A Spiritual Sun - some meditations

Our physical sun, our nearest star, is of course the provider of the energy that makes life possible on earth. Since ancient times it has been considered, if not a god in itself, the physical correlate of the divine, which is the Spiritual Sun.

It appears necessary to imagine the divine as 'out there' while we know philosophically that we subsist in the divine as our ground of being; the divine is not 'out there' any more than it is 'in here'. The Ground of Being is immanent and transcendent. Immanent in that it is closer to us that our own heartbeat, transcendent in that it is not identical to any beings or beings, not even the sum of all beings.

The relationship between process and the divine source is analagous to 'waves' on the ocean of being. Waves come and go... a transient disturbance of the surface that does not disturb the depths below, yet is not apart from the depths. And if the ocean is the ground of being in this analogy, then at the surface being meets non being, their dialectic results in 'becoming' (or coming and ceasing to be)

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.

Is that it?

Is that it? Why did my Christian contemporaries show no interest in my loss of faith? Why indeed didn't I get any divine assistance or revelation...why was the doubt permanent?. The history of my slow 'de-conversion' is itself evidence of the lack of truth of Christianity. Or perhaps I am just a particularly bad sinner and apostate.

Agora

I have just watched the film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, a very powerful and moving film. The story is about the last 'pagan' philosopher-teacher Hyptia, a mathematician and astronomer, who lived in Alexandia at the end of the 4th Century AD. She is killed by a Christian mob, who have already destroyed centuries of ancient learning by despoiling the library of Alexandria. But her 'crime' is that she teaches people to question what they believe and know. Therefore she is confronted by the fanatical bishop Cyrill. The same man who much later became a saint and Doctor of the Catholic Church. Hyptia is presented in the film not so much as a pagan, as much as an early scientist and rationalist.
The film portrays (in an imaginative reconstruction of course) that Cyril uses the words of St Paul in the Epistle to Timothy that required a woman to be silent, and submissive and to not teach, in order to stir up the people and government against her. This part of the film disturbed me, because the command that a woman be 'silent' was inveighed years ago against my own father, a church elder, who wanted women to simply be able to pray openly within the Church. A minor version of St Cyril and Christian fanatics drove my father from his Christian fellowship.
Christian leaders have always abused power, for as many who have been gracious, others have been fanatical. This does not mean the core teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are wrong, or even that he was not the Messiah or 'Son' of God must be denied. But the film brought home the need to always questions even what is allegedly revealed or from God. Without reason, or more accurately, without questioning, we fall prey to all manner of ideological or religious fanaticism. Nothing should be beyond questioning or debate or criticism. Free speech is essential and faith must always be subject to review and reconsideration.
For many years I have been 'searching' for religious answers. I felt a failure because i never came to any solid conclusions, except about what I didn't believe in. Now I realise that if I question until my dying breath, this is far better than simply believing or even knowing (because 'knowing' is really just the state of believing that I know). Questioning means examining the evidence and always being open to new possibilities and argument. No belief, no practice should be beyond questioning. This is the only way we can live freely and peacefully.
The Christian Church, like most organised religion, has always been rotten at the core. And the greatest irony, that the words of its founder but loving enemies, mercy and justice have frequently been ignored or twisted or qualified by Christians themselves. Most Christians in the past and today, do Christianity as a source of comfort, social significance, for some purpose or meaning...but not it seems to simply love God and love one's neighbour. Somehow loving God is made into a reason to destroy one's neighbour, or even fellow Christian. Defending God or God's honour, is the cause of the worst evils that religion can perpetrate.

Another thought had struck me recently just before viewing this film: if, as my intuition wants to tell me (but I cannot ever rest on this) there is some supreme source, necessary being, and first cause for our existence, some divinity, we do not understand or know it's nature. And why should we? I realise that conceptualising the divine, in a theology, to create a set of eternally correct and static religous rules or dogmas - is as certain a form of idolatory as to create a 'graven image'. All theology then, all dogma in so far as these beliefs are not just considered manmade, provisional and open to question and doubt, is idolatory.

I would sincerely wish to repent of any notion that somehow I could fit within an organised religious institution. The universe is my temple, my life is my altar, my desire for beauty, peace, justice and well being in the world starting with my family is my proper worship. All authority must be tested by reason including claims of divine revelation and knowledge.

Rejectionist

Actually, I've really decided i don't like polytheism after all. At the moment I don't like theism. I've been losing my grip on reality chasing after vain imaginings.
What reason, what reason at all, do we have for believing in invisible beings? We have a number of rational proofs of God that turn out not to be proofs. We have the testimony of prophets and biblical writers, and the experiences of the countless faithful. There is rather a lot more of this kind of "evidence" for one particular kind of theism, Christian theism, than
for any pagan theology or polytheism. So if one is tending to the supernatural, it makes no sense to prefer a less rational theology or explanation of the supernatural. For you can be sure I will want an explanation.

The most rational view of the world, is a naturalistic world view. This requires no supernatural invisible entities.
The next most rational view of the world, after naturalism, is probably Buddhism or Taoism - non theistic, yet religious belief systems
The next most rational view of the world, is some form of Monotheism

I have also decided that nature is not 'part of God' nor is nature God. If there is a God, then nature is created by divine will and power and ultimately out of the divine substance or pleroma. I am not sure I believe in creation from nothing at all.

a kind of polyunified panentheism

For me, divinity is at the core of our reality, and it is also 'the whole', the unity of all nature and everything. I call this my 'is-ness' of being.

I agree (in part) with the Buddhists that the world we know is in constant flux and change, and individual existences are the temporary waves that appear on the surface of the ocean, but beneath the surface of the waves is an infinite depth. The divine is not 'something', it is isn't a 'self' . From the human perspective, it is emptiness yet not pure nothing ness.It defies categorisation. I feel it is yet not impersonal (because after all the universe contains persons, and so cannot be less than personal) but somehow involves a transpersonal cosmic consciousness. [And I say 'transpersonal', but have no real idea what I mean, just it 'feels' very true to me!]

I don't go the whole way into only identifying the divine with the physical world i.e. pantheism because to my mind, this view point sees only the 'surface of things' as divine - just the physical alone - and does not 'capture' the full essence of the divine. I believe there are more 'subtle' and 'immaterial' aspects of nature in deeper (or 'higher') dimensions of reality, and this is my understanding of 'transcendence' - not as something 'outside' of nature, simply the supreme reality is not just corporeal, or physcial or limited by the finite: it extends beyond space-time as we know it. So my God is not 'outside' nature (how can anything be so as nature is everything?) but the full reality of divinity is still ''beyond' what we humans understand as nature and can realise with our everyday senses.

Fundamentally we are all, at the level of reality where quantum physics operates, just dancing patterns of energy'..and that moving energy itself and the 'field' and 'current' and potentiality is the life of God. God is Spirit and Spirit is simply 'being(or essence), life, and consciousness'. However a truly holistic, pantheistic cosmic divinity is very hard, perhaps impossible to conceive of, except in some mystic's ectasy. Soon the idea gets muddled up with a notion of a personal supreme being. My take on this misunderstanding is that the ancients had many 'gods' some crudely understood, but the best of the ancient mystics saw that true divinity was 'cosmic' in scope. Unfortunately the panentheist divinity and the crude character of the local chief' god of a tribe or nation was often conflated, resulting in the worst excesses of monotheism: a cruel local god with cosmic pretensions. So I shy away from this kind of monotheism.

I'd better explain that I have been around 'polytheistic' pagan traditions for some years, which indicates my very long personal journey away from my rigid Christian upbringing. This 'paganism' has informed my viewpoint. So I tend to believe 'God' is most fully encountered and 'felt' in the numinous in particular places and times, and through the forces of nature, and through examples excellence, holiness and beauty. Many different cultures through the wonders of the human imagination personify these 'theophanies' or 'outworkings' of the cosmic divine. Thus the cosmic divinity really manifests pluralistically, as a poly-unity, becoming the many different 'gods' of actual religious worship. So each god or gods really is approximately, a real concrete example, of an aspect, an appearance, of the cosmic divinity. That said, I think we too, in our little lives, are or can become, an 'aspect' of actualised cosmic divinity - through a well lived life, where we must make the hidden Godness potential shine through!


And I love nature, which means I strongly tend to panpsychism - that mental (though not necessarily cognitive) abilities are found in all living creatures, even allegedly 'inanimate' beings have the raw material of consciousness.

Difficulties

I am not finding 'polytheism' easy going. In fact i find it does not mesh with my 'core spirituality' at all well. I'm also put off by reading stuff written by contemporary hard polytheists. Dealing with the first point first, hard polytheists seem to pick and choose their gods in a typically post-modern 'consumerist' fashion. One can add any 'god' to one's basket depending on one's particular life situation, likes, feelings. Even if they can 'hold' to one pantheon (for today at least) polytheists are generally unable to explain how their pantheon can be related to other 'pantheons' e.g. Greek to Norse to Vedic to Egyptian to Semitic and so on. This is leading me to realise that polytheism is no more necessarily conducive to religious pluralism than any other religion in principle. Only the attitude of polytheists is necessarily tolerant, I suppose because every belief is, and, must remain 'available' for purchase. The only significant ancient god that doesn't get a look in among those pushing such hard polytheistic eccleticism are Yahweh.

So what is my 'core spirituality'? Well, first I note that my encounters with polytheism are helping me define what I can believe in. My tendencies are toward:

• monism - there is unity underlying all reality. On the mind/matter debate I am a 'neutral monist' i.e. 'mind' and 'matter' are two 'sides' of the same coin of fundamental 'stuff'
  

• panpsychism - I tend toward the believe that all things have mental properties, though only certain animals are show cognitive life, and having mental properties could involve a state of 'unconsciousness' relative to sentient creatures. This belief also flows from having since childhood a sense of the 'spirits of place' or the 'vibe' of a location
• a love of nature, and a sense that the forces of nature are 'divine'
• a sense of 'transcendence', that there is a 'higher realm' or 'higher reality' distinct from but encompassing the physical world.
• I am impressed by arguments for a 'first cause and necessary being' and the apparent 'fine tuning' of the universe. These point to a 'cosmic God'
• I accept there may be some fundamental 'plurality' of deity as manifest (so a willingness to accept a 'soft' polytheism. The plurality wanted though is a poly-unity
  
• Evil in the world is such that I do not believe in a benevolent divinity who can intervene in the world.
• My religiosity must have less problems of coherence or irrationality than the religion I have left behind. I have fully absorbed the naturalistic objections to the latter.
  

Some form of Pan-en-theism or Pandeism seem to be a better 'fit'. However there is no 'tradition' of religious practice to draw upon.