Friday, October 12, 2007

Godde doesn't exist yet

I had a radical and rather liberating thought this morning. There was no Fall, because there was never a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden to fall from. But there is an Arising. There was no Creator God or Divine Source, rather the universe and its inhabitants are becoming more conscious, more compassionate, more empathic, with the arising of the universal Mind (which proceeds from the unfolding of the Tao). As we interact socially with the Universe, we increase its consciousness. First we awakened gods and spirits of place, then gradually began to perceive the All and wonder at the glories of Nature and the Universe. (Evil occurs when we fail to empathise with others.) We are part of the Arising of the universal Mind, as we become more conscious and more empathic. We are all Future Buddhas. As we become more empathically connected to the All, when we die we contribute our consciousness to the All, and it is in this process of connection that universal Mind arises. Those who mystically identify the All as a Thou and not an It contribute to the process of expanding awareness and continuing the process of making everything more conscious. The process of individuation and self-development is part of the process of becoming aware of the uniqueness and preciousness of all life in its glorious diversity. The golden age is in the future, not in the past. The genius of Buddhism and Unitarianism is that they are focussed on a future golden age, not a mythical one in the past from which we fell. Bodhisattvas (such as Jesus and Kwan Yin) so identified with the All that their compassion / karuna / empathy accelerated the arising of the universal Mind, and they are still there in some sense, guiding humanity towards awakening. But the awakening will not be from the illusion of matter, but rather matter itself is becoming ever more conscious or ensouled - it is awakening. Only when the Mind of the Universe is fully conscious - when the kundalini of the Universe has arisen from the depths - only then will "Godde" fully exist.

See also: God as Manifestation of Mind

3 comments:

Yewtree said...

Further thoughts: I have always believed in reincarnation, but never been happy with the idea of God or Nirvana or Heaven as being outside the Universe. Since the Universe is infinite, there can be nothing outside it, except in the sense of being unmanifest and therefore non-existent. But space and consciousness are constantly manifesting in the form of bosons (consciousness particles) and other particles winking into existence.

Ali said...

Talk about synchronicity! Just last night I was on the phone with my father, and he said to me, "If God made all of Creation, then that making is the creation of God." Meaning God is still being made, because the world is still engaged in the process of becoming. I was so surprised when he said it (we were discussing whether the Catholic Church would excommunicate me for being Druid, even if it was because my study of Christ had led me to that form of spirituality)--firstly because he's a born-and-raised Catholic and I'd never heard the Church say such a thing, and secondly because just the night before I had emailed my best friend this quote from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

"Then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you really have lost God? Is it not rather, that you have never yet possessed him? For when should that have been? Do you believe that a child can hold him, him whom men bear only with effort and whose weight compresses the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not think rather that whoever had him could only be lost by him? [...]

"Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into times that are in process of becoming, and living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of great gestation? For do you not see how everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect, must not the lesser be before him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and overflow?--Must he not be the last, in order to encompass everything within himself, and what meaning would we have if he, whom we long for, had already been?

"As the bees bring in the honey, so do we fetch the sweetest out of everything and build Him. With the trivial even, with the insignificant (if it but happens out of love) we make a start, with work and with rest after it, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything we do alone, without supporters and participants, we begin him whom we shall not live to know, even as our forebears could not live to know us. And yet they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.

"Is there anything that can take from you the hope of thus someday being in him, the farthest, the ultimate?

"Celebrate, dear Mr. Kappus, in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very fear of life from you in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time where everything in you is working at him, as you have already once, in childhood, breathlessly worked at him. Be patient and without resentment and think that the least we can do is to make his becoming not more difficult for him than the earth makes it for the spring when it wants to come."


I found the quote by accident, as it follows directly after a quote that another friend of mine had sent me in connection to something completely different. But now that's three times the universe has hinted this same lesson to me, from three unexpected sources. Perhaps I should listen. ;)

In any case, thank you for your post. The sentiments you express are beautiful and, I think, very wise.

Yewtree said...

Thanks Ali, that is a truly amazing quote. Rilke was a genius. Your dad sounds like he is a true child of the universe, too.

Paul Tillich's ideas about the Divine being the ground of our being are quite interesting in relation to this, as well.