(continued)
I’m saying that science can take care of itself in terms of accuracy regarding exteriors. And since the Enlightenment it has served to help separate out the “I” and “we” interior of things from the “it” and “its” that used before that to be very much muddled together. But it has given us a monological approach that has gutted the world of its soul. And religion has become formalized as well and imo lost what was its original impetus, how that happened being another story.
My theory is pretty simple, as is my practice. Like everyone else, I make assumptions. My assumptions are that whatever it is called, be it Soul, “created in the image and likeness of…” or commonality of ancestry on either “religious” or anthropological grounds, we are, generally speaking, schematically very very similar. In other words, we can point and say “That’s a human, like me.” And we can say that even by saying “That’s a human less than me because their (insert objectification) is different than mine.” So I’m thinking that we’re all from the same mold in a fundamental way, regardless of the particulars of our learned and acquired differences.
So based on that my tendency regarding things “spiritual” is to go with Universals and dismiss parochialisms. About the first thing to go in that regard would be socializations, including formal religions. Not the idea of God, mind you, but the dramatizations surrounding the idea of Deity. Next, since God is Unknown and Invisible, or that there is an Unknown and Invisible we seek to explain, I look at the component of myself that is most like that. That would be my mind. Specifically it would be that fact that regardless of what I am aware of, or we are aware of, I and we are aware. So we can abstract awareness as a principle of the human condition and abstract thoughts as objects, though they are “internal.” Thoughts and the senses are the objects of awareness. Even the sense of “me” and “my” are found to be the objects of awareness upon honest reflection.
Now when I was younger, and very very religious and praying a lot, specifically to know and be close to God, I had an experience that changed my life. I had an experience rather beyond words which demonstrated to me that “I” am before, or under, or the ground of, or whatever, relative to awareness. In other words, there is a state we can where it is experimentally known that “I am” before the perception of “me” relative to “it(s).” In other words, the perception of being a “discreet” person relative to a world is a construct supported by a state that is totally devoid of any contents and is equal to Identity and Meaning. You or anyone can name that state whatever you wish.
The Significance, for me, of that state is that it means that all of us are in Essence derived from or dependent upon this Absolute State I abstract as Undifferentiated Consciousness per se. So since it is our common Root, despite our particular differences in the state in which we experience time and space and each other as discernible differences, I can base my morality on that Identity, knowing that what appears as “another” is in Essence identical to my Self. Not to “me” as an object of my own awareness, but to that “I” whose supremacy my ego usurped and gave that name to itself. How could it not do that, given that our ordinary state is in the subject/object mode and not devoid of the mental construct that would allow us to perceive Identity as Such.
But here’s where it gets interesting. this State, which is Universally available and is the reason since time immemorial for the dictum to “Know Thyself” is also identifiable by anyone experiencing it as the Source of inspiration. It is that because That State is identical with Good. It is as well the Source and Reason for the Great Commandment and the forms of the Golden Rule and the Law of Reciprocity. But how do you talk about that which is Self in the Highest sense to the vast number of people who have not experienced it for themselves???
The classic way to do that is to use a familiar model, that of the family hierarchy, with it’s all powerful head as either the Disciplinarian, the Protector, or the Provider. And thus, since the Source is the Same and localities are multitudinous and varied both in environment and mental predilections, we get the differences in the parochialisms of religions. And since biologically we are mostly hypnotized into our ways by 7yo, and the mind is hard wired to be “right” almost no matter what, we tend to kill each other over inconsequential differences instead of looking to where the Root of religion IS.
So for that reason the “Holy Book” which one is most emotionally and experientially invested in becomes THE Holy Book to the exclusion of others until they achieve or are gifted by that Insight which allows the true value of any of them to come forth as Meaning. And that is why truly Holy men and women can extract Love from squiggles of ink on paper, or now, from dancing electrons.
Likewise, from this standpoint, the manifest is seen as having Meaning as Self expression. Since it is ans stems from a Unified Whole, the “ghost in the machine” is no longer the elephant in the room, but the agency of exploration of what it, from a far larger perspective, is doing.
