom and its companion gifts of the trust in the trustworthiness of Profound Reality and that mysterious Love for all neighboring beings.

Freedom is a powerful potential to do free deeds, deeds I do with my own freedom. Here is the paradox of being free: I am 100% dependent upon Reality for my freedom, and I am 100% response-able to enact my freedom or to lose it into some self-created slavery. Freedom is both a glorious gift of opportunity for the living of my authentic life, and a serious demand—a calling to be free with my own freedom.

Response-ability is Not Control

The Response-ability of freedom is a strong power that bends the course of future time for myself, my society, and my planet, but freedom is not in control of the future. We humans are limited beings. We are limited by the powers of nature—gravity, the weather, sickness, the strength of our bodies, the length of our lives. We are limited by the freedom of other people. We are limited by the willful unrealism of other people, and much more. We make our choices and actions as prayers for a future that may or may not happen. And the future never happens exactly as we plan it. The future is not in my control. That which finally controls the future, I am calling “Profound Reality.” And this Profound Reality can be my God-devotion.

So we might say that a chosen deed intends a result, but the result is “in the hands of God.” That is, Profound Reality is like a great dialogue partner. I act, and Reality gives the results in response to which I act again, and again Reality gives me a result. Reality always answers our acts with a result. Then we get to chose again, if we are willing to keep choosing to be our freedom. Reality grants us the freedom to dialogue with Reality about the results of our lives. Such living can never be called “in control.” It might as well be called “obedience” to Reality. Here again is this paradox: my obedience to Reality includes embracing my freedom—a response-ability granted by Reality. In each and every moment, we might be granted the ability to receive that freedom and enact it.

However paradoxical this may sound to our finite minds, we are determined by the course of things to be free to decide, and thus change, in some measure, the course of things. We meet forks in the road, and we opt for real alternatives. In doing this opting, we either opt for the freedom to decide those options, or we we opt to allow ourselves to be driven by forces other than our freedom. Perhaps this other force is our personalty. Perhaps this other force is our social conditioning. There are an enormous number of operating forces, but none of them are to blame for our conscious choices. We are response-able and thereby responsible for being our freedom or for giving away our freedom to some of these other forces.

We are mistaken if we choose to think that we are in control, or if we choose to think that we are completely in the power of an already determined fate. We are not in control, nor are we merely an awareness that is standing by and watching this grand dance of life dancing in us and around us. If we are merely standing by, we are choosing this “standing-aside role” for our lives. Our choices to stand aside rather than be our response-able choices make a huge difference in the overall outcome of our living. It is our basic choice to choose to enact our essential freedom—the freedom from all personality constructions, from all social conditioning, from all addictions, from all forces whatsoever except that powerful nothingness of our essential freedom. We are being given by Reality the power to dialogue with Reality.

Becoming aware of the lies that deny our freedom might be called “awakenment.” This awakenment does not mean that I no longer have my personality, or that I need a different personality than the one I have. Awakenment simply means that my personality has ceased to be a prison, and has become instead a useful part of my life—more like an arm or a leg than an identity.

The truth of our raw freedom remains a mystery in spite of all our talk about it. Our conscious can be aware of our freedom, even though our minds cannot fathom the enigmatic quality of that freedom. The mind seeks to give its topics stable substance, but freedom is not stable, nor is freedom a substance.

Nevertheless, freedom is a necessity of human life that cannot be escaped, even though our lives are littered with acts of attempted escape. Profound Reality remains sovereign over our lives in the sense that freedom is demanded. However much we try, no one escapes from living the demanding response-ability of our essential freedom, any more than anyone escapes birth or death. We are totally determined to be free, however paradoxical that sounds, and however persistently we manage to avoid being our full freedom. We are essentially free, however trapped in unfreedom we may also still find our lives.

Conclusion

In the year 1960, I wrote a poem that began with this line: “God waits to decide what the future will be until I decide who I will be now.” This affirmation of radical freedom to bend the course of history has characterized my religious faith all these intervening years. I have also long viewed this radical freedom being referenced when I read verses of Christian Scripture like the following:

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

The post Imprisoned in Personality first appeared on Realistic Living.

The meaning of “freedom” and the meaning of “truth” are closely related symbols in the Christian heritage. The “Truth” we are talking about here is “Truth” that yields the “freedom” we are also talking about here. And the “freedom” we are talking about here is a freedom that follows from taking on, for the living of our lives, the “Truth” that we are talking about here.

The Truth

The “Truth” indicated in the above scripture is a deeper sort of truth than the approximate truths we learn through our ever-moving scientific approach to truth. Yet, these approximate truths of science are probes into the same Mysterious Encounter with Truth of which our text are speaking. The truth we know through our contemplative approach to truth is also an approximate sort of truth. We can see truth with our own consciousness looking into our own subjectivity, but we see with a finite consciousness, and we tell about it with a finite mind. Truth is being approached by our contemplative inquiries, but the Eternal Truth of Mysterious Reality is never reached, only approximated in our contemplative inquiries. Furthermore, we approach truth through our interpersonal, I-Thou experiences—truth that we can never learn through the scientific and contemplative approaches to truth. And we all also participate, whether we know it or not, in a fourth approach to approximate truthfulness—an approach that arises through living within our sociological fabrics and changing those economic, political, and cultural manifestations of social workability.

All four of these approximations of Truth are valid guides for our living and none needs to be seen as inconsistent with the Eternal Truth. Yet they are only partial truths—truths that we change as life goes along, truths that get transformed through and through, truths that become obsolete or subsumed into more expanded truths. The Truth indicated in above scripture points to an Eternal quality of Truth, the Whole Truth of which these other approaches to truth are approximations.

Human consciousness can encounter Eternal Truth in the everyday experiences of our lives, but we cannot hold this quality of Truth in words, language, art, or mathematics. It takes paradox or parable—myths, icons, rituals, and other cryptic expressions—expressions that require shifts in our core consciousness in order to see the meanings that such religious tools were invented to help us to become aware of and to speak about to one another. We cannot hold Eternal Truth rationally with a finite human mind. We can only speak the secret of Eternal Truth to one another with religious symbols.

Freedom

I will illustrate the “freedom” that this Eternal Truth sets free with a story. I could use a story out of my own life, a fragment from a novel or movie, a story made up by me, or something else. I have decided to retell in my own words the story of Moses. I believe that there was in that dim past a person named “Moses,” but his story has become legend, myth, parable retold for centuries—retold because this story was about a dialogue with Eternity—a dance with Final Wholeness of Reality.

Moses

Moses, in my story, was a member of a slave community in one of the world’s most well developed multi-city civilizations in the 14th century before Christ. The life being lived by Moses and his companions was harsh. This immigrant population had come to Egypt during a famine and got stuck there as part of the bottom layer of that strict hierarchy. Moses was an unusually talented boy who benefited from both Hebraic and Egyptian brands of culture. In my story he worked as a slave during record keeping alongside the more severe hardships of brick-making. He knew the people of his culture and he knew the state of those people.

One day, Moses witnessed an Egyptian soldier mistreating one of Moses’ fellow Hebrew slaves to the horrific extent that Moses lost his cool and killed that soldier. This being a capital offense for a person of his standing, Moses fled to the outback to live with an uncle, married his daughter, made a life there, and was never found.

Being an unusually aware person, he kept up with the horror stories of the hierarchy. He and his Hebrew family had absorbed a religious history that remembered stories (perhaps similar to the later stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). Moses also participated in dialogues of prayer with the “God” of those realism-loving ancestors.

One day while herding sheep out in the bush, a particular bush caught his attention. He reported to his fellow Hebrews that this bush burned without being consumed. Actually, we can surmise that Moses was seeing in his experience of this bush his own massive interior burning. His whole self was being burned away, yet the given particulars of his life were not being consumed. Everything about him was the same except that his entire selfhood was being burned away; nevertheless, nothing was lost. He was not being turning to ash, only an unreality was being consumed.

On this place that he called “holy ground,” he saw himself encountering the Profound Realty that was revered by his ancestors. And the message forming in his being within that “holy encounter” was, “Let my people go.” A number of other groups of slaves had attempted to escape to the wilderness. Most of them had been run down by the Egyptian chariots. Nothing was ever heard from those who made it into the wilderness. The whole idea of feeling called to do this sort of thing not only seemed preposterous and super dangerous to Moses, but doubts of all sorts rose in his mind about his own ability to lead such an extreme enterprise.

First of all, would other members of his culture even follow “meager me?” Yet here he was face-to-face in give-and-take relation with the Realty of Realities as perceived and adored by his sub-culture. His old images of himself were being burned up, and an unfamiliar Moses was being exposed to his consciousness.

His first response to this horrific calling was making excuses of all kinds. He tried to claim that his brother was a better speaker. But the answer that clarified for him about that excuse was, “Take your brother along, but you are the one being called here. You have to tell him what to say, when to say it, what to do, and when to do it. This whole adventure has to be your initiative.”

This was one hell of a jiggle in Moses’ inner being, and what was getting to him was the prospect of this jig, this dance that Moses would be volunteering to dance with the rest of his life. The adjective “awesome” only begins to describe the feel of this. The inner life forms of the previous Moses were evaporating, and the only symbol he found to tell his story was “a burning bush that was not consumed.”

As Moses begins to respond to this awesome calling contained in this history-making moment of his life, he is amazed with the results. People considered him charismatic. Some thought him crazy. But more found him and his story a sign of hope coming from their God. When the course of events opened up an opportunity to flee this slavery, hundreds of men, women, and children were ready to go. They picked up their belongings and babies and followed this dangerous call.

The actual escape before the onrushing chariots was seen as miraculous. When those chariots got stuck in the mud, the fleeing slaves were convinced that the Almighty Reality of all historical outcomes was able to offer openings for success to such bold intentionality. Moses was then determined to build upon the energy of this revelation of Almighty friendliness a culture of disciplines for these escapees—rules, religious practices, and laws based on a continuing trust in the friendliness of that Almighty Mysteriousness met in the outcomes of history. Within this hopeful set of convictions and communal disciplines, a spirit intensity was generated to follow Moses in solidifying a cultural revolution—working their Egyptian enculturation out of their lives and creating in its place a freedom-loving set of bold norms for living within this forbidding desert environment for another 40 years until Moses’ death. Other spirit leadership by then had emerged and they continued the core elements of this innovative heritage.

Later descendants of the Mosaic spirit clarified that not only had a temporal freedom from Egyptian slavery come about, but freedom of spirit itself had been discovered on behalf of the entire human race. They came to see that the freedom to risk death in order to break chains made of iron was the same freedom it took to risk security and selfhood in order to break cultural, institutional, and psychological chains. Indeed, if we in our time can be aware within our being of the raw freedom to use whatever power we have to bend the course of events, we can thank Moses for his assistance with this revelation.

The Truth of how Eternity deals with human beings was opened-wide through the Exodus experience. Finding the Final Reality we all meet in every moment of our lives trustworthy is a Truth that sets us free. Moses and his company enacted that trust and experienced that freedom.

A New Exodus

The crucifixion/resurrection revelation also awakened the Truth about the friendliness of Eternal Reality—theTruth that sets us free, the Truth that includes freedom. A New Exodus was made on behalf of humanity from the many estrangements of our species by this New Exodus community. But that is another story—another cryptic story exposing the Eternal Truth.

Here, once again, is how the writer of the Fourth Gospel put it:

You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.    John 8:32 New English Bible

The post Truth and Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cause

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

Chance

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

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

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

Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is my guess:  An unusually aware, sensitive, and perhaps educated member of the Hebraic slave community was moved to lead a significant number of his Hebraic companions out of a severely hierarchical Egyptian society into the wilderness where a new vision of law-writing was established that was based on a vision that the Mysterious Realty allows free action to change the course of history.  This was a huge shift in life interpretation for these Egyptian enculturated slaves—so huge that it took Moses and others 40 years, so the story goes, to wash Egypt out of this people and prepare them to fight for a more promising place on Earth for their revelation and their emerging peoplehood.

A more personally rooted story-time rendering of this transformative event begins with how a man named Moses got so angry over a member of his people being mistreated by an Egyptian soldier that he killed that solder, and then had to flee to the out-back into a life in hiding.  Then one day, so the story goes, Moses came upon a bush that was blazing with a strange type of fire.  Temporal bushes burn up, but this bush was not being consumed.  It remained the same old bush in spite of this strange conflagration. This was surely a bit of Moses’ poetry for a very real inner happening to Moses himself.   His own “who-he-thought-he-was” was being burned up, yet he was not consumed.

According to the further elaboration of this poetry, Moses witnessed that the whole scene around that bush had became Awe-filling and that it spoke to him about rescuing his people from their slavery.   This was the last thing in the world Moses wanted to do.  He raised the fact that his speech-making talent was far inferior to his brother’s.  Take him then, said the bush, but be clear that I am speaking to you, not him.  You will have to do the speaking to your brother.  You are the one I am calling to this task.  Your brother is not here for this awakening in your being.  After a bit more excuse making, Moses set out to do this.

Now what had Moses encountered?  “The God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob,” the story says.  “The Mystery of History” is another clue to understanding this encounter.  Moses is looking into the black hole of the Eternal Abyss about which human beings know nothing.  And Moses is receiving a revelation concerning that essence of that  Still Lasting Mysteriousness.  What did Moses see?  What viewpoint on the Abyss did Moses learn from this conflagration of the temporal Moses that left him still alive, but in a whole new way?  Let’s just say this revelation had to do with the topic of historical possibilities.  The story continues.

When a series of cracks in the seams of Egyptian society offered an opportunity to slip out, Moses had already prepared the people to do so.  We do not need to factually believe the exaggerated story-telling that elaborated these events.  I don’t believe that Moses ever had an audience with the Pharaoh.  Perhaps in his dream life, Moses said to Pharaoh ,”Let my people go.”   I don’t doubt that plagues happened in Egypt.  Such things happen to every society.  I can also believe that this religious people already understood that every event emerges from that Mysterious Abyss served by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Anyhow, on one highly opportune day a fairly large group of slaves got underway before the Egyptian CIA noticed them, alerted the authorities, and got a detachment of fast-moving military chariots in pursuit.  I believe that the real historical miracle was more like the chariots bogging down in the mud of the Reed Sea rather than that there were walls of water as pictured in the Red Sea myth.  But however that was, the big happening was that this group, like many others, actually escaped.   It is likely that most of those other escaping groups did not find a way to survive in the challenging wilderness.  They did not have a Moses who could explain to them how Mysterious Reality was for them (Mose insisted that they remember the Exodus and how to remember it).

I can imagine Moses saying, “Let us view our freedom from slavery as an ongoing realism that applies to the current situations that are now at hand.  Here are five ways to not forget the Exodus and five more ways on how we need to treat one another if we  are to be true to what we have learned about Reality and about being free souls who can dare the impossible and win.

At Mount Sinai Moses was giving an elaboration of the burning bush revelation about how Mysterious Reality IS and how humans who are true to this truth will find their “better angels” in their own inner depths and live those profound states of living. This profound living includes embracing the freedom to bend the flow of history.

Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others accessed the Moses-initiated vision into the Mysterious Abyss for their new situations and thereby expanded upon the relevance of the Exodus experience for all humankind.

John, the Baptist and Jesus also applied the Exodus experience to their situation,  John, the Baptist washed people of their evil era in the Jordan River.  And Jesus carried out his loyalty to the Mosaic revelation to such an extent that his followers called the result “a New Exodus.“  Jesus emphasized a positive “Exodus” from the entire Kingdom of Satan into the now available Kingdom of God on Earth.

What do these symbols mean?  They mean that we humans can exit our estrangements and find our authenticity in the living here and now of every event that comes our way.

This revelation, this viewpoint on the essence of the Mysterious Abyss, was also spelled out in the symbols of Cross and Resurrection.  When we allow our false expectations to be crucified, we can be raised up to the true and glorious life that is being given to us in this real-time moment.  “Hallelujah, the Body of Human Authenticity is Risen.”

The elaboration of this revelation about the essence of the Absolutely Mysterious Abyss continues.

The post The Revelation of Moses first appeared on Realistic Living.