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Truth is subjective
and cannot be accomplished neither through a collection of ideas, nor through forcibly limiting it to some supposedly
basic feature to which everything is to be added. I stand in a faith far beyond discursive intellect and absolute
conceptual forms, yet embraced with the power of reason to subjectively force the irrational to rational, not of
words written by men, concepts and theology, which in itself is nothing more than that of idolatry created by men,
but rather an existential faith that stands in the paradox of "knowing" in resolved value positing while
simultaneously within the insecurity of uncertainty in "unknowing," to align myself with the universal
life force, the unconditional, the irrational center of existenz, call it God if you wish, that is not external,
nor an object, but the source of Being, the rational grounded in the irrational, that can only be found in what
some mystics describe in purely subjective experience, as the dread of the night, in the darkness of faith, within
the inner depths of one's nothingness. It is there that one can somehow be revealed the peaceful certainty of light,
unable to possess, never to retain in intellect, nor communicable in linguistic clarity, only to be rediscovered
each time the continual renewal and grace in the interior depths of Being to be embraced in humble silence.
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If I could explain math, I would use mathematics. If
I could explain chemistry, I would use chemistry. If I could explain Greek, I would speak Greek. If I were to explain
to the deaf, I would use sign language.
I cannot explain God. No one can ever explain God. There is no scripture that can explain God. There is absolutely
no objective language for the comprehension and explanation of God.
As I experience the soft breeze blowing the flowering tops of grass, hear the sweet sound of leaves in the wind,
feel the soft rays of sun from beneath the clouds. All this while thinking of absolutely nothing, of no-thing.
It is the experience of love without conditions, disinterested, unattached love simply for the sake of existence.
This is but one (and yet inadequate) explanation of God.
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The universal life force, the unconditional primordial wisdom,
the impersonal spirit, call it God if you like, to being the very core of our being, that is, the source of life,
source of love and ground of being. Through both meditation and further, contemplation, is the awareness to perceive
the paradox of God energy, being both external and internal, yet never separate, connected to all as the ground
of our being, as Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton. John Spong so describe, as Eastern thinking of both Buddhist and
Hindu insight and Jung, Watts, Huxley and Goethe, so well describe, to name only a mere few, and yet at the same
time, simultaneously, externally present in all living matter, the universal spirit and life force that animates,
empowers and brings energy to all matter, to all life, to all being, the "One" as Plotinus attempted
to describe it. Yet God is not the personal being, as the theistic parent figure in the sky separate from our existence,
but the very source of our being. This Source Being that we call God, exists as all things and is "in"
us only in that sense. All things do not live in It, and It does not live in us. It lives "as" us. The
Eternal Being expresses Itself "as" us! We are the manifestations of His Spirit. Meditation is the effort
to experience this fact. Contemplative bliss is the experiencing of it.
For the church
to retain life, the death of theism is inevitable, for our call to Christ is not in an external deity who rewards
us with good and punishes with torment, but rather our call is to live, to love and to be all that we can be in
our fullest sense. Our doorway into hope for life that is transcendent and eternal is located at this point, beyond
our ultimate limits. It is not being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and
daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.
I find God internally, far apart from corporate worship and liturgical service, apart from the need to have the
ego massaged in the presence of admiring onlookers, beyond the group approval of communal admiration and certainly
in stark contrast and opposition to organizational conformity. Quiet days are no bore and while never embracing
formally institutionalized church pilgrimages or retreats, the time spent in solitude and silence with meditation
in simple humility can never be underestimated, nor devalued for its contemplative effects in interior envelopment,
embracing nothingness in the fullness of life, and essence of indescribable mystery, that is, within the unknowing
of knowing.
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"There are two possibilities. Either you close your eyes
and become dogmatic, become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan . . then you become like an ostrich. It doesn't
change life; it simply closes your eyes. It simply makes you stupid, it simply makes you unintelligent. In your
unintelligence you feel secure - all idiots feel secure. In fact, only idiots feel secure. A really alive man will
always feel insecure. What security can there be?
Life is not a mechanical process, it cannot be certain. It is
an unpredictable mystery. Nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. Not even God that you think resides
somewhere in the seventh heaven, not even he - if he is there- not even he knows what is going to happen! . . .
because if he knows what is going to happen then life is just bogus, then everything is written beforehand, then
everything is destined beforehand. how can he know what is going to happen then next moment, then life is just
a dead, mechanical process. Then there is no freedom, and how can life exist without freedom? Then there is no
possibility to grow or not to grow. If everything is predestined, then there is no glory, no grandeur. Then you
are just robots." - OSHO
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The person who has learnt to regard
things, not as literal with literal meanings, but as symbols, who sees not religion or religious organizations,
but all persons, regardless of culture, race, sexual orientation and religious beliefs, as temples of God and his
or her actions as divine, is a person who has learned constantly to remind themselves who they are, where they
stand in relation to the universe and its Ground of All Being, how they should behave towards their fellow man
and what they must do to come to their final end.
God is not some separate
being, nor good over evil. To see all of life as one whole is to understand that good and evil and all elements
of opposing qualities are essential to life's existence and cannot be interfered with and dissected, as the body
of the universe can not be taken apart, with pleasant and desirable portions preserved and unpleasant events cast
way. This is what the philosophical Hindu understands when, looking at the most evil things in life, can say, "This,
too, is Brahman," that divine Being of whose Self, as each single thing, is a changing aspect. And Brahman
is not merely the whole universe any more than seeing the whole of life; in this sense Brahman is rather the wholeness,
even the holiness, of life which can be destroyed only in the fantasy world of our own minds. Therefore those who
attempt in religion and theism, to put God separate from evil and imagine a Satan separate from good, to preserve
life over death, pleasure over pain, wealth over poverty and youth over age, are only holding on to the world as
a body with dismembered limbs. For no mountain can exist without valleys and no branch without trees.
The more someone tries to
capture or hold on to one pleasant quality of life, the more one looses it, as a fly tries to escape a spider's
web, each effort creating more tension and less freedom. This is the paradox and the nature of life, the ground
of being, and the opposing elements of inner contentment. You cannot capture the wind to feel its soothing effects,
but must let it pass through and let go, as you cannot capture the warmth of the sun's rays nor the peace of inner
contentment or the meaning of the Ground of Being, the Brahman, the Tao, the primordial wisdom and the unconditional
force that emanates all life and transcends all religious doctrines.
It is the religious experience
that we can know is real, not God. This presents the old argument between rationalists and revelation. Revelation,
not rationalism, is what teaches what man is and what he needs. This does not support the existence of the ground
being (God), but one does not deny those with revelatory experiences, as their experiences are critical. We look
away from those particular revelatory illusions of God and objectivism, moving into the search of the inner self,
seeking the mysterious substitute for their perception of ground to the extent of our ground. Such is result of
an atheistic religiosity
in the mysterious meanings of those such as Max Weber, Jean-Paul Sartre and those writing about the relationship
of faith and progressive living, unlike most religious leaders and rational thinkers.
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"Truth is the kind of error without
which a certain kind of living being could not live. The value for life ultimately decides." (WM 493). ' Truth,'
according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental
cases only the position of various errors in relation to one another" (WM 535)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
"It would be utterly
superficial to explain such statements in to that of Nietzsche saying everything that is an error to be true. Nietzsche's
statement that truth is error, error is truth, can be grasped only in terms of his fundamental position in opposition
to all Western philosphy since Plato. . . for Nietzsche avers that by means of reversal a new order of values should
originate; he says explicitly that in this way an order should originate "of itself." MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Nietzsche Vol I, pp. 29-30
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"The non-rational acquires being and meaning for
us only through its connection with reason. Reason is the indispensable. Thus, I perceive ignorance itself through
knowledge and perfect ignorance only through the maximum of reason. The universality of thought, insofar as it
is not formalized but is engaged and filled with content, is reason itself. "KARL JASPERS
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"As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines." ABRAHAM HESCHEL, Between God and Man
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"Truth cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it is not likely to be found in its entirety
or in all its bearings in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and for ever by any one teacher,
thinker, prophet or Avatar." - SRI AUROBINDO, Essays on The Gita, p. 5
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"The quest for philosophical
understanding is subject to the same danger as formal spiritual practice, because both involve focusing and concentrating,
structuring and organizing awareness. The secret is to allow the water of awareness to flow. In philosophical pursuit
we must not force the patterns perceived by the intellect to become fixed, or rigid. The intellect must flow through
these patterns, and the patterns themselves must melt and flow in continuous evolution." LEX HIXON, Coming Home, p. 180 (The answers to a question posed in I Ching, that of hexagrams 29
& 48)
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"There is one Truth which we have to know in our lives. That one Truth is undiminishing,
incomparable, indestructible, beginningless, endless, without sorrow, it is the Perfect Purity which exists every
second." There is no concept or doctrine which touches this Truth. The fundamental theme of Bawa's teaching
is that Allah is inexpressible by the human mind."
BAWA MUHAIYADDEN
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"God Is A Concept, By Which
We Measure Our Pain. . . . the Dream Is Over."
JOHN LENNON
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"Religious doctrines are not the residue of experience
or the final result of reflection. They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent
wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes." SIGMUND FREUD
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......
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"To know God is
to identify ourselves with the divine element which constitutes our essential nature, which in ignorance, we choose
to remain unaware of." - PLATO, "Theaetetus" (Abridged)
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Intelligence dwells entirely within
the region of thought we call the intelligible realm . . and is not merely one: it is one and many . . Yet in the
Intelligence realm there is The (One) Intelligence, which like some some huge organism contains potentially all
other intelligence's as a city having a soul, including the inhabitants, each of whom would have a soul. Each individual
soul of intelligence are possessed by a desire to return there whence they came, and they possess to a power over
the realm, as sunshine is attached to the sun." - PLOTINUS
Each individual is interwoven with the "One"
Consciousness or as Carl Jung called the "Collective Unconscious." All inner peace and enlightenment
moves towards the center direction of the interior self, apart from the separate ego consciousness, in the attempt
to return to the "One" Intelligence of consciousness, which our conscious being or souls are just a part,
as the rays are the manifestation parts, the realm, of the Whole, the sun.
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......
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"You asked for
God to be invented because you could not live alone. You were incapable of facing life, its beauties, its joys,
its sufferings, its anguishes. You were not ready to experience them on your own without anybody protecting you,
without somebody being an umbrella to you. You asked for God out of fear. And certainly there are con men everywhere.
You ask and they will do it for you." OSHO
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......
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"To gauge the
soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. . . . the
eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me." MEISTER ECKHART
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"The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved,
but a reality to be experienced." . .
"In blindness and materialism, man wants to have
truth, to grasp and hold her, to lock
her between the pages of a book, to make an object, a thing of that which is the heart of things, then the nobility
of his aspiration is lost and the hero of yesterday becomes an object of pity, at whom the great gods smile in
compassion." - J.J.
VAN DER LEEUW
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"It is absurd and impossible to try to grasp God
as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds. . . . The
obsession of doctrinal formulas, juridical order and ritual exactitude has removed the heart of Christianity, the
living experience of which far transcends all conceptual formulations."
- THOMAS MERTON
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"If you are able to relax - relax to a cloud by
looking at it, relax to a drop of rain and experience its genuineness - you can see the unconditionality of reality
and are experiencing the state of being of the cosmic mirror, the wisdom of the cosmic mirror." CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
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"There are no
valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being,
whether we know it or not."
PAUL TILLICH
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"The God of theism
is so visibly dying that only by playing a game of denial and illusion - a game that many play - can we continue
to maintain that this God is still real. That is the nature of the religious dilemma of our generation." -
"Yes God is real, intensely real, for me, but God is not an external being, supernatural, or theistic - to
whom I seek access. God is rather a presence discovered in the very depths of my life, in the capacity to live,
in the ability to love, and in the courage to be." - JOHN SHELBY SPONG
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"It seems to me to be the road toward freedom—external
revolt is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside—reach the mental
through the physical."
JIM MORRISON - THE DOORS
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It has been judged and labeled, "New Age" philosophy. And
yet the basic common sense of human self-consciousness with the courage to live IN life has existed since the beginning
of man. The ability to walk outside of learned concepts and teachings others have both introduced and imposed on
us.
Biblical literalism is like trusting the steel beams planted in soil that rests on faults unseen to the eye. Data
may  reveal
the faults, yet the lack of visible movement being so rare, creates a false security and protection which crumbles
the moment the ground shakes. Over the years the ground has quaked with the reformation, the renaissance, the wisdom
of the cosmos and orbit pattern of our solar system, the birth of higher thinking in evolution, matter, energy
and the willingness of the West to open its blind eye to the East for spiritual growth.
Yet those who refuse to walk outside of scripture and its claim of infallibility, are those that refuse to venture
beyond their interior castle walls of protection and remain in prejudice. Prejudices are most difficult to eradicate
from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education and the sun of heightened perception
outside of creeds and dogma; but remain in ignorance of belief systems and grow there, firm as weeds along rocks.
It is only with the courage and willingness to venture beyond the walls of protection that one can transcend narrow
minded beliefs in virgin birth stories, the walking on water and the idea that God is a person living in the sky
and the Devil is a person who brings people down. It is only with the courage to face oneself and perceive a higher
consciousness beyond myth and certainty to that of the unknown mind, or rather the emptiness of no-mind or void,
the subconscious and the idea of a collective unconscious that may or may not be objective reality that one can
find his or her self and the divine.
Using Beauty to Inconspicuously Confine
Many cults, new age movements, philosophical groups, and of course, most religious organizations,
are those who rely on fundamental thinking. In an attempt to appeal others to their cause and belief systems, they
will use the beauty of mysticism, with the ambiguous and open vulnerability, to appear as just, impartial, honest
and reasonable in human development. Subsequently, they subtly, slyly and inconspicuously lure in idealism constrained
of all intuitive awareness into linguistic rationalization, mapping out realities into incognizant vision of narrow
logic, the ugliness of fundamentalism, embracing the safety zones of certainty and one-sided dogma, labeling all
such as objective ""truth.""
After such certainties and one-sided belief systems are built, a complete removal of all emptiness and subjective
relativity are trashed into oblivion in the neurotic prison walls of intellective refuge, the internal walls of
artificial barriers and false protection.
 It
is almost humorous to see such groups as the Watchtower Society quoting Nietzsche in some of their publications.
If Nietzsche were alive he would most assuredly puke all over the idea of such utter masking and misconstrution,
bending and twisting his words and chaotic passions into short, rapid, narrow thinking of a theological pretzel.
One can look at other groups and religious organizations who will act as agents of insight for world intellectuals
and philosophers, when underneath it all, they are a closed book, blind to all conceptual and imaginative perception
that lies outside of their limited partisan certainty of jaundiced and tendentious teachings.
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"They say the best men are molded out of faults,
And for the most, become much more the better
for being a little bad." - William Shakespeare
(Or in this story, a little stupid, but now the better,
"of course." - Smile)
The positive result of former fundamentalism and Cult involvement: The Ability
to differentiate between religion and psychology, the very bedrock behind it. For this I am grateful.
This is not a story for self pity, nor to relive old wounds.
I take full responsibility for my naive discernment, lack of awareness, passive actions and allowance for any outcome
that has occurred. I forgive all parties involved and wish them no harm, only justice, fairness and compassion
in their treatment of others.
This story is written for, is purely for both personal therapeutic means and for the accessibility of other Watchtower
Society adherents, such as those who are in any condition: active, inactive, contemplating leaving, living in Bethel
as stupefied youths in honor of one's parents and family inculcation, or simply out of sheer youthful ignorance,
and so forth. For any other persons, cult escapism stories bear very little relativity of any interest.
Osho, from, The Book of Secrets;
"Just a few days before I was reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. This is a rare book. It is really
the first book in world literature in which someone bares himself, totally naked. Whatsoever sins he has committed,
whatsoever immorality, he opens himself up totally naked. But if you read the Confessions of Rousseau you are bound
to feel that he is enjoying it; he feels very much elated. Talking about his sins, talking about his immoralities,
he feels elated. it seems as if he is enjoying it with much relish. In the beginning, in the introduction, Rousseau
says, "when the last day of judgment will come, I will say to God, to the Almighty, 'You need not bother with
about me. Read this book and you will know everything."
No one before him has ever confessed so truthfully. And at the end of the book he says, 'Almighty God, eternal
God, fulfill my only desire. I have confessed everything; now let a big crowd gather to listen to my confessions.'
So it is rightly suspected that he may have confessed some sins also which he has not committed. He feels so elated
and he is enjoying the whole thing. He has become identified. And there is only one sin which he has not admitted
to - the sin of being identified. With whatsoever sin he has committed or not committed he is identified, and that
is the only sin for those who know deeply how the human mind functions.
When for the first time he read his Confessions amongst a small group of intellectuals,
he was thinking that something earthshaking would happen, because he was the first man to confess so truthfully,
as he said. The intellectuals listened, and they became more and more bored. Rousseau felt very uneasy because
he was thinking something miraculous was going to happen. When he ended, they all felt relieved, but no one said
anything. There was complete silence for a few moments. Rousseau's heart was shattered. he was thinking that he
had created a very revolutionary thing, earthshaking, historical, and there was simply silence. Everyone was just
thinking about how to get away from there.
Who is interested in your sins (stupidity) except yourself? No one is interested in your virtues, no one is interested
in your sins. Man is such that he becomes elated, he becomes strengthened in his ego, by this virtues and by his
sins also. After writing Confessions, Rousseau began to think himself a sage, a saint, because he had confessed.
But the basic sin remained. The basic sin is being identified with happenings in time. Whatsoever happens in time
is dreamlike, and unless you get unattached from it, not identified with it, you will never know what bliss is.
Identification is misery; nonidentification is bliss."
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