Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Exiling the Lawgivers from the Psyche

There was a woman comedienne, I forget exactly which one, who once said, "when we talk to God, it is called prayer, but when God talks back to us, it is called schizophrenia."

This joke does an excellent job of pointing out the trouble with religion: it makes itself (and anyone who listens for the voices of the quantum realm) crazy in the eyes of the collective. I get this all the time, most recently from the lady I wrote about in my other blog who accused me of being "scientological" for using the I Ching the way I do. And then there's the O'Reilly crowd that would brand one such as I as a tree-hugging freak who hates America, Budweiser, and football (two out of three ain't bad, though Bill: I'm not that crazy about football, and Budweiser sucks). So the equation of mysticism, spirituality, and derealization is a real problem, you might say the biggest problem that fellows like me encounter in society. Moses was an avowed mystic, for example, and we are to this very moment still struggling to get out from under the massive stone tablature of Commandment that his mysticism dropped onto our heads. Hell, we're still arguing about it in our highest courts and legislatures.

To me, the ultimate in spiritual understanding is the realization that when a bush burns, nothing comes of it but smoke and ashes. Then it's simply a matter of clearly sensing that they too, are alive with consciousness.

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