WHY OUR NATIONAL VIOLENCE? and EACH OF OUR PART IN IT? ..... December 9, 2015

Ideology is defined as “The set of ideas and beliefs of a group or political party.” -Merriam Webster.

Historic Examples of  terror arising from Christian/American Ideologies.

Following the massacres in Colorado and San Bernardino, even more intensely Americans are asking, “What can we do?” History shows that to ' just do something' regarding a social crisis without an understanding of the underlying dynamics can be worse than doing nothing. Right now it seems that government institutions, political parties, disciplines of learning and religions have different and unsure understandings of what drives so many murders in our land. Some central ideologies that are common in America include : Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal , Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

These are important relatively large ideological groups of our culture. One way caring people who condemn such killing could conceivably achieve a working consensus is to focus on the destructive dynamic of ' Ideology'. This has not been such a sinister word in our culture but I think it is time to consider it an underlying dynamic of our massacres, homicides and  the dangerous social/political polarities of our nation..

We might declare war on a dark potential all 'ideologies' have in common. An ideology can be a formal religion or religious perspective, or it can be a political orientation of a group within a culture. Or it can be a superior view of ones group  based on skin  color or ethnicity.

Why and how does any ideology hold a potential threat to the common good for a safer yet diverse culture? A good number of persons holding an ideology, which is a high majority of citizens, will have some level of desire for more persons to embrace their ideology, making the culture more comfortable for them. This last sentence is the underlying danger of every ideology. Among those having such a desire still fewer of them will become 'radical' enough to attempt pushing their view and beliefs publicly, to the point of harming others emotionally or physically for the 'success' of their ideology.

A necessary challenge requiring a mature mentality is for persons of every ideology to face that their own ideology has the potential of some persons becoming so 'possessed' by its ideas to become, if not murderers , destructive of unity and cooperation in culture. This very tangible situation requires that  each ideology group  self monitor itself from thinking that 'their' group's perspective is a 'one and only' or 'only right' point of view. The fact that it is hard to so self monitor shows how urgent the need is. For we are seeing , in our country's expressions of violence, evidence that a growing number of persons now see themselves as representatives of some 'only right way' to proceed politically, culturally or religiously.

Here is a hard but glaringly necessary need. It means that persons holding to any political party, no matter how personally sincere, stop themselves short of ever concluding that other perspectives do not have something important and needed to bring to the culture , to the public discussion.

It would religiously mean for example that Christians of all stripes realize that, regarding public life, we must give up contending that 'Jesus- Christian's  human/God symbol' is the literal  rightful ruler or Lord of all people and cultures. We would need instead to see this image as a matter of one's inner private center of security and meaning, not something to impose by force or law on the outside world. To externalize this as a literal/physical ideal for all persons needs to be seen as a 'radicalized' belief(But because many believers are unconscious of the violence this projects toward others they claim and experience complete innocence.) which is destructive, disrespectful and has historically been murderously violent. It would mean that followers of Islam be convinced that any statements of the Sacred Quran not be taken as literally meaning persons who are not Muslims should be considered automatically enemies. It would mean that persons of the Hebrew faith refuse to use Hebrew Scripture as literally meaning any certain piece of geography belongs them by eternal decree.

Individuals of the major Faith Groups can decide that if they are to contribute to a peaceful world, which all surely can, such statements taken literally and physically are very divisive for a sustained culture. And are more correctly applied as the private internal symbols they actually are coming from the stories of ancient Sacred texts. These 'beliefs' apply to the inner meditative practice of faith, not wished for impositions on the whole nation or world.

Ideological systems, political and religious (which often go hand in hand), are not inherently bad . They have been for millennia the cultural/psychological foundation for the most livable civilizations of humanity. But the world is now too small for any ideology to assert itself as superior to the others or to seek to impose its symbols literally on the rest of the culture.

If more people from all ideologies were to stand together against these underlying threats which each carries within itself, then a rational critique of ones own ideology could develop. We could also then help each other with understandable explanations when any ideology is being emotionally, if not physically, violent against the common well being of the whole culture. It seems to me if humans presently cannot strengthen individually the process of critiquing the destructive potential of all ideologies present , beginning with their own, violence in the nation and the world will only escalate toward mutual self destruction. I'm trusting that a good number of persons of every ideology mentioned above find the thrust of what I am describing sensible and critical in our present time. Perhaps a growing cross section of strong and fair minded persons is significantly greater in the nation than ones who are already, perhaps unknowingly, possessed by their particular ideology of superiority.

GOD, BIBLE, JESUS, US AND POST MODERN SCIENCE..... September 8, 2015

When anyone speaks of us humans being as God, even Jesus made the statement, it must primarily mean that the only avenue by which God has ever been imagined has come through the natural human psyche.

There is no story or metaphor of God in or out of the Bible that demands  the notion that  God came , or was revealed, to humanity except through the natural processes of the human psyche. All comes to us from within us, the mind or psyche. No reality outside of us, including God, is pushed literally or physically into our heads and we thus get an image of it ...whether it be a tree or a god. There is no other way to comprehend or to be conscious except through the natural processes of the psyche. God was never, by any normal evidence, ever anything 'outside the human' that the human discovered. It seems quite important to get clear this awareness in order for our notion of god to further develop from the ' Super being in the sky.'

This does not mean that any human is equal to God or that the idea or experience of God is always as Freud said,  'only a crutch for the weak minded'. No human has ever or can ever 'know' and thus embrace consciously the whole psyche. In fact most of the whole collective  psyche remains unconscious to any one human and even to all humanity's combined consciousness.

The part of anything can never embrace the whole but the part can be the home of the whole and so we are, in that sense, all God in potential.
For all that can be potentially known is at home within us. Philosophers have spoken of the          'Macrocosm being contained in the Microcosm.' This, if Jesus were truly a human being, had to also be true of him or else, by any psychological definition of human, he was not fully human. Of course Jesus of Nazareth must most assuredly been  fully human-- and thus  potentially  God. This reasoning does astonishingly imply at some point God and Human become the same from different perspectives. But like us, for Jesus to remain human means he also did not embrace or become conscious of the whole psyche- the  Collective Unconscious. Only his admirers claimed that status for him. And their claim need not be considered a delusion or deception  but an evolutionary psychological fact for them.

Now there have always been humans who have claimed to be God overtly or by their presumptuous
behavior and their cultures have usually recognized them, when in that state of mind,  as not healthy representatives of the human species. Jesus was no doubt a very healthy representative of our species so would have made no such claims for himself.

It was not deception by which those who after his death told and wrote about him made him to be the totality of what depth psychology now calls  the Collective Unconscious or God but a sincere natural human process we can now call unconscious projection. Everything that is or can be that has not become conscious to the human is automatically and unconsciously(without our knowing it) projected onto something in the outside world and there we 'see' what was already in us both good and ill.

We have within us an image or many images of God and, until we become more conscious of how we 'see' or imagine God by projection we unconsciously project these images of 'all knowing' and 'all powerful', 'all perfection' and 'all horrible' onto the outside, most usually as a 'person' or 'being' much like ourselves only much more of everything. Thus our unconscious determination to keep alive the Big Person, anthropomorphic image of God in the sky.

One among many ways to begin to grasp our own projection of the internal psychic God image is to explore our experience of how we projected this on to our parental figures as small children when personal consciousness was just beginning to unfold. We 'saw' them as 'extremely powerful, knowing and either very kind or the opposite.' Our parents simply were not truly as we 'saw' them but were very much our own projections. Many persons cling strongly to those original parental projections their entire life, never facing and integrating the imperfections of their own human parents. Humans become conscious of such projections and many others in varying degrees for reasons we do not know. It seems evolution of the mind pushes us to withdraw projections as much as possible so we become more conscious. The level of consciousness attained, and there are always many blind spots remaining, does not depend primarily on having superior intelligence but more likely on experiences, inner and outer, that seem to push one to doubt the conventional notion of  'common sense' reality and to intuit that there is a 'world unseen'. An underlying penetrating world  that is just as real and influencing us, mostly unconsciously, as the  biased conventional claim to see clearly the material world as it 'actually is' whether acknowledged or not. 

Finally now, in the past 100 years, the objective processes of science, which at first supported our common human confidence of the certainty of the material world being substantially what it 'appears' to be by common sense, is showing us more and more(via Sub Atomic Quantum Theory) that consciousness development in the human is the process of dropping our projections along with all other kinds of biases and assumptions in what can be a long and painful, as well as exhilarating, awakening to more and more of what is more  real and true. The maxim, " Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" continues to be happening with us. 

LOVING THE EARTH ...FOUNDATIONAL FOR LOVING OTHERS..... August 10, 2015

I've recently harvested a nice crop of potatoes and carrots from the garden. This year I've gardened more mindful of how well the Earth works to produce its wonders. No matter how we rise above the earth's dirt as we go through the stages of human development it can be very rewarding  to come right back to the Earth. And put our hands and noses against it as we partake of its fruits with renewed gratitude. The Earth seems not guided by any perfect hand but more by one that eventually gets the job done. June was horribly wet and threatened to rot the tomato plants but the hot weather came  in time for an abundant tomato crop.

I'm more aware that it took the processes of creation some 10 billion years to give birth to the Earth and another four billion for human consciousness, the only consciousness yet that can be aware of these things, to come into existence. Before human consciousness there was nothing in nature that 'observed' the rest or was able to know of the world and its wonders. The Earth now seems run not by a perfect mind but one that only has a strong hint of where it wants to go. We now know the evolutionary process, though seemingly guided by mind at some deep level,* made many false starts, wrong turns and ran into innumerable dead ends as it made its slow way forward to produce the human consciousness which  generates continuous questions about our origins and sustainment.

I'm strongly struck with  how totally dependent we are on the Earth. It is truly from the dirt that the somewhat conscious mind of nature  has provided some general direction leading the material world and finally  the human conscious mind into existence. We and all our forebears, near human and older life forms, were birthed by the Earth. And all have been and are sustained by it. It is our source of life, food, water , air, and our mindful, sometimes creative,  exhilarations due to just being in the Earth with its sounds, sights, wonders and mystery.

I've a growing sense, since the Earth appears to have some kind of mind within it,  that some level of consciousness belongs to the Earth. Perhaps the Earth is more correctly thought of as having Soul. This might change how we relate to it. We humans being this final high level of the Earth's birthing , with our exceeding measure of consciousness, are potentially able to be so open as to comprehend the idea of the  'whole ' of the Earth and to recognize just how good 'it seeks' to be to humanity. This in spite that its many wrong turns and disastrous accidents such as tornadoes and tsunamis kill thousands of  plants and animals and innocent humans every year. The 'Earth's mind' shows itself to us as  imperfect and  not always moral or just.

Yet if the Earth might feel as a Soul it must be horrified that with its best, however imperfect, efforts in nurturing us humans to this present state of consciousness that humanity has treated  her terribly. Since science came of age with the great jump in the human capacity for objective reasoning, instead of humanity turning to the Earth with gratitude and care for her wonders and complexities, humans have treated her as a thing only to be used for self interest. Her glories have been used as a garbage dump. Her high places mutilated  for a year's  coal  supply  or for someone to 'own' a beautiful view.

The oceans are viewed as a permanent sewage system. Humans, the only mind in nature capable of seeing just how wondrous the Earth has been to us all, have treated her with contempt in acts of ignorance and abuse. Instead of protecting her capacities, seasons in and out for millennia , to replenish herself with clean water , air and soil we have seen just how far we can go to destroy her capacities for such cyclical renewal.  We are literally killing her and  taking her remains as spoils as if we were some victor in a conflict with her. We have, in the space of a few centuries, used our growing technological capacity of control  over aspects of nature to greedily use up Earth's finite  resources and turn them against her. We have  drastically and  unthoughtfully interfered with her fragile, millions of years in the making, ecosystems.

Science is clear we are far from understanding the deep complexities of the Earth's ways, how one change can affect a whole complex. We truly have acted as ones who 'do not know what they do.' Is humanity, especially its representatives who are most in control of our most powerful technologies, becoming conscious of these cruelties toward the Earth and willing to make amends?

None of this is brand new. Our own sound knowledge has issued continuous warnings for several generations but we have barely heard. There are numerous well articulated  and informed voices in the world saying these things. But we obviously have not reached a resolved consensus so that we are turning away  enough from our abuses of the Earth and becoming finally its truly conscious caretakers. There should be the same collective response as  the individual response once the abuse of a spouse becomes fully conscious: 'There will be no more of this, ever.' If this needed collective leap in consciousness does not happen our own species, and likely all others, will certainly face extinction. We will be but another failed turn in the efforts of  of evolution to arrive at a creature's state of consciousness capable of  understanding  that it alone can gaze on the  Earth with a conscious, appreciative face and become a lover of the world.

Being more  mindful of the Earth in something as common as it gifting me 20 pounds of potatoes  can bring one closer to being a  lover of the Earth. From a religious perspective, and certainly a Christian one, many believe that 'loving one another ' is a value goal more important than any other to  actualize in the real world. We make strong efforts to heap unconditional love on our children and closest family members. And  to spread  loving and kind behaviors to as broad a circle as we seem capable but are we building on a foundation of loving the world which births and sustains us all?

I trust many are coming to see that the goal of a world where humans love each other so effectively  that we no longer are a threat to each other likely calls for an indirect approach. We have too long  assumed we can simply exert our will and, with a prayer, manage to directly 'love others', even our own families, well enough to do our part of helping the world to survive its present violence. But the Christian story of stimulating such love has clearly not worked well enough so far. Humanity is far closer to destroying itself and its Earth than it was when the founders of our major Western religions exhorted us to 'love one anther.' I strongly suspect that we are predominantly attempting to love one another, our families, friends and our human species without first falling in love with the source of it all, ... the Earth...without seeing ourselves as its only assigned caretakers.

We learned once to call her Mother Earth but do we really believe now strongly enough that the Earth is our mother,  who stands always attempting and desiring, with her imperfect consciousness and sometimes failed omniscience, to sustain us so succeeding humans can more participate in where evolution will guide humanity in the centuries of a new millennium? It appears from  the best scientific data, along with religious and mythological stories of Earths' destruction, that  it is the level of present human consciousness about these very matters that will determine if there are to be more centuries ahead.

These understandings are totally within the human's intellectual and technological capacity so we are enabled to act appropriately  and urgently. Or if this does not happen significantly in rather short order the evolutionary effort to reach new plateaus of advanced human  consciousness,with the bonus of an expanded quality of intimate love, will be a dead end. We will have no one to love if we have failed to 'so love the world.' Humanity will become  a history which  will never be told.

*Quantum Physics is now making discoveries that point to some' kind of mind' present in matter.

Resources: Some writings which  support the ideas of this essay can be found in these books:

Sacred Universe by Thomas Perry

An Undivided Universe by D. Bohm and B.J. Hiley

The Earth Has A Soul by C.G. Jung

The Individuation of God by   Peter B. Todd

KILLING OF LIONS AND PEOPLE...August 1, 2015

Internationally people are enraged over the killing of a lion by a trophy hunter who lured him out of an African animal preserve. Others respond with outrage that people can be so upset at the killing of a lion while not as disturbed by the killings in our American streets and genocides around the world. How can we approach such  challenges to our strained value systems?

Until humans become more consciously aware  the planet with all its features (rivers, mountains, forests, air and seas), manifold species and complex ecosystems, all predating humans and our religions by millions of years, was not evolved simply  for our human self interests we will not consistently value our own species. We fool ourselves to think we can love each other while not loving and caring for the 'whole' thing, while not really 'so loving the world'. Humans are not the center of the world, as we tend to assume; but have amazingly become, via evolutionary processes, the only part of creation which can be conscious of the whole. We have become the only 'conscious mind' in creation capable of caring for the Earth as our primary task. I hope we are up to it?      

So far since the birth of our scientific consciousness, some 400 years ago, we have acted like we despise the Earth and its precise balance and dazzling wonders, bringing more destruction to it than all other uncreative forces combined in its four billion year history. This damage has exponentially  escalated with our technology. So damaging that we have significantly warped the Earth's capacity to seasonally replenish life's needs for quality water, air and soil. This path unchanged has one end....extinction. Obviously both the killing of the lion and the murder of humans are unconscionable   behaviors, not just against the lion and fellow humans, but against the Earth itself.

THE NATURE AND CHALLENGE OF JESUS' TEACHINGS.... July 26, 2015

"And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
-- Jesus

 Here are some thoughts on hearing Jesus. I don't believe any genuine spiritual teaching can be approached literally as something the human ego is addressed by God 'to do.' Instead they are not intended as rational statements but are always paradoxical. I hear the sayings of Jesus intentionally creating an impossible bind for any human who aspires to live an ethical life(Which I assume to be most ordinary folks) for it points to what we well know we have not and cannot consistently or even usually practice in a literal external way. It pushes one to acknowledge their distance from any claimed moral or loving perfection. And to become aware that when any unconditional or sacrificial or effective love comes from us, it is not our ego's doing but a spirit or The Christ or The Self acknowledged within that makes such moments possible. Such moments would be ones experienced by the ego consciousness as 'grace'(where did that come from? we might ask ourselves with gratitude) and not of our own egocentric doing. That is why Jesus would would say such is not to be announced or paraded for that honors the ego which is not where such love behaviors originate, and the practitioners of this fully know that.

This would imply that behaving by the love ethic is not one to be 'worked on' as much as always 'prayed for' as in 'thy kingdom come.' Ironically this is the very prayer I was taught growing up  we do not pray, for the 'kingdom' has supposedly already come....it is the institutional church. Surely this is a tragic misunderstanding of Jesus.

I would add that I find it important to think of Jesus as not always experiencing such perfect love and sharing as a human being either. (I ask for the Christian reader's patience to not rush to the conclusion that this paragraph diminishes the value or adoration I have for Jesus. It is quite the opposite I assure you.) I imagine Jesus lived with a sense of 'grace' like I am describing above.  He  experienced being aided from beyond his ego consciousness and enabled to be what love demanded when it was most needed, often just barely enough and in the nick of time- not some continuous morally perfect life without any flaw. That is how I have come to understand what it is to be a human living in harmony with the Spirit. This would be what the actual 'incarnation and union of divine and human' would look like and how it would be experienced by the human in our day.  The idea of Jesus the man being lovingly and morally perfect(except potentially as he also implied other humans are)  makes it impossible for me to either relate to or genuinely appreciate him as a model for living.. .. I'd have to say I am somewhat repelled by that interpretation of his life for it is totally distant to what is actually me and what I observe in the best of  others. It does not help or empower me toward a more loving life. Instead it  implies Jesus was not a real and whole human being, which is the only goal I can rationally aspire to, to experience my being's center as not my ego consciousness but something much larger, something which I am not the manager of and which creates those moments of grace whenever love and full generosity  should emerge in my behaviors. This would also imply our imperfections and character flaws, rather than being despised and rejected outright,  become consciously a necessary and essential part of our true and 'whole' character or personality.

ADDENDUM: 
Jesus also says, 'All things are possible with God'... Applying that to the individual or group would mean just that. We do not ever 'know' by reasoned knowledge what The Self or indwelling spirit or The Christ can work to bring forth from humans. The important point I think is that morality and ethics in Jesus' teaching is not primarily a matter of the thinking, willing, planning ego consciousness. It is created by the 'other' undetectable by physical senses .... religious function. Depth psychology stresses, this 'other' function is as much a reality of the natural human being as are  the capacities to think and feel. Becoming more aware of this and Trusting 'It' is there and functioning creates a transformed 'state of mind' that can bring about development of the 'whole' person and  potentially  a genuinely transcending  and  realized ethic. ... where one potentially experiences 'so loving the world'. I think we can see how hope in any kind of PERFORMANCE UNDER LAW or human reason alone , runs contrary to this paradoxical emphasis of Jesus' teaching.

OBAMA... UNCOMMONLY FORWARD THINKING PRESIDENT... July 14, 2015

I'm thinking our president may be one of the most visionary persons in high public life in recent times. This 'deal with the devil' (Iran) is nearly a perfect example of the Jungian notion that you do not rid the 'shadow' within or without by ... destroying it , crushing it and trying to live as if the shadow is not real or powerful. We have become so accustomed to just beating the crap out of 'the enemy' that we have nearly lost the capacity to interact creatively with any scary 'other'. This reminds me of that metaphorical statement of Jesus, ' you had better strike a deal on the way to judgment with your adversary or you will pay every penny.' Metaphorical truths have their moments when they are exactly and literally true in the outer human real situation.

I am feeling grateful that Obama seems to have been thinking far more into the future from the start of his presidency than the themes that were the hot ones in the news all along. He had dreams of creative solutions to some of the biggest problems. I imagine he envisioned today, and why it was the right thing to do, before he ever entered the office. I'm pretty amazed and proud of his accomplishment(s).

BTW.... just listen to the 'smaller' voices all over the air waves. Someone said, ' it is late in the day when small persons cast long shadows.' Its good to see there are some very large persons that come along in history. I know many do not, and perhaps cannot, agree with this assessment. I am  open to other opinions also.

OBAMA 'CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING' EFFECT......A SYNCHRONICITY .....July 17, 2015

This may be my recurring kind of thought process and observation of public/private life that 'helps thou my unbelief.' and creates hope.  I do not credit Obama personally that he, in my opinion, is being a significant 'consciousness raiser' for the American collective. I hope he is an example of a person being an instrument of nature, evolution, God, or however one describes it, for the common good. This is not something that anyone can plan or scheme into reality. It is larger than any me or us.  But is an example of 'what one is for whatever reasons' being, at just the right time, in a 'just so' perfect harmony with   barely conscious  needs of the collective consciousness. To have such an un-conspired effect is like hitting  the  bulls eye of a rapidly moving target at an incredible long distance with a bow and arrow while riding horse back.

Psychologically, and maybe theologically, this can be called a 'synchronicity'(A highly attention getting meaningful coincidence that is not rationally caused.) I interpret the recent sudden successive Supreme Court's decisions, 'making more conscious'  the  meaning of the Confederate flag, the Iran Deal and the first presidential visit to a prison as aspects of this Obama-Nation synchronicity.(This is all when a President is considered a lame duck) All these are likely very important 'consciousness raising' happenings for the country. I am also very sensitively aware that all these can be individually  painful  experiences, which is the nature of 'consciousness raising.'

This latest example included his speech inside a prison which may become quite  significant  in their  historical  ethical social effects...He said, " Many of these are young men who made a mistake, not unlike the mistakes that I made and that many of you made. The difference is they did not have the support structure, the resources (socially/legally/psychologically/educationally) to  SURVIVE their mistake like you and I did." This statement  strikes me as a mixture of personal confession and gratitude of his own life along with a solid 'as yourselves' application to the lives and hearts of others; the inmates and all the rest of us who have developed or allowed unjust public  policies.

GROWING PAINS: IS AMERICA EXPERIENCING AN EXPANSION OF ITS COLLECTIVE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS ?... July 10, 2015

The Collective Consciousness of America seems to be rapidly expanding on various fronts.  Are Americans waking up to some changing moral  values including the value  and support placed  on  the love and  marriage commitments between  gay persons?  This has breathtakingly  surged from polls taken  even ten years ago. Such rapid change or waking up to a new value is always accompanied by growing pains from whichever point of view one has carried rather habitually. We can hope that changes are not coming so fast that people do not have time to assimilate or rush to think that 'some conspiracy' is forcing it on us.  Maybe what eventually takes shape in the culture will be experienced  by most  as an activity of 'something larger' at work than just politics or activists.  This can be a new sense of the religious function at work in the culture and  give some  people a renewed  sense that the Sacred is involved.

This being said it is my hope that we are all having some of our religious or moral  traditional beliefs challenged.  I know mine have been continually for several decades. I've found   the way I had concluded that homosexuality is always immoral, and not another expression of human/Sacred love, can only be reached, as best I can tell, when the Bible is read as if it were written directly to us by a modern author. And even then by ignoring strong contradictions to such a conclusion with  far more central teachings of Jesus and other Bible themes. The Bible's truthful overall nature has to be, however sincerely, intentionally disregarded to reach that negative conclusion about this part of our citizenry.  I  fully understand this is how many sincere people  read and follow parts of the Bible. This short video briefly demonstrates at least that there is another way to read the Bible... A way of approaching the Bible that results in different applications today of the few selected verses of the Bible used to devalue and not support, as we do for straight couples, the love between same sex committed partners. This other view of the Bible has led many to value and support sexual love between same sex couples believing it can be just as needed in the world and a fulfillment of God's will as that between any straight couples. This other view of the Bible's nature helps explain why many Americans have awakened to a new value and  now support the Equality of Marriage for gay and lesbian persons as something genuinely good and loving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDKL-f9Iwds

A WISDOM IN THE DEPTHS OF NATURE.... June 12, 2015

Notice the caption on the picture. One of my first 'big dreams'(there have been only a few) was a bottomless abyss(personally and professionally) in the road. I was pleased to be traveling this road  and most needed to complete it. I was not told to jump but a 'blue collar' man with a beard appeared and pointed way down toward one end of the abyss, so far I could barely see.  There was a very narrow barely visible winding road up the other side of the abyss. It was implied I would need to enter the abyss and find that road out which  would be provided. I was, in my life, sailing on very well when I had the dream so it seemed irrelevant. I wrote it down and shared it with my Clinical Pastoral Education director.

It was two years later that the abyss became stark reality. I was not quick to recall the dream but did and  then decided to take it as a trustworthy resource. Such experiences confirmed for me there is a 'wisdom', an unconscious natural phenomenon, like is  present in evolutionary processes, embedded in the deepness of universal creation and life. It is now second nature for me to return to that understanding and rely on it no matter how unrealistic it at times becomes in routine daily life. That is when I need it most. I think such 'wisdom' is present both collectively and individually for  all that is is  one interrelated thing. I'd say many of the religious stories that Karen Armstrong vividly relates in A History Of God are experiences of such wisdom, which can be as frightening as they are fascinating and attracting. They deserve the word numinous.
 
I think the earth itself appeals to us constantly with its seductive numinosity which is spiritual in nature. But post modern people still consider the earth as 'different' and 'disconnected' from us, an outer object to be observed and tinkered with (We are so deeply influenced by the last 400 years of science and much dualistic  monotheism theology.) Because because the earth seems as the 'other' to us it has, more harshly than probably any temporarily destructive dynamic in evolution, resulted in the human wanting to subdue, control and pillage it for temporary privilege in a completely unattached sterile way. I'm thinking that a much elevated consciousness of our interrelationship with the earth and all its parts and systems and its life giving may be our most likely approach to recognizing God again in ways relevant to humans of this new millennium.

THE 'NUMINOUS' AS THE EXPERIENCE BASE OF RELIGION... June 12, 2015

Ezekiel's  Vision Of The Celestial City

Many of Karen Armstrong's religious stories in A History of God are ones which  she says were captured by 20th century religious thinker Rudolf Otto in his work The Idea of the Holy. He explains there that worship ritual and environment are efforts to provide a 'safer' way for people to experience the Sacred without a direct encounter that could overwhelm. That is why large beautiful cathedrals with their art and statuary can render the most intellectual types silent. To be analytical and deconstructive(which one can choose  to do for sure just as one can when viewing a full circle  rainbow) would seem inappropriate and irreverent. Otto used the words NUMINOUS to describe such experience.  The callings and visions  of the  prophets, which Armstrong so vividly describes, and the conversion of Saul to Paul are classic examples of such breath taking  numinosity. This no doubt is why there is a  New Testament  passage  saying, ' It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.'

I'm not sure that  progressive Christianity's emphasis, which I  think is doing  much good in giving direly needed attention to social injustices of our day,  on 'following Jesus', whose numinous experience would be his baptism voice/vision and his wilderness temptations, are acknowledged or stressed. So there is little awe and silence and many arguments for political  agreement. One with good emotional/thinking balance does not argue with the numinous or need other persuasion. It is truly a, if not the, source of natural, uncoerced, belief in what has always been called God. Any intellectual analytical description of such things fully misses their experienced meaning, even can destroy it for that person. It takes such descriptive, poetic writing as Armstrong's to point us in the right direction for the numinous  impact of such Biblical narrative. And she pulls this off in the name of history. Good for her.

 Likely our insistence on an 'only good, comforting, perfect and pleasant God' can take us away from what might be a fuller more conscious experience of the Numinous Sacred. Nature as a reflection of God is likely one of our most direct encounters with the numinous, such as  in hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis(not to mention rainbows. high mountains, life forms, waterfalls, galaxies and now wonders of the subatomic world  which deny all  'common sense' physics). My Dad's childhood home was blown away by a tornado. He talked about it all his life, not only  the destruction it did but also its powerful  fascination for him. It was a numinous experience for him no doubt. Even the life disrupting death of a loved one can be such an numinous far reaching  factor  in ones life. Part of the thrill of viewing the Grand Canyon is imagining losing footing and plunging to the bottom. These all point to the numinous which takes one beyond thinking  and reasoning  and is wrapped in irrational wonder and sometimes gut wrenching fear. Truly a religious aspect of conscious human life.                                                                                                                            http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/Otto.htm

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU'S SPEECH TO CONGRESS MARCH 5, 2015

Watching Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress I see a classical projection of one's shadow onto the 'totally demonized other', Iran in this case. He creates an apocalyptic tirade that competes with any  Armageddon  imagery. Obviously, Israel's collective fears are  rational but the  Prime Minister appears to have lost himself to the full flow of  unchecked emotional  energies. 

A SIMILAR PREVIOUS  SPEECH AT UNITED NATIONS

This kind of outpouring of 'all or nothing-ism' by a world  leader can be contagious. Heaven knows he was speaking to some in congress who are very primed to step into his horrific proportions 'all or nothing' worldwide ' we vs them'. He builds a conspiracy theory which forbids acknowledging any benefit to rational discussion of differences and he wants no kind of agreement with Iran, even one that would limit their capacity to have nuclear weapons. Of course he would never be interested in reducing his U.S. sponsored nuclear arsenal.

This is an excellent example of C.G. Jung's ideas of how the eternal archetypes, emotional causing patterns in our Collective Unconscious, stimulate the individual and collective psyche, initially at an unconscious level. This causes dangerous situations in outer reality when persons do not question but instead give such emotions  free course in their attitude and speech. It is disturbing to hear such 'all or nothing, good vs evil' doomsday talk coming from Israel's Prime Minister. The speech sounds parallel to the Bush/Cheney mind set  that led to the rushed bombing of Iraq in the Spring of 2003,

Only higher levels of consciousness and owning ones own shadow by all parties can prevent tragedies this kind of rhetoric, with the prompting of unconscious forces, is ginning up to bring into physical reality. We should be quite concerned that Prime Minister Netanyahu would  choose to stimulate our polarized political situation even more by injecting his toxic one-sided  ideas of good vs evil.

WHERE DOES GOD COME FROM TO HUMAN AWARENESS? Jung Red Book Quote... January 26, 2015

Below  is a quote from the Red Book, the record of C.G. Jung's inner world experience from roughly 1913-1930. As with all that comes directly from the Unconscious this is symbolic language as are all dreams and visions. The Unconscious has always brought up the symbolism of God and 'the gods'. This is an example of that and says something about some characteristics of God..... 'God has smashed his own weapon' and the theme of the 'futility of the human effort at earthly power.' Such statements directly from the Unconscious are why Jung would say of God, ' I don't believe, I know.' His' belief'  is not talking of giving ascent to what he has been told 'to believe' or even only  to what 'has been written' as Sacred text,  but that the reality of God is  the human psyche's own collective and personal  confession. Obviously he is not speaking of believing as simply saying yes to 'a creed' but yes to the psychic reality of God as it has forever shown its multifaceted Self through the Collective Unconscious in all human groups and religions as well as the humble nightly dream. Jung would likely also add  those  moments when  nature displays itself  to a person in seemingly extraordinary timing of 'just the right event happening in an un-caused way with others... of even a sequence of such events back to back.' This Jung calls synchronicity and such a momentous happening  can make the most stubborn reasoning rationalist  to ponder,' this simply means far more to me than mere coincidence.'  He would say in fact it is from this same source, the Collective Unconscious,  that all the human images of God have come to us. It seems to me, a little reflection would inform us, images of God  are not the products of the outside material world but of the human inner world.

Augustus-First Roman Emperor

" You gain everything from the God whom you bear, but not his weapon, since he crushed it. He who conquers needs weapons. But what else do you want to conquer? You cannot conquer more than the earth. And what is the earth? It is round all over and hangs like a drop in the cosmos.
You will not reach the sun, and your power will not even extend to the barren moon; you will conquer neither the sea, nor the snow on the poles, nor the sands of the desert, but only a few spots on the green earth. You will not conquer anything for any length of time. Your power will turn into dust tomorrow, for above all-at the very least you must conquer death.
So do not be a fool, throw down your weapon. God himself smashed his weapon. Armor is enough to protect you from fools who still suffer from the need to conquer. God's armor will make you invulnerable and invisible to the worst fools." ~Carl Jung; Red Book