Stephen Fry neatly articulated how he felt about god in the local interview with Gay Byrne recently, inspiring supportive comments on Facebook. You can check it out on the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo
Stephen cites the example of a the worm in the child's eye, burrowing from the inside out, as an insight into god's loving creation. Darwin was equally abhorred, rejecting the notion of a beneficent god, when he referred to the ichneumon parasite wasp that lays its eggs in the living body of a caterpillar. A hundred and twenty years later, Richard Dawkins ups the ante and tells us about the Sacculina parasite that begins its rampage by devouring the host-crab's testicles. Why? To fatten it up. It leaves the vital organs to the end; after all, it wouldn't do to spoil tomorrow's meal.
When I left school(ing) and started out on the thorny path of unlearning in my life, the first thing to go was the god, not only the 'sadist' god as described above, but the primitive judge at the pearly gates who meted out reward and punishment. As Stephen himself intimated in his interview, as long as anybody or anything was to be punished, there was no way I could even conceive of a reward.
Having thrown out the baby with the bathwater, it took me many years to realize that the baby I had thrown out - i.e. what I had been told was the Source - was not, in fact, the simplistic, dualistic god of my conditioning but
me, myself, and not even that, not even me, because there is no
me, no
you, just this single, mind-boggling stream of creativity and unimaginable beauty of which 'I' and 'you' are a part, like ripples in an ocean. Most of us imagine that we are 'me', individuals, separate from the ocean.
'Many of us know that we are but a drop in the ocean but few of us know that we are the ocean in the drop' (Rumi).
There's more, however. It is soooo hard to live in a world where you have deleted the god of your conditioning and settled for your own version of reality out there as being the be all and end all (the 'superstition of materialism'), rather than continue on the quest for the Source. Source? The meaning of life? Nah. Let's forget about that for the moment. (It's actually unimportant.) After all, our priority in life is how to be joyful and live in peace with ourselves, with others and with all other species on this planet. (Another priority would be not to fear death - or indeed, not to fear anything at all.)
When you settle for the 'superstition of materialism', certain nagging questions always remain unanswered (and we're ignoring the meaning of life now because it's not important): what, exactly, is life? What is consciousness? Why are qualia so beautiful and yet impossible for scientists to explain? Qualia are qualities of life we describe as beauty, love, compassion, inspiration, the creative impulse, touch, the scent of a rose, the lightness of being when we experience joy, taste, the coherence of the universe we see, the breathtaking splendour and process of nature...and so on. There is actually no reason, by the way, why our Earth experience cannot be like living in a paradise. But that's another day's discussion! The point is, with a slight shift in perspective, what seemed to us like hell can be heaven itself. When you settle for the superstition of materialism, you become the plaything of chance and the ravages of time. As I put it in my book,
Be In Me: You can be a leaf in the wind or the leaf and the wind; it's your call.
There is a body of knowledge which has been available to us long before all these loud, divisive and violent religions came into being. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century,the Sanskrit word
maya, for example, could only have been understood by believers or mystical types, and for them it was virtually impossible to communicate what it meant. If you'd asked them, they might have just smiled and suggested you meditate, implying that to know the taste of chocolate, you have to taste it yourself. It's just impossible to describe or explain.
Happily, there isn't a single physicist living in the world today who will deny the truth of
maya. If you're patient enough, you'll be able to get a handle on the rationale given to you, based on quantum physics. You will find that it doesn't necessarily mean that life is an illusion, as some people might interpret
maya to be; the tree at my window only exists as a tree because I (or my neighbour or the cat or the bird ) decode it to be such with a brain and a species-specific biological makeup. Music doesn't exist until I decode it with my hearing. Look at your friend: by the time you see (decode) her, i.e. in the 'photograph' in your brain, she is already in the past. The whole universe exists within me. Hence the Sanskrit,
Ahum Brahmasmi, I am the universe. So, just to help us get this straight: reality out there is just a projection of and from ourselves. It simply makes it easier to get through this dense existence that way. (And that's why we need our ego, by the way; a wonderful servant, but a terrible master!)
So anyway, it's like a film on a screen. That's what changing the world from the inside means; you don't go up to the screen, you go back (or in) to the projector.
Gaze into a mirror. You are not your reflection; but your reflection is most certainly you.
My understanding is that we are here in our capacity as people, or cats, or birds, or even stones or water as part of the single process of spiritual deepening and creativity.
But wait: do I really understand that? Tiny little 3D 'me' ? Do I understand what I've just said?
No. I don't. Not at all. I've no idea why we need to 'spiritually expand'. I'll say this much, though: that taster I got from the spiritual supermarket -and which leads me to things like this blog today - that little square of chocolate is...well... it's out of this world!
Speaking of this world, apparently the Earth experience is much sought after between lives because it's so slow and so dense - although I think that may sound a bit too flaky right now!
So what about the worm in the child's eye? What about the caterpillar and the crab?
OK. So, first things first. God is gone. Hurray. We've got rid of god. (Thank god for that!)
But aren't we just trying to fill the gap here? Replace god with something else? After all, this blog is still ranting on about some kind of meaning, even though it doesn't actually use the word, as such. Could this blog be a surreptitious attempt to 'justify' the worm, the wasp and Sacculina?
When one sees the Earth experience as
maya and when one realizes that you yourself are (or will be/has been) the child or, indeed the worm, undergoing 'this strange eventful history' in all its manifestations, to experience all that is imaginable, to accept this, and then to return to Source with all its thrills and spills, between lives, and proceed from there to another manifestation of experience, Stephen's or Darwin's or Dawkin's interpretation of the way things are can be seen as uniquely, but also simplistically, human. My heroes on this planet are all those people who have come in with all kinds of disabilities and huge challenges ahead of them to experience and deepen their spiritual expansion - and of course, by 'their' I mean
all spiritual expansion.
People who have had a Near Death Experience (NDE) invariably report back about an overwhelming embrace of love they experience when 'crossing over'. (Most doctors, of course, prefer to believe that it's the body's response to trauma, etc.) They can't quite explain what it is or how to describe it. That much-abused word 'love' is invariably used to describe it. Because there's only one word for it in English, we generally tend to include sentiment when we describe love. Let's look at the word for a moment:
The Greeks had at least four different words for love.
Agape, for example, describes the kind of love felt by the people who have had NDE's. I have taken the liberty to coin a new word in English (typographically, at least) for the Greek agape:
lOve (the O is in higher case). While I'm at it, could I also take this opportunity to introduce my new word for death?
retUrn (the U is in higher case).
It can be used as a noun and a verb - even as an adjective in the case of an NDE!
Deepak Chopra uses the term 'unity consciousness' to describe lOve. The beauty of that is that it excludes the 'me' element in lOve or compassion, you know, you don't gloat or pat yourself on the back because you find yourself lOving or compassionate. It's a beautiful expression because it tells us that everything is lOve. When we are joyful, that's lOve. All the birds, everything in nature, jumping about, all the trees, everything organic and inorganic (but full of life - ask the physicists!), the stars, the universe, the universes (ask the cosmologists!) - all is lOve.
The love which is greater than the love of the child with the worm in her eye is the love of the child and the worm.
