December 2005 Archives

One of the fundamental principles of material life is limitation – in particular the limits of our faculties and the resources they act upon. For example, we can live for only so long without food, and there is only so much food to be had in the world. Nothing is without limit; not even the whole universe could satisify an unlimited number of people who all wanted the same thing.

In society, positions and luxuries are even more limited than the basic necessities of food and water. Many people want to become doctors, for instance, but universities and medical schools have only so many openings available. Many may dream of a sports car, or a mansion by the sea, or just a warm house with a healthy family; but the fact is, not everyone who dreams of a thing can have it. It’s only those who work hard, or have some natural, cultural or social advantage, that can gain access to the limited number of rewards available.

As a result of this fact of life, children are brought up with a sense of the critical importance of education to their future happiness. There are advertisements on television telling them that high school dropouts make less money than those who go to college; only the best grades can get a student into Ivy-league schools; a diploma is the only sure way to reserve a spot in the coveted echelons of white-collar society. Success is very much tied to our ability to secure for ourselves a place in the ever-dwindling real estate of luxury. The rest is the lot of the common man, who must toil until the end of his days “just to make ends meet”.

Since this is a reality of social life, we are faced with it almost from day one. We can hardly rest for the sense that others might snatch up the opportunities if we let them pass by. First, we must do well in primary school, then on to high school and deciding a major, then fighting our way into a good college and a prestigious program, then to find a young, pretty wife or husband before “all the good ones are taken”, then a job in competitive markets that never seem to have enough positions, then a house in a good neighborhood before housing prices go through the roof, etc., etc. We are racing to beat out others who might find the better deals before us. Not being content with second or third place is a frequent subject of books and movies.

In such an atmosphere, it’s no wonder that we continue this image of life into the next world. Nowhere is it written that heaven has limited real-estate, yet I remember at least one Christian movie that described a “well of souls” – where the souls of babies come from – that will run dry with the coming of the Last Days.

Driven by our sense of competition, Heaven is imagined as a place that only the holiest, most devout may reach. It’s almost an exact comparison between attending school to find a good job, and “working on our virtues” to secure a place in paradise.

But is this an aspect of spirituality at all? If I were to discuss heaven with a farmer from the slopes of Costa Rica, what would he imagine? Maybe a place where crops never fail, and grow without toil; but would it be as colored by the sense that not everyone may experience it?

Or take prayer as another example. When I talk to my friends about their concerns and ask if they’ve prayed about it, some say they do. Then they express the hope that God will hear their prayer – as if maybe He doesn’t have enough ears for everyone. But why wouldn’t He hear us? Does He have a limited attention span? Does He allocate assistance only to a certain number before it runs out? If a person thinks he or she is “not good enough” for God to hear their prayer, my response is, “Good enough for what?” To make the grade? To beat out others who are praying on the same day? To say it loudly enough for God’s ears to pick up the cry?

As far as I’ve read, God and heaven are utterly without limitation or end; these are primary factors distinguishing Them from our present reality. If this is the case, wouldn’t it imply a fundamentally different economy from what we experience here? Yet our upbringing has presented such a concrete sense of what life’s about that I think we project this understanding forward, as if what’s coming next is just an colorful extension of what we’ve already known.

Assuming for a moment that God and heaven have no constraints, what does that imply? Well, it means that God can do anything whatsoever, for one thing. I remember one day talking with a friend, and I proposed the idea that God might wilfully govern the movement of sub-atomic particles, thereby continually expressing His will through the medium of creation and assuring that at each moment all things work out for the ultimate best. My friend was shocked at the implication that God would waste His time on such mundanity. He preferred a model where God had designed the world so perfectly that He simply “turned the key” at the beginning, and since then we’ve been operating on natural laws and principles, freeing the Creator from having constantly to watch over it.

This is actually a fairly common idea of creation, but it begs the question: What could it possibly mean for God to waste His time? Does He really have only a fixed quantity of it, such that by misusing it He would waste it? Is His attention span so limited that watching every atom would have an impact on the infinite span of His mind?

Consider an example: You have a thousand dollars. A friend comes up to you and says he needs eight hundred dollars to satisfy a debt. But giving him eighty percent of what you have leaves you with very little to work with. It means you can’t really do much with the money you had hoped to spend on other things. Maybe you say yes, maybe you don’t, but certainly you will feel the loss.

Now imagine you have about two hundred billion dollars. This is enough money that if you blew five million dollars a day, every day for a century, you still wouldn’t finish spending it all. Now your friend asks you for eight hundred dollars again. Would you even notice it among the five million others you spend each day?

If you can, project this to trillions, quadrillions, to absolutely ridiculous sums of money. At a certain point, you could give a billion dollars to every baby who would ever be born, until the expiration of the Sun, and still it wouldn’t dent your pocket-book. These are absurd, practically useless riches, they’ve become so large.

Now consider that this isn’t even an atom within a drop within one of the countless oceans of Infinity. If God commands resources of this kind, the concept of “resources” flies out the window; it becomes laughable to imagine that God doesn’t have the time to personally and fully attend to the concerns of every individual who has ever been. He could watch over the movements of every atom of billions of universes, and it would be less for Him than it is for us to laugh at a small joke.

The idea of competition belongs to this world. I don’t believe there are a limited number of spots in heaven, or to God’s attention. I doubt even there really exist highs and lows where infinity is concerned. If the Writings of God talk about gradations of heaven, perhaps it refers to gradations in our capacity to accept and perceive them, than to any real separations in such a place.

In fact, I think Heaven is going to be the biggest culture shock of all! I mean, what if gold were unlimited in this world? It would suddenly lose all its value. We prize what is rare, and have developed a society around the acquisition and accomplishment of things that not everyone can do. Within Infinity, value must be based on something far different than rarity.

All of this is one result of a cultural upbringing that focuses us so much onto a path of progress and ascent. It’s what we’re about, and what moves the engine of Western civilization. So we imagine an after-life that is essentially an extension of the same thing in its underpinnings. But it is divine. What this truly means is something I think none of us can accurately perceive yet.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about culture and how our cultural upbringing dominates our interpretations of very basic things. Where this interests me most is in how it affects our understanding of spirituality and our relationship to the world of the unseen and to God.

One historical figure who keenly appreciated this was Socrates. As the story goes, one day a person went to visit the oracle at Delphi. He asked the oracle if there was any man in the world wiser than Socrates (who was probably well known for his witty discussion and his humor by that time). The oracle responded, “No”. So the man went to Socrates and told him what the oracle had said, at which Socrates was shocked. How could it be me? he thought. To test the truth of the oracle’s pronouncement he went around asking people difficult questions about profound topics, to see if their answers were better than his, or if he really was the wisest man alive.

This caused Socrates, for example, to go up to a lawyer and ask him, “What is justice?”, or ask teachers what knowledge was, or the philosophers of the time (the sophists) what wisdom was. Each time they gave their answers, Socrates would consider it and probe its implications. Over the course of their discussion they would invariably be forced to refine their answers as Socrates found more and more cases where not only did they not apply, but they had contradicted themselves. Finally each person gave up in frustration, claiming that Socrates was merely playing with words, or tricking them into saying things they didn’t mean. “It’s obvious what Justice is and everyone knows it, there’s no reason to ask such questions!”, was a typical reply.

What Socrates discovered is that no one really knew what they were saying, they just repeated what everyone else had said about it. In the end, he decided that what the oracle really meant when she claimed him to be the wisest man is that no one was truly wise, and only in recognizing this could wisdom begin. Everything the people held as obvious and true about life was based on a set of cultural assumptions that most people left unquestioned. Rarely did Socrates present his own definition of things (though he does try to define justice in his best known work, “The Republic”); instead, he wanted people to own up to the fact that no one knew what life was about, and that by assuming they did they prevented themselves from ever approaching wisdom. Such an approach came to define the Socratic method, and today people still use his form of argumentation to peel away layers of assumption and gain insight into the foundations of what we claim to know.

His success as an individual failed socially, however, because the elders of Athens did not like the way he encouraged the youth to question tradition and the canons of social opinion on subjects such as truth, virtue and knowledge. People favored the public definition of these things because they fostered social stability, whereas he began a movement which very much destabilized what others had long regarded as sacrosanct. For this they condemned him to death; and believing in justice as greatly as he did, he complied with the judgment and administered their poison himself.

What was then true of society remains so today. We are brought up with basic notions of life, existence and truth which many claim to be self-evident but few can define. I have witnessed people bring God Himself to task based on such empty ideas – when in fact their disagreement really boils down to, “Things aren’t going the way I want them to”. Take for example the laws of God, which are clear enough, but are constantly redefined to be “inapplicable” if they disagree with a person’s desires.

Because these basic concepts remain unexamined, they can sometimes take on the role of mystical symbols which shy from definition. I have seen people on television claim unbelievable things in the name of “God’s will”, or “justice”, or “destiny”, as if the power of these words themselves requires no further understanding. In fact, conversation about their real meanings is avoided, and why? Would it lessen the magic hold of “God’s will” has over people, if they thought it meant illumining the world with the spirit of His love by way of action and example? A far less versatile buzzword that would be!

How much does our package of cultural assumptions affect the way we see the world and experience of God and spirituality? Is our understanding of these terms really an understanding, or more an inchoate “sense” passed down to us by family and friends? Might the real truth be so foreign to us that – as people throughout time have always done – we would reject the very Prophets of God Themselves should They arrive on our doorstep and proclaim loudly the answer to our hopes?

What is this “sense” of truth we hold to so dearly that it provokes such virulent debates, yet likely blinds us from the beauty and simplicity of Truth itself? I have known too many people whose joy was ruined by the demands of religion, whereas in His Own Book I find such declarations as these:

Were men to discover the motivating purpose of God’s Revelation, they would assuredly cast away their fears, and, with hearts filled with gratitude, rejoice with exceeding gladness.

My counsels and admonitions have compassed the world. Yet, instead of imparting joy and gladness they have caused grief…

It behoveth them that are endued with insight and understanding to observe that which will cause joy and radiance.

In further entries I would like to examine this effect of our culture further, because it appears to condition our attitude toward some of the things that matter most. My entry next week will look at “competition” in society, and how much it determines our views on the next life.

I woke up this morning from a very powerful dream; the feeling of it is still with me. In its details it was rather simple, but in its feeling and meaning it was very profound for me.

I had somehow come to a complete understanding that human souls are granted by God the freedom to experience whatever reality they most believe in. This took particular forms in the dream, but in the clearest, I was seated in an empty, white room, eating a phone book. A co-worker stepped in to wonder what I was doing, but I had no way to explain that for me, the room had everything in it I could ever want, and that the phonebook was actually a very tasty lasagna.

Later when I thought about this it occurred to me that a phone book, of sorts, represents an particular ideal of knowledge: a single book that’s a compendium of irrefutable factual knowledge, well organized. Meanwhile I was eating this book as if it were a tasty meal. This brought the following quote to mind:

Although to outward view, the wayfarers in this Valley may dwell upon the dust, yet inwardly they are throned in the heights of mystic meaning; they eat of the endless bounties of inner significances, and drink of the delicate wines of the spirit.

In another scene, I was driving on the freeway, which was filled with traffic, yet I was somehow feeling the most intense peace and joy to be alive and experiencing such a place. I wondered, “What if hell is our real home and this life is just a respite? That would completely alter how we experience existence here.” That is, we seem to want something so much better; what if this life is actually fantastic, and we miss out on that reality because we believe in something else?

At the end of the dream I was trying to tell a group of people this, even lifting myself into the air to shock them into accepting the possibility that things might be other than they seem. I remember saying to the group: “Our culture has so completely determined the life we experience, we can’t even separate what we’ve been told from what we know ourselves. Imagine if the basis of all our understanding begins with the number two. No matter how much we add to that foundation, we will never comprehend unity. We need to subtract from what we started with to achieve that understanding. We’ve been set up in such a way that Truth is simply not perceptible.”

Then the dream ended and I felt as if anything were possible provided I truly believed in it. It might appear one way to those who see me, but how I experience it is something completely up to me.