Categories
Spirituality

Our spiritual isolation is another myth…

One of the unique characteristics of the three great religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is the broadly held belief that each offer the singular path to spiritual truth. Even in the name ascribed to the Creator: Adonai, God (Father, Son – Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit), or Allah, is indigenous to a particular religious faith. Yet concurrent with the notion of one specific path to spiritual truth, the faithful subscribe to the foundational belief of a universal, all powerful, all knowing Creator. As a man raised in the Christian faith, and a deep reader of the Scripture, I have become acutely aware of how religious practice sometimes differ with Scriptural guidance.

One of the most important examples is the interpretation of Jesus Christ as the “narrow gate”. At the heart of the Christian faith is the belief that Jesus died so all of our sins would be forgiven, and He rose from the dead to demonstrate our salvation. The significance of the universal forgiveness of sins was to allow all people to worship God (The Creator) directly. Therefore, Jesus was the “narrow gate” to our reconciliation with the Creator. As a result, the narrow gate has become the basis of Christian exclusivity for spiritual truth.

In Judaism, the tradition of the Chosen people includes the opportunity to sense Adonai’s closeness, hear the truth, and share the truth with the world. Jewish salvation emphasizes correct conduct as revealed by the Mosaic covenant and recorded in the Torah and Talmud.

I have never had the pleasure of reading the Quran, so I can not cite the basis for Islamic exclusivity for spiritual truth. Nonetheless, each of these great religious traditions have expressed their exclusive claim for spiritual truth through political & legal force, and even violent conflict.

As a Christian, I look to the Scriptural guidance regarding “speaking in tongues” to counter the tradition of Christian exclusivity of spiritual truth. The Scripture introduced the practice of speaking in tongues to describe how through the power of God, the Holy Spirit, we each hear the voice of God in our native tongue. To me, these verses of Scripture epitomize the universality of an all-powerful Creator…one voice, vividly understood by all because the words are heard in the native tongue of the listener. This in my view is how a Universal Creator would speak so all creation would understand. I further interpret the native tongue as a metaphor for how each of us discover our spiritual truth.

Assuming for a moment the presence of a Universal Creator, would our relationship be constrained by the randomness of birth?

I was born in the Bronx, New York. Would I have been raised in the Christian faith had I been born in Tehran? Or as a member of the Australia Aboriginal communities?

Doubtful.

Even as a practical matter, spiritual exclusivity feels more like ego than truth.

Why would I think that my narrow path to truth defines anyone else’s path to truth? The full richness of our human experience teaches us of the boundless diversity of tangible, emotional, and spiritual reality.

Yet at our core, who amongst us doesn’t seek truth, confirmed by experience, which leads to a deeper purpose for living?

Categories
Economics Politics

What divides us?

Let us consider our organizing American characteristics: independence, ordered liberty, self-interest, free market economics, and currency as a medium of exchange. Each of these characteristics encourage differentiating individuals from each other.

As an independent person, I am free to choose my own values. My liberty is only limited by laws designed to prevent me from imposing on the liberty of other people.

At the heart of free market economics is the utilitarian principle of individual actors making market choices based on their individual preferences (self-interest). Based on these choices, market prices are set for all goods and services in the global economy, thereby distinguishing consumers by their capacity to pay.

Accordingly, the quality of every good and service we buy is tied to how much money we have. Since most consumers cannot afford the very best quality goods and services, fortunes are made selling substandard quality to the broadest part of the market (i.e. Walmart).

Under these circumstances, well-being has become a function of fierce competition to accumulate money. And as a result, the universal desire to provide for ourselves and our families is reduced to creating a zero-sum environment of inhuman, non-sustainable inequality.

Categories
Philosophy

The Universal Oneness Manifesto

We all came from the same place…
And we all will go to the same place.

The only distortion of our reality is our wide acceptance of our independence…our individuality…our inherent separateness.

From this mythology, all inhumanity is born.

Categories
Personal Growth

A simple proposition

Intimacy is a clue to our universal oneness. By intimacy, I mean physical proximity. Consider the term “personal space”…loosely defined as the physical comfort zone between ourselves and anyone else. Take into account how this personal space varies based on the relationship we have with individual people. The more we trust someone, the smaller our need for personal space becomes. In rare occasions, our personal space becomes synonymous with another person…and we no longer are separate people. We actually feel the other person. We hurt because they hurt. We feel joy because they are happy. We feel lonely when they are not present, and complete when they are with us. Yet who ever this rare person is, they once were a complete stranger. The experience I describe is not unique…it is all too rare, fleeting, but pervasively true.

The question this truth reveals is whether the separateness we experience from strangers is true or just a widely accepted illusion? Context is another clue to answering this question. What makes a person a stranger is the cultural assumption they are driven by their own interest, guided by values of their own choosing, with no inherent responsibility to provide us with any consideration. Such a person cannot be trusted without knowing more. Therefore, when dealing with strangers our need for personal space is at its maximum.

Now contrast this generic stranger with the litany of strangers we see on the evening news. Seeing something tragic or wonderful happening to a stranger on our TV screen can invoke very powerful emotions within us, depending on how we relate to this complete stranger. These feelings come from the same place as the emotions that join us to people we trust. They too are all too rare, fleeting and pervasively true.

All that remains are the strangers we don’t relate to…or do we? Who amongst us doesn’t cherish the air we breathe? Or the water we drink? Or the warmth we feel when sheltered against the elements of our environment? What stranger can you imagine that doesn’t seek safety and comfort for themselves and their families? Who doesn’t have high aspirations that their children will live more fulfilling lives than they did?

We are one humanity because at the heart of this life, even at the moment of apparent individuality, our deepest hopes and aspirations are synonymous.