Quoted from Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death: 1984 has not occurred, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in many ways had. People come to love their oppression. Embrace the technologies which undo their capacity to think. Orwell feared banning books, Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because no one would ready them anymore. Orwell feared truth would be concealed, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in irrelevancy. <aside>I’m missing most of this, but you get the idea.</aside> In short, Orwell feared what we hate and fear will ruin us, but Huxley feared what we think we love will really ruin us.
Some people say the major heresy of the western church is silliness. The work of authentic religion is to teach humanity how to be travellers with mystery. Instead, we have taught people what to see rather than how to see. In western religion, we give people the conclusions. This prevents people from having the ability to critique their own lens. The higher level of consciousness is the only way to access the divine. When we are at the lower level, we pull the divine down to us - generally, into the dualistic, win/lose perspective. This is the level of consciousness that most people operate in.
Prayer has been understood at the functional level - getting God to do what you want. People started using words other than prayer to understand the higher level access to the divine - meditation (oh God, sounds too eastern), contemplation, etc. Doesn’t care what word we use, but he hopes to describe the higher level of seeing. Until religion moves to there, we won’t see very much, very far, but only mirror images of ourself. Won’t get out of egocentricity. One reason so many people are attracted to Buddhism is because it has refined the vocabulary to tell us that how we see is what we will see.
We need to teach our people how to see. Then they can be released into what to see. But that doesn’t matter, because once they know how to see, it will take care of itself. He would like to close down church programs for 3 years and just teach people prayer.
The normal way we see is the Egoic operating system. If we haven’t been taught how to look at the world contemplatively, we look at it calculatively. This operating system cannot get you there. The best it can do is produce liberals and conservatives. Both operating on the same OS.
The higher you move, the more comfortable you become with paradox and move beyond dualism. Think of all the dilemmas in life - if religion does not allow you to cope with the dualing items, then it is not real religion.
When the scriptures talk about Jesus praying for 40 days, he had to be standing in the middle of a different pair of eyes that didn’t involve the thinking mind. The judging mind is only a self-cancelling system - based on binary system of affirmation and denial. For some reason we think someone will make an affirmation or denial that will cause the other side to roll over. Do we see any evidence of this? After a while we think if we talk louder it will get our point across. This just solidifies the other side in their belief of your immaturity (which you are).
We need something beyond affirmation and denial. In the last Presidential debate, we were convinced that our candidate won. But then it was divided 50-50, because we only hear what we want to hear. We need to move into the contemplative way of thinking.
The calculative way is not evil or bad, but rather it is insufficient at seeing the spiritual. The finite cannot access the infinite. The logical mind cannot access paradox and mystery like the trinity. It is no mistake that the trinity is three - it breaks us out of the dualism.
The Egoic operating system is confrontational, which leads to anger in our conversations. We are thinking about our next arguments rather than resting in a different place. Jesus always comes from a different place - he doesn’t buy in when they’re trying to trap him. “I am convinced that Jesus was the first clear non-dual thinker in the West.” This is why the church in the west has not been prepared to understand his teachings.
He is here to give us new software which will make us much happier. Dr. Phil: “Some point in the course of your marriage you have to decide if you want to be right or if you want to be happy.” Most people want to be right. He’s not talking about taking away “nos” - opposing injustice, etc. But the “nos” have to come from a primary “yes.”
Did not put the conference together to train in leftist politics. They have something better - a third way. If religion doesn’t learn to teach a non dual way of thinking, then we are not an answer. We can see the love affair with death that religion can have. Heroic thinking is always egoic thinking.
Science is becoming religion’s very best friend - previously considered an enemy. Read a book about neutrinos. The book said the only reason the universe doesn’t self-destruct is any time a atom disintegrates, it releases a neutrino. We cannot measure it, it isn’t visible, it’s weightless, races through the universe in all directions, changes flavors, cannot be captured, but leaves traces of its passing. Sounds like the holy spirit. Neutrinos neither negative nor positive, weightless, and are only released when atoms are destabilized.
We want to maintain our ego structures. The ego maintains itself through constriction and differentiation. “I’m this, I’m not like you.” The neutrino is only released when it stops constricting and differentiating. The soul defines itself in a different way. It looks out there and say “My God, I’m just like you.” We’re all the same, naked under our clothes. This is why mysticism is so dangerous - their seeing is too universal. It’s not dualistic.
Lets go back to Jesus. The sun rises on the good and the bad, the rain falls the just or the unjust. There is no ability to be superior under this teaching. Paintings of Jesus incarnate hold two fingers up showing his dual nature - fully human, fully divine. We need to put together the fact that we are sons of God and sons of the flesh and they don’t cancel each other out. This is good news. To the rational, dualistic mind, it’s impossible. It took the church 3 centuries to get its mind around this.
You would hope that we would be the masters of non-knowing. But in the neo-conservatism of Catholicism and Protestantism insists on knowing, which confines us to the lower levels of thinking. Jesus is asked 183 questions, but only answers 3 directly. He hardly ever answers the questions - he changes the question, or reframes the question. They are always designed around mystery. “Don’t you end the reading of a parable with a level of dissatisfaction?”
Jesus leads us to the end of our own knowing. But it is a kind of knowing that cannot be proven. The contemplative mind is the non-need to prove anything. If you have a lot to prove, you won’t become contemplative. When you are contemplative, you don’t need to prove things. “It is what it is.” Most times you can’t get there in the first half of life. You must be defeated many times trying to fix things.
“When someone runs into the room saying, I know why you did that - they probably don’t.” What great religion gives you is a respect for mystery. Jesus’ word for living in that space is faith. The other great heresy is we took the biblical model of faith and made it into a whole bunch of certitudes, an insistence on clarity, knowledge, and light. The mystics are always teaching darkness, not light. It’s a different kind of knowing, where you don’t need to know. The tradition calls this wisdom.
The gift of knowledge is listed separately from wisdom. In this case, he’s using knowledge to subvert the idolatry of knowledge. There are two major paths of transformation - the path of prayer, and the more common path of suffering. Sometimes much more quickly. Major grief, loss, failure, humiliation, gets you there quicker. Death is the utter encounter with mystery, which doesn’t make sense to our mind.
In initiation rights, grief is the only thing that can help a male give up control. God initiates us on the life path itself where in the midst of the woods we encounter the dark wood, where nothing makes sense. This is where the new door opens, and you can get on with your real spiritual journey. “Everything up to that point is just foreplay.”
If religion doesn’t move to the second half of life questions, we won’t be able to influence politics. The life of contemplation or suffering is how we will be able to influence.
When most people don’t receive an answer, they close down. Slowly you stop hoping. If religion does not transform your pain, you will always necessarily transmit it. The wars of the world are the transmission of untransformed pain. The fact that we don’t treat people like the slave traders in the movie shows that we have already been transformed in many ways.
Trinity is an eternal giving between the three. If this is true, then any thought of violence, hatred, withholding by God is theologically impossible. God only gives.
If God is a punishing God, then most of the people in this room are more compassionate than him. We wouldn’t torture our enemies for all eternity. <aside>Apparently, he’s not a big fan of the concept of hell.</aside>
Most institutional religion is invested in stage 3 of 9 of consciousness - good versus bad. We have been given the gift of being able to undercut any theology of war. When you are at the higher levels, you can have sympathy with folks at the lower levels.
Find some kind of practive where we can let go of dualistic critique. For men, it’s competition, for women, it’s comparison. Is this relativism? No, because what religious experience is to encounter the absolute. Once you meet the great lover, then everything else is relativized. That’s what makes you patient. That’s what makes you humble. Anybody who knows, knows that they don’t know. If you’ve met God, you’re humble, and if you’re not humble, you haven’t met God.
What we’re really teaching in contemplation is how to live in an undefended way. We are highly defended creatures, with rationalizations surrounding us. When we can let go of those, only then communion and community can happen.
This will not lead you into a privitized individualistic Christiantiy, but exactly the opposite. Universal communion, universal empathy, which allows you to get out and for God to get in. If you get this you will know for yourself. Your politics will change, you economics will change, your sexism will change. These things will fall away.
Authentic religion is the most radical form of political correction there is.
