Remainder

The occasional jitters continue...the wistful desire to believe and return to an innocence of the younger me, to its social world, its great hopes and ideals. Once again I reviewed the arguments, the reasons to believe and not believe.. The answer was the same, as far as it was in my own power to convince myself, I found that intellectually I cannot accept the biblical theism in which I was brought up. It is obviously impossible to lift myself by my own mental bootstraps to a position of intellectual belief. So why the emotional attachment?

Because naturalism alone does not satisfy. I am inescapably religious. No simple pure atheism can fulfill a longing within me for transcendence and the powerful intuition that there is some creative power and higher consciousness.

But what religiosity can possibly remain through the fires of extreme doubt?

Some 'remains' that I may never systematise into anything like a world view, but remain uncombustable jewels in the charred ashes of my religion.

• That the divine is the Ground of Being. The divine is not a being among beings but the source of being, and the ultimate concern. The experience of the Ground of Being is also the 'isness' of pure being. The Ground of Being is necessary being and prior to all beings, and eternally sustains all manifestation, but is not identical to it. All manifestation is the ever changing procession of creative will and creative power.
  

• That there is a Higher Consciousness. It is possible I think to experience a state of cosmic awareness of the most sublime intellectual and also spiritual peace and bliss. This Higher Consciousness involves the contemplation of pure ideas and the Eternal objects. It is also about love, and finding unity in plurality and plurality in unity, a true communion. I believe we have a 'higher self', by which I mean, an ideal state of consciousness, and an inner wisdom.
  

• The powers of nature are imagined as gods that we may relate to them, and in the ancient world, appease them. Gods are personifications and images of the powers that 'rule' existence. The Gods are also shaped by the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and they are parts of our selfhood speaking to our self hood. In psychological terms, but not as objective physical facts, the Gods are real. They are as 'real' as our own selves.
  

• We are exiled from our spiritual roots. We are cut off from the perfect. We fall short of the divine nature. The ego revolts against the communion of the all in all. We find ourselves in a mental hell created by our own desires and fears. True faith is an absolute dependence upon the Ground of Being yet this is a feeling of rooted-ness and not a surrender for the latter in practice only implies a smothering of our true goodness and ability to think for ourselves. Very soon the ego re-asserts itself if it is just quashed. Legalistic religion tries to do the latter - it is ultimately a failed attempted to control the ego self.