The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “Oneness”

03 Sep 2011

RS4: Challenging the Apophatic Path

A: In the last week of August I returned for a brief time to a Christian forum I used to post on. It didn’t take me long to remember why I left two years ago. Most of the recent contributors are people I’d known there before, with a couple of newer members who seemed to fit right in.

Theatre at Epidaurus, Greece, 4th C BCE ((c) JAT)

Theatre at Epidaurus, Greece, 4th C BCE. Photo credit JAT 2001.

Some of these people are now assistant moderators with hundreds of posts to their credit. They need a lot of moderators on this forum because they have strict codes of etiquette — which I don’t mind in principle. What I mind is that this diverse group of Christian Atheists and Christian Deists and Christian Buddhists and Process Christians are all required to be polite to each other, but nobody is required to be polite to God. Which you’d pretty much expect from a group of people who say they’re Progressive Christians, but really don’t seem interested in discussing theism and faith in the same breath. Many of these contributors are cruel — cruel to God in ways they’d never contemplate being cruel to their fellow human beings. Not in a public forum, anyway. I just couldn’t take it.

J: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In my day, we would have expected to see this group sitting on the edge of the marketplace and nodding sagely at the words of their Hellenistic wisdom teacher. They wouldn’t actually do anything to confront their own issues. They’d just talk and talk and talk. They would frequently impress themselves and each other with a particularly fine piece of philosophical poetry. But philosophical poetry is no substitute for faith.

A: The talk seems to go round and round in circles. As far as I can tell, the long-standing forum members — the ones I wrote with years ago — are still asking the same questions and answering them in the same vague ways. There’s been no movement, no forward-moving change or transformation or insight. It’s like they’re stuck in a hamster wheel.

J: Like the character in the beginning scenes of Groundhog Day.

A: Yeah. Just like that. They’re still angry, and they’re still in a state of denial about their anger.

J: Denial is the key word here. They deny to themselves that they’re angry — angry with others, and angry with God — and at a psychological level they’re repressing that anger behind “wisdom words.” Lots and lots of wisdom words like “peace” and “oneness” and “love.” A person in denial can make a highly effective smokescreen or “veil of mist” around the anger by throwing up constant jets of wisdom. But these are only words. Words without honest inner intent to back them up.

Words without matching intent don’t make the world a better place. You can tell other people how kind and inclusive you are — and they may even believe you — but if you spend a big part of your day throwing slings and arrows at God (as if God can’t hear you and has no feelings) then you’re probably not as kind and inclusive as you say you are.

A: The apostle Paul was very good at employing this strategy.

J: Yes. Except that Paul wasn’t really in a state of denial about his own motives. He knew what he was doing. He co-opted the language of the Hellenistic sages, but not their message. He had a different agenda, an agenda to devise a new theistic religion from whole cloth. Well, okay, not exactly whole cloth — more like a patchwork quilt. A “crazy quilt” stitched from a bit of this, a bit of that. This is what Pauline Christianity resembles.

A: One powerful insight popped in for me during my brief sojourn on the forum site. You guys helped me understand that the uniting theme for the long-time members of this site is apophasis — the path of trying to know God by unspeaking or unsaying all that is known about God, the path of dissolving the self to become one with the transcendent cloud of unknowing/knowing.

J: Yes. It’s a path that leads to tragedy. The world starts to shrink for these individuals. It gets smaller and smaller as they struggle to maintain the position that there is no position. They stop using big chunks of their own brains, a choice that creates serious consequences for their biological health and well-being. They become dependent on the power of words — words without intent or praxis. They become “people of the Word,” people who live behind a veil of self-deceit and denial. They start to “float” in a place where nothing is real and everything is relative. They stop believing that “right and wrong” exist. Needless to say, this can have tragic consequences.

A: You can’t fix something if you insist it ain’t broke.

J: My sentiments exactly.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, atheism, Church of today, faith, Mother and Father God, Oneness, Paul, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, The Word and tagged | Leave a Comment
20 Aug 2011

RS2: The Importance of Ethical Mysticism

A: The universe has a sense of humour. Two days ago, on Thursday morning, you and I decided this blog site would try to focus on the question of science and faith. Thursday afternoon I went into work, and there on the lunchroom table was a newspaper article by Tom Harpur entitled “Where science meets the Divine.” Interesting timing.

J: As I remember it, you weren’t too happy when you read Mr. Harpur’s article.

A: No. As readers of the Concinnate Christianity site will know, I’m not too fond of Harpur’s neo-Gnosticism. He and I don’t agree on much. He seems to be yearning for mystery, but when he’s presented with an actual mystery — one that confounds his belief system about God — he rejects it without first carefully examining it. At least that’s what he did with me, when I wrote to him in May and June of 2005, and he responded in writing that he didn’t accept my experience of mystical conversation (i.e. channelling). Hey, I understand people’s suspicion, and I support the idea that a mystic should have to prove he or she isn’t floridly psychotic, etc., etc. There’s no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific investigation. But for a spiritual writer and researcher to not take the time to ask a few thoughtful questions of a modern-day practising mystic . . . to my way of thinking that’s just sloppy and a waste of information that could turn out to be quite useful.

J: Your problem is that you told Mr. Harpur in the beginning you’re channelling me, and he doesn’t believe there ever was a me. So he wouldn’t find it useful to learn that he’s been incorrect about me.

A: After you’ve published a book like The Pagan Christ, it’s pretty hard to back down from the position that the historical Jesus never existed. So I can understand that from his point of view it would’ve been much more convenient if I’d never written to him.

J: There’s those Popperian black swans again. Showing up to bug the hell out of both theologians and scientists.

A: I find it interesting that in this week’s article Harpur wants to make the point that religion and science need each other and are both part of a cosmos that is an “infinitely vast, interconnected unity in which every aspect of every facet and particle is knit from all the others.” He’s certainly very poetic. But unless I’ve missed something about his academic training, he is not and never has been a scientist — that is, a person standing in a lab mixing solvents and solutes and running analytical tests on the products. He’s a philosopher, writer, theologian, and former professor. Which is great. Except he’s not a scientist, and he doesn’t think like a scientist, so he has to rely on what other people say about the intersection of science and the divine. He can’t decide for himself about the scientific merit of certain arguments because he doesn’t work with primary sources in science. He doesn’t read that particular language. Philosophy of science — which is Harpur’s area of interest here — isn’t the same as science itself. Plato was a philosopher of science. Aristotle was a philosopher of science. But these guys weren’t and aren’t scientists.

Harpur’s thesis about the unity of the cosmos sounds no different to me than Plato’s anogogic and apophatic mysticism from Phaedrus and Timaeus. For goodness sake, can’t we hear something new about the relationship between science and faith? Can’t we be honest about the fact that faith and religion have as little in common as science and religion? Do we have to live in the hamster wheel that Plato devised 2,400 years ago? Do we have to cling to the mystical teachings of Paul and the Gnostics? These people were barking up the wrong tree before. Why do we suddenly imagine that quantum physics is going to prove that Plato’s tree was the right tree after all?

J (chuckling): Don’t forget the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals would like those trees to be real, too.

Willow in the stream at UNESCO World Heritage site Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. Photo credit JAT 2025.

A: Harpur has an interesting quote. He says, “What is most striking about the complete revolution in physics that has taken place over the last century is that the old materialist philosophy of the past has been given the axe.” I find this ironic, since Pauline thought and Gnostic thought are both forms of Materialist philosophy, and Harpur is nothing if not a keen fan of Gnosticism.

J: Materialism still reigns in almost all spheres of human thought and human activity. Certainly most physicists would rather cut off both legs and both arms than admit to the audacious idea that non-locality exists as a verifiable force within the universe. They’re trying very hard these days to redefine non-locality and lessen the overall message it conveys.

A: What message is that?

J: The overall message of weirdness in the universe. Of instantaneous communication between consciousnesses. Of a very annoying measure of unpredictability in the way things work. The quest for a Grand Unified Theory is an example of scientists’ desperation to avoid the non-materialist implications of non-locality.

A: I’m not a physicist, and I’m not up to date on the mathematics of current quantum theory (not that there’s any agreement on current quantum theory), but I know one thing for sure: Einstein was wrong about non-locality. He was wrong to reject its existence. Every day my experiences as a mystic teach me that Einstein couldn’t have been more wrong.

J: Yes. Theologians who want to unite science and religion find a lot of support in Einstein’s theories. The problem is that Einstein was wrong about a number of things, so his theories are of limited use for a theologian who wants to talk about Divine Science. Flawed scientific doctrines are no more useful for helping people of faith than flawed theological doctrines. There has to be constant reexamination of both scientific and theological doctrines as people of faith move forward in the third millennium.

A: The operative word being “forward.” Not “backward,” as in looking to Plato for answers.

J: A strange thing sometimes happens to highly educated, highly intelligent physicists and theologians. For years they operate on the assumption — the absolute conviction — that the universe obeys strict Materialist laws of Cause and Effect. They shape all their research, all their “observations,” all their conclusions on this assumption. They’re certain of their rightness.

One day, they have what might be called an epiphany. They have a sudden awareness deep in the gut that maybe there is a God, that maybe there are more levels of connection in the universe than they once dreamed of. This insight is good. It means the biological brain has finally got the message the soul has been whispering for years. But they tend to stop right here, right at this point. They stop at the very beginning of the journey. They think the awareness of interconnection is the end of the journey. In fact, it’s the very first step. They haven’t begun to ask the questions about relationship and learning and growth and change. Let alone the questions about redemption and forgiveness and the mystery of divine love. They stop dead in their tracks at the idea of “Oneness.” Of unio mystica. Of unified field theory. They don’t continue along the Spiral Path to find out what it really means. They never learn that the universe only works — only holds together — precisely because it is NOT a Oneness. It is, instead, a relationship. A relationship of mutual respect. A relationship where boundaries are everything, because without boundaries there can be no individual consciousnesses, no individual souls, no individual children of God, and no God.

A: Without clear boundaries there can be no God?

J: God isn’t a force field. God is two people. Two actual consciousnesses. Very big and very old compared to us, their children, but still people. They have bodies (just as we have bodies). They have minds (just as we have minds). They have talents (just as we have talents). And they have a heart — a big, mysterious, blended place of shared love and learning and tears and laughter that we call the heart. It’s God’s choice to create the sacred shared place of the heart that allows all souls to exist as separate but interconnected children of God. If you try to speak of God as Divine Mind while ignoring the other aspects of God — body and talent and heart — you’re not really speaking about God. You’re speaking about human narcissism, the kind of narcissism that imagines logic and reason and the Materialist laws of Cause of Effect form the core essence of the cosmos. These thinkers never speak about the chaotic and unpredictable nature of divine love. Thus, they never speak of miracles. In their view, miracles are impossible. Miracles can’t exist.

A: Yet miracles happen all the time.

J: Miracles take place because God and God’s angels choose for them to take place. This is where non-locality comes in. This is where classical physics goes out the window. It’s all very messy. It’s too messy for people who’ve chosen to be Non-Whole Brain Thinkers. There’s too much emotion involved. Too much trust. And too great a sense of personal responsibility.

A: A Non-Whole Brain thinker would rather try to “escape” into unio mystica than deal with difficult emotions such as love and trust.

J: And the sacred religious texts Mr. Harpur is so keen to preserve make it very easy for people to try to escape.

A: In his recent article, Harpur says, “Sacred books on the other hand deal with the spiritual and psychological verities behind and beneath the human search for meaning and purpose. They speak a different language, one of myth, parable, poetry and symbolism because life’s deepest core can only be explored that way [emphasis added].”

I disagree vehemently. Myth, poetry, and symbolism are the languages of religion and traditional mysticism, and even more frequently they’re the languages of successful psychopaths and political ideologues and purveyors of the HDM Myths. How can God’s ongoing communications with us be clearly identified, remembered, understood, and acted upon if symbols and myths are given more credence than identifiable scientific facts? Seems to me that Harpur’s promoting a foundation of moral quicksand.

J: He is.

A: I don’t think that’s very ethical.

J: It’s not. But anogogic and apophatic mysticisms have never been about ethics. They’ve always been about “escape” — escape from the hard work of healing and transforming the self. The hard work of learning to trust God.

A: Trust. You mean trust without the theatrics and wailing and chest-beating and false humility and self-pity and chosenness of orthodox Western Christianity.

J: I think you’ve just described Paul’s themes of salvation and escape quite nicely.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", Cause & Effect, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, historical Jesus, miracles, Mother and Father God, mysticism, Oneness, Paul, Plato, quantum theory, Realspiritik, science & faith, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Aug 2011

JR62: Seventh & Final Step: Remove the Thorn in Jesus’ Flesh (That Would Be Paul)

A: We’ve talked a lot on this site and on the Concinnate Christianity blog about the differences between your teachings and Paul’s teachings. Many readers will say there’s not much evidence in the Bible for the differences you and I claim. What would you say to Progressive Christians who want to “have their Jesus and keep their Paul, too,” who want to make you, Jesus, more credible, without actually giving up any of their cherished Pauline doctrines?

J: They make me look like a dweeb, to be honest. An ineffectual, wimpy, turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy.

A: Which you were not.

J: They say they want to save me from the fundamentalist Christian right and the secular humanist left, yet they’re forcing me to sit down at the Tea Party table with Paul, which is the last place I want to be. I’m a middle of the road social democrat, and I believe with all my heart and soul that a society can’t function in a balanced way unless rights and responsibilities are given equal weight in all spheres of life. Paul was a man who taught about rights, rights, rights and not nearly enough about responsibilities. He and I had very different values.

A: Paul talks about punishments.

J: Yes. Paul talks about divine punishment and divine testing. He talks about his freedom — his right — to speak with divine authority. He talks about the need for self-discipline. He talks about divine rewards. But, you know, when you look carefully at what he’s written, he doesn’t speak to the soul of his listeners. He doesn’t challenge them to see each of their neighbours as a separate person worthy of respect. Instead he does the opposite: he encourages them to see themselves as non-distinct members of a vast “body of Christ.” Paul, instead of insisting that people build solid interpersonal boundaries — which are the foundation of safety and respect and mutuality between individuals — tells people to dissolve those boundaries. It sounds good on paper, but “Oneness” does not work in reality. If you encourage the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, you’ll see to your horror that the psychopaths in your midst will jump in and seize that “Oneness” for themselves. They won’t hesitate to use it to their advantage.

A: Because they have no conscience.

J: Humans (as well as angels on the Other Side) are all part of One Family. But this isn’t the same as saying humans are all “One.” As anyone who comes from a big family knows, respect for boundaries is the grease that keeps you from killing each other.

A: It can be tricky to manoeuvre all the boundary issues in a big family.

J: Yes. You need all the brain power you can muster to stay on top of the different needs of different family members.

A: Spoken like a man who came from a big family.

J: When you’re the youngest son in a family with three older brothers and two sisters (one older, one younger), you catch on fast to the idea of watching and learning and listening to the family dynamics so you don’t get your butt kicked all the time.

A: It’s real life, that’s for sure.

J: That’s the thing. It’s real life. It’s not about going off into the desert to live as a religious hermit. It’s not about living inside walled compounds or hilltop fortresses. It’s about living with your neighbours and learning to get along with them through communication and compromise and empathy. It’s not fancy, but it works.

A: The Gospel of Mark makes this message very clear.

“Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled” (Mark 6:39-42). Photo of hills in the Cotswolds, UK. Photo Credit JAT 2023.

J: Christians have long assumed that the author of Luke truly believed in my teachings and was trying his best to convey them in a fresh way to a new generation of believers. Luke, of course, had no interest in my teachings, and was instead trying to promote Paul’s package of religio-political doctrines. This is seen most obviously in the so-called Great Omission — the complete absence in Luke of Mark’s most important theological statement. Luke cut and pasted many parts of Mark’s gospel, and thereby changed their meaning. But he didn’t even try to include the dangerous theology found in Mark 6:47- 8:27a. He ignored it and hoped it would go away.

A: Why? Why did he want it to go away?

J: Mark’s gospel, as we’ve been discussing, was a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul wrote first (years before Mark), and in the middle of his letter he included 3 linked chapters on freedom and conscience, authority and obedience, sin and salvation, as these themes revolve around food — idol meat and, more importantly, the blood and bread of Christ (1 Cor 8:1-11:1). We can call this set-piece the “Idol Meat Discourse.” In this set-piece, Paul makes a number of claims about God that Mark, following my example, found particularly galling. Mark countered these claims by writing his own 3-chapter set-piece (Mark 6:30-8:26). I’m going to call Mark’s set-piece “the Parable of the Idol Bread.” This was Mark’s head-on attack against Paul’s Eucharist.

A: Mark didn’t support the sacrament of the Last Supper?

J: Mark knew that Paul’s speech about sharing in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10:14-22) was a thinly veiled Essene ritual, the occult Messianic Banquet that had grown out of earlier, more honest offerings of thanks to God. I rejected the notion of the Messianic Banquet, with its invocation of hierarchy and status addiction. Mark rejected it, too.

A: Right before Mark launches into his Parable of the Idol Bread, he includes an allegorical tale about a banquet held by Herod and the subsequent beheading of John the Baptist (which we know didn’t actually happen).

J: Yes. Mark uses a lot of sophisticated allegory in his gospel. (Plus I think the less loving aspect of him wanted to see John’s head end up on a platter, which is where he thought it belonged.) Mark leads up to his set-piece — which, of course, is an anti-Messianic-banquet — by tipping off the reader to an upcoming inversion of religious expectations. He’s telling them not to expect Paul’s easy promises and glib words about “Oneness.” He’s telling them to prepare themselves for an alternate version of Jesus’ teachings about relationship with God.

A: What was that alternate version?

J: It was a radical vision of equality before God, of inclusiveness and non-Chosenness. It was a vision of faith without status addiction. Of faith and courage in numbers. Of freedom from the slavery of the Law. The love of a mother for her children (including our Divine Mother’s love for her children!). A relationship with God founded on trust rather than fear. The healing miracles that take place in the presence of love rather than piety. The ability of people to change and let go of their hard-heartedness (ears and eyes being opened). The Garden of Eden that is all around, wherever you look, if you’re willing to see and hear the truth for yourself. The failure of both the Pharisees and the Herodians to feed the starving spiritual hearts of the people. The personal responsibility that individuals bear for the evil things they choose to do. The importance of not idolizing the words of one man. (There’s no lengthy “Sermon on the Mount” in Mark as in Matthew; in fact, there’s no sermon at all, let alone a set of laws carved on stone tablets!)

A: That’s a lot to pack into three short chapters.

J: This is why I refer to Mark’s set-piece as a parable. As with any properly written parable, the message isn’t immediately obvious. You have to use all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength in order to suss out the meaning.

A: I noticed when I was doing my research papers for a New Testament exegesis course that the setting of Mark’s Parable of the Idol Bread is crucial. Not one but two major teaching events with miraculous endings take place out in the middle of nowhere near the Sea of Galilee. There’s no proximity to important sacred sites such as Jerusalem or Jericho or the Dead Sea or the River Jordan. There’s no Greco-Roman temple or Jerusalem Temple. There’s no holy mountain. There’s no sacred stone. There’s no palace or patron’s villa. But there’s a lot of green grass, with enough room for everybody to recline in groups (as in a Roman banquet) and share the event together.

In the middle section, in Chapter 7, Mark shows you leaving Galilee to carry out more healing miracles, but these healings take place in Gentile areas — everywhere but the sacred site of David’s city. You can tell Mark doesn’t think too much of Jerusalem’s elite.

J: Mark had a scathing sense of humour, much like Jon Stewart’s. When he wrote his gospel, he was thinking of it as a parable and a play at the same time. He wanted the actions of the actors to speak to the intent of the teachings.

A: Actions speak more loudly than words.

J: Yes. He wanted people to picture the actions, the geographical movements, that changed constantly in his story but never went close to Jerusalem in the first act of his two-act play. His Jewish audience would have understood the significance of this.

A: Tell me about the Idol Bread.

J: The meaning of the bread in Mark’s parable makes more sense if you look at the Greek. In Mark’s parable, and again at the scene of the so-called Last Supper in Mark 14, the bread in question is leavened bread — artos in the Greek — not unleavened bread, which is an entirely different word in Greek (azymos). Mark shows me constantly messing with the bread and breaking all the Jewish laws around shewbread and Shavuot bread and Passover bread. At the teaching events beside the Sea of Galilee, the bread is given to the people rather than being received from the people in ritual sacrifice. It’s torn into big hunks. It’s handed out to everyone regardless of gender or rank or clan or purity. It’s handed out with a blessing on a day that isn’t even a holy day. Nobody washes their hands first. Everyone receives a full portion of humble food. Everyone eats together.

A: If the fish in this parable are a metaphor for courage and strength (see Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength) then what does the bread represent?

J: Artos — which is very similar to the Greek pronoun autos, which means “self” and, with certain prepositions, “at the same time; together” — is a metaphor for the equality of all people before God. Everybody needs their daily bread regardless of status or bloodline or rank. It’s about as status-free a symbol as you can get.

A: Something tells me that got lost in the Pauline translation.

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Posted in Church of today, Essenes, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Mother God, Oneness, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Nov 2010

CC40: How My Experience as a Chemist Has Influenced My Mysticism

Theology at its best is a language — a language that helps individuals understand their relationship with God while not contradicting or denying one of God’s other important languages: science.

It’s important for God’s children to have access to the language of uplifting theology. This is because not all of God’s children can easily understand or relate to the language of science. This is okay with God. In fact, it’s more than okay. God’s children (one of whom would be you) are not all the same. God’s children are all different from each other, although we share some traits in common, such as the ability to love and forgive.

Your soul wasn’t created by God the Mother and God the Father with a batch of dirt and a cookie cutter (Genesis 2:7 notwithstanding). In all of Creation (and it’s a pretty darned big Creation!), there’s no other soul quite like you. There’s no other soul who thinks exactly the way you think, no other soul who expresses love exactly the way you express love. You’re one of a kind.

This means you “get” some languages better than you get other languages.

Maybe you totally get music, which means you feel the rhythms and harmonies deep in your bones without anyone ever really teaching you how to do it. You just “get” it so deeply that your whole life is transformed by it, each and every day.

Maybe you totally get poetry. That’s a language, too. It’s not the same as prose. Somehow it triggers different feelings and different responses in you than prose. You read a few verses of exquisite poetry and BAM — powerful insights descend upon your soul and you’re forever changed.

Now don’t laugh, but I react to chemistry the way many people react to music and poetry. It’s not that I don’t like music or poetry, it’s just that, well, I really, really “get” the language of chemistry.

“Tremble, O Earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water” (Psalm 114: 7-8). Photo credit JAT 2017.

If you’ve studied a lot of chemistry, you know that chemists don’t think in quite the same way as physicists, or biologists, or computer scientists, or mathematicians. Physicists get excited about field theory. Biologists get excited about energy transfer in living organisms and ecosystems. Computer scientists can think in binary code (an amazing skill!). And mathematicians live and breathe for the wonder of tautologies (showing how two sides of an equation are actually equal).

But chemists spend most of their time dealing with bonding. Molecular bonding. They want to know what holds atoms together into molecules. They want to understand the relationships between the constituent parts of both atoms and molecules. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to coax one little ion or electron from one spot to a different spot so it can do a different job. A chemist’s stock in trade is the probability wave functions of electrons, those tiny little negatively charged particles that are so much smaller than an atomic “nucleus” and are so damned fussy about where they’re willing to be located at any one time. Yet where would our material world be without them?

Even though physicists now estimate that “ordinary matter” (that is, atoms and molecules) accounts for no more than 4-5% of all known energy in the known universe (they call this ordinary matter “baryonic matter”), baryonic matter has a lot to tell us about the nature of God. And this baryonic matter is what chemists really “get.”

A number of physicists these days are pulling out all the stops to try to find a unified theory of nature. (Hence the construction of the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider). But, you know, for my part, as a chemist and as a mystic, I’m wary of anyone in any field who starts to look for a simple unified theory about anything. This smacks of monism, the longstanding religious belief that when you get to the very heart of Creation, there exists only a singular, undifferentiated, divine “oneness.” Plato’s middle writings, such as Phaedrus (247c), speak of this colourless, shapeless, all-inclusive oneness, and many neo-Platonic Christian mystics have followed suit in the monism department.

Needless to say, I’m not a monistic or apophatic mystic.

Me, I think it’s okay for us to listen to what God is saying to us through the language of chemistry. Even though baryonic matter (including the ordinary atoms and molecules that make up Planet Earth’s waters, lands, and atmosphere, plus all life on Planet Earth) represents only 4-5% of the universe’s energy, it’s the only part of Creation we can directly access as human beings, and it’s the only part of Creation that God seems to think we need while we’re living here as angels-in-temporary-human-form, so I figure it’s worth paying attention to!

And as I said above, chemistry is all about bonding.

It’s all about the relationship and balance between the tiny negatively charged particles we call electrons and the much larger positively charged particles we call protons. It’s all about the relationship and balance between certain probability wave functions and certain forces such as gravity, etc.. (I’m simplifying here, and am purposely skipping the whole subatomic particle thing, as it would needlessly complicate the discussion at this point).

When you think about a molecule such as sodium chloride (table salt), you probably think about it as salt. Me, I think of God the Father’s negatively charged electrons dancing a beautiful electron orbital dance of harmony, balance, intentional cooperation, and divine love with God the Mother to help her unite her much larger sodium ions with her equally large chloride ions in a very specific and useful scientific way that helps them together, as God, create the necessary biological building blocks used by the many forms of individual life that have lived here at one time or another over the past 3.85 billions years or so.

There you have it — my one-sentence rebuke of Creationism.

In my opinion, Creationism is an example of the language of theology at its worst.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, Creationism, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, monism, Mother and Father God, Mother God, My Spiral Path, Oneness, Plato, Soul and tagged | Leave a Comment
15 Oct 2010

CC38: An Ancient Mystery Revealed

I’m old enough to remember the 1984 Wendy’s commercial that featured the three little old ladies and the stick-in-your-head catch phrase, “Where’s the beef?” Sure, the commercial was meant to sell Wendy’s bigger hamburger patties. But the catch phrase went deeper than that. It quickly became a cultural metaphor for something that was “all talk, no action.” Something without real substance.

Many spiritual teachers are interested in selling you books about how to “raise your consciousness” and “seek wisdom” and be “one with all Creation.” These books are full of platitudes and cliches, and they remind me a lot of the big fluffy bun that was being parodied in the Wendy’s commercial. The bun looks impressive on the outside, but when you bite into it, you discover there’s precious little substance inside. There’s just the same old mystery teachings that have been taught by cult leaders for . . . oh . . . for at least five thousand years now.

We are all One. Blah, blah, blah. Your soul is a spark of the Divine. Blah, blah, blah. Your physical body and your physical mind are drenched in evil and must be transcended. Blah, blah, blah. Specially chosen spiritual leaders have consented to descend into this corrupt world to lead the forces of light against the forces of evil. Blah, blah, blah. You can help in this great battle. Blah, blah, blah. The time is at hand when human beings will rise to a new, never before seen level of consciousness and enlightenment. Blah, blah, blah. In order to reach this new level, you must surrender yourself, let go of yourself, live in the moment, let go of attachments, let go of illusion. Blah, blah, blah. Only then can you know the bliss, peace, and joy of oneness with the Divine.

At the beginning of Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling 1997 book The Power of Now (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997), he describes an episode of spiritual awakening that took place after a “dark night of the soul” when he was 29. For five months, he “lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss” (page 2). He then “spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy. But even the most beautiful experiences come and go.”

Really? They come and go? Because that hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been that if you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing on the Spiral Path, and if you ground your spiritual journey in reality instead of in ancient mystical gobbledygook, you can get up every morning and go to bed at night and live every moment of your ordinary, ho-hum day in a state of profound trust and companionship with God.

This makes every ho-hum day anything but ho-hum.

If you see what I’m getting at here.

This amphora, found in Etruria and dated 540-535 BCE, depicts Herakles killing the Nemean lion – the first of the twelve labours of Herakles. The spiritual journey shouldn’t make you feel as if you’re reinventing Herakles’ terrible struggles. (Amphora on display at Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.)

 Eckhart Tolle and his mystical predecessors are always talking about escape — escape from the body, escape from suffering, escape from illusion, escape from evil forces, and (in the most extreme form) escape from death. They’re missing the point. The Spiral Path has never been about escape. The Spiral Path has always been about forgiveness, healing, and redemption.*

If you want to feel deep peace and joy every day (and this is possible, believe it or not), your ongoing goal is to HEAL yourself, not escape yourself.

In order to heal yourself (and perhaps others, too), you need to understand at a conscious level what’s going on inside your biological body as you struggle to make sense of your spiritual journey. In order to do this, you need more than ancient myths to guide you. You need science.

There are no exceptions to this general statement. Every mystic in every faith tradition in every country of the world needs science. There is no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific exploration.

There is no science in The Power of Now. There’s a great deal of mystical speculation, but there’s no science. Put plain and simple, I don’t trust any spiritual teacher who’s afraid to look science in the eye.

There is no need to postulate, as Tolle does, the existence of a “negative energy field” (called an emotional “pain-body”) whose job it is to control your thoughts and your mind like some sort of “invisible entity” (page 29). This sounds little different than demon-possession as it was formerly understood. It’s an irresponsible and scientifically insupportable claim. It confuses and frightens people.

Furthermore, it relies entirely on the author’s own authority as mystic and prophet. It starts with Tolle’s personal assumptions about the interface between mind, body, soul, and brain. From there, he builds a pyramid of guesswork. My question in response to his thesis is . . . where’s the beef? Where’s the science combined with the heart? Don’t talk to me about a corrupting “pain-body.” Talk to me — scholar to scholar — about neurotransmitters and glial cells and underactive sections of the brain and seizure disorders and over-activation of the pain-pleasure circuitry (to barely scratch the surface of the neurophysiology that’s involved). I don’t mind if you use some analogies and even some mythical archetypes to explain brain chemistry to a lay audience, but if you yourself don’t understand your spiritual journey in scientific terms, then you’re not saying anything different than Plato said to a vulnerable audience 2,400 years ago. It’s pure myth. And it’s pure crap.

I’m sorry, but it’s just not true that human beings can somehow separate the spiritual journey or the spiritual brain from the everyday science of everyday life. You cannot find God by sitting on park benches for two long years. (You’ll find something on those park benches, but it won’t be enlightenment.) You can only find God in a lasting way by making lasting choices in your life — choices that will slowly heal your biological brain and your biological body, and allow you to live each day as an angel-in-human-form. Your spiritual task is not to become less yourself. It’s to become more yourself — more and more like the soul you really are.

This depends, of course, on a belief in the soul. If you don’t believe you were born with a soul — a pure, amazing, unique soul that always is and always will be a pure, amazing, unique soul — then you and I have no common ground for discussion. Everything I’ve learned from God the Mother and God the Father, and everything I’ve learned from the angel who once lived as Jesus, begins with the core integrity of the soul. Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the full integration of your immortal soul with your very mortal human body.

Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the balance of body, mind, soul, and heart. Around the balance (NOT the pyramidal, step-wise hierarchy) of Maslow’s physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, and self esteem needs. Around the balance of physical joy, mental joy, spiritual joy, and emotional joy. Around the balance of work, play, extroverted relationships, and introverted downtime. Around using the whole brain, not just parts of the brain.

Whole Brain Thinking is the only way to find the Spiral Path, understand the Spiral Path, and persevere on the Spiral Path.

There. That’s the Ancient Mystery in a nutshell: you have to use your whole brain — your whole central nervous system — in a consistently balanced, healthy, emotionally mature way. When you do, you can more easily hear God’s voice, because God’s voice is as balanced and emotionally mature as can be.

And guess what? You don’t have to take my word for it! You can research all the ways to have a happy, healthy, fully functioning brain, and you’ll come up with essentially the same ideas I’ve presented here!

Science and spirituality together on the same page. Now we’re cooking with gas.

* On the last text page of The Power of Now, Tolle reveals that “the whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary (page 193).” Needless to say, Tolle and I couldn’t disagree more.

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Posted in "Escape", balance as spiritual practice, brain-soul connection, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, healing, mysticism, Oneness, Plato, prophets, Soul, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
08 Jun 2010

CC18: "Oneness" — The Great Bait and Switch

There’s something particularly insidious about the idea that “We Are All One.”

Yeah, I know, I know . . . it sounds wonderfully spiritual and enlightened to say “we are all One.” It sounds, oh, so inclusive, so un-American, so gentle and loving and soothing and healing. It sounds like the very opposite of our society’s social isolation and lack of love. It sounds like something the soul would say, doesn’t it?

Droplets upon the waters (c) JAT 2015

These ripple patterns in a still lake were formed as single water droplets fell from the trees after a heavy rain. As souls, each of us affects the universe in the way these small water droplets bring wavelets to the lake. From a distance, it may look as if the waters of the lake are “all One.” But up close, each droplet affects the lake in unique ways. Christian mystics have too often looked at Creation from a distance and chosen to see it as “all One.” In fact, Creation is a marvel of diversity and uniqueness. It’s Divine Love that creates the background of calmness and beauty against which each soul — each droplet — can paint a small picture that says, “I’m here! I may be small, but I matter!” Together, countless small droplets flow and dance and weave together to create infinite wonders. Photo credit JAT 2015.

Millions of spiritual seekers think so. They’re out there trying to become “one” with God, “one” with Creation, “one” with each other. They’re trying with all their might to “let go.” They’ve been told by religious and spiritual teachers that they have to dissolve themselves and let go of their wants and needs in order to experience transcendence — a blissful sense of union with the oneness of all life, a sense that all boundaries have vanished, a sense that they’re finally free of all longing and suffering.

This, my friends, is not what mystical union feels like. This is what dissociation from your thoughts, feelings, and inner wisdom feels like. This is what the major mental illness called Atypical Dissociative Disorder feels like. Sometimes the dissociation is so extreme that the person can be said to exhibit psychopathy (also called sociopathy).

Many people will be furious with me for saying this. But it needs to be said. And it needs to be fully researched. There’s no excuse for the church — or anyone else, for that matter — to be teaching people to dissociate from their thoughts, feelings, and needs. This is reckless, dangerous, and abusive. It scars people’s central nervous systems, typically for life. It’s no different than driving a steel rod through their skulls, and turning them all into Phineas-Gage-lookalikes. (Phineas Gage was a 19th century worker who underwent a dramatic personality change after an industrial accident propelled a steel rod through his left cheek, into the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain, and out the top of his head.)

I am a practising mystic. I’m NOT a mystical wannabee who wants to be counted as a mystic but has never actually had a genuine mystical experience. Thomas Merton, famed 20th century Christian monk, contemplative, and writer on mysticism, died in his 50’s without ever having experienced a transformative mystical connection with God. Yet he wrote many books on the topic. I think he was a very sincere man, but I don’t think it was right for him to claim to be an expert on something he’d never figured out for himself.

Me, I don’t keep track of the many mystical experiences I’ve had in the past few years, because mystical experiences are now a normal part of my normal, everyday, Canadian life.

I live a normal Canadian life in most ways. I don’t live in a religious community, and I don’t live according to traditional Christian monastic rules. I have an apartment, a car, and a job. I take courses at the university. I get together with friends and family. I like to listen to pop music, and I love to watch TV (certain shows only, though).

Yet woven all around and within this daily life is a deep spiritual practice that yields a tremendous harvest of mystical connection with God. How have I managed to do this when dedicated, highly religious people like Thomas Merton have failed? I’ve managed to do this because I’ve discarded all spiritual teachings that insist “we are all One.”

We are not all One. To say that we should have empathy for other people is NOT the same as saying we are all One. Of course I believe we should have empathy for others. Of course I believe there’d be a whole lot less suffering in the world if more people had empathy for others. Of course I believe that to cultivate empathy is to walk the walk of a spiritual life.

But this isn’t what spiritual leaders mean when they say to you that “we’re all One.” They mean it literally — they mean there’s literally no real distinction, no real boundary, between you and your God. They mean that boundaries between you and other people are “illusion.” They try to use some of the recent findings from physics to “prove” that everything in the universe is really only a manifestation of one big blob of energy in the sky. (Yes, I’m being facetious).

When they say you’re One with God, they mean that if you try hard enough to shed all your humanness (like a snake shedding its old skin), you’ll be able to merge with that big blob of energy called Creator. In effect, you’ll become God, because you’ll be able to “remember” that your “inner spark” is God. Once you’ve achieved this wondrous state of perfection, you’ll no longer have to struggle with annoying human challenges such as forgiveness. You’ll be above illusory things such as forgiveness. What’s to forgive, after all, if the neighbour who harmed you is really just “you” in a different snake suit?

Isn’t it an interesting coincidence that when you fully embrace the idea that “we’re all One,” you don’t have to do any spiritual work anymore?

It’s a good life, being “One with the All.” You don’t have to struggle with messy feelings, because you’ve dissociated yourself from your healthy human emotions. You don’t have to feel guilt or shame about your choices, because all choices are illusory anyway. You can smile when other people are crying, because you’ve detached yourself from all that pain and grief stuff. You can go around pretending you understand what unconditional love is, because words are cheap when you’re disconnected from your own inner wisdom, disconnected from your own soul.

The true path of the soul — a path that has rarely been described in the history of Christian mysticism — is a path of finding yourself rather than losing yourself. It’s a path of finding out who you really are as the soul God made you to be. (Needless to say, everyone’s soul is amazingly awesome.) It’s a path of finding out what makes you a unique individual in a vast angelic family of other unique individuals (none of whom are better than you — they’re just different from you). It’s a path of learning how to deal with powerful, divine emotions such as love, gratitude, courage, devotion, and trust. It’s a path of honouring and respecting the differences between you and others (i.e. gender, race, age, talents, quirks, and “blind spots”), and at the same time rejoicing in what makes you the same (i.e. our innate ability to love, to learn, to change, to forgive). It’s a path of knowing who you are so you can know who other people are. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and other people. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and God.

Only then will you be able to enter into a mature and humble relationship with God the Mother and God the Father while you’re living your human life.

This is the path that Jesus has taught me.

I highly recommend it. 

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, boundary issues, Concinnate Christianity, dissociation, empathy, ethical mysticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, Oneness, psychopathy, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment

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