God Needs to Grow Up
From Elfi
Contents |
Introduction
God needs to grow up. As a title, it's not a bad one; it's catchy, a little offensive. The truth is that god is an idea and not a thing, and that may offend people more than the title. There was a time not that long ago, when people were sure that this world was the only possible place where anybody could live, (some idiots still believe that,) and they looked up at the stars and saw just dust or tiny holes in the firmament that the sun could shine through. There came a time when people found that the Earth was probably round, and that the universe wasn’t geocentric it was heliocentric - that the Earth wasn’t even the center of the solar system. And not too long after that in the big scheme of things, they found that the solar system wasn’t even the center of the galaxy, that it sits out in a little backwater, a tail of one arm of a spiral galaxy, and it's rotating around some central sun. Perhaps halcyon, some place that’s so far away most of us have never even heard of it. And at a consciousness level, that’s a difficult thing.
Somebody once said: "the absolute most difficult time in the life of any young man, is when he finds out his father is just human." I think this is true of all little kids. It's a difficult time when the superheroes we had as parents turn out to be just as flawed and scared and broken as we are. They're no longer the center of everything, they’re just a tiny piece out in the tail of it all that we're rotating around. Painful, scary, difficult, uncomfortable, this time realizing that our parents are not all that.
As for the consciousness of something more, something larger than just humans on this planet: the idea that we are not the center of everything, that there isn’t some god up there watching because we are the absolute epitome of creation and everything else is just for our amusement, but rather we're one insignificantly tiny piece of something so vast... that is a painful growing up, but it's a necessary growing up. If you got to age 18, or 25, or 40, and still thought your parents were superheroes, listen to me: they're not. You’d be angry and frustrated because they are not flying through the air and creating world peace, or making your relationship OK, or telling your boss he's a jerk and whatever else needs done. You’d have all kinds of frustration because your expectations are wrong. It's necessary to let go of the childhood ideas. Santa Claus, the easter bunny, a vicious, narrow-minded avenging god.
God Needs to Grow Up
Now if you look not at the idea but the feeling, its easier to see what the feeling is of just about anybody in this world who talks about god. They'll use lots of big fancy words: omnipotent, creator of the universe, omniscient. In substance, though, if you look at it, if you look at the feeling behind the word “god” when almost anybody says it, it is insular, it is like the tight husk on a seed, there is a feeling of “big” relative to human. A big, powerful entity, that's hovering right over the Earth and watching everyone's every move. That there is something bigger, smarter, more powerful than humans, in the Earth orbit, manipulating human destinies. This isn’t god, this is some sadistic meddler, and yet this is the feeling that everyone evokes when they speak of god. Their surface may be all kinds of different things, fear, awe, irrelevance. But the substance of the feeling is of something close at hand, that’s leaning over - looming over - and watching everything. It is this idea of god that needs to grow up.
The Lizard Brain
Humans have left the caves, the trees, and built huge cities and traveled this world. But their minds and the fundamental emotions are still those of some primitive creature who lives in the caves scared of the dark, or hides in the trees frightened of the predators below. Humans still, no matter how advanced they might be, like Einstein, or perhaps even Ghandi... when they walk into a new situation, something deep in their guts, something in the lizard brain, says, "All right... Is this thing big enough to eat me, should I be scared?" And if not, it's something like, "Can I take advantage of it? Can I eat it?" And if not, the thoughts turn sexual. This sounds simplistic, but most of human perceptions and responses to those perceptions occur in a simple way in any new situation. A given person will say, "Will it eat me, can I eat it, can I fuck it?" This is an incredibly primitive thing, and it might work for a raccoon.
There are people who build nuclear bombs and vehicles that travel the world, even leave the world and go to other places. People can no longer afford to have this emotion set that comes from a time when they were so primitive. They need to grow up and leave that behind, in the same way they left behind the idea that their parents were superheroes. And in this same way, this same thing, they need to leave behind the idea of an insular god. God needs to grow up.
Does God Exist?
So the idea that there is somebody in the Earth orbit, watching over everything, waiting to pounce, is preposterous. Is there such a creature, that depends on a mythology, to believe in? The idea of this infinite god? Well, something that hovers in one place is not omnipresent. Something that is obsessed with watching and judging, is not omniscient. And something that demands sacrifice, faith, belief, and ignorance, and all the insanity that religions have talked about is definitely not all-loving. It's a tiny, broken, probably vicious little bugger that needs to be put out of its misery.
If you lived in a little tiny tribe, in Papua New Guinea, or some other place that’s a little further from the center of things, and you had never seen anybody but the 30 people in your tribe, you might believe the shaman when he or she said that your god was the powerful god that controlled everything. But if somehow you got a hold of a television, and were able to see the mass of cities, and great ships, and planes flying through the air, you’d suddenly think your tiny god of your tiny part of the world wasn't so huge anymore.
Humans are moving with a new awakening. We are moving out of our fundamental subconscious geocentric orbit into a galactic orbit. Someday it could get bigger still and we could perceive the whole universe, but for now at least people are starting to see it. And this is just one small part of the galaxy. Our consciousness, awareness, needs to evolve with that idea that no god of this world can be all powerful, any more than a little tiny god in Papua New Guinea who’s never even heard of airplanes can possibly be running the world.
Now, as long as we believe in this narrow minded, judgmental, watching-our-every-move little god, even if we call it all-knowing and all-loving and speak with faith and hope and love and all the silliness on these balloons without turtles attached. The turtle, the fundamental feeling, is something narrow minded and insular. This idea of god needs to expand.
Expanding Your View
When we speak of god, if we do, it should be a bit more like the Force in Star Wars. God is the creative source, the one that has created everything. It's far from where we are, but permeates everything. People probably are not ready for such a universal view, but at least on a galactic view they can see. In this galaxy, the judgmental, cruel, vicious god of one tiny world cannot possibly be running everything. And so people can start to look for something more abstract.
Perhaps there are sentient, non-human entities that look like reptiles, or are as big as planets or live in microscopic worlds, with a god that is the creative force, the spiritual center of the soul, of all the different species. It can't be a Yaweh or an Allah, or a Krishna. It can't be something with this tight, constraining, controlling, looking over your shoulder, squeezing sort of attitude. As people have shed the idea that this world is the center of everything, and most of them have, so too they need to shed these ideas that their primitive gods are the center of all that is holy.
It's like an eggshell that they've outgrown; it squeezes them down and they can't breathe. They need to shatter this eggshell, they need to destroy this idea of god. They don’t have to believe something new, they need to stand up and stretch little wings and look around and see that there’s something new, see that the tiny little eggshell that held them is now just crumpled bits they can stomp on or peck at or toss out of the nest and forget.
Perhaps less than seeing it as something aggressive (or more than seeing it as something aggressive) imagine you’ve been asleep someplace cold. You’ve got a blanket tightly wrapped around you and you’re squeezed in there. The sun comes up, the day is beautiful, there’s much ahead of you. It's time to go out and explore your world, but you’re lying in bed covered up in these blankets. You can't even get up to pee. You definitely can't go out, dance in the sun and celebrate the wonderful things that could happen to you. The primitive ideas of god that have held this world in sway for so long are like that blanket. Perhaps they’ve helped it, perhaps they’ve kept it warm and safe through the night. But it's time to stand up and shed the blankets. Just let them drop to the floor, fold them up and toss them in a corner; you don’t need them anymore.
The Pilgrim's Progress
Perhaps sometime 10,000 or 100,000 years from now, when we go back into the next night of the cycle, you'll want to pull out those dark, dusty, narrow-minded ideas of a manipulative and judgmental deity looking over your shoulder so you can wrap yourself up in them and feel safe. I’m guessing not, though. I'm guessing this is much more of an eggshell than a blanket. But for those who have loved the idea of god or have been taught that they should love the idea of god and are at some deep level addicted to it, it may be easier to see it as a blanket than an eggshell. To see yourself standing up and stepping into the light, taking these primitive ideas, (and again you can't see this so much as feel it deep in your guts) this idea that has weighted you down and wrapped you up... you can stand up straight and shed that, you can let it fall away.
There’s an image in an old Christian movie called the Pilgrims Progress of a man walking with so much weight on his back he can hardly stand. At one point he stands up and the weight falls away and it rolls down the hill. He can stand up and breathe and look at the sky and dance.
It's a bit like that. The current ideas of god are this huge weight we carry around. All we have to do is stand up straight and let them drop. And I guarantee you that if you do, within three generations people will look back and say, why did they carry that weight all the time of an awful judgmental god, sending them to hell, or whatever religious equivalent of its narrow-minded, insular, manipulative, judgmental, over-your-shoulder deity? Why did they keep that for so long? People won't be atheists, they won't be heathens. They'll still be spiritual, because humans are spiritual, but their spirituality will be set to something much larger.
Primitive Navigation
Most people don’t know why a moth flies into a flame or bounces into a light bulb. It's pretty simple: that creature evolved in a time where during the day the world was lit by the sun, in the night by the moon - just this single big light. And it's far enough away, that if you set it exactly to your right, at 90 degrees from you, and fly keeping it at 90 degrees from you, you'll go in a straight line. That may not make sense to someone who doesn’t know the math of it. But if you take something in the distance and keep it in the same place in your peripheral vision, you'll walk in a straight line. It's a bit like looking up at a star in the sky and keeping it exactly to your right and walking. You won't walk in circles, say, in a desert or someplace where you lack landmarks. Moths, insects, fly the same way. They pick a distant light source, the sun or the moon, keep it at the same angle in their vision, and go straight forward. It works beautifully, it has for millions of years. But if you take that light and put it someplace close to them, and they fly trying to keep it exactly at 90 degrees from them, they'll go forward a little bit and say “oh the light's behind me” and they’ll turn, go forward a little bit and say “oh, the light's behind me” and they'll turn. And they'll keep turning until they end up going in a circle. And in time that circle will get smaller and smaller until they bang into the light bulb, or burn up in the flame.
Trying to navigate by this primitive idea that is just no longer relevant destroys them.
Trying to function in a galactic scheme in a larger galaxy with these ideas of a local, eggshell, planetary deity, is not helpful; you'll end up flying into the flame.
So, if humanity as a whole, but more importantly, any individual, wants to progress, right now one of the most important steps they can make is to require their ideas of god to grow up. To let go of the idea of an insular god looking over their shoulder. This is one of the most important steps you can make – to require your god to grow up. For your idea of god to go from the planetary, to at least the galactic. Spiritually you can't afford to be heliocentric.
The Professor and the Reporter
Now, there are people out there who will say I'm an atheist, that I don’t believe in god; this is irrelevant to me. And I will quote a conversation from, I don’t know when, but a very educated professor type was talking to... perhaps a reporter, and one of the questions that came up was, “do you believe in god?” The intelligent man said, “No, of course not, that’s a silly primitive idea, I don’t need that nonsense.” The reporter asks, it was either, "when you die, are you going to hell?" or perhaps "do you think you'll see that person in heaven?", it was the dark or the light side of that same idea. As soon as the reporter said, "Do you believe in god," the professor said "no, of course not, how silly is that." But when the reporter asks, "Well, do you think you’re going to hell," the professor's response was something along the lines of, "god, I hope not." And it wasn’t humor.
When faced with the idea of hell, this big terrifying, intimidating bullshit idea that’s kept humanity in fear for so long, something deep in your subconscious responds. Even if you don't believe in god, you've heard of movies like Hellraiser, or video games like Doom or Hellgate: London. The idea of demons from a dark place where, if you're not a good person you'll go to be tortured. It does'nt matter how grown up you are, those core ideas are deep in your subconscious. That is, you may not believe in god, and you may not believe in hell because belief is a sort of naive, primitive head insistent on truth, but something deep in your guts thinks they're real. They show up in your nightmares, they own the deepest, darkest parts of your subconscious. And at this level, at the deepest and darkest places, you do believe in god because you live in a world where this idea has caused so much pain and horror, and at times, hope, for a very long time.
This is in the global subconscious, this is deep in your dark recesses inside, and you need to find this place - this deep, dark, hidden place that still believes in a heliocentric (this-planet centered) judgmental, manipulative, watching-over-your-shoulder deity. You need to find these places and start letting them go. It will require you to stand up and look around, and see that there's a whole galaxy out there and more beyond that, and that your primitive, narrow minded - "god said to invade this tribe and so we did. God said to sacrifice your first son to show your belief" - that kind of narrow minded primitive tribal nonsense can no longer be applied to the creator.
You need to find a new spirituality.
What's the Pint of All This?
People, at some level, their spirits are dying and have been for a long time because they don't have a god to believe in. Anybody who’s gone through what some call a dark night of the soul... when a spouse or a child dies, a divorce happens, a job is lost after many years, some major life event, or physical assault or serious crime. People are forced to reevaluate. They look deep inside and say “why am I here, what's the point of all this, does any of it matter?” Those are god questions, those are spirit level things. Is there something bigger than this life? Am I more than a reproductive tool for my genetics to be passed on? More than some phylogenetic inconsequence?
And the problem is that something deep inside you looks for that, and the only thing you find in society to fill it are the many faces of the narrow minded earth goddess, or the evil Yaweh type deity. You look for something deep and spiritual and all you can find is that. It's like being in a desert and heading for a mirage and all you find is sand. You can try and take it in, but it's not gonna satisfy. It isn't what your spirit seeks, which is an opening, an expanding, an increase in power and awareness, and increase in love and light and life. And you can't find this from a narrow, insular, judgmental deity.
Even for those who have some sort of spiritual awakening, where it's like falling in love, suddenly everything's brighter and everything makes sense and it's all clear... Even these, if you watch, in a week or a month or a year have developed into unhappy, frustrated rule slaves. Can I do this? Shouldn’t I do that? Is god watching? Am I going to hell if I say this thing?
People are dying, their spirits are dying, because they cannot find a spirituality that will feed that deep spiritual hunger. And yet there is one that's just not in the mythology of this planet. All we have here is the heliocentric deities, the gods of the tiny villages. So for humans to grow, this spiritual side needs to grow, and for that to happen a larger spirituality needs to evolve. One thats aware of a galactic, universal deity. One that accepts the interconnectedness of all things, the vastness, the underlying power, the mystery, the harmony.
Modern Mystics
A guy named Ken Wilbur wrote a book once, that said that every major physicist in the last 100 or 200 years, every major player in physics in the world, has been a mystic. The idea is you cannot poke deep enough into the science of things without suddenly finding yourself in the mythos, the hidden, the other realm, the magic. So whether you come to this from a childish need for something big to protect you, or from a deep hunger for something spiritual, or from the desperation of a dark night of the soul, or even from the logic and supposedly cold hard facts of science... All of these things hunger for the same, they reach for the same: for a spirituality of the mystery of the vast mythos. Bigger than the tiny gods of any world, for there are many worlds.
It's Time
You need right now, at least a galactic idea of god. And deep in your guts, like Prometheus chained to a rock, you are bound to the primitive ideas of the tribal, the manipulative, the judgmental, the heliocentric gods. Afraid to let go, bound so tightly you can hardly move.
It's time to stand up and drop the chains, come out of the eggshell, kick off the blankets, whatever the metaphor. To explore deep inside and find the last bastions of the tiny earth-centric god and shed them, and replace them with an openness, an awareness, a willingness to look around and see that theres something much larger out there. And when you see that there is, begin to ask the questions.
And when it comes to this search for the divine, for purpose, for meaning, for something more... there's probably one basic, total rule of thumb to keep in mind. That is, "for now, avoid answers." Any answer you get is going to be proven wrong, in 10 or 50 or 100 years, considering the move from heliocentric to something much larger.
Try to avoid answers, just try to get better at asking the questions. And from that perspective, stay open at least to every possibility that comes to you.
That's all.
Lecture transcribed by kattzyze 10-16-2010
Edited for formatting by Mel 24-09-2011
