Under a Banyan Tree

Has more harm or good been done in the name of organized religion?  What with the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch burnings, heretic burnings, Popes with mistresses, September 11, 2001, priests defiling children, and other events, one really has to wonder.  How was anyone able to do any of these things in the name of God, Allah, Jehovah, Christ, Mohammed, etc.  Well, it is always claimed that humans did these things and you can’t blame religion.  But humans created these organizations and hide behind them in order to carry out their actions.  When does organized religion have to accept responsibility for what is done in its name?  It will probably never happen. 

So, people have to accept responsibility for their own actions.  This is where I think that religion becomes an individual experience.  In my last post I stated that God is everything and everybody.  He is universal consciousness and inside of us right now.  There are really about 7 billion different religions in the world because we have to discover that part of ourselves that is connected to everything.  God is everything and everything is God.  Have you ever wondered why inventions and discoveries of new knowledge are often made almost simultaneously at different geographic locations?  It is because we really are connected to a universal consciousness.  Discovering that part of us that makes that connection, is vital to our well being.  Our Egoic mind gets in the way of this connection because it always puts its own wants and desires ahead of what that inner voice tells us is true.  Organized religions because they are manmade have a tendency to attend to man’s desires.  This is not to say that organized religion is an evil in our world.  Many good things are done by religious organizations.  However, individuals within those organizations really have to start accepting individual responsibility for what the organization does, good or bad.  Congregations need to demand it.  Individuals need to demand it.  If we all get in contact with our inner being, this will begin to occur.   We need to stop desiring more things, more power, more money and more physical gratification and start desiring a spiritual connection with our universe. 

Seven billion people can have their own relationship with universal consciousness – God, and still belong to an organized religion but it takes those seven billion people striving for Nirvana to bring about any real change.  People accepting responsibility for themselves, their world and the universe can be miraculous.  Look at Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed.  They took it upon themselves to make a better world.  However, other humans have distorted their real message over time.  They were all sons of God because we are all sons and daughters of God.  Act like sons of God as they did.  Restore your connection with the universal consciousness that is always there to assist you to do the right thing.  Practice meditation – calm your Egoic minds, and get into contact with the real you, the one that is connected to God.  After a while you may find that instinct will lead the way. 

I know, kind of preachy but someone had to say it. 

For years now I have struggled with religion and with finding myself.  In the 1970′s I had read Herman Hesse novels such as Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, Journey to the East, Narcissus and Goldmund and found myself wanting to change because of his philosophy.   That of course was almost 40 years ago.  What happened in the interim is life I suppose.  Still lost I went through many periods - some of which included extensive travel, another where I worked at a home for emotionally disturbed children and still another where I got married, moved to a small town and tried to be a responsible adult.  Through all of this I never could find the confidence and courage to stop depending upon others to verify my self-worth.  I was even told once by a therapist that I did not have a personality of my own but was just an extension of my mother.  That was at a point in my life where I even contemplated suicide, something Hesse had done early in his life and something I would contemplate periodically for years

It was not as if I wasn’t intelligent.  I had attained a B.ED at university but had promptly had a nervous breakdown when I first stepped out on my own to teach.  Failure was something that I always felt would eventually occur and as this was as high as I thought I could ever go this was the time for it – a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Finally, I did get back into education but always on the periphery as either a substitute teacher or an aide.  Believing in my abilities seemed to be beyond me.  However, it all brought me to where I am today and that is at peace with who I am and what I have done.  Now retired from teaching I still go in and substitute from time to time and I thoroughly enjoy it.  What has changed?  Why can I accept myself now when I never could before?  Certainly my accomplishments are not exemplary, but I have affected people positively including me.

The major change has been in how I view the world.  All the books I have read and all the people I have known and worked with including my wife, son, students, animals and colleagues as well as my own thought processes have led me to a philosophy of life that works for me.  Those Herman Hesse days from years ago had always been working at my psyche and then my son put me on to books by Alan Watts and I read a couple of books by Eckhart Tolle.  These and a propensity towards eastern religions, especially Buddhism seemed to solidify in my mind an attitude toward the universe that helped me reconcile my past and live in the now.

I believe in the Big Bang Theory of the Universe but not in the normal sense.  God was the Big Bang.  He is everything and everybody including you and me, rocks, trees, planets, empty space, stars – all that exists – every electron, atom, and molecule that make up the universe.   Everything has a consciousness and an energy inside it that is connected.  God is the universal consciousness that encompasses it all.  We come from this consciousness, are always connected to it and will rejoin this consciousness in a meaningful way when we die.  We will know all the parts we have played in God learning about himself through us.

How do we develop our own inner being to unite with this universal consciousness?  Meditation of course is a good way to quiet everything inside us that gets in the way – our Egoic selves - which Buddha realized causes our suffering.  Buddha did not mean we had to get rid of our desires, just that we had to find a way to release ourselves from the control of these desires.  I find, if I admit to myself that when I have a desire, that is just my ego wanting to control something or somebody and then hand that job off to that inner voice that attempts to tell me what the universe wants I realize that most of my desires are irrelevant.  The desire for Nirvana however is a suitable desire.  My son always said that Buddha’s philosophy had this dichotomy in it – Nirvana is a desire.  But the word desire was mistranslated.  Basically, the First Noble Truth states that life is unsatisfactory and imperfect.  The Second Noble Truth states that there is a cause for this thirst and ignorance – to try and fill our unsatisfactory and imperfect lives with meaning.  The Third Noble Truth states there is a way to overcome this thirst and ignorance and that is to strive for Nirvana – to realize your oneness with the universe and with God.  We are all the sons and daughters of God because everything in the universe is God.  The 4th Noble Truth is a package of self-cultivation know as “The Eight Fold Path ” that enables the practitioner to attain the goal of “Nirvana”.  That path is important but comes quite naturally if you try and live your life by calming your “Ego” and striving to strengthen and follow that inner universal voice within you.   The path deals with three major areas – Morality, Concentration and Insight all of which help one to discover and cultivate their inner self as separate from Ego and connect to universal consciousness. 

Much of the above paragraph came from a Buddhist website http://www.serve.com/cmtan/buddhism/fournt.html which goes into greater detail on the Eight Fold Path and gives a better idea of what Buddha really meant by the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path.  Please refer to it for this detail.

I sign off this first post now and hope to add more in the future.