Deepak Chopra asks ...

[RogerChristie]

Does God Have a Future?

One of the most amazing developments in spirituality is that freedom is now considered positive. For centuries religion suppressed freedom. To be a believer meant, first and foremost, adhering to dogma. To think outside the church risked anathema, and that meant social expulsion, revilement, and possibly death. Thus religion made people less than human "for their own good." Science made it difficult if not impossible to believe in human beings as divine offspring of Adam and Eve, but the rise of democracy made it equally hard to believe that a bishop, rabbi, preacher, or mullah should control one's thoughts about God.

Even in pop culture we see the victory of spiritual freedom. Not only have tens of millions of believers walked out of church, they read books like "The Da Vinci Code," which is basically a freewheeling fantasy about Jesus as a sexual being, married man, and father of children who took up with Mary Magdalene. Could anything be more heretical? But heresy is a pointless label in a free society. Spiritual freedom should be seen for what it is, a natural evolution, a step toward becoming more human.

This step can occur without God. There's a famous saying in Buddhism: If you ever meet the Buddha on the path, kill him. What this means is that a literal person who stands for Buddha cannot actually be Buddha. Buddha is wakefulness, the state of a fully developed soul. It is not a statue, a person, or a set of dogmatic beliefs. In this vein millions of people have already killed Christ (metaphorically) by wanting a version of Christ that was not completely tied to worshipping a man, no matter how great and revered that man might be. Yet if you do not literally believe in the Resurrection and the Last Judgment, where does that really leave you?

Mainstream religion has been left with resounding moral teachings but little power elsewhere. Christianity emphasizes doing good works and being a good person, yet it hardly dares to call for a transformation of spirit, even though millions of people yearn for such a transformation. They are not satisfied with the scientific portrayal of a human being as a higher mammal governed by habits, genes, lower instincts, and a vaguely defined mind, which is probably just a factor of brain function.

Thus for God to have a future, he must create an inner revolution. Fundamentalists claim that they have achieved such a revolution by being reborn, and this is believable if the born-again person turns out to be more Christ-like rather than the more narrow-minded, prejudiced, and intolerant. Indeed, to be a literal Christian would mean giving away your money, turning the other cheek at injustice, forgiving all enemies, and loving your neighbor. That sort of inner revolution hasn't happened, needless to say, on a mass scale in this country.

Freedom implies a different sort of inner revolution in which the believer awakens just as Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad awakened. They serve as role models and guides, not avatars and lawmakers. Such a path has certain common features:

--Giving up on materialism as the ultimate reality.
--Looking inward for answers rather than outward to authority figures.
--Being open to changes in one's psychological makeup.
--Discovering the reality of higher truths and spiritual laws.
--Learning to live from the level of the soul, however you define it.
--Gradually shifting one's allegiance away from the ego and its unquenchable demands.
--Finding one's place in a common humanity, living in peace with other souls.
--Growing in wisdom and love.

The reason that the mass media, evangelicals, and divinity schools are all unreliable when it comes to current spiritual trends is that the qualities on this list are private and personal. Awakening isn't a group activity except in the most limited sense--you can live among others who have the same spiritual goal as yourself. India's great devotional poet Kabir said that he had read all the scriptures, heard all the Brahmins, and bathed in all the sacred pools without finding God, who appeared only when he looked inside. It's a simple but irrefutable message. In fact, God is the sum of these private qualities. Even the Bible does not refer to Him as a person; only once does He appear in the Old Testament as a white-bearded patriarch sitting on a throne. The Judeo-Christian tradition, in common with Islam and Hinduism, teaches of an abstract God who is the ultimate perfection of spirit, not a superhuman ruler, lawgiver, or judge.

Right now spiritual freedom has created an enormous gap. About 90% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe in God, but only 22%-44% regularly go to church (In Europe the figure is much lower, under 5% in parts of Scandinavia). This gap is not a sign of sin and decay; it is a sign of spiritual evolution. In the next post we'll see how lapsed believers are succeeding in forming a new relationship to God that is highly encouraging and a healthy antidote to the fundamentalist reaction that seems to dominate the scene.

from www.huffingtonpost.com


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* Puff, puff, pass. :-}

Roger


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[Mystic Power]

Go Deepak!

The fastest growing denomination is the box checked: SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS.

It's simply the next logical step in our spiritual evolution.

Follow Your Bliss,
Ben
_________________
"We are the Ones we have been waiting for."
~Hopi Elder ~

"In Lak'ech"
~ Ancient Mayan: "I am another YOU." ~

[Mystic Power]

Go Deepak!

The fastest growing denomination is the box checked: SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS.

It's simply the next logical step in our spiritual evolution.

Follow Your Bliss,
Ben
_________________
"We are the Ones we have been waiting for."
~Hopi Elder ~

"In Lak'ech"
~ Ancient Mayan: "I am another YOU." ~

[4_Bob2Marley_0]

Deepak!!!
_________________
Legalize!
Bob Marley is back

http://420vision.blogspot.com/