Retrieved from the basket, first published
February 2019 There is a moment most mornings when imagination is already alert but my thinker is just getting ready to stretch and yawn. The first thoughts of the day may escape censorship long enough to take shape. New ideas are not necessarily good, but what about old ideas? Old ideas are presently urging us on like bison stampeding toward a cliff. We are glancing back at the sacred totems of the herd a mere blink before they drive us to extinction. New ideas may be a way of avoiding the leap to oblivion. Let's give them a chance.
Labeling the sacred leaves the rest profane. For example, everybody knows that human life is sacred. According to Mother that made bacteria profane. She didn't know much about biology. Since Mum, we understand that humans and bacteria are part of a larger system within which competition and cooperation generate and sustain life. If human life is sacred, bacterial life cannot be profane since without bacteria there would be no human life. They count for as much as the tiny neurons in our sacred brains, for they were our great...great grandparents and remain distant cousins living with us and within us.
To stretch a fable, long ago, Adam was a bacterium that was engulfed by an archaeon host cell; call it Eve. Adam liked his food. Eve was good at shopping. Together they made a great couple. This Adam-Eve endosymbiotic partnership was the first eukaryotic cell. All higher life forms, all plants and animals, are eukaryote descendants.
I use the names Adam and Eve as a nod to the sixth day of creation in Genesis. As for the current story, the on-going, 14-billion-year story of emergence and evolution, the love scene in the eukaryote chapter remains a guess. According to one version, love lit up the world after a eukaryote was infected by a lysogenic virus. The virus found the eukaryote housekeeping too messy and volunteered to declutter. It gathered up all the genetic material in the cell and gave it a room of its own which we now call the nucleus. Then things got interesting.
You will be thinking that's too much profane detail for a Sunday morning. Things sacred, when examined in detail, begin to look profane. However, the fact that love may have begun as a viral infection a billion years ago does not make it less sacred. The universe is so densely connected across space and time that either nothing is sacred or everything is sacred.
Maybe everything is sacred. If so, what does this tell us about how we choose to live? We have imagined God with a human face, and we have prospered. Now we are the top predators, not the prey. We are the invasive species laying waste to land and sea. While we push back on death with new technology, other species are dying because the world is infected with a plague of us. We are the disease, not the helpless victims of disease.
Suppose we continue on as we are going, guided by our sacred humanistic totems. Suppose we thrive at the expense of the rest until it is all used up. When there are no grapes and no wheat and nobody left to ponder the sacred meaning of bread and wine, will God still have a human face? Hidden in plain sight are signs that God is more inclusive than we thought. Seeking this hidden sacred is an act of worship.
Hidden in Plain Sight: uncensored thoughts from unhurried mornings
The spiritual and material are not separate things but different ways of looking at the same thing.
We imagine our best selves, project that ideal onto the blank screen of the unknown, and call it God. Then we forget to ask what is behind the screen.
Beliefs are ideas we settle for when we are too busy, too confident, or too lazy
to continue seeking the truth.
The only infallible belief is “I don't know.”
Faith is trusting an idea that needs more work. Every idea needs more work.
God plays dice. People work at improving the odds.
God doesn't tinker with events in response to pleas, tears, bribes, flattery, sacrifice or obedience. Prayer changes the one who prays. The world is reliably arbitrary. Rain falls on everyone. Some of us will share an umbrella with a friend.
Not everything happens for a reason, but if we have reasons, we may make things happen.
The universe works and we have a say in what happens next.
God is in us with this...
It's that old demon "dualism" isn't it? We're always falling into that trap, it seems.
ReplyDeleteUnavoidable, even when we know it's there.
DeleteYes, I tend to demonize dualism because it is habitual. But to be rigorously nondual I have to admit that dualism has its place within the universe of mind. It is the default mode of rational thought, and rational thought is not bad; it's one of our best tools. After we have finished disassembling things to see how they work, we need to put them back together so they actually work. Even then we shouldn't take our cognitive processes too seriously, like Dr Frankenstein thinking he could make a man by stitching bits together. Cognition is often productive, and always incomplete. We are tempted to think we can put the biosphere back together by managing what we understand. What we don't understand is magnitudes more complex. We need to manage ourselves, and simply belong while the world manages itself.
ReplyDelete