Enlightenment

When I was in college and Alan Watts was hot, I thought enlightenment was a sudden flash. Bang–Nirvana–I'm now an enlightened being. That's like thinking God literally created the universe and then rested in seven 24-hour days.

Enlightenment is more like the creation: it can start with a big bang of insight, an epiphany, but it is a progressive, constantly evolving process of awareness.

The creator is reflected in creation. We reflect the creator and recapitulate creation in our own lives–we start with a big bang and evolve over time.

Time magazine arranged a debate [9/30/2006] between the scientist Richard Dawkins, author of the recent book, The God Delusion, and Francis Collins, a Christian biologist. In the very last sentence in the debate, Dawkins, a self-proclaimed atheist, states:

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything any theologian has ever proposed.

I think this statement stirs the heart of a large number of modern people who are faced with the paradox of the mythological overlay that still dominates almost all the religions of the world and the manner in which they are presented, and the discoveries of modern physics, cosmology and astronomy, which have still not begun to seep into the consciousness of modern humans.

The earth is a planet revolving around one star, the Sun, in the Milky Way galaxy, which has 250 +-150 billion stars. And there are 2 trillion galaxies. If the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo rattled the mindset of the medieval mind, it seems to me that Dawkins is crying out "your understanding of God is too small".

Then again, what of non-locality, the quantum hologram, and the transfinite sets of the mathematician, Georg Cantor. Much of modern Information Technology (IT) is based on these principles, which are totally foreign, to our linear, binary mindsets. This unconscious bifurcation is creating great unrealized tensions within individuals and societies on a global scale.

I remember hearing at a weekend retreat "The Catholic church is falling apart because it is too small to contain the [Holy] Spirit."

I would expand that statement to say that the planet is falling apart because our enculturated mindsets are so narrow, we will destroy one another rather than change. Want an example? One group labels the other "the great satan"; another group labels the holders of this outlook as "the axis of evil". These minds mirror one another.

I have come to realize God as a spiritually expansive substance extending throughout and beyond the cosmos; a much more universal presence than that proposed by many organized religions. God, I found, was everything, and being godlike meant identifying with, and not merely tolerating, more and more people. Understanding that the idea of God signified absolute unity, I concluded that anyone advocating unquestioning loyalty to a restrictive group such as a faith, ethnicity, or nation was in fact promoting the fall of humanity by advancing its division.