Sadness

The bomb crashing through the window and the sudden blast in the room. 

The long dry stretch of desert spreading down from the mountainside.

Sadness

The bloody child’s backpack half buried in blackened and shattered debris. 

Sadness

The shrieks of terror wandering around between the slabs of the shattered building 

looking for a way out into the daylight. 

Far above in the distance reaches of time, the stars stare down silently and impassively.

Sadness

Loosened from the bonds of earth, 

All those souls, at last freed from their pain, fear and grief, soaring upwards to their Home.

Shattered bodies, bones, blood pouring out. 

Sadness

 

Mothers sitting on a patch of cloth laid out on a hot dry desert,

Cradling their starving dying child.

Just a sack of bones, 

The life gone from their hollowed out eyes. 

Nobody cares. 

Still, the stars stare down impassively

At the tiny blue speck in the cold empty darkness of space.

Almost gone.

 

Wait, do you hear something? 

All that noise, all that violence, all that laughing, all that singing, all those explosions,

The wind sighing through the pines,

The busy roar of the surf on the beach, the song of the meadowlark on the fence.

Wait. Do you hear something?

The deathly stillness of the nuclear warhead on top of its column,

Waiting patiently for its time. 

Wait, do you hear something?

The laughing of carefree children racing around in their playground;

The shriek of the air around the fins of the missile racing towards its destination. 

Wait, do you hear something? 

All of that noise fading out as the blue orb fades away in the distance. 

 

Sadness

Does it all mean something?

The joy of two lovers walking on the beach,

Hatred all bottled up in the next howitzer shell about to drop into its tube,

The warmth and love overflowing out of a mother’s arms

into the small trusting infant cradled in bliss. 

The fear and hostility pouring forth from the demagogue's  pulpit.

The whale’s ping in the depths, 

The trillium pushing up through the snow,

The smoke, fire and poison pouring forth from the shattered refinery,

The unheard hiss of the snow blowing off the windswept peak into the abyss below.

 

Does it all mean something? 

Can you hear something?

Sadness

 

From above, the stars and galaxies continue their whirling dance,

From above, a vast Silence.

All around the Universe looks on and enfolds it all in Her everlasting embrace. 

Some Notes on the Nature of God
 
The “Divinity Test”, i.e. the basic qualifications of a divinity
 
Let’s inject some logical thinking into the pondering the nature of “God”. This is not as crazy as it might sound. Any “religion” or spiritual belief system worthy of the name cannot exclude logic or logical thinking. Some religious tenets may go beyond logical thinking – the intuitive and all that. We can label that stuff as “transcending” logic. The clear implication is that some of this intuitive stuff cannot be presently dealt with in a logical fashion, but as knowledge increases, sooner or later, that intuitive stuff which transcended logic now begins to make sense logically.
 
Logic is a system of apprehending that which is, primarily knowledge that has an empirical basis. Therefore empirical knowledge, much of which is road-mapped using logic, is a description of that which is. “That which is”, that is, that which is presently known can be regarded as a description of the known creation, a description of that which was created by Divinity, or indeed, a description of Divinity Itself. Therefore logic is compatible with any valid spiritual or religious belief system.
 
We can infer the inverse of that statement. If logic (and science itself) is compatible with any valid spiritual or religious belief system (or more accurately, and this is very important, any valid religious or spiritual belief system is compatible with logic, science and what is known empirically.  And so the inverse is true: Any religion or belief system that is in conflict with logic, science or empirical knowledge is NOT a valid religion or belief system. We can label those beliefs as “superstition”. This is a very important statement: I cannot overemphasize that. This rule is our guidepost to sanity regarding the multitude of religions and religious belief systems out there.
 
However, it is not my intent to go into the epistemology of religious and/or spiritual belief systems here.
 
The Divinity Test
 
I propose a metaphor here:  Let’s say that there is an occupation called “Divinity” or “God”. A prospective divinity or god is applying for that position. Not just any “god” or “divinity” qualifies for that position. He/She has to meet some basic qualifications to hold that job title.
 
What might those qualifications be. Well, first off, any divinity worthy of the name must be Infinite. Infinite implies a number conditions: First of all, “Infinite” means without beginning or end. So, a valid divinity is immortal – neither born nor capable of dying. Infinite implies no bounds: One cannot say that “Infinity” is not inclusive of this or that. The “this” or “that” cannot exist outside of the “Infinity”.
 
God is Omnipresent
 
From this definition of infinity, we can infer three fundamental “properties” of a Divinity or “Infinite Being”. For the sake of discussion, let’s call this Infinite Being or Divinity “God”. Property #1: God is omnipresent. If God is infinite, there is no place in Space-Time where God is not present. There is no place in the known universe in either the past, present or future where God has not been, is not now, nor in all of the future is not present. Already, a corollary immediately falls out: If we define “Hell” as a place where God is not present, a place where souls exist that are separate from God, then Hell cannot possibly exist. End of story, period. No amount of intellectual sleight of hand can extricate us from that conclusion.
 
God is Omniscient

Property #2: God is Omniscient. If God is infinite, there is nothing that She/He does not know. This is compatible with the definition of omnipresent. If God is everywhere, there is nothing, NOTHING, that this God does not know. God knows everything that happened in the past. God knows everything that will happen in the future. God knows everything that is happening now, right down to the last minute detail, such as the next location of an electron in the corona of one of the multi-billions of stars that exist in the billions of galaxies in the known universe. Just pondering that for a moment is staggering. Another corollary results from this omniscient property:  It is impossible for God to be surprised about anything that happens, much less “regret” it.  Now compare this to Genesis 6:6-7:  6 And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” This is one of the most astounding passages in the entire Bible. In essence, God was surprised that mankind, His creation, had become so evil. Furthermore, He regretted having made them (not just man, but all the animals also). This Old Testament God fails one of the basic qualifications for Divinity. Logical conclusion: The Old Testament God (Jehovah) is a fraud, a Fake God.
 
God is Omnipotent
 
Property #3: God is Omnipotent.  This property follows from the other two. If Divinity knows everything, and is everywhere, then it also follows that nothing takes place or happens which God is not aware of, and gave His assent to, and indeed, made it happen. If your God is not Omnipotent, then He/She is not big enough to be a “real” God. Not being omnipotent implies that there is an entity with a will that exists outside of God and that it can make decisions and can act on its own without the knowledge or assent of God. Another more troubling corollary proceeds from the property of omniscience:  Nothing happens or can happen that God did not permit or actually cause to happen. This is a very troubling corollary that is totally logically consistent with property #3. So, when an earthquake happens and an entire mountainside slides down onto and buries alive dozens of campers in the middle of the night, we have to admit that God let this happen. Furthermore, He/She caused it to happen. Now we are face-to-face with the problem of Evil. “How can a loving God allow this horrible thing to happen to good people?”
 
Indeed, this “loving” God, in December of 2004, caused a strong earthquake to happen far out at sea in the Indian Ocean, giving rise to a huge tsunami that roared ashore on the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Maldives and Thailand and killed more than 225,000 thousand people. God did that.  It’s almost too horrible to contemplate. I suspect that the horror is so overwhelming that it is easy to conclude that God does not exist and life has no meaning. “Why did all those people have to die, so quickly?”
 
Some people deal with it by saying that God did not do that. They absolve God of responsibility for all those deaths. Somehow it was an “accident” or the earth’s fault, or maybe an evil demon caused that earthquake or something like that. They cannot deal with the contradiction posed by “love” and the horror of so much mass death. Other people, I suspect, (though maybe not in public) may have concluded that it was not God Who was evil, or “made a mistake”. They may have concluded, in order to preserve their idea of a “just” God, blamed these mass deaths on the people themselves. “Mankind is sinful, born blind, dead and enemies of God”, and thus deserve punishment like this. God was just meting out justice to wicked sinners who deserved this fate. Presumably, these “wicked sinners” also ended up in an eternal hell a little sooner than their heathen counterparts around them. Besides the enormous moral problems posed, there might be the problem of how to deal with problem posed by all those “righteous people who were right with God” when He drowned them also.
 
Other people deal with this enormous problem of evil by concluding that “God” doesn’t exist and that the tsunami was just a random event that drowned a lot of people by happenstance. Furthermore, the lives of those drowned had no meaning or purpose (the Atheist hypothesis, a very bleak outlook.)
 
If however, one believes in the existence of an Infinite All-powerful, All-wise omnipresent Deity, then that Deity CANNOT escape responsibility of not only having prevented the event, but with having CAUSED the event. And it gets even more challenging.  Take, for example, the Nazi Holocaust, another event of enormous and horrible moral consequences. If one rigorously hews to the principle of Omnipotence, then this omnipotent Deity is not only responsible for permitting this horrible event to happen, but also directly caused it to happen. There is no other way to deal with it. Nothing happens without the permission of, indeed, actually causing it to happen.
 
How can one deal with that? This is an enormous problem. I was not personally present for the Holocaust, nor the Great Tsunami of 2004, so it is easy for me to speak about them on a theoretical basis. Perhaps, because I was not there, I am not qualified to comment about them. My way of dealing with it is in the following manner:  “Nothing matters. Nothing really, really matters.” In the end, it is part of the Universe, the totality of God. And in the end, when I pull away from the scene, far enough away so that I can see the entire planet Earth in my mind’s eye, the totality of what Earth was, is and shall be, is so incredibly beautiful that it takes my breath away. These tragedies only become troubling and “evil” as I get closer and closer to them. I suspect that if I were caught up in the middle of one of them, my personal distress would be so extreme, so painful that I would not be able to make any sense of it. It would just be a devasting event that would have devastated my entire life, so huge that I cannot deal with it on a logical or emotional basis.
 
And yet, the kaon exists: The Infinite Divinity is the source of both “good” and “evil”. I suspect that these are labels that we human beings assign to things and events around us, labeled primarily by the effect that they have on ourselves.
 
God Transends Gender and/or Personality

“God” transcends gender and personality: From the “3 O’s” assumed above, another corollary falls out about the property of “God” or the Divine. This corollary is that God transcends gender and furthermore, God transcends the property of personality itself. I refer you to the Hindu concept of “Brahman”. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/concepts/concepts_1.shtml
 
The Hindu “Brahman” is refers “to a transcendent power beyond the universe”. As such, this “power” or Presence is all-encompassing, is universally present and transcends everything and everyone. As such, God therefore, cannot be confined to a single gender.  God cannot be labeled “He” as is common in the Bible. God could just as well be labeled as “She”, the female gender. This property or fact alone comes into conflict with the claims of the Bible, which, from the 5th verse in Genesis 1, labels God as “He”. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. (New King James version.) The Bible, as a document, limits God to the male gender. Since the Biblical God is absent from the female gender, already we see that the Biblical doctrine of God limits God’s omnipresence. God is a “He”, therefore “He” cannot be present also as a “She”. This would be standard practice for a patriarchal religion, and thus not a “universal” religion. Indeed, as will be dealt with later, the Old Testament God is far from being a Universal God. “He” picks out a special people, the Hebrews, to be His special people. “He” also dictates a complicated set of rules that His “special” people should obey and follow which specifically sets them apart from all other people. Thus the Old Testament God is a very exclusive God. Very few people get to belong to His club. This is quite the antithesis to an omnipresent or universally transcendent God.
 
Furthermore, since “God” or Divinity is infinite, eternal transcendent power that pervades everybody and everything, past, present and future, “God” cannot even be confined to a single distinct “person”. God transcends the concept of personhood. In my words, God is also an “It”, and non-personal (or more accurately) a trans-personal Being. Even trying to contemplate this becomes a mind-stretching exercise that defies definition or classification of any kind. About all one can really do is to “experience” it. God, is after, primarily an experience, as we are all participating in the Divine, and conversely, the Divine is participating in us. So, all I can do is to label God as “He/She/It” or “It/She/He”, encompassing both genders and a localized personality itself.
 
Many, if not most people cannot deal with the concept of God on an impersonal level. The Hindus were aware of this and made allowances for this. So, God can be personal, and indeed very personal. So, for some people, God becomes “Brahman”, that is, big-B Brahman, a distinct person that one can personally relate to and worship. The Hindus had no problem with other people or peoples apprehending God as other personalities and worshipping God as them also. So the Hindus have “other gods”, such as Krishna, or Shiva, Kali (a ferocious female deity). So also, the universal God could be understood by different peoples as “Jehovah” or “Jahveh” or “Elohim” (for our Jewish friends), or simple “God” or the “Trinity” by our Christian friends. Our Muslim friends know God as “Allah”, of course. Others know God as “The Great Spirit. Some knew God as “Zeus” or “Jupiter”. Others knew God as “Osiris” or “Horus”, et. al. ”. And the list goes on and on and on.
 
A critical difference here, though, is on the issue of exclusivity. The Hindus (and other universalists) have accepted that “God” can be approached in a multitude of different ways, according to the cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds of different peoples. Each approach is just accepted as just another approach to the same Divinity.  Or as I like to put it:  “All rivers lead to the same ocean.” Other religions, especially the patriarchal ones, are hung up on exclusivity. Many of them insist that their approach to God is the only correct one and that ALL other approaches are wrong and lead to a false god. This insistence on exclusivity can become very strong, leading to violence, torture, murder, warfare and ultimately to genocide. I suspect that this insistent approach on exclusivity is a manifestation of “cultural or religious narcissism” and is a characteristic of the tribal nature of humankind.
 
So, in my reading of Upanishads, there is the capital B (Brahman), the personal God or Divinity. Most humans want to relate other beings on a personal level. There is also the small b (brahman), or the impersonal God or Divinity. Most Hindus do not worship the small-b brahman. It is an impersonal evanescent transcendent Presence that pervades all things.
 
On another note, explored below, since God is omnipresent or pervades all things, It, God, also pervades (and dwells in) all human beings. This is the doctrine of “atman” or “Atman”.
 
God Indwells Every Human Being
 
Omnipresence corollary:  God is present in each and every human being. (The doctrine of “atman” or “Atman”)
 
If one assumes that God is omnipresent or pervades all things, then God is certainly present in all human beings. In fact, this “God” dwells within all human beings, and furthermore, cannot ever be alienated from, nor separated from the human being itself. Thus this indwelling of God, both physical and psychic, is a fundamental property of and inalienable quality of all human beings.
 
The consequences of this teaching are very profound and universal in scope:

1. Whatever bad thing we do to any human being, we do to God. When we hate and persecute other human beings, we are hating and persecuting God Him/Her/Itself.

2. All human beings are literally family.

3. All human beings are created equal, as stated in our own Declaration of Independence.

4. Because all human beings are participate in the same Divinity, all human beings are part of ourselves individually. Thus the Golden Rule is born: “Whatsoever ye would that other people do unto you, do so unto them.” In other words, the Golden Rule is based on the assumption of the family-hood of all human beings.

5. All human beings, by virtue of being human beings, are endowed with inalienable rights, i.e. those rights that we would accord to ourselves. Thus, the concept of Divine Omnipresence results in the concept of human rights.

6. Another very important corollary that results from this doctrine of the universal divinity of humankind is that the Christian doctrines of original sin and/or total depravity cannot be correct description of reality. Thus the doctrines of Original Sin and Total Depravity are totally mistaken and invalid. Therefore, these two doctrines need not be feared or trusted. I will deal with this more at length later.

A Beach Experience
 
Written on 2-30-2007
 
I sat on the beach, bundled up in my “foulies” (sailor foul weather gear). The wind was cold, and sun alternated with showers. I sat of a long time and allowed myself to get pulled into the drama of the sunlight, the roaring surf, the clouds, the wind and the beach. Several time I felt an urge to get up and leave, but I sat with it as the showers slowly approached. The sun went away, the wind picked up and I was pelted with wind, rain and sleet. Still I sat with it. The 2nd shower left me and the beach with a cold layer of white sleet.
 
After the 2nd shower, my attention was drawn to the sun which soon returned from hiding behind the clouds. It came out and bathed the beach with warmth and glorious yellow light. Everything lit up. Up until then, my senses had been full – the roar of the surf, the panorama of sun, surf, clouds, gulls, sand, clouds, the freezing cold, the smell of my parka and salt air. But then I began to feel emotion. The sea had gotten to my emotions. I came close to tears, certainly goose bumps. I felt full.
 
Afterward I examined the emotions I felt. The nearest parallel that I could come up with is the feeling I have when I’m close to someone I love. That it! I felt loved. Then I realized that the sea – she had “loved” me. She had shared her love with me. Weird, huh?
 
OK – the Sea is in her integrity – just as she has been in for billions of years. We humans live in a “demand” culture. We click a button on the remote and expect action. “OK, I’m here – now love me!” But Mother Nature, in her integrity, does not immediately honor our demands. We must honor Her first. Be patient and sit with Her. Sit through the sun and the wind. Sit through the freezing uncomfortable sleet. Be willing to be cold, bored and uncomfortable. Wait for Her. At last, in Her integrity, at a time of Her choosing, She will sneak up on you and bestow Her gifts.
 
So my point is, realize that the Sea is in her integrity. She is doing and being just what She does and is, for millions of years. She speaks to everybody who is willing to honor Her integrity. Be patient, be quiet, endure discomfort and listen. Her gift is worth the wait.
 
OK, my 2nd point: We sometime impute violence to the Sea. She comes sometimes with fierce storms that cause damage, uproot trees and flood the place. Violence, however, is a value judgement. Nature is in her integrity as I said. She is and does as She has always done. If we call it violence, we are valuating Her behavior with regard to its effects on us. We are anthropocentric – we expect Mother Nature to revolve around us and our desires. The is infantile foolishness. Accord to Mother Nature the respect of an independent existence, Her own intentions and purposes and adjust your own behavior and expectations accordingly. You’ll be much happier. If you go sailing on Mother Sea in a small 35 foot sailboat in the winter gales, get into trouble, sink and drown, its not Mother Sea’s fault. She only being what She has always been. You can only blame your own foolish intention.