Saturday, March 07, 2009
Universe
As conscious beings, we are able to be a universe unto ourselves;
we can be all our pleasures, and we may be all our pain.
In our narcissism and greed, we are centered solely on our own pleasure and needs. And it can be quite gratifying.
In our despair, we are centered solely on our own pain. And it can be worse than any hell.
One of the points of religion seems to be to find a focus outside ourselves.
All the our experiential processing is done inside ourselves.
Sometimes we never let it get back out in any meaninful way.
When we are told to care for the poor, it was not meant to take a tax deduction. What was meant was to get involved in caring for the poor. We have found it so hard to let our bodies touch what we see as unclean, for that would mean actually opening up the closed universe of consciousness. St. Francis embraced the poor. Gandhi did. The Buddha did.
The very concept of unclean comes not from a blemish in another, but from our own inability to open consciousness outwards; since we cannot be open, we explain it away as being a sensible precaution against some external defect.
Our struggle is to break out of our self containment. We are not to love the universe, we are to love with the universe.
We are not to despair of the universe, but we shall feel agonies with the universe.
When we open up, we do so to join, not to take the outside as yet another object of our desire or repulsion. We are to be open to join.
Our sufferings are no longer the irrational and blind scourges of an unfeeling Creation; our suffering is shared with all mankind and with the entire range of Creation. Our pain is the pain of all. Their pain is ours.
So is our love their joy, and their love ours.
So with all the animals and plants and stars and suns, all creatures large and small, all entities created by God enter into community with us.
Here I do differ from the usual religious outlook: I pray not to adore God as an object of my worship; I pray that I may join into a community with God.
And I must do more than merely pray: I must live in community with all Creation.
thanks to: Ruth at http://ruthie822.blogspot.com/
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3 comments:
I really like where you went with this, and I don't just mean from my cup. It's our oneness with Nature and with humans that we've forgotten.
But this is actually one reason I've left the church (apologies to the Daughter), i.e., Christianity: The separateness of God as Other. It's possible, of course, to lead a contemplative Christian life. But still, always, God will be Other, even if she/he is inside. I have come to myself as divine, and I mean that not sacriligiously at all. I actually think it's possibly what Paul meant when he said we shall be like him.
Oh, the egg cup is Spode buttercup. It was my Grandma Olive's.
I know exactly what you mean. It is so hard to put it into words, mainly because it is so different from what we were taught from childhood.
At a certain point, you just cannot continue - the urge is there, but the words and images are not...not yet!
I did not have any idea of where I was going with the universe within a cup idea. When I started, there was just your image and my sense of...something...
The ending was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else.
I don't think I ever said it that way before.
Perfect that this blog has provided that. I mean, what you're getting at here (in the blog, I mean) is that God is everything. Well we can't get our heads around everything. And in the human exchange, even in blogworld, we get things revealed to us that were there all along, through someone else's trigger.
It's good stuff.
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