After Unity

Part 1

The main theme of progressive Christian dialogue is Unity. Scientists are talking about the Unified Field too. It’s no coincidence that the last major scientific theory was “relativity”. It feels as though the wholeness we find ourselves swimming in is speaking to everyone. The season of realization has arrived. Like the falling leaves of autumn, this isn’t something we have to make happen. It’s happening to us, independent of our beliefs. In discussion groups who are hearing this call, the reality of oneness is almost universally accepted. This is our cue to stop preaching it and ask, “What’s next?”

For all those who are exchanging the old belief that God is a human-shaped spirit looking down on us, for the more accurate concept of a life force that energizes and binds all things together (thank you George Lucas), the image of Father God in his robes and halo is difficult to uproot. I believe the original idea for a personal God was to make the impersonal force more cozy and familiar so the “it” was turned into “he” and he was appointed our father. It backfired. This fantasy created separation and we adapted our language, hence our thinking, to accommodate the distance. We strove to find God, be closer to God, lead others to God and pray that God be with us. This advanced to separation between you and I and between earth and heaven. This fantasy has been rehearsed for a very long time. It’s ingrained in our neural net and is not going to just disappear. All we can do is be conscious of our thoughts so our words are, as much as possible framed in the awareness that all is One.

Once we created a world where spirit and flesh were separate from and even enemies of each other, we digressed to setting up our soldiers, blue against red, and waged war in every aspect of our life. Now, for the common human, most of his hours are spent in conflict rather than peace. Relationships with others tend to be a struggle. We battle with survival on a financial and intellectual level. Even life itself, rumored to be eternal, has become a fight against death. To undo the error we have to unlearn it. We have to return to the root and unearth it.

Much of my audience are or have been churchgoing folk. I myself have only been Catholic, Lutheran, evangelical, non-denominational, studied Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Existentialism and the Universal Faith of the Nonlabeled. It is to my fellow God-seekers that I offer my thoughts on liberation. First we have to unlearn separation, then go on to unity of thought and deed.

Are you willing to let go of what you deemed sacred in the past, or right now for that matter? Can you take all that was spoken and written to you by man in the name of God and ask: “Is it so?” Have you ever been chastised by an elder for questioning the infallibility of the Bible? Have you considered the possibility that some “truth” can be believed by everyone around you and still be wholly false? Are you ready for a new set of friends to go with your new perspective? Let’s start with this (those who are still here):

The Bible isn’t the Bible. It’s a bible. The Omnipresent One did not give truth to you and yours in the only legitimate collection of scriptures I refer to as the Western Bible. The All in all would not forsake three fourths of earth’s population as well as anyone from other places in the universe or other realms we know not of. Such pride is anti-spiritual. Neither the universe nor the spirit realm revolve around Christianity. The Western Bible, like the Koran, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao de Ching and many other scripts were written by man. They may still be inspired truths, but so is Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the Wizard of Oz, the Odyssey and a million other classics. Man has also selected the books from Genesis to Revelation and edited out other books. Nothing produced by man is infallible. Even if the text was absolute truth, our interpretation is usually pathetic anyway. We don’t know the truth, only our interpretation of it. If interpretation was simple would there be 150 denominations who use the same book?

The place to find absolute truth is the same place the author of the sacred text found it. It’s inside you. I believe all of it is inside us. Our temporal counterpart, the human, is a veil that obscures omniscience so that only passing shadows of truth can be seen. We walk the path on a quest to sort things out, but what we need to do is gather things together. In a vision I had in the 1970s while meditating, all the separate things of my world began to melt together and I saw the connection between diverse ideas. Then the connection dissolved and all things were just one thing in countless forms. That one thing was crystal clear to me. This experience does not come by thinking hard about it. It comes on it’s own when you stop thinking. The mind of man is part of the veil that shows us shadows of truth, but not as it really is.

Meditation is the ancient tool of choice to suspend the thinking process and melt into wholeness. While thought is suspended, so are the filters that break the universe up into fragments. Without being consciously aware of it, you are then immersed in all wisdom. You have left your shell and swam in the cosmic ocean. The ocean is at rest. There’s nothing to think about, nothing to do. You awaken to an eternal self that already is complete and changeless. The time spent in this state causes radical changes back in the feel world. Regular meditators glide through the daily routine watching events spontaneously fall into place without effort. Or at least that’s how I’ve heard it works. I don’t meditate well, or often. I’m not here to teach it or exhort you to adapt it. I use it as another image of how this spiritual universe operates.

“Take no thought.”