My friend, Patrick Neas of KXTR here in Kansas City interviewed Richard Smoley (Conscious Love, Inner Christianity and Hidden Wisdom) and you can listen to it here. Richard will be in Kansas City next week (January 16 & 17) for a Friday night lecture and Saturday workshop sponsored by the Kansas City Friends of Jung.
Author Archive for Ken
Jeremy (The Kibitzer) makes a point I’ve never before thought about in Imperfect Civilization Is Better Than an Impossible Utopia. The Garden of Eden was not a day-spa where Adam and Eve were waited on hand and foot and got facials, pedis and manis, took mud baths, &c. There was actual work to be done!
Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. [Genesis 2:15]
I don’t know how how many acres the ol’ garden was but Adam certainly did not have any John Deer tractors so this must have been a lot of manual labor. This also implies that Adam grew his own food which means that either the room service was very slow or quite expensive. I just never thought about Adam having to work in paradise.
Jeremy points out that “[a]fter the Fall humankind’s work became more difficult, but it was difficulty in work, not work itself, that was God’s judgment.” And that makes sense but it doesn’t jive with my up-till-now-image of Paradise. Eden was supposed to be perfect and yet there still had to be work done? I’d have thought that the ground would be fertile and flat and ready for planting but, apparently, it had to be cultivated.
The other thought this brings to mind is that Heaven is supposed to be a return to Paradise where everything is perfect. But what if there is work to be done in heaven, too? Golden mansions to be painted, golden roofs to be replaced, golden pot holes to be filled. I thought we would spend all day praising God and worshiping at his feet but I guess that’s only on weekends and major holidays.
And then, a final thought. If Adam had to work in the Garden of Eden and he was in perfect communion with God, then how can I think for a second that if only I did such and such or earned this amount of money or had this or that job that my work would be easy or I wouldn’t have to work at all? If Adam, a perfect human, had to work, then work is part of being human and not a curse with which we have to deal and try to avoid.
Tim Freke uses the term “lucid living” to describe a state analogous to lucid dreaming but lucid living is the balance point between our mundane life (the “dreaming” state) and a state of higher consciousness. Ram Dass states that the highest mother, student, therapist, lover, &c. is the most conscious one. So, what is conscious living? What are some attributes of a person who is living lucidly or consciously? Here are some initial thoughts.
Conscious living is …
- … not letting my mind, thoughts, or eyes wander when someone is speaking to me.
- … not focusing on what I want to say next to the exclusion of listening to others.
- … not letting my mind wander to work, blog posts, &c. when playing with my daughter.
- … being in the present and not the past or the future. This pretty much sums up the three ideas above. If I’m playing with my daughter, I’m not working or writing so any work or writing that I may think about is either in the past or in the future. If I’m concentrating on what I’m going to say next in a conversation then I’m focusing on the future and not the present in which the other person is speaking.
But with that short list, I’m realizing two things: 1) that I don’t really have much of an idea what conscious living is and 2) that I have more questions than answers.
If I’m at lunch with a friend and he’s talking (as happened a few days ago) and I get a text, do I look at the text? It’s most likely my wife who is wondering where I am since lunch is taking longer than either of us expected. This dilemma seems trivial but I think it represents a much larger class of dilemma that exists because of technology. Cell phones that we carry around with us all the time make it possible for the “present moment” to span physical space. If I did not have a cell phone, my wife could not be “present” with me at lunch because she is not physically there. But a text message from her can bring her into my present moment with my friend. So, I have the dilemma of being conscious with my friend and his conversation versus being conscious with my wife and acknowledging her text. Of course, the same questions arise with email, phone calls, &c.
Is multi-tasking not conscious living? An email just came in for me and I checked it on my phone then came back to this post. Again, this is a representative of a larger class. Say I’m on the clock writing code and a thought pops into my head about a blog post or an idea for a writing project or whatever. If I am living consciously, do I take a few moments to move over to my personal computer and start a draft so that I don’t forget the idea? Should the thought have even come into my head in the first place? Is conscious living synonymous with completely focused, one track thinking?
Not acknowledging another human being seems to be a very unconscious act. So does that mean you have to make eye contact with everyone you pass while walking down the street? But what if you live in NYC? Are you really supposed to make eye contact with everyone?
As I’m working on this post, it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate and to write and I’m feeling a lot of resistence. My initial reaction is to save the draft and come back to it later. But I know that there is a large possibility that I’ll never return to it because it’s difficult. It’s difficult to think about these things and come to realize how unconsciously I am living right now, how much work I have to do on myself. So, I’m going to publish this post as-is, un-finished, mid-stream. Please leave some comments about what you think conscious living is. Perhaps some interaction will lighten my load a bit and help me get back to the self-inspection that this topic needs. I will, hopefully, some back to this topic and write more later.
caveat lector: I am an engineering Ph.D. with a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (complete with a Dictionary of the Greek New Testament) and Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon and I’m not afraid to use them! So, therefore, I would appreciate input on meaning and nuance from anyone who has actually studied ancient Greek.
I want to bring in a later definition of faith from Hebrews 11:1 which reads, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This definition seems at odds with Jesus’ definition because it emphasizes the future and the unseen whereas the people Jesus credits with faith have faith in something happening right now because of what they’ve seen Jesus do in the past. On the one hand, this seems perfectly reasonable because we have not witnessed Jesus perform a miracle and so our faith must be based on things unseen. But on the other hand, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus defines faith relative to things in nature—the birds and the flowers—which we do have the ability to witness even today.
The first half of the definition in Hebrews 11:1 is rather pedestrian and obvious. Faith—πίστις (pistis)—has the meaning of persuasion or conviction and derives from πείθω (pĕithō) which means to convince by argument. The Greek word, ἐλπιζω (ĕlpizō) translated as hoped also means expected. Indeed, in English, hope implies “reasonable confidence” that the desired outcome will occur. So we have faith as the assurance—ὑπόστᾰσις (hupŏstasis) also means the support, foundation, or ground of hope—of what we expect to happen. This is very nearly a tautology: we have been convinced of something and this conviction is the basis, the ground of our expectation, that that thing of which we are convinced will come to pass. If we are convinced of something, of course we expect it!
The second half of the definition is more interesting although just as unsatisfying. The Greek word for conviction—ἕλεγχος (ĕlĕgehŏs)—has the connotations of reproof, a cross-examining, testing for the purposes of disproof or refuting. The Greek word for seen—βλἐπω (blĕpō)—implies “simply voluntary observation.” So, our faith allows us to examine, to test, with the end goal of being able to disprove things that we have chosen to not observe. But if we are persuaded of something we do not need to observe it. I am convinced that electrons exist so it does not matter that I have never seen an electron. The real, unanswered question is, “in what does our faith, our persuasion, consist”? This definition in Hebrews does not answer that question. But, taking Jesus’ definition of faith, we are persuaded by seeing what God has done. There is no “leap of faith” involved. Our faith is based on past experience.
via The Rev’s Rumbles I found the Germatriculator which rates my blog as balanced exactly, yet precariously, between the two extremes (at least as of right now). I’ve achieved my goal of holding the tension of the opposites!! The universe now has an incrementally greater amount of consciousness. My work here is done (but I’ll still probably continue blogging anyway).
God is real. The Christian life is about a relationship with God as known in Jesus Christ. It can and will change your life.
– Marcus Borg via The Rev’s Rumbles
What I want to emphasis in the above quote is the word Christian. It is the Christian life that is about a relationship with God as known in Jesus Christ. It is not life in general, but specifically the Christian life. It is not the Muslim life or the Buddhist life or the Zen life or … it is the Christian life. Other lives are also about a relationship with God but as known in or through other people or ideas and not Jesus Christ. But they are still about a relationshop with God.
Continuing from my last post, I have not totally thought through the “why” of the ultimate observer doing no action but, taking that as an assumption to be “proven” later, I think there are two answers to “Who, then, created?”
First, as some spiritual traditions suggest (and I can’t, at the moment, recall which one(s)) it was a demiurge who did the creating. The Old Testament God, Jehovah, was not the ultimate observer but a “lesser” god, more akin to a child with his fits of rage, anger, jealousy, &c., and it was this god who created. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode (the “real” Star Trek with Captain James T. Kirk) where the Enterprise crew is trapped on this planet by a “god” which turns out to be a child playing. The child’s parents come in at the end and save everyone from annihilation and apology for their child’s behavior.
Second, there is no creation — it’s all a dream, maya, an illusion. This fits in with Eastern tradition, especially Vedanta and Hinduism.
Vedanta has an aphorism which states: “I do nothing at all.” Our true “I,” our true Self, is the ultimate observer and does not act. If our true Self were, itself, observed, then it would be the object to another’s subject. That other subject would then be the ultimate observer (unless, of course, it was observed by yet another subject). To break the infinite chain, there must be an ultimate observer which is not observed by any other subject. This ultimate observer is “God” and our true “Self.” This is the “I” in the above aphorism. However, if “I” do nothing, i.e. “God” does nothing, then who/what created the world that we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell?
I feel like I’ve been harping on this a lot lately but this is what I’ve been thinking about and trying to deal with in my life. MysticSaint at, Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, has another excellent post from which I’ll pull a couple quotes that he quotes:
… the mystic is known only through the fact that he brings opposites together, for all of him is the Real. Thus Abu Said al Kharraz was asked, “Through what have you known Allah?” He replied, “Through the fact that He brings opposites together,” for he had witnessed their coming together in himself.
– Ibn Arabi
Praise be to God who hath given His creatures no way of attaining to knowledge of Him except through their inability to know Him.
– Abu Bakr
Things lie hidden in their opposites, and but for the existence of opposites, the Opposer would have no manifestations.
– Al Alawi
I’ve written elsewhere about the anthropomorphism of God but another parallel with Jung’s psychology has suggested itself. This time, it is the concept of transference. Again, from The Theory of Psychoanalysis: Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 19:
Freud calls this process transference, owing to the fact that the images of the parents are henceforth transferred to the physician, along with the infantile attitude of mind adopted towards the parents. The transference does not arise solely in the intellectual sphere, but the libido bound up with the phantasy is transferred, together with the phantasy itself, to the personality of the physician, so that the physician replaces the parents to a certain extent. (p. 102)
A little later, Jung discusses the role of transference:
Through the transference to the physician, a bridge is built, across which the patient can get away from his family, into reality. In other words, he can emerge from his infantile environment into the world of grown-up people, for here the physician stands for a part of the extra-familial world.
Now, I would like to suggest an analogy where the “patient” is us and the “physician” is Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. The transference was initiated by Jesus when he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” We now view Jehovah as a father figure, i.e. we have transferred to Jehovah the image of a parent. What this transference provides us is a way to “grow-up”; to shed the “infantile environment” of the Old Testament and enter a more mature world with a more mature view of God. However, there can be a downside to transference:
But on the other hand, this transference is a powerful hindrance to the progress of treatment, for the patient assimilates the personality of the physician as if he did stand for father or mother, and not for a part of the extra-familial world. If the patent could acquire the image of the physician as a part of the non-infantile world, he would gain a considerable advantage. But transference has the opposite effect; hence the whole advantage of the new acquisition is neutralized.
How often have you seen this exact symptom? Someone, or a group of people, “assimilat[ing] the personality of the physician.” Think of all those Christians filled with “righteous anger” who condemn (or worse) sinners “in the name of God.”
There are two end results of transference:
The more the patient succeeds in regarding his doctor as he does any other individual, the more he is able to consider himself objectively, the greater becomes the advantage of transference. The less he is able to consider his doctor in this way, the more the physician is assimilated with the father, the less is the advantage of the transference and the greater will be its harm. The familial environment of the patent has only become increased by an additional personality assimilated to his parents. The patient himself is, as before, still in his childish surroundings, and therefore maintains his infantile attitude of mind. In this manner, all the advantages of transference can be lost.
Transference can lead to either greater maturity or a continued infantile attitude. In the latter case, Jehovah maintains a strongly human father image and we continue to take on the personality of the Old Testament God, the only result of which is a wallowing in our childhood and immaturity.
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