We imagine Universe and God to have zero tolerance for religious insubordination. This is a monarchical image of God, taken up by the church in its earlier formation. When the rule of the king ended and the democratic rule of the people started, the church quickly took over the vacant position that was abdicated by the King. The King’s throne have walls immediately behind them and all who present themselves at court must prostrate themselves or kneel, because this is an awkward position from which to make a sudden attack. It has perhaps never occurred to Christians that the church was also designed on the model of a King’s court. The rituals in a chapel, the church and the basilica also follow what was followed in the King’s court. This may have been due to a lack of imagination and innovation by the church in that period of history. The authorities who ran the church during those times were primarily theologians, well versed in the understanding of Bible and nothing more. In doing so they implied that God was like a human monarch, afraid of human attacks. It may not have been meant that way, but it turned out that way.
Thus, society’s concept of religion and the concept of human beings who claim oneness with God became a conflict for many. The dilemma and the dichotomy of this artificial truth clashed. The kingly concept of God became an image that lasted for all off 12th century, right up to the 20th century. The truth is so far away from this understanding. Ask any biologist, or an ecologist or a physicist and they will tell you a different story of life and its evolution. The consciousness of any life form is connected with their environment. Thus, the words, I and self, really means the whole universe. The universe is telling us a different story and all religious institutions are telling us a different story. No wonder we remain confused about God and our universe.
This has created a metaphysical handicap and an intellectual handicap. We lack awareness of the basic unity between a living being and its environment. This has led to a serious and dangerous hallucination with religion and a distorted image of God. We are today equipped with immense technological power; this has led to alienation between us and nature. We use technology to fight and destroy nature like a child who possess a box of matches in a cardboard house. We wish to conquer nature instead of intelligently co-operating with nature. We are today eroding and destroying nature, the very house God gave us to live. Planet Earth is God’s gift to human beings, a house for us to live. Passion is a two-way street, one end of it is Conquest that leads to gory violence and the other end is glory that leads to peace. Humankind has always chosen violence over peace to live and sustain. Instead of angelizing our civilization, we have villainized our civilization.
This is the major threat overhanging us, be it western or eastern cultures. We still feel the need to survive and so our actions still remain barbaric, in a made over version from our cave days. We hunt in suits and ties with guns and advanced weaponry, no longer with clubs and stones. It is the act that defines us not the tools we use. We are industrialized on the outside but remain pre-historic on the inside. One of the greatest problems of any republic legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust. Metaphysically, the industrial and the American revolution was a rejection of the dogma of Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot trust yourself or other people, there must be some Superior Authority to keep us all in order.
What if we could trust ourselves and the original sin was a figment of imagination, beautifully crafted to sound like an advertisement to keep religion and the houses of religion in power long after the king’s rule ended. We have the power to trust ourselves, in fact we are exceptionally reliable beings who have been told over years, we are not because in fear we will need a higher being to look up to. The marketing of religion began this way and has never stopped.
This made us go far away from the environment we live in; from the universe we know from the true self we really are. We have been always one with God and the universe. We have strayed away and led away by the Pied Piper of Hamlin and like children we followed all these years to wander into distant lands and distant ways. It is time to come home, it is time to awaken to who you are and from where you came from. The truth will set you free. This is A Higher Conversation.
