Waving or Drowning?

Question Power. Always.

A little flash of insight--simple in its own way but incredibly profound and provocative--via Richard Rohr, who rode home with me from my Mandarin class this morning on bus #58.

(I'm paraphrasing, reworking, and adding my own two cents.)

Who killed Jesus?

The Romans? No.

The Jews? No.

The Chief Priest and Pilate killed Jesus. (And it seems to me that of the two, Pilate was the less enthusiastic about it.)

Not the prostitutes. Not the drunkards. Not the poor.

The personification of religious power and the personification of political power killed Jesus.

Therefore, for followers of Jesus, the injunction to always question power is Biblical.

Always.

The Bible as a Conflict Book

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts; but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life’s problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes, and if you read it honestly and humbly it should actually create problems for you!

The way you struggle with the fragmentation of the Bible is the way you PROBABLY struggle with your own fragmentation and the fragmentation of everything else. The Bible offers you a mirror that reflects back to you how you live life in general. There are very high levels of consciousness and holiness in the Biblical text, and texts which are frankly hateful, selfish, and punitive. You need to recognize them as such. As Wendell Berry says, “the mind that is not baffled is not employed.” The Bible mirrors our own human fragmentation, your own two steps backward and your own occasional three steps forward. Your spiritual eyes will eventually be trained to see which way you—and the text—are going (See 1 Corinthians 2:10-16).

Richard Rohr, from A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters

When Reality Supports Our Theories

Sometimes reality presents us with object lessons to back up theories we've been prattling on about.

Read Air Quality Sucks Across Middle-East and Asia

NASA/Public Domain

We've talked before about how we generally do not evolve until we are forced to by crises. Now, for the first time in human history, we now have the ability to create problems that literally threaten the entire planet. And in order to solve these problems, we need a leap in the evolution of consciousness to a global mindset. Writing this from China, where the air quality has been particularly bad, has itself been a helpful if unwanted demonstration. Borders only exist on maps and in the minds of politicians. Bad air here becomes bad air there and everywhere with a little help from the wind.

To summarize, individuals and corporations, operating on at best a national level, are creating regional and global problems. And as Einstein said, we will never solve problems with the same thinking that got us into them. Global problems require global thinking.

Evolutionary Quotes: The Name and Texture and Aura of That Future

“The message is clear: history belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being. This is not simply a religious statement. It is also true of Communists or capitalists or anarchists as it is of Christians. The future belongs to whoever can envision a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable.

This is the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs.

The future is not closed. There are fields of forces whose actions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present. In the New Testament, the name and texture and aura of that future is God’s domination-free order, the reign of God…

Walter Wink

Afterthought: This is exactly why knowing that we evolve is critical. Knowing that we evolve means knowing what kind of future should be, can be, and eventually will be, and moving up the schedule.

We're All (Alone) In This Together

Here's a brief thought exercise for you:

What if there is life on other planets, but it turns out that it is physically impossible to exceed the speed of light? No such thing as Warp Speed, Hyper Speed, or even Ludicrous Speed. 

That would certainly finish the job that Copernicus started - relieving us of our humancentric view of the universe. But while evidential knowledge of life out there might serve as something as a motivator for us, we could never meet, communicate, or in any other way share information with our cosmos co-inhabitants. Effectively then, we would be alone in the universe.

It would make sense to me if this was the way that The Creative Force Behind Everything, aka God, chose to do it. Each beautiful macrocosm given the same opportunity to make it, to fully develop and reflect the spark of the Creator resident within them.

The reality of our alone-ness would eliminate the pipe dream of some more intelligent life form swooping in to the rescue, fixing our problems and cleaning up our messes. And whether or not this scenario is accurate, I propose that we need to think this way. Urgently.

For the first time in human history we have generated problems serious enough to potentially wipe out human life on this planet. That's quite an accomplishment, and we will require a world-centric consciousness to solve these problems. 

Einstein, or whoever said it, was right: We can't solve problems with the same thinking that got us into them. For that we will need to evolve, and this we will have to do on our own.

And since no one is coming to help, we had better get started.

I (Used To) Believe In Father Christmas:

A Heretical Plea (Of Sorts) For An Evolutionary Christianity

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
'till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I Believe In Father Christmas
Emerson, Lake & Palmer

I used to be troubled by that song. I say troubled, because I found myself drawn to it, yet disturbed by the message. It seemed to me that the song was about belief lost, and listening to it felt like a betrayal of my faith. I no longer feel that way.

When I first started to delve into integral philosophy and the ensuing evolutionary thinking, I was immediatey struck by two thoughts. First, this really resonates. And second, this is going to be trouble for the Christian faith as it is broadly practiced.

Christianity is largely a static faith. After all, that's what a doctrine is, isn't it? Something that is true, always has been true, and always will be true. Wars have been fought and blood spilled over the slightest deviations. And even today so-called heretical thinking can still get you shunned, ex-communicated, or at the very least hammered with nasty comments from self-appointed guardians of the faith.

A human consciousness that evolves and a faith that doesn't is problematic.

I've come to believe that we are evolving, both as individuals and collectively as a species. In my own way I have tried to say that as we evolve, our understanding of God must also grow. I added that God didn't change, but our capacity to understand God should. (I no longer hold to that point, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Unknown to me until recently, I've been echoing a thought of the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who more elequently wrote:

"The world must have a God; but our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended."

Teilhard (1881 - 1955) was truly a man ahead of his time, and most of the evolutionary thinkers I have read or read about cite him as a key influence. His own theories landed him in hot water with the Church; a 1950 encyclical condemned several of his theories, and much of his work remained unpublished during his lifetime. More recently, as the world (and the Church) catches up with this giant thinker, some of his ideas are coming back into favour.

Christianity is a human construct, as are all religions. They can help us to imagine what is unimaginable, to grasp the ungraspable, and to put borders around what cannot be contained, so in that sense they are helpful. But they should not be mistaken for Ultimate Reality. And as we expand our consciousness and slowly grasp just a little bit more of the Reality, our faiths must evolve too.

As they are now, they make no allowances for a humanity that is evolving. If our faith and our understanding of God don't evolve with us, we run the risk of outgrowing that faith, of leaving adherents no choice but to leave it behind, just as we did Santa Claus, ultimately looking back on it as a quaint fairy tale from the childhood of our species.

 

Evolutionary Quotes: We Are Creating II

This popped into my Inbox just this morning. In a perfect world I would reverse the order of these 2 quotes, but I think they compliment each other quite well; the macro view and our part in it.

Bearing Witness to the Cosmos

In order to understand what the interior, or spiritual , dimension of evolution is all about, you have to pause and stand back for a moment. Stand back and dare to bear witness to the majesty of the creative process as a whole—the miracle that emerged from nothing in a burst of light and energy 14 billion years ago. Bear witness to the glory and inconceivable creative power of this cosmic process that ultimately gave rise to the conditions that made it possible for you to have the experience you are having in this very moment. And then pay attention to the experience of being alive when you step this far outside the normal narrow sphere of your daily awareness. Realize the enormity of what it means to exist from this expanded perspective. What you will notice is that inherent in the vastness of it all is a powerful driving ecstatic urgency. That ecstasy and that urgency is the felt sense that the entire creative process is moving. It's going somewhere all the time.

Andrew Cohen, Blog Post: When The New Year Doesn't End

Evolutionary Quotes: We Are Creating

Image Source: Nasa
 

We are not just participating in an already-created universe; we are also participants in the process of creation. And that knowledge carries tremendous moral weight.

Carter Phipps, Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science's Greatest Idea

Afterthought: Our every action or non action, our every word, our every thought, is creating. Are we contributing to the world we want, the world that could be, should be, and one day will be*, or are we adding to something that will need to be cleaned up by someone else? Will another soul be required to spend their precious, priceless creative energy just to clean up my mess?

* We could call this the Kingdom, the Reign of God, or simply the future.

Willful, Willing, Literal, and Serious

I apologize for the rapid fire Richard Rohr references, but I couldn't hold this one back. (The good Father is currently outlining the Seven Fundamentals of his teaching in his Daily Meditation, and they are outstanding. Sign up if you are not already receiving them.)

 

“Fundamentalism” Misses the Fundamental

My dear friend, Dr. Gerald May, made a distinction years ago that I have found myself using frequently. He says spirituality is not to encourage willfulness, but in fact willingness. Spirituality creates willing people who let go of their need to be first, to be right, to be saved, to be superior, and to define themselves as better than other people. That game is over and gone; and if you haven’t come to the willing level—“not my will but Thy will be done” as Jesus says (Matthew 26:39)—then I think the Bible will almost always be misused.

I would like to say that the goal in general is to be serious about the Scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious, and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please). The point I would like to make is that literalism is not to take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism in fact avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text. Willful people use Scripture literally when it serves their purposes, and they use it ‘figuratively’ when it gets in the way of their cultural biases; willing people let the Scriptures change them instead of using them to change others.

Adapted from the webcast A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters

God is Just Another Word For Everything

I haven't done much blogging since leaving China on December 19 for Canada, or since leaving Canada for Hong Kong on January 2. There have been countless magic moments, and I've tried to capture some of them on Facebook, but mostly I've just tried to experience them fully. This afternoon I take the 1 hour flight up the coast back home to Xiamen, and this trip comes to an end.

But the journey of INTENTION for 2013 is just beginning.

I can't think of a better way to launch the New Year than with these wise words from Richard Rohr, in discussing his latest book, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. Read about the book here, order it directly from the Center and receive a bonus CD, or get it from Amazon. 

Listen to Richard discussing the book below, prompted by the playful teasing of Travis and Steve from Alter Video Magazine and The Work of The People.

Click the image to view the video

This might be the one. This might be the book you're going to want to have a dozen copies of, or a case, to give away to friends and strangers both. I think this may very well be the one.