Having One God

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
- Exodus 20:3

If God were any less than All, this might be a problem. If there were God, and then some other things, not necessarily God but possibly good, the command would be asking us to choose. Asking us to give up some good things for what we might presume to be better things. Asking us, perhaps, to gamble, not knowing for sure if what we are giving up is worth what we’re giving it up for.

But if God is All, and God is good, then anywhere anything good is, it’s of God. There is no good anywhere that isn’t a result of God’s presence. In other words, and very basically, good is good. There is no bad good, no evil or forbidden good.

When God says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” it is a statement of utmost tenderness and conscientious care for us. It means, don’t go buying into the lie that there is ever a price in evil to pay for good - that in order to have good, you must suffer, or you must hurt someone, or you must sacrifice something that you love. Don’t believe that it is part of life to be sick, disappointed, miserable. False gods require human sacrifice. God is Love. Love always delivers good and not suffering.

So what of all the suffering in the world? It is from the tyranny of false gods. You can tell they are false because they speak with contempt in their voices. Moses told the Children of Israel to choose: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” He exhorted them to choose to know they were under the control of the God who is good, and that they never should settle for any other cause to control them.

Every one of us has the right to obey the first commandment, to have good be the only thing in our lives. The snapping jaws will respond with scorn that there is no way we can have that, that we have no right to ask for it, that we can’t have it because other people don’t have it. But the all-loving God is everpresent, and tells us that we, along with everyone else, can have all good.

The Big Lie

In a radical departure from mainstream Christianity, Christian Science calls the story of Adam and Eve an allegory, the purpose of which is to help us tag faulty perceptions and correct false conclusions about cause and effect. When we buy into a faulty story about the nature of God (as a being which creates evil, or coexists with it) we get the Adam dream - a blighted view of life, a degraded sense of who we are. I call it The Big Lie.

 One thing the big lie says is, you have to till the soil.  To me this means always having to do something to make myself better.  Fix my body, fix my thought, improve myself, accomplish, achieve.  To try, through my efforts,  to go from a state of unworthiness to a state of worthiness.

But life isn’t about self-improvement. Nothing I do makes me better or worse. When I first considered this, I wondered how I would possibly be motivated to do anything good if it absolutely didn't matter.  Then I glimpsed that my motivation to be good comes from goodness itself - the nature of what I am.

Human thought tries to appropriate the I Am, and dress it in all kinds of garb of conditional worthiness.  When I saw Mrs. Eddy's instructions to throw out material thought, it used to sound to me like I was being asked to throw out all the goodness I see in nature, and people, and embrace some abstract concept.  But I now see that she is asking me to throw out the garb of conditions, the box of limitations that error tries to shove good into.

We all know what good is.  We know it by how we respond to it, resonate with it, desire it.  It is a huge thing to say that good is infinite, and in fact all that there is.

The big lie tries to say a couple of things:

* that if everything were good, we wouldn't appreciate it anymore - that we need evil or blandness to make good seem good to us.  Similarly, that if everything is good, goodness isn't such a great thing.  

* that good comes in limited packages, and you have to take very careful care of the packages or you will lose the good.  I had an image of goodness like all the sunshine that was pouring out, free to everything in the landscape, and evil saying, yes, that's very good.  Here, let me put it in this box for you so you can have it.  And then adding - make sure the box doesn't fall apart, and don't let anyone steal it, and be careful who you share it with, because you don't want to lose that good.

The big lie leads us to darkness and despair.

But there's no place for that.  Goodness really is the nature of the universe.  It includes each of us - what we think of as our insides as well as what we think of as our perception.  We can't own it or contain it or make it more or less by our presence.  But we are loved in it.  There's no contest between individuals to be the best or even to be reasonably accepted.  We are all of the One.

“Mortal existence is a dream . . .”

Wednesday was rainy. I was walking down the hill on Yesler, from up above Broadway where I had parked. I was carrying about ten Bibles in a plastic bag, and a similar number of Science and Healths in my backpack, along with my books – going to the jail to deliver literature and visit people. I had already gotten pretty wet picking up the books – unlocking the padlock at the gate, walking up to the Reading Room, walking back, closing the gate, replacing the padlock, stepping gingerly through the half-inch deep sheet of water pitted by raindrops. And I had driven in low visibility on a freeway thick with cars, my windshield wipers thrashing. The rain now was a little lighter but still getting me wet.

The walk down Yesler is always a bit breathtaking. There is the sweeping vista down and across the Sound, and to the left across the valley. To the right is the roar of freeway cars being channeled down various parallel and diverging rampings of concrete. Then you come down, across the homeless encampments, into the land of the skyscrapers.

So I was walking along, hunched and squinting, when I suddenly got an arresting thought. I imagined that this was all a dream, and I had awakened. I still found the dream interesting, so I was describing it to myself, trying to remember everything. I told myself, we had these things called cars that could move us along special channels that we had made for them. And we had these things called bodies that we moved around in, too. We considered the bodies more attached to us than the cars, but we moved them with similar instrumentation – with both we would listen to their feedback and supply them with what they were said to need.

A funny thing happened to me at that moment. The rain, which had been an annoyance, suddenly became an interesting detail of my dream. I felt the drops on my face as cool and soft, refreshing; something to notice. I wanted to remember everything – I felt a love for it. I also started to think about what I knew now that I was awake – that good is here, now. I could feel that goodness, that feels-like-flying lightness inside.

After I was done at the jail, walking now up the very steep hills but with a lighter load, I again put myself into mind of noticing what was in the dream. I thought, in the dream, we all had different things we were supposed to be doing. Some of them were considered more desirable than others. There were people that we really loved, and things we really cared about. But we didn’t necessarily notice that love is present all the time.

As I maneuvered my car onto the freeway, I felt a surge of satisfaction at having accomplished all my tasks successfully. And I thought, in the dream, we thought we could have goodness based on certain conditions. We set up the conditions, or felt that others had, and then we tried to meet them. If we succeeded, we got to feel goodness. Otherwise, we didn’t.

There are two places in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “Mortal existence is a dream”. I’ve accepted that on an intellectual and analogical level, but hadn’t come so close before to feeling what it might mean. The question, so if it’s a dream, what difference does that make? is an important one. I could say, it’s just a dream so it doesn’t matter what happens. But that feels like a cop out, and also something my heart would never quite believe. I could say, it’s just a dream, so if we get good at lucid dreaming, we can make whatever we want happen. But that misses the point – it is an attempt to live in the dream instead of wake up. I could say it’s like the premise in The Matrix – that while this may be a dream, it may be preferable to stay asleep than to give up everything I know as true.

My experience on Wednesday pointed to a different answer. I had the feeling of being awake to the truth that good is here now, and that nothing else is absolutely true. The particulars of the dream give me many opportunities to love, and the love is real, something I’m actually doing in my waking state. I start to see that elements of the dream are only real to the extent that they are opportunities for me to love. The phenomenon of cars and highways is dream, but the desire to move freely and to harness power is real. I have the opportunity to love the dance of harmony, and the swift movement, and the ingenuity of invention. The phenomenon of bodies is dream, but locus and volition, presence and interaction with the environment, feeling and caring, are real. I have the opportunity to love the long strides and wide vistas of high hills, and tender touch, and being with people.

There are so many issues in the dream that cry for healing. The ground beneath the highways cries to breathe; the air cries to be clean; people cry to know their worth and purpose. All the currents of human systems, many swept along by blind grabbing for a misunderstood need, cry to be set right so they don’t keep on impoverishing people and wreaking environmental havoc. What delivers healing to the dream is doses of awakeness, moments of vision which guide actions toward the natural good that all creation desires.

My World is Mine to Save

The problem with comparing my life to other people’s runs deeper than its being a bad idea, something that’s not good for me. It’s not one of those things to know I shouldn’t do but still do “because I’m only human”. The problem lies in its being an artifact of a false paradigm – an error which exposes a misunderstanding of the whole way the world is put together.

There is a part of the daily prayer (given by Mrs. Eddy in the Manual of the Mother Church) that says, “Let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me.” When I think of the “me” in the prayer, I sometimes think “the kingdom of me,” to remind myself that everything I perceive is part of myself, and the establishment of the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love in me means that it’s all I can ever see, in my whole world.

This is not a megalomanic statement. It just acknowledges that all I can ever know of others is my perception of them. My prayer for others is my looking to God – my source, our common source, to see something of their true identity. Seeing them, then, as perfect, is not some wonderful thing I do for them. It’s just cleaning up my own act about something that is already true.

It comes down to this. I have access to my world through my perceptions. What I perceive is, in a very real way, my world. I can’t assume that it is the same as anyone else’s. I don’t have access to anyone else’s world, except for this: through communion with God, I have access to the truth. The truth as God knows it doesn’t include any relative opinions about people. It doesn’t include an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, achievements and follies. It only includes the deep and perfect being, rooted in the infinite, sustained by Love itself. The only opinion I can have that comes anywhere near the truth is this perception of reality. Any other opinion is only my construct – the story I tell myself, based on my projections.

When I interact with you, it is an intersection of our worlds. I know that I am interacting with you, but what I think you are, and what I think you do, may be very different from what you think you are and do. You may say something that I feel compels me to react in a certain way –say for example, with indignation. But since what I see as you is just my construct, I’m not actually compelled to react in any way at all. I can notice that my impulse to react is based on my perception, but that my perception isn’t the actual fact. I can stop and check in with Truth before I react.

If I act on assumptions I have about you, based on what kind of person I think you are, I probably will offend you, as the assumptions expose the difference between my and your perceptions of you. My best chance at having an authentic interaction is by acknowledging that I can’t rightly know anything about you except by seeing what God knows.

Comparing my relative achievements with others is just comparing my view of myself with what I’ve projected about others. I can only do it in my world. I may assume that I have some kind of an objective standpoint from which I can judge, but I don’t. The others I would compare myself with are just my own constructs, and are probably unrecognizable by the people who share their names.

The powerful part of this realization is that my world is mine to save. It’s up to me to make sure that I view my world correctly, that I take careful and diligent time to make a fair estimation of what everything is, based on what God knows about it. Then I can expect to see my perceptions come more and more in line with the perfect reality. I may have wondered when “they” would get around to seeing things in a more intelligent way. But now the answer is clear: it’s up to me. Of course, this can be said by everyone else as well, though of course, I can’t say it for anyone but me.

Casting out the beam

Jesus taught, “first cast the beam out of your own eye so you can see clearly to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.”

I’ve come to see that this is more than just a figure of speech telling me to pay attention to my own problems before criticizing others. It turns out it isn’t literally impossible for me to have a beam in my eye, and it is with great enthusiasm that I report that I have found out what the beam is, so now I can cast it out.

A beam is a structural member that holds up the floor and the roof of a building. The relevant structure here is my paradigm – my construct of the system of laws that govern my world. Everything I see is dependent on this construct – every deduction I make regarding cause and effect, every conclusion I make regarding what happened and why. And if a part of my construct is faulty, it will distort my vision, hampering my ability to see what’s what. It will be a “beam in my eye.”

So I found out what the beam in my eye is. It’s the notion that it’s possible for one person to be better than another, or for me to be a better or worse person based on my choices. I cast out the beam by realizing that this isn’t true.

There is nothing I can do to make myself a better person. There’s nothing I can do to make myself a worse person. There’s no way for me to be better than anyone else, or worse than anyone else. How does that make me feel? What does it mean?

It means there’s no need for me to ever criticize myself. There’s no need for me to make resolutions to be better. There’s no need for me to look to others to see if they’re doing better or worse than I am. There’s no need to feel anxious because maybe I haven’t done enough, or I haven’t done it well enough.

It is a big structural plank. Lots of things rest on it. Lots of things threaten to fall if I remove it. How can I get myself to be good if my behavior doesn’t matter? What motivation will I have to achieve anything? If I give up that plank, what makes me be good?

God makes me be good, just because God makes me that way. My being good is in gratitude, in joy, in delight – it is what I want. It’s not in trying to measure up, to be worthy, to earn God’s approval. God approves of me because God made me that way.

This was Job’s lesson: he thought God would be good to him if he was good. He needed to learn that God is good anyway, and that he was good because God made him that way; there was no way he could be otherwise. After he learned this lesson, he was healed.

The beam I get to cast out functions like a teeter-totter – giving the sense that one person can be up and another one down. In fact, no matter what we do, we are all of the same quality. We are each here in our nakedness, with all of our mistakes and failures, and all of our beauty, and all of our desire to be redeemed. We are all here with our love, and our loneliness, and our desire to be loved, and our desire to be holy. We are each the child of God.

One theological view says, “God loves you even though you are unlovable. This shows you how great God is.” Another says, “God loves you when you are good. Do well to be worthy of God’s love.” Both of those are just shadows of the truth, that God makes us lovable and good, and loves us that way.

If I can cast this beam out of my eye – this false paradigm that leads to comparison, then I will be able to see clearly to cast the mote out of my brother’s eye, for I will see him with compassion, and with oneness, and with love.


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Feels like Flying

Ever since I was very little, I’ve had the sense that I know the feeling of free flight, and have longed for it. I have flown in dreams from time to time, and always awake from such dreams with a deep sense of well-being.

When my being grasps for a moment the wonderful law of goodness, it feels like flying. There’s the same sense of expansiveness, of filling with more joy than my lungs can hold, of hope soaring – a buoyancy behind my chest and beneath my throat. There is power, belonging, and coming home – a sense of the rightness of this, and that it has always been part of me. It also feels like a huge new world to explore. In those moments my questions are gone – questions of how I am to improve, what my course of growth should be, how I’ll ever get there (wherever “there” might be). For I am conscious of the rightness of here and now.

My sister said this morning, “We’re taught that our thoughts determine our experience, right?” I said, “We’re taught that, but I’m not sure it’s right.” I told her of a book I had been looking at, on the Sermon on the Mount, which said it would bring out the Science of Christianity by explicating the meaning of those teachings. But it didn’t mention Mrs. Eddy anywhere, or even Christian Science. I soon determined that what it said may have been along the lines of what I was taught as a child, but also that those lines would never get one to the flying place, never bring healing, and so would lead seekers awry.

The problem is that it shares the underlying world view of the great body of self-help instruction to be found in our society. It assumes that there is something wrong with us, or at least something that can be improved upon, and that if we adopt this course of discipline and work hard at it, we can make ourselves better.

In this paradigm, God is not the moving and shaping force in our lives, our creator and determiner, the law which governs us. At best, God in this scenario is a judge, someone whose favor we might eventually earn if we are good enough. This is not the God that Jesus taught when he said “the kingdom of God is within you”, “I and my Father are one”, and “Our Father, which art in heaven.”

When I have been in the self-help paradigm, I’ve found it hard to love, much as I wanted to, much as I thought it would make me a better person to do so. I was too busy being anxious about myself, how I was doing, how I was progressing in my self-help program. The love that Love teaches is a celebration of universal oneness. It is a joy that springs forth in the contemplation of others, an exaltation at their presence and all the unique qualities of their being. It rides in the deep confidence of being well-loved, of belonging, of being home. It feels like flying.

It is an interesting project to steadily untangle myself from the self-help view of life and to embrace, more and more, the love that is the law of Life. The benefit is opening up those soaring spaces, where the fabric of my world view rips open and my whole vision fills with light.

Another dimension

I have no personal experience with the fierce loyalty of a soldier. I haven’t had the intense feeling of being willing to die for a cause or a person. It’s a thing I’ve read about in books, a thing I’ve felt the edges of in the “yes, ma’am,” of people involved with the military. It’s not something I’ve missed – my tendency is to be suspicious of obedience, wary of the blindness of following orders. Still, I’ve felt, from time to time, a wistfulness for the fervency such an allegiance could have. A book I read recently once again hinted at its power as an ordering principle and a giver of purpose in life. It left me thinking about what it would be like to have this kind of a relationship to God.

The intense eagerness to serve God wouldn’t have the pitfall of serving a person – the inevitable human failings – or of serving a cause, with the tendency of causes to get bogged down in process and co-opted by power-hunger. I felt a kind of swift excitement when I thought of being in service to Love – of dedicating all of my life to standing for Love, living it, acting according to its impulses. Though I think of God as Principle – as the creating, controlling force governing the universe, rather than an anthropomorphic entity, I found this sense of loyalty to be everything I hoped for it – galvanizing, ordering, purpose-giving. It added a dimension to my prayer. I thought, so this is the legitimacy of that whole allegiance concept. It is a thing we are meant to feel. It’s not a seductive but misguided way of having ones life ordered, or a great thing we miss out on if we are civilians. It’s part of the nature of love – part of my nature – to want to give myself in service. And service to Life, Love, is obedience to the great first commandment. Another compelling reason to give my allegiance to God.

Christ Says Yes III – nothing shall offend them

In my orthodox period, as an aspiring good person, I tended to believe that when people were good, they deserved good things, and when people were evil, they didn’t, Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. (Jesus says, Love your enemies, …; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.) Also, though I loved Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” as immortalized in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, I squirmed a little at the concept that “Everything that’s good and everything that’s bad follows Joy’s rose-strewn path.” I didn’t really want the bad stuff to get to be in there.

Lately I have been loving the concept expressed by these passages. To me they are gateways to a paradigm shift. In order to embrace them in my world, I have to change my understanding – have to open new dimensions in order to include them. The new worldview that includes them is much richer, more comprehensive, and more satisfying than the old one, so I am happy to be here.

I read something in a Christian Science Sentinel this morning which I found very interesting. In a discussion about the practice of Christian Science healing, one of the participants says, “You need to be the practitioner that is in you, with your own love. You cannot duplicate someone else’s life-experience or life model.” (Christian Science Sentinel, June 11, 2007, p. 7.) This seems very true and important to me. I think I allowed at least some of my upbringing to be guided by the grave, hushed voices that spoke, with eyes averted, of some unfortunate choice someone had made. Make sure you don’t do what she did. The implication was that you could make a good life out of negatives, by avoiding all of the bad things other people might do.

To me the message from this practitioner says that I can’t build my life based on what someone else found to be the right path. Similarly, I can’t base what I don’t do on what someone else felt would be a bad idea. There is a good reason Christian Science practitioners don’t give human advice. It’s because human advice is not scientific – it’s not based on anything provable, accountable, or replicable. The advice I would give is, decide your course based on what increases your love.

I will now illustrate why that advice must remain based on spiritual terms – your love – rather than human terms – the activities you take on. For me, one of the things that very greatly increased my love was having a baby. The influx of love for my children also strengthened the love in my marriage, increased my appreciation of others in general, and multiplied the level of my compassion. Yet it’s obvious that it would be very bad advice to tell someone looking for more love to have a baby. I knew it was the right step for me at the time; other people find their right steps, too. One person may find an increase in love by serving in a soup kitchen; another, by climbing a mountain; another, by writing a book; another, by an intense romantic relationship. All of these human things can be right steps for people at certain times. Only the individual, looking within and testing each step along the way for the increase in love, can know what the right step is.

This is the very loving way that the Christ works, leading us from within and saying yes to everything that affirms our being. This also leads us to a judgment-free appreciation for the different paths others take. I’m finding it very freeing to realize that no human pursuit is intrinsically more spiritual than another. An athlete is not less (or more) spiritual than an intellectual; a person who does finance not less (or more) spiritual than one who does art. Each person’s gift, nurtured and given with integrity, blesses us all.

Neither do I ever have to feel that grave concern that someone’s life has taken an unfortunate turn. I don’t have to become like my (perhaps faulty) memory of older church members, casting on myself and others the fear of some life courses and the people who take them. It says in Psalms, “Great peace have they which love Thy law, and nothing shall offend them.” It is my great joy to challenge myself to not be offended by anyone, but to love the law of Love and how it guides us all in our right paths.

Absent from the Body?

Here’s a quote from 2 Corinthians 5:
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

I like the idea of being “present with the Lord,” but I think I’ve been, at times, rendered ineffectual by confusion of the meaning of being absent from the body. The phrase could be associated with out-of-body experiences, or it could mean that we’re supposed to cultivate an unfeeling state, stolid and stoic, and consort only with our concept of God, which we might assume would reside in our heads. We would read the words in our holy books and not try to associate too much with the experience of the world, since, presumably, we’d take in this information through our bodies, from which we desired to be absent. In our efforts to “translate things into thoughts” we would trade the vibrant, colorful, fragrant world for dusty, abstract, concepts. This would give us a God that we could have intellectual ideas about, but not a God we could really feel.

This can’t be what is meant by the phrase. If our purpose were actually to have no relations with things in the physical world, why would physical healing be part of our ministry? Why would we care what our body was manifesting, if we are supposed to be absent from it anyway?

So it must mean something other than that. Here are some things that shed light on the subject:

Immanuel means “God within.” Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” If God is omnipresent, it can’t mean that God is present up to the boundary of our skins, and then there is the part where God isn’t because our bodies are there. God is law, and law permeates and pervades everything. In fact, it’s not just that God permeates and pervades everything – it’s that God is what is. There’s no “everything” first which God then permeates and pervades; everything is within the being of God, and so is subject to God’s law.

So we, here and now, in the place that we may think of as “in our bodies,” are the manifestation of God. Here where we feel joy, where we delight in beauty, where our hearts swell with love, is where we experience God. Here where we walk in our own centered balance, and speak in our own centered truth, we are present with the Lord. We don’t know God by absenting ourselves from all of the glory that is Life – we know God by being Life’s expression, with all the strength, agility, beauty, sensitivity and love that entails.

So what are we to be absent from? More and more I’m seeing that we are to be absent from complaint. What we perceive as our body is a fine instrument for expressing the glory of God, but when it wants to turn around and tell us it needs certain conditions met in order for it to experience or express goodness, it is out of line. If God is creator, and God is good, then good is here now, and there are no conditions on it. If we are present with the Lord, we are aware that good is here now. I think Paul’s sense of being “at home in the body” is the sense of being at the beck and call of all the body’s complaints. I think from this place we can’t be aware of God’s continual goodness, because we’re assuming it’s not there until conditions by the body are met.

Mrs. Eddy says the intercommunication is always from God to man. This to me is a clue that we receive the knowledge of God right where we are, right in what we perceive as our bodies, and we feel present in that goodness, right in our bodies. But the body doesn’t get to be the determiner of anything – it doesn’t get to send information back. This makes sense, since there isn’t any place in consciousness we can go where God isn’t. So there isn’t any source of information or communication other than goodness.

Mrs. Eddy also writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” I think this means look away not in a spatial sense. Look into Truth and Love not in a different place from where our body is. But look at Truth and Love right where we are, right as we experience it in what we think of as our bodies. Look away from complaint or a sense that there are conditions to be met before goodness is present. Consider that the divine cause establishes everything that we are, including our bodies. Then we will exude the health and glory which are God’s plan for us.

Understanding Self-Immolation

On the very first page of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she writes, “Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind.” When I quoted this, a friend said, “did she really use that word?” His understanding of the term was that it meant: to set oneself on fire – which, indeed, is the meaning you will find if you look it up in Wikipedia. That meaning of the term is not what this post is about, and I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not how Mrs. Eddy meant it either.

The Latin word it comes from means to sprinkle with meal in preparation for sacrifice, and the word in earlier times meant to prepare oneself as an offering for sacrifice. The first definition of sacrifice is: an act of offering something precious to deity. So you could define self-immolation as preparing to offer yourself as something precious to deity. This makes the term more palatable to me, but my desire is not just to make it more palatable. My desire is, and has been, to understand how to accomplish the Christianization and health of mankind.

A word about Christianization – my working definition is that it means establishing the rule of Love – that is, achieving the state of civilization where people are always motivated by love in what they do. The law of Love is that, at whatever scale you look, everything there is being tended with utmost tenderness and perfect provision of exactly what it needs to thrive joyfully. This is seen on the level of the individual, the family, the civilization, the planet, the galaxies, etc, and also on the level of the cell, the atom, and all the things we don’t even know enough to name. To me Christianization has nothing to do with what people say they believe. It has everything to do with Spirit moving within.

So when I consider how I might have a part in bringing this law into human consciousness and experience, I need an operational understanding of self-immolation. Setting myself on fire, as a suicide, wouldn’t do much, but perhaps setting myself on fire with the fire that burns but doesn’t consume would be a good idea. Being on the burning edge of aliveness, being the flame that dances in its embrace of the air, demonstrating the spontaneity, heat and brightness of the fire, could be good.

Self sacrifice as it’s most often understood is a cause of much harm to people. Sacrificing my voice to some other authority entails the loss of my ability to stand up for my heart’s wisdom – for what I know is true and good. Sacrificing my choice to do what I love for some assumed necessity deprives me and the world of the gifts I am meant to give, and also prevents me from making sure that the things done in the world are life-affirming. Self-sacrifice is a concept too often used to allow uncaring forces to be at the helm of civilization, designing structures that kill life. The design of the universe is for each being to be heard, honored, and given its place to fulfill its whole potential, and not be sacrificed for anyone else’s purpose.

There is a part of my experience of growth in grace that involves constantly putting aside things that I thought defined me. Judgments, justifications, the sense of being the one who understands, have to go. Since growth entails continually gaining new understanding, the need to put aside the sense of being one who has the answers is also continual. There are other flavors of this as well in life experience, related to gaining of skill and even to being kind and feeling the glow of goodness. To use another analogy: every time a wave comes up on a sandy shore, it leaves a little line when it recedes. I need to remember: no matter how beautiful or how ungainly each line might be, I am not the line. I am the wave. It is the sense of self as a line left on the sand of time that I find useful to continually put off. As I become more conscious of myself as the wave, it serves to make me a precious offering to God. I offer not my death but my life, my life that is bright and fervent because it isn’t stifled by these senses of myself that are not me. So that is how, for now, I am using the concept of self-immolation.

Substance: Vector or Bitmap?

A friend told me last week about a TV segment he had seen where they showed an area one meter square and then went out in powers of ten so pretty soon you were looking at the whole galaxy. Then they went in by powers of ten into a water droplet. It never got less intricate or beautiful.

This morning I was reading this passage in Proverbs, where wisdom is speaking:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.”

As I read, the image from the TV program came to mind. At every level of observation and experience, the same law is present – the law that makes everything beautiful and delicate and harmonious – the same wisdom can be seen in the Creator’s hand. I thought, that makes sense, because the law of Love would always be operating in each reference point, in each center, at every here and now, no matter what the scale in time or space. With a shiver of awe, I felt the vectors of Spirit’s control, shaping me, shaping the galaxies, making all the streams of energy flow together in harmony – my life, my purpose, my limbs, the stars and planets, the surge of life.

And in the way that thoughts leap topics along the lines of thought vectors, I thought of vector objects in computer graphics. Since their shapes are established by code relating them to geometric shapes and relationships, they stay true no matter how much you zoom in on them. You can move them around and place them in relation to each other, and they don’t lose their identity. If they have a 3D component, you can change the viewing angle and see other sides.

Bitmapped images are very different. Since their code is just the color of each pixel on the screen at the time the images are created, when you zoom in on them you see jagged edges and little squares. The image only exists in the context of the pixels on the screen – you can’t move them around or see around them. If you do select an image and move it, it leaves a hole, which you then have to doctor up somehow. So I thought, we’re not bitmaps, we’re vector objects!

In other words, we’re not a collection of matter stacked together in a certain way. The pixels of our lives – our shape, our circumstances, our relationships – are not determined by the material code of location on the material plane of being. They’re not things that can get disarranged to our detriment, or things that lock us into a certain mode of being. They’re not things for us to manipulate around to improve or fix our identity. Instead, our pixels are determined by the vectors that give us our identity. These vectors allow us to move about freely, without being constrained by the circumstances around us. If one of our limbs is foreshortened due to a viewing angle, it doesn’t mean that we are deformed and will always have a shorter limb. A quick change in viewing angle will show us wholly symmetrical. This is the essence of healing: when we realize that we are vector objects – that is, spiritual, and we look to the truth of our vectors to show us our identity, we will find ourselves whole.

Keeping in right relation to Truth

There is a message in the Bible that God (and those who speak for him) keep trying to tell the people. God tells it to Moses, who tells it to the children of Israel. Most of the prophets also are found trying to make the people understand. Jesus tried through stories, his healing works and his explanations of them, to make the people understand. Most of the time they didn’t.

The message has to do with the relation of the power of God with the goings on of the world. God is found giving the message of being the great I AM – in other words, Life, The Event Going On, That Which Is Interesting, That Which Sustains – that upon which our attention is designed to be focused. The misinterpretation of the message is that God is the thing that sometimes has the power to make the things in our life go in a favorable way. In other words, instead of God being the event, the circumstances of the world – issues such as food, shelter, wealth and social position – are seen as the event. Then God is seen as a force that can manipulate those things.

In the Bible, whenever people get the message right – when they see God as The Event – then things also go right for them in terms of their circumstances. They get their needs met – for survival, security, and prosperity. But whenever they get it wrong – when they think their security and prosperity are based on their food, shelter, army strength, etc, then they lose those things. So God, and the prophets, keep telling them: it’s not the things. It’s God.

It’s still a hard message for us to get. I think this is because we struggle to grasp what God actually is. The Bible language makes it easy enough to visualize God as an authoritarian, jealous figure, who doesn’t want us to pay attention to anything but him, although there may be other interesting things that would vie for our attention. When I read it that way, especially if I imagine God to be represented by the voice of some church institutions, I naturally bridle at the implied lack of freedom and the possible boredom such obedience would require.

On the other hand, if I can make my thought of God big enough, the command to attend to God is transformed. If I grasp that God is Life, I hear Life saying: Life is The Event – pay attention to it, learn all about it, be true to it. Live with all the vibrancy that Life offers. Don’t be stopped by the limitations of what you thought before were essential material conditions for your existence. Trust Life to guide you beyond what you thought was possible.

Like the Children of Israel, I have had definitive experiences of the presence and power of God. In those moments, I feel Spirit as tangible substance, as aliveness, as regenerative power. I think, of course this is what we’re about. We’re about joy itself, not about the material conditions sold as prerequisites to joy. Then, like the Children of Israel, I let my focus shift. I think, for example, that the e-mail in which I received the message of joy is the source of joy, and start checking my e-mail obsessively, and feeling let down when another message hasn’t arrived. Then I have to try to get back in right relation to Truth.

And so it goes. The challenge is simple, but all-encompassing. The lesson is there to be studied, but it is the practice that brings the mastery.

The Ecosystem of Life and Love

From time to time I’ve come across writings of scientists who study life, where they’ve expressed their continuing awe about what they’re studying. It seems, the more they study, the greater the awe: how does life manage to do it? How does it form? How is it that the deeper we probe, the greater the intricacy? The explanations that gave rise to Social Darwinism, touting a fierce and predatory competition for resources, give way to more nuanced views in which cooperation and a delicate balance of interdependence govern every aspect of life. As we’re ready to see it, we get to behold exquisite interlacings between and among species, amazing adaptations that require intimate relations with every other member.

I marvel at what a leap of trust is entailed in single celled organisms choosing to come together to be a more complex organism. Or for a fungus and a root to form a relationship that benefits them both. (I know some would dismiss the above as hopeless anthropomorphism; in my defense let me say I’m using the word “choose” in the sense that every action is a choice, whether it’s “conscious” or not, and that every action that depends on another entails trust, whether it’s reasoned or not.)

I remember in high school biology learning what were considered the properties that would make something qualify as life. They included growth, reproduction, metabolism, and adaptation. As a student of Whole Systems Design at Antioch University, I learned a few more: life is negentropic, cybernetic, autopoetic. I love these words. I sort of smugly love that I always have to define them to people:

Negentropic: working contrary to entropy. It is a law of thermodynamics that things always wear down – that they move from a greater level of complexity to a lesser one, that energy always moves to a less usable state. But life is negentropic – it always moves to a greater level of complexity, where more energy can be used. It creates conditions that make for more life, and not only within species. Trees make it possible for many more things to live – providing atmosphere, shelter, nutrition. I’ve read that in the early stages of evolution, the micro-organisms gave off gases that created an atmosphere wherein life forms such as ourselves could develop.

Cybernetic: equipped with a system for taking in information and, based on it, adapting behavior to optimize itself. In other words, it has a goal, a means of setting a course towards it, and a way of measuring its progress and using that information to steer its continued course towards that goal. Whether the mechanism for the system be a chemical one or a reasoned one, each living thing has this series of feedback loops which allow it to enhance and extend its life. Biologist Humberto Maturana made an eloquent case for intelligence to be redefined as present where goal seeking behavior is present.

Autopoetic: formed for its own purposes with a code contained within itself. Trees do not exist to be timber or even to be animal homes. They exist because of an imperative within themselves, and their being is for their own sake. This, of course, is also true for people, though we do seem to forget.

All of these properties have interesting implications for the understanding of life. Negentropy makes a compelling case for the existence of God, like this:

Clearly, life is a lot of work. Life is something that makes a lot of effort; in fact, you could say it defines effort. So the obvious question is, why does life bother? And the answer is, because it wants to. I am fond of quoting the biology teacher of one of my students, who said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” All the explanations for life’s continuance – the struggle for survival, the amazing efforts to procreate, the stunning adaptation – require as their engine life’s desire to be. Without that, there is no explanation for negentropy.

Well, desire is a property of love. The zest for life that gets us up in the morning is a kind of love. So is the absorbing interest that keeps us working hard at gaining a new skill even when the progress is slow. Though there is a predatory sense of the concept of desire, and though desire often filters into the dominant paradigm as something that keeps us from being present to the joy of the moment, in the simple sense of the desire of life to be, it doesn’t need to carry those connotations. Mary Baker Eddy says desire is prayer. This relates to the Biblical concept of being drawn by lovingkindness – being pulled forward by the power of a love that may feel to us to be our own.

The other thing I think is important is that desire can’t be expressed in material terms. Matter, by definition, can’t desire, as matter is defined as the inert building blocks from which things are made. Therefore desire is a spiritual property. What seems to me the obvious conclusion is that Spirit is a necessary component in the description of life.

And now I’ll stop pretending to be an authority on all this stuff. I’ll admit that I took a leap when I capitalized Spirit. I’ll admit that it could be another leap to say Spirit is God. And when I bring my faith into it and say God is Love, so Spirit is Love, and Love is the engine of Life, I have to abandon the voice of proof-through-argument. But these are things I hold to be true, and I find the contemplation of them deeply enlightening.

The cybernetic property of life gives evidence that Mind is Love, like this: Intelligence is defined by the presence and complexity of goal seeking behavior. The goal seeking behavior of life is always to make the best choice for itself. So intelligence is making the best choice. The act of always seeking the greatest good is a property of love, so Mind is Love. OK, that’s in shorthand, a little bit, but I find it interesting to think about it.

Autopoeisis is important to understand for the purpose of respect and the honoring of every living thing. Each thing has its own center. The center is the place of stillness around which things circulate. A tiny movement from the center can engender a great movement at the periphery. It takes much more effort to move something from the periphery, and there also is far less of a reference point for accuracy. It’s not surprising that each living thing would be designed to steer itself, from its center. Our society tends to operate on the assumption that it’s beneficial to have someone other than the individual determine what it will do. But the ecosystem of Life illustrates for us a better plan.

I think that whenever we study life with honesty and openness, we find great awe and inspiration. Similarly, when we explore our faith with honesty and openness, we approach truth. I find I do best in my inquiries when I’m not so much seeking to disprove other theories as to learn everything I can about the ecosystem of Life and Love. It seems to me that any explanation in words can only be a shadow – minus at least one dimension of the actual truth.

Banana Nature – an allegory

I came up with this analogy a few years back, and since then it has grown into a story that I find useful. I've told it to people but not written it - so I hope this account is able to convey the light-hearted nature in which it's intended:

Imagine that a large group of people were hypnotized into believing that they were bananas. As a result of this, they would spend much of their time sitting in groups of reclining chairs (their bowls) arranged so their heads were near each other, reaching their hands over their heads and clasping them together with each other. They would mostly occupy themselves by talking about the condition of their skin – their coloring, how their brown spots were coming along – and their insides – how soft they were, how much they were bruised.

Imagine then that after a while, a few of them started speculating that there must be more to them than this, their banana nature. Someone might suggest that, after all, if they were really bananas, they wouldn’t be able to talk. But most of them would not want to talk about that. They would say that talking was one of those things that couldn't be explained, and that its existence could be questionable – it could also be attributed to a chemical phenomenon in the skin. And the conversation would quickly go back to such things as the effects of bowl location on health, and the effect of bunch size and position on personality.

But there would be some of them who would keep thinking there had to be more to life, and maybe one or two of them would get up and walk around. They would say, see – bananas can’t do that, and we can. Some might reply, that’s not healthy – it’s bad for bananas to be alone. You need to stay with the group or you’ll get terribly bruised. Others might say, wow, that’s something to aspire to. And they might try getting up. But they might say, I try to escape it, but I just can’t get around my banana nature. It keeps pulling me back with the deep need I have to sit in the bunch and be connected at the top.

Eventually, some of them might wake all the way up, and it would be clear to them that they had never been bananas at all. Some of them might just walk away from the whole group and go have adventures and live normal lives. Others might come back and try to wake up the rest of the group. They might say: look, you’re not a banana. You’ve never been a banana. It doesn’t matter if you think you were badly bruised during transit or that you’ve gone too brown and soft and need to be thrown away. This truth about you, that you’re not a banana, can free you from all those difficulties. You can get up!

If it’s anything like current life in our society, there would be some in the group who would be angry at that assertion. They would say, how can you say it doesn’t matter whether I was bruised? How can you assert that the inevitable process of becoming brown and mushy doesn’t govern us all?

Meanwhile, there might be some kind of a religion formed around this new teaching – it would be a gathering of the bananas who believed there was more to aspire to, and that it was reachable. There would be some among these who would sit in their place asserting the words, but not actually getting up. They might talk about how they were trying to have faith but they hadn’t gotten a clear sign yet. They might get in contests with each other about which of them was a deeper believer – which was best able to recite the words and carry on convincingly about how their nature was more than bananas.

The more these believing bananas would sit there and talk about it without doing anything, the less credence the words would have among the whole group. But occasionally, there would be a banana who would take the words to heart and actually get up and walk around. That banana would try to tell the others: you don’t have to be a banana – you can get up.

And in fact, any of the group who did choose to entertain the possibility that this was true, that they weren’t bananas, could get up and slowly prove it for themselves. Maybe at first they’d be drawn back to their banana natures, but after a while their actual selfhood would become clearer to them. They would find a huge world to live and move in, far beyond what they could have imagined. They would be free.

To be tiringly obvious in driving this point home: I believe that the gap between the hypnotized “bananas” and their true selfhood is not larger than the gap between what our societal norms tell us we are and our actual being. I believe we each not only have the power, but are already being much more than our societal constructs give us credit for. After all, we do have love as our engine. We do take soaring leaps of compassion and understanding. We have beautiful dreams. I believe that a close look at what we already are can help us see that we deserve to aspire to much more than we do.

A deeper understanding of God – and time and space

I had a healing last fall. There was a time of struggle and despair. I prayed deeply, and what I learned brought moments of light but no relief. Then the healing came, and ever since, I have felt the understanding of something that is very important to me. It is the fact that God owns the whole show – God is the whole Mind, the only perceiving and thinking that goes on, not just what is here but presence itself; not just a power but power itself; not just something that acts, but action itself.

To continue along this line of thought: God does not exist in space, but space exists in God. Space is a concept that God created – it is the idea of every creation of God having room to move, to develop, to interact. It provides for harmonious and intricate interweavings of motions on every scale, from cosmic to microcosmic, and at all levels between. The law of God regarding space is that everything has the right amount of it in which to move and grow, and everything with it in that space in order for Life and Love to be made splendidly manifest. Space wasn’t something that existed first, and God needed to fill it. Space belongs totally to God. Therefore, there are no spatial constraints that have any relevance to God. And for man, there can be no properties of space which hinder man’s relations with God. There’s no such thing as not enough space, as being cramped or stunted or imprisoned. There’s no such thing as too much space, as being lost or isolated or without needed resources and companions. When we think there are space related constraints, it’s just a story. Understanding that space belongs to God and is used only for God’s purpose frees us to move freely in space as God intends us to.

It’s the same thing with time. God does not exist in time, but time exists in God. Time is an idea which God thought up, which allows for various aspects of Creation’s expression. Time is the idea which allows for unfoldment and growth, for an identity to display a sequence of development while still being itself. It allows for rhythm and harmony, and periodic pattern. Time and space, as ideas of God, work together to allow the arena for music and dance, and for Life and Love. Since time is an idea of God, there is no time before God, and there is no time in which God is not being expressed. Since man is God’s expression, man must have the same dominion over time that God does. There’s never not enough time. God uses time to make room for every needed thing to happen. There’s never too much time – no time in which good is not unfolding, no emptiness or boredom. When we think we are under the crunch of time, we are believing a story - that time exists independently of God – perhaps that God might be able to help us, if we pray right, but that it is a hard problem even for Him. When we understand that time is God’s idea, we can see that we need never fear that it will give us a bad turn.

Spirit and Matter

In the Scientific Statement of Being, Mary Baker Eddy says that matter doesn’t exist. I have found it crucial to understand what this means and doesn’t mean. If you define matter as that which you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, touch, etc, then it doesn’t make sense to say that matter doesn’t exist. After all, you can see beauty and love and harmony, you can observe incredible intricacy and order. If you say that what you can observe is matter, and then say matter doesn’t exist, you miss out on all the myriad, specific, splendid acts of love that are manifested in all forms of life, from the minute to the cosmic. It would close you off from all the color, texture, symmetry, pattern and grace of being, and leave you trying to construct a shadow world out of abstracts. Clearly, that’s not a good way to start.

Here is my understanding of matter: Matter is not a thing, but a construct. It’s not just something there, which we observe. It’s a set of assumptions about the nature and behavior of what we observe. Specifically, it is the notion that things are constructed of a substance that is independent of their identity. So a living thing is said to be composed of chemical substances. The substances are supposed to exist independent of the presence of life, and to operate according to a set of laws that have no necessary relation to those said to govern life. So every living thing is considered to be subject to two forces – one; whatever it is that holds it all together and causes it to organize as it does, and two; the matter, which is presumed to operate according to the tendencies inherent within it. So the life-force (whatever that is) is set as being in opposition to the forces of matter, which are said to tend toward entropy and inertia. Then, in many discussions, the life-force is hardly considered at all. All the discussion is about the somehow organized building blocks and how they may go awry.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to construct a theory of life without a life-force component. The theories I would call most material are those that posit existence to be a series of reactions of different forces on each other. Their proponents want to be clear that there is no grand design, no intent. They believe that random forces account for every development of life. Yet even these theories have a spiritual engine: the desire of life to perpetuate itself. Without that you can’t have natural selection, you can’t have survival of the fittest, you can’t have DNA and RNA working to keep life continuing. I’m not sure why it is considered anti-scientific to notice a required, fundamental element of one’s construct. Yet biology, as taught in schools, rarely mentions the spiritual force without which none of the explanations of life could float. A student of mine once told me that her biology teacher said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” But no further examination was made of what would constitute such a desire. It seems to me that such a desire can’t accounted for as a material force, since matter is the construct of something that doesn’t have volition. I understand volition to be a property of Spirit. Therefore I state that the engine of these theories is spiritual.

Once the spiritual engine of life processes is acknowledged, it begins to seem less obvious why we should think that Spirit needs a mindless component as a medium for its self-expression. And it seems more possible that an interplay between a spiritual force and a passive substance is not the only way to think about things. In fact, the word mythological comes to mind. A myth is a story which is used to explain a possible cause for something observed. People’s mythology then tends to color what they look for – hence what they see to be the driving causes in their lives. So we develop the expectation that the body, if not assiduously tended to, will fall apart (and will sometimes fall apart despite all tendings).

How would it change what we observe if we started out from the standpoint that things that are alive are comprised of the force of life itself? The properties of life are observable and very interesting. What if these properties are the organizing principle and the substance of life? For my own part, the more I am clear that my being is spiritual, the better my health, and the more lovely are the unfolding of things in my life.

So to get back to the question of Spirit vs. matter, I find that Spirit is something we observe with all of our being, including our sight, hearing, etc. It really is everywhere, so we experience it everywhere. Matter is a story about how things are put together, which says that existence is passive, and determined by various forces that act on it.

God and gods

My mind has been circling around a comprehensive discussion of religion-as-phenomenon. It could be framed as “why people choose to believe what they believe”, or “what is the basis of faith?”

I’m thinking about why the children of Israel wanted to make a golden calf, and what they did with it. (Background: They had been led by Moses, who was following God, out of slavery to the Egyptians. But Moses had been gone for more than a month – he was up in the mountain getting the commandments from God. So the children of Israel felt rudderless, and asked Aaron to make a god for them to worship.)

To me this points to the power of projection of the human mind, and man’s habit of externalizing the forces he believes to be governing him. If the Children of Israel were in a habit of looking to external forces to guide them – kings to rule them, war commanders to send them to battle – they might have closed off access to the notion that they, themselves, could determine the course of their lives. So in the absence of Moses to command them, they wanted something to project their allegiance to, so they could follow it. So they gave Aaron their jewelry to melt and make a calf. Symbolically, they put things they owned into it – they projected their own ideas, intentions, and motivations onto the calf.

The Bible’s main premise is that there is a God who is more than just the projection of the human mind. The Bible presents the appearing in consciousness of a creative force that teaches man the power of truth over treachery, the presence of a life-force beyond manipulation and might-makes-right. The Bible delineates a God who would always win in a contest between truth and illusion. And, as it comes clearer as the Bible history unfolds, it acquaints us with a God who is good.

In thinking about the gods of these times, there are many things to which people give away a sense of their own sovereignty. Genetics and chemical makeup get a lot of press, as do brain development, personality, diet, exercise, and economic background. People, in their efforts to define themselves, choose a whole raft of limitations, such that you would think they were defined by their constraints instead of their life-force. People in this culture don’t think of these limitations as gods, but they think of them as forces which control them, and which they can’t control, but which, through certain carefully performed actions, they may be able to appease.

What would be thought of one who said she doesn’t believe in these gods? She would be considered foolish, ignorant, in denial. But that is what people always encounter when they deny the prevailing gods. To deny the prevailing gods is a courageous stance, and a wilderness experience. It is to choose to be alone – to be outside the comfortable boxes. It is also to choose to be free.

Maybe when people choose not to believe in God, it is from this same desire for freedom – the desire to throw off anything that is a projection of power to something other than themselves. They put God into the category of all the other projections of the human mind, and they refuse to bow down to a force external to themselves.

I applaud this. I think it is a necessary step towards truth. But I think the next step is learning the nature of the power that remains – the power within one’s self. And on examination, I have found the power within myself to have discernable characteristics, and to be an unfailing fountain of strength, and to be something I can lean on for guidance. I find its characteristics to coincide with what in the Bible is called God. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.”

Religion and Science - God as Cause

In ancient times, there was not a distinction between science and religion. People’s inquiry then as now was about cause – what makes things happen as they do, and how can they make things come out better for them. God was a concept that meant cause. Some people’s inquiry led them to posit many causes – the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, the earth. Where people’s lives were more urban, and power of people over each other became an overwhelming component of life, this became another realm for the inquiry into cause. The gods were the impulses giving power to some, and making others submit.

The Bible chronicles a people’s explorations into the nature of cause. At certain points, they found themselves in possession of a power with which they overwhelmingly won, in conflicts with rivals and when up against challenges in nature and circumstance. They called this power God [cause]. Various prophets gave insight as to the nature of this cause called God, and as time in the Bible progresses, this understanding grows clearer and more accessible to more people. Earlier senses of fearsomeness, vengefulness, and exclusiveness give way to love, support, and universal inclusion. Worship (doing whatever is needed to have the cause work the desired effect) goes from burnt sacrifice, to living mercifully, to embodying a love that embraces all mankind and nature in universal harmony.

The separation of science from religion came, it seems to me, as politics, rather than inquiry, became the basis of what people were led to believe. As long as the study of cause is pure inquiry, science and religion are one. When politics gets wrapped up in religion, manipulation is mixed with inquiry. People are told things are true not because this is someone’s best understanding, but because it will make them do what those in power want. And once people are relying on others to tell them what is true, instead of inquiring on their own, they can be deceived.

I believe the same happens with science. The pure inquiry of science is also susceptible to manipulation by powers that want people to behave in a certain way. We have heard outcries about this regarding the way the current administration has dealt with issues of global warming and other environmental degradation. Less decried, but more pervasive, is what we are told daily by those in support of pharmaceutical giants regarding the nature of health and disease.

In the debates about science and religion over issues such as intelligent design, I keep thinking all the arguments are muddled. Instead of being so concerned with what students will be concluding, I think the focus should be on how they are coming to those conclusions. Are they just being told to believe what’s in the textbook? I know the field of science prides itself in not being susceptible to manipulations. But does the structure of science education protect students from it when it does happen? Does it give students the tools to inquire for themselves?

If students inquire as to the nature of cause and discover God as a palpable force in their lives, what should they do with that? Is it right to make them compartmentalize their inquiry based on subject matter? Is it right to say their attending to the cause that they find governing them (by prayer and worship) is less permitted than for someone else to attend to the cause they find governing them (such as diet and chemicals)?

Well, but is it right for students or parents to shut down a whole area of inquiry because they don’t believe in it? And is it right for students or parents to impose their beliefs on others? What kind of an enlightenment would it take for us to get to the place where none of us felt the need to impose any beliefs about cause on others, but to encourage and trust us all to find out on our own? Then no science education would be repugnant to people of faith, and no faith inquiry would be repugnant to people of science. We would all present our findings as the sharing of our best inquiry to date, knowing that we may or may not be able to express them in a way that resonates with someone else, but trusting (as I do) that all honest inquiry leads to truth.

What if the religion that people are getting is not about inquiry, but is about being told something, with great persuasive manipulation or with threats of damnation? Religion has the sanction that people can believe whatever they want, and a group of people can collectively believe what they want, and they can use whatever means they want to make people agree with them. It is valuable to have this sanction, as there are many ways of knowing that are not universally understood, and there is truth that mainline science doesn’t know how to get to at all. But in this necessary safe haven for religion, there can also bloom various bizarre enslavements. The best protection against this is to have a healthy amount of unmuddled truth readily available to all who seek it. And that is one of the reasons I have chosen to write all this down.
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