The purpose of this post is to lay down some basic notions of divinity based on my own study and experiences, which are pretty extreme. Some general differences about “God” will be highlighted, but my main purpose is to get everyone thinking more deeply about how your notions of divinity may unknowingly affect and inform your worldview and life choices. As you read this Post, look for unexamined assumptions you might be carrying, that may need reconsideration. Incidentally, I wrote this piece in a voice for a generally informed lay audience. So I will ask that my religious scholar friends not attack too quickly.
First, a word about belief. My overall goal is to get each of you to think and live out of your own center of awareness and not according to any doctrine or belief system that was delivered to you, East, West, or from anywhere else. We are at a stage in history where the next step in the evolution of human beings requires moving beyond belief systems. The root of "belief" is the Saxon word lief "to wish", and thus belief is nothing more than a fervent hope, exhibiting a lack of faith. Faith is contrary to belief and means being open to whatever may turn out to be true. If a critical mass does not evolve beyond the obsessive need to "believe", then there is a good chance that as a species we will regress or even fail. probably as a result of destroying ourselves, lashing out at each other based on cherished beliefs. Note that.
Plato taught in his "Divided Line" metaphor (see POST 8) that beliefs are a mere step in human growth and must eventually be released if one is to advance into higher stages of awareness and creativity. Believing is for Plato one of the least useful things you can do with your amazing mind.
Before we begin, remember that I will always try to negatively provoke or positively inspire you through a process of education, based on a variety of source materials. Therefore, the following is not to be taken as factual but educational, a word whose Latin root educere means “to draw out”. I want to draw out the latent insight and wisdom buried deep in your mind that could perhaps use some airing. Let’s stir it up...
God is obviously a personal, subjective issue, but we find interestingly that every religion, every metaphysical system, whether contemporary or primitive, new age or archaic, masculine or feminine, somehow falls into one of two very general categories regarding notions of divinity. We can use the classic East/West comparison because it is here that the two general categories have been well-contrasted in the philosophy of religion.
For purposes of this discussion, by “the West” I mean the conventional Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions of the near and middle east (and their predecessors such as the Babylonian and Zoroastrian cults, from which they heavily borrow). An interesting insight already--our Western religions are not "Western" at all--they have nothing to do with Europe or the Americas.
By “the East” I am referring to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism of the farther east—essentially India and China—and their derivatives such as Zen.
As a quick aside, I am aware that secularism (capitalism, humanism, and science) sort of “overrule” our daily lives for the most part, no matter what our spiritual beliefs might be. In other words, secularism is heavily mixed into our mind-thoughts. That said, let’s go...
In the West, God is traditionally seen as a conscious intelligent being with describable and definable qualities. You hear preachers and rabbis and mullahs say, “You know God wants us to do this...”, and “God spoke to her and said...” In this sense God is personal, knowable, and can be named.
While there are certainly mystical interpretations of God within the Western traditions (Gnosticism, Sufism, Kabala, which are more like Eastern thought), for most practitioners in the West, God is perceived as anthropomorphic (human form) and masculine. There is no Almighty Goddess. The feminine principle is instead represented in the form of a virgin, a mere vehicle for divine masculine seed. There may be feminine angels and other entities, but unfortunately, the feminine principle is relegated in the traditional Western worldview as an abomination. She is similar to Nature, that is, something man is to dominate, something to be mastered or corrected. Of course we pretend that we have overcome this notion in the post-modern world, but it is still a strong undercurrent, and without doubt a lingering form of male adolescent ignorance.
The Male God of the West is communicated to through worship and prayer, mostly in a posture of outward address. One looks and speaks upward to the heavens, evident in the art and architecture of churches and temples—typically tall structures with religious imagery portrayed at significant heights. Prayer is also inward-turned of course—speaking to “the holy spirit within” for example—but humans and God are still separate. Prayers are requests of God and conversations with God, and thus, believers are in relationship to God, in some cases directly and in other cases through an intermediary—a savior or prophet.
Except for a very few esoteric interpretations of Western religion, identity with God does not exist and is considered heresy. God and man are not the same. Man is imperfect, fallen, and thus requires forgiveness and guidance from God. If humans accept and do God’s will, they will be saved. The goal of a believer is to surrender individual will to God’s will. The Arabic term Islam means “submit”, and "surrender" is a prevalent concept in Christianity. Surrender and submission are necessary for a more peaceful life on earth and a glorious afterlife.
Since the emphasis in Western religions is one of relationship over identity, the notion of an individual soul prevails in the West. Each person is the container of a separate ontological being, a soul that is born into this world, that has this lifetime to get right with God, which in turn determines one’s afterlife.
Western traditions are religions of duality, where Good battles Evil, and eventually the former will win. This clearly delineated dualism places prime emphasis on social morality and ethical behavior through defined laws and commandments. The strictness of interpretation of such laws varies from sect to sect.
In the creation stories of Western religions, God is the source of creation but separate from it, viewing it as an artist or craftsman would admire or critique his own work. As 20th century philosopher Alan Watts said of the Western view, the world is an artifact—it is made. This was later shifted in the European Enlightenment to include the process of evolution as postulated in science. The idea was that God created the evolutionary process and set it in motion. In short, if you are a believer, God is behind the process, be it creationism or evolution.
Though there is individual will and choice in the religious West—a sort of limited free will—God is ultimately in control of all creation and its destiny. There is a strong accent on teleology, that is, a divine purpose and plan behind the creation and the unfolding of the world, including your individual life. This evokes images of a logical, directional path that feels linear in shape and forward-moving and ascending in time and destination.
Moving to the East, things get more complex, that is to say, more fluid and open. Most Eastern sacred texts describe what God is not rather than what God is. Religious scholars and theologians call this the via negativa path. Things also get more psychological in the East. God is not a conscious intelligent being with whom you relate, as in the West, but rather a state of realization, a state of mind. Those who have had such an experience find it hard to give it a name or describe it through senses, feelings, or language.
God is given strange names like “Self” (Hinduism), “No-Self” (Buddhism), and “Way” (Taoism). “Self” and “No-Self” are attempts to describe a pure, unfiltered ground of being with no qualities itself, and yet everything manifests from it. “Way” means something approaching “natural order”.
The primary religious posture in the East is inward-turned meditation. This is confusing to Westerners when they hear of the many deities worshipped in Eastern religions (perhaps 33,000 in Hinduism alone). Though outwardly addressed in prayer, these deities are not considered absolute or almighty. They are seen only as expressions of the infinite variety of the Self or the Way, just as humans are infinitely diverse.
Therefore, deities are a means for inner dialogue on seemingly infinite variety of whatever is at issue in your life. Such inner conversations reflect the relationship aspect between humans and God. The many gods and goddesses are not final authorities but rather, vehicles of the Self or the Way.
While these multiple gods and goddesses provide for intimate relationships to divinity, they are only steps to the ultimate experience of your identity with the Self or Way lying behind them. That is, the final goal in your spiritual quest is to realize that you are the Self, you are identical with it. This realization of identity can happen through different pathways, depending on your individual nature or psychological wiring. You use the methods that work best for you. The four general categories are action, devotion, study, and meditation. The Eastern combination of a relationship to God and an identity with God (Self) results in the concepts of both an individual soul and a non-individual soul. For the Easterner, we are both at once.
Eastern religions are not of duality as in the West. Rather, they transcend duality. This means Light and Dark, God and Devil, are of the same source. They both emerge from the Self or Way, which is itself non-dual, in Sanskrit, advaita. It does not side with good or bad, hot or cold, right or wrong. And yet all pairs of opposites (and all degrees in between) flow from It. The whole cosmos is comprised of pairs of opposites and reciprocals, coming into existence together, giving meaning and value to one another, and necessarily disappearing together. This is basic Eastern common sense, that the concept of “good” vaporizes into meaninglessness without the opposite reality called “evil” to go along with it. Male has no meaning without female, and so on.
Thus, the deities in Eastern religions typically come in pairs of opposing or reciprocal energies: god and goddess, creator and destroyer, etc. They are metaphors for deep psychological conditions we carry within our minds--we all embody conflicting pairs of opposite in our angst-filled minds. The gods and godesses are here to tell us "it's OK".
Incidentally, before the spread of monotheistic Christianity and Islam, the divine pairs of opposites and reciprocals were prevalent in the native religions of Europe (Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Nordic), as well as most primal religions (African, Aboriginal, Eskimo, Native American). In Taoism, the coincidence of opposites becomes such a fundamental principle that it gets reduced to the very simple tai chi symbol...
Given the necessary coincidence of opposites, emphasis in the East is not so much on the triumph of good over evil, but rather on an adept and virtuous approach to life within the play and tension of opposites. One does not live a virtuous, ethical life because it’s “right” to do so. Rather, one practices techniques that bring the mind to a central psychological position which rests in the balance of opposites. This automatically creates a gentler, more harmless lifestyle, and a more all-embracing worldview, knowing that bad necessarily comes with good. Otherwise, good would have no meaning.
Virtuous living is therefore is not adhered to in order to generate heavenly credit, but is rather a means for reaching a sophisticated state of mind that truly enjoys life with all its beauty and brutality. The benefit to society is a natural overflow that results from the enlightened insight of affirming and dancing with the pairs of opposites. Cosmic justice is handled automatically through the impersonal law of karma, which through a non-judgmental process of action-reaction always returns things to balance, even if it takes awhile.
In Eastern creation stories, the Self or Way becomes the creation. Creation is a process of growth and not a matter of a deity crafting separate things. The world is not "made". It therefore follows that there is no need for the Self to control creation, which is merely an extension of itself. In this sense, the Self is everything…including you and me. Here is that identity idea again. Everything is a manifestation or expression of the Self, not created by a separate God.
There is no final destination of the individual in the East, but rather countless rounds of reincarnation, which is ultimately not individual either. Everything is continually reincarnating into everything. One does not end up in some final heaven or hell somewhere else. Rather, heaven and hell are psychological states of being right here in bodily form, whether one lives on this planet or in some other world.
In Eastern cosmology, there is no single divine plan, no final destruction of the universe, but rather the endless creation and destruction of entire universes that contain billions of galaxies, all teaming with life. Thus, there is no accent on teleology, no final Omega Point, no eschatology. The corresponding visual image is thus more circular and endless versus the linear and endpoint images that come from the Western perspective.
Of course there are exceptions, crossovers, and blends of East and West. I spent more time in this post describing the Eastern view because most of us in the West still don’t truly understand Eastern ideas. In any case, I hope this comparison can serve as a backdrop for contemplating your own notions of divinity and nature of the world, and how this in turn informs your thoughts and actions that directly affect our world.
On a shrinking planet with people of questionable intelligence and judgment in positions of great power, it is imperative for us all to educate ourselves at a grass roots level and live what we learn out of our own intelligence and intuition. Our leaders are merely a reflection of the collective degree of enlightenment of the population at large. The leadership will only change when we advance our wisdom as individuals.
Digg it.
First, a word about belief. My overall goal is to get each of you to think and live out of your own center of awareness and not according to any doctrine or belief system that was delivered to you, East, West, or from anywhere else. We are at a stage in history where the next step in the evolution of human beings requires moving beyond belief systems. The root of "belief" is the Saxon word lief "to wish", and thus belief is nothing more than a fervent hope, exhibiting a lack of faith. Faith is contrary to belief and means being open to whatever may turn out to be true. If a critical mass does not evolve beyond the obsessive need to "believe", then there is a good chance that as a species we will regress or even fail. probably as a result of destroying ourselves, lashing out at each other based on cherished beliefs. Note that.
Plato taught in his "Divided Line" metaphor (see POST 8) that beliefs are a mere step in human growth and must eventually be released if one is to advance into higher stages of awareness and creativity. Believing is for Plato one of the least useful things you can do with your amazing mind.
Before we begin, remember that I will always try to negatively provoke or positively inspire you through a process of education, based on a variety of source materials. Therefore, the following is not to be taken as factual but educational, a word whose Latin root educere means “to draw out”. I want to draw out the latent insight and wisdom buried deep in your mind that could perhaps use some airing. Let’s stir it up...
God is obviously a personal, subjective issue, but we find interestingly that every religion, every metaphysical system, whether contemporary or primitive, new age or archaic, masculine or feminine, somehow falls into one of two very general categories regarding notions of divinity. We can use the classic East/West comparison because it is here that the two general categories have been well-contrasted in the philosophy of religion.
For purposes of this discussion, by “the West” I mean the conventional Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions of the near and middle east (and their predecessors such as the Babylonian and Zoroastrian cults, from which they heavily borrow). An interesting insight already--our Western religions are not "Western" at all--they have nothing to do with Europe or the Americas.
By “the East” I am referring to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism of the farther east—essentially India and China—and their derivatives such as Zen.
As a quick aside, I am aware that secularism (capitalism, humanism, and science) sort of “overrule” our daily lives for the most part, no matter what our spiritual beliefs might be. In other words, secularism is heavily mixed into our mind-thoughts. That said, let’s go...
In the West, God is traditionally seen as a conscious intelligent being with describable and definable qualities. You hear preachers and rabbis and mullahs say, “You know God wants us to do this...”, and “God spoke to her and said...” In this sense God is personal, knowable, and can be named.
While there are certainly mystical interpretations of God within the Western traditions (Gnosticism, Sufism, Kabala, which are more like Eastern thought), for most practitioners in the West, God is perceived as anthropomorphic (human form) and masculine. There is no Almighty Goddess. The feminine principle is instead represented in the form of a virgin, a mere vehicle for divine masculine seed. There may be feminine angels and other entities, but unfortunately, the feminine principle is relegated in the traditional Western worldview as an abomination. She is similar to Nature, that is, something man is to dominate, something to be mastered or corrected. Of course we pretend that we have overcome this notion in the post-modern world, but it is still a strong undercurrent, and without doubt a lingering form of male adolescent ignorance.
The Male God of the West is communicated to through worship and prayer, mostly in a posture of outward address. One looks and speaks upward to the heavens, evident in the art and architecture of churches and temples—typically tall structures with religious imagery portrayed at significant heights. Prayer is also inward-turned of course—speaking to “the holy spirit within” for example—but humans and God are still separate. Prayers are requests of God and conversations with God, and thus, believers are in relationship to God, in some cases directly and in other cases through an intermediary—a savior or prophet.
Except for a very few esoteric interpretations of Western religion, identity with God does not exist and is considered heresy. God and man are not the same. Man is imperfect, fallen, and thus requires forgiveness and guidance from God. If humans accept and do God’s will, they will be saved. The goal of a believer is to surrender individual will to God’s will. The Arabic term Islam means “submit”, and "surrender" is a prevalent concept in Christianity. Surrender and submission are necessary for a more peaceful life on earth and a glorious afterlife.
Since the emphasis in Western religions is one of relationship over identity, the notion of an individual soul prevails in the West. Each person is the container of a separate ontological being, a soul that is born into this world, that has this lifetime to get right with God, which in turn determines one’s afterlife.
Western traditions are religions of duality, where Good battles Evil, and eventually the former will win. This clearly delineated dualism places prime emphasis on social morality and ethical behavior through defined laws and commandments. The strictness of interpretation of such laws varies from sect to sect.
In the creation stories of Western religions, God is the source of creation but separate from it, viewing it as an artist or craftsman would admire or critique his own work. As 20th century philosopher Alan Watts said of the Western view, the world is an artifact—it is made. This was later shifted in the European Enlightenment to include the process of evolution as postulated in science. The idea was that God created the evolutionary process and set it in motion. In short, if you are a believer, God is behind the process, be it creationism or evolution.
Moving to the East, things get more complex, that is to say, more fluid and open. Most Eastern sacred texts describe what God is not rather than what God is. Religious scholars and theologians call this the via negativa path. Things also get more psychological in the East. God is not a conscious intelligent being with whom you relate, as in the West, but rather a state of realization, a state of mind. Those who have had such an experience find it hard to give it a name or describe it through senses, feelings, or language.
God is given strange names like “Self” (Hinduism), “No-Self” (Buddhism), and “Way” (Taoism). “Self” and “No-Self” are attempts to describe a pure, unfiltered ground of being with no qualities itself, and yet everything manifests from it. “Way” means something approaching “natural order”.
The primary religious posture in the East is inward-turned meditation. This is confusing to Westerners when they hear of the many deities worshipped in Eastern religions (perhaps 33,000 in Hinduism alone). Though outwardly addressed in prayer, these deities are not considered absolute or almighty. They are seen only as expressions of the infinite variety of the Self or the Way, just as humans are infinitely diverse.
Therefore, deities are a means for inner dialogue on seemingly infinite variety of whatever is at issue in your life. Such inner conversations reflect the relationship aspect between humans and God. The many gods and goddesses are not final authorities but rather, vehicles of the Self or the Way.
While these multiple gods and goddesses provide for intimate relationships to divinity, they are only steps to the ultimate experience of your identity with the Self or Way lying behind them. That is, the final goal in your spiritual quest is to realize that you are the Self, you are identical with it. This realization of identity can happen through different pathways, depending on your individual nature or psychological wiring. You use the methods that work best for you. The four general categories are action, devotion, study, and meditation. The Eastern combination of a relationship to God and an identity with God (Self) results in the concepts of both an individual soul and a non-individual soul. For the Easterner, we are both at once.
Eastern religions are not of duality as in the West. Rather, they transcend duality. This means Light and Dark, God and Devil, are of the same source. They both emerge from the Self or Way, which is itself non-dual, in Sanskrit, advaita. It does not side with good or bad, hot or cold, right or wrong. And yet all pairs of opposites (and all degrees in between) flow from It. The whole cosmos is comprised of pairs of opposites and reciprocals, coming into existence together, giving meaning and value to one another, and necessarily disappearing together. This is basic Eastern common sense, that the concept of “good” vaporizes into meaninglessness without the opposite reality called “evil” to go along with it. Male has no meaning without female, and so on.
Thus, the deities in Eastern religions typically come in pairs of opposing or reciprocal energies: god and goddess, creator and destroyer, etc. They are metaphors for deep psychological conditions we carry within our minds--we all embody conflicting pairs of opposite in our angst-filled minds. The gods and godesses are here to tell us "it's OK".
Incidentally, before the spread of monotheistic Christianity and Islam, the divine pairs of opposites and reciprocals were prevalent in the native religions of Europe (Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Nordic), as well as most primal religions (African, Aboriginal, Eskimo, Native American). In Taoism, the coincidence of opposites becomes such a fundamental principle that it gets reduced to the very simple tai chi symbol...
Virtuous living is therefore is not adhered to in order to generate heavenly credit, but is rather a means for reaching a sophisticated state of mind that truly enjoys life with all its beauty and brutality. The benefit to society is a natural overflow that results from the enlightened insight of affirming and dancing with the pairs of opposites. Cosmic justice is handled automatically through the impersonal law of karma, which through a non-judgmental process of action-reaction always returns things to balance, even if it takes awhile.
In Eastern creation stories, the Self or Way becomes the creation. Creation is a process of growth and not a matter of a deity crafting separate things. The world is not "made". It therefore follows that there is no need for the Self to control creation, which is merely an extension of itself. In this sense, the Self is everything…including you and me. Here is that identity idea again. Everything is a manifestation or expression of the Self, not created by a separate God.
There is no final destination of the individual in the East, but rather countless rounds of reincarnation, which is ultimately not individual either. Everything is continually reincarnating into everything. One does not end up in some final heaven or hell somewhere else. Rather, heaven and hell are psychological states of being right here in bodily form, whether one lives on this planet or in some other world.
In Eastern cosmology, there is no single divine plan, no final destruction of the universe, but rather the endless creation and destruction of entire universes that contain billions of galaxies, all teaming with life. Thus, there is no accent on teleology, no final Omega Point, no eschatology. The corresponding visual image is thus more circular and endless versus the linear and endpoint images that come from the Western perspective.
Of course there are exceptions, crossovers, and blends of East and West. I spent more time in this post describing the Eastern view because most of us in the West still don’t truly understand Eastern ideas. In any case, I hope this comparison can serve as a backdrop for contemplating your own notions of divinity and nature of the world, and how this in turn informs your thoughts and actions that directly affect our world.
On a shrinking planet with people of questionable intelligence and judgment in positions of great power, it is imperative for us all to educate ourselves at a grass roots level and live what we learn out of our own intelligence and intuition. Our leaders are merely a reflection of the collective degree of enlightenment of the population at large. The leadership will only change when we advance our wisdom as individuals.
Digg it.
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