THE BIG PICTURE

The Secret of Happiness is knowing who you are.

Perhaps you have wondered about the big picture – the Big Bang, the universe, life, evolution, our sometimes enlightened more often savage history, the purpose of life, God. How to make sense of it all?

Life is a mystery for which science has no explanation. For the most part, we can tell when something is living and when it’s not. We know that there is a difference between a living being and a corpse, and viva la différence! We know that babies are born alive. We know that they are made by the union of a living sperm and a living egg. We know that our bodies somehow create either living sperm or living eggs. Somehow that spark of life is transmitted thru us. But that’s really about all we know of this miracle that we are. Oh sure, we know a lot about the chemistry of life, we know a lot about life processes, but all we know about the spark of life is either it’s there or it’s not.

Just for simplicity, imagine that God is the living being that we call the universe. God is the universe. We can tune in to any aspect -- mountains, trees, waterfalls, flowers, the sun – and not only sense the spirits of these entities but get real and useful answers to our questions. God is everything and God is in everything. Direct communication to Source is possible thru any part. All we have to do is ask.

Sure, you can go off on speculations that God is not the universe: God is an energy being that is creating the universe. Or the universe if just a figment of God’s imagination, this is all a dream. Or the universe is just an accident of energy: there is no God. You are welcome to explore such options to your heart’s content, and if you find anything that makes any practical difference in our lives, I would love to hear about it. But in the meantime, let’s just keep it simple. God is the living being that we call the universe. James Lovecraft’s Gaia Hypothesis has offered considerable evidence that our Mother Earth is alive, and from there, it is a fairly short step to conclude that the universe as a whole is alive. You can check out Gregg Braden and others for considerable speculation on the subject.

Trying to understand God is pointless. We can understand many aspects of how the universe works, but we have about as much chance of understanding God as a computer has of understanding Bill Gates. How can we grasp a being that appears to be around fourteen billion years old and twenty-eight billion light years in diameter, and who may exist in other dimensions besides the space-time continuum with which we are familiar?

We can, however, physically experience God in a variety of ways, as simple and direct as appreciating a flower or a sunset. Through meditation we can experience God as the miracle of our breath, as white light, as the energy that is keeping us alive, as infinite compassion, as utter holiness, as beauty beyond description, as the cosmic vibration or music of the spheres, as the peace beyond thought, etc. When folks have such experiences, their view of life changes.

Our most important question is what is our connection to God? We may not be able to understand God, but because we are parts of God, we can explore our connection. It is easy to say we are cells in the lifestream of the Great Mystery, but we can be more specific.

God has endowed us with free will. This is our most significant attribute. The purpose of our brains is to exercise our free will with intelligence. All life on this planet has a degree of free will. Life is God’s experiment in free will, answering God’s question, “How can I create a being that operates independently of me?” We human beings are the highest expression of free will on this planet. Perhaps even the inanimate has something like free will, because quantum physics tells us that there is an indeterminacy in the atoms and smaller particles that make up matter. If you plant the same species of tree in a row, they will not sprout identical branches. Therefore where the branches sprout is not a simple mechanical response to the environment. Here is that indeterminacy, the beginnings of free will, within each tree telling it where to sprout branches.

We have an enormous amount of free will, more than any other creature on Mother Earth. We choose our actions every minute of the day. Furthermore, our technology has considerably increased the scope of our free will. Steam engines, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, computers, the internet, Ipods, Blackberries, Iphones, Kindles, etc. have all enormously increased what we can do and when we can do it. For $20,000,000 we can even take a flight in space. The rich have more free will than the poor, because they can choose such extravagances. But also the more intelligent you are, the more free will you have, because you can see more options. As a wise man told me when I was 16, all you have to do is live awhile and die. Everything else is up to you. What a wonderful statement of free will!

Free will creates an apparent paradox. The paradox is that since there is nothing that is not God and we are parts of God, everything we do is God’s will regardless of whether we think it is free will. But this is just a confusion of  levels. In giving us free will, God determined that we should be able to choose our values and choose our paths, anything from the Path of Love to being a suicide bomber. We have choice, even tho everything we do is within the framework of God’s will.

However, we have tended to believe that we are separate from God, which made it easy to believe that we have free will – according to some we are using our free will to be sinners, disobeying God, which is not a very accurate notion. We are simply toddlers, exercising our free wills without awareness of the less immediate consequences. We are therefore appropriate subjects for compassion, not judgment. We have the potential to evolve out of our ignorant use of will. All of history can be seen as the gradual evolution of consciousness, and as we gain understanding of what we are, we start to use our wills in a less ignorant, childish fashion.

Some scientists have been trying to prove we don’t have free will, because it appears our brains unconsciously know what we are going to do before we make a decision. But that situation could just as easily be interpreted as being how, using our free will, we make a decision. If we did not have free will, then we would simply be waifs amid forces over which we have no control. While to some extent that may be true, particularly when faced with war or natural disasters, we all know that we make conscious decisions in a very wide scope of areas, ranging from what color underwear we’re going to wear this morning to whether we’re going to choose a particular career. Would we rather assume we have free will and take responsibility for our choices, or just claim the Devil made me do it?

Some of us expend a good deal of energy trying to reconnect with God. The yogis and saints who wish to merge with God surrender their free will: they just want to do God’s will. But God might well reply, “You’re pretending to turn your free will over to Me, but of course you’re the one who is imagining what My will is. So why don’t you take responsibility in the first place and say you’re part of Me, co-creating with Me, and this is what you believe to be an appropriate direction for you?”  You can “let go and let God,” but that is simply tuning in to a deeper place within yourself.

Our purpose is not to merge with God, altho merging can be a beautiful, temporary experience of transcendental holiness. It’s important to love God back, to embrace our creator, and say wow! Thank you for this wonderful gift of life. But then we go forward. What are we supposed to do with this wonderful gift of life? Our purpose is to explore what we can make of our talents and our free will. Free will is both a curse and a blessing. It is a curse because God is everything, and God will support us in whatever values and course of action we choose. God supports the Path of Love, and God supports the path of war. God supported Osama bin Laden and George W Bush just as much as God supported Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King. Of course it may be that the Path of Love is a finer and deeper joy than the paths of deadly competition and power over, but it seems that folks have to discover that for themselves. If you think God only supports the paths of love and righteousness, you are ignoring what is actually happening in this world, or expecting rewards and punishments to be meted out in the next world, which may or may not be the case.

Free will is a blessing because we can choose the Path of Love and Peace and Cooperation. It is entirely up to us what values we choose and act upon. We are entering an age where we both know that we have free will and know we are parts of God – the Age of Aquarius –  and we have the opportunity to use our free will to explore the Path of Love as best we can. Buckets of holy bliss are available to us, and we can pass it out in every hug we give. Make no mistake. Consciously or unconsciously we choose our values, and our values determine how we act, and thus how much we enjoy life.

Human society has always felt that free will is too dangerous to handle, and has always set artificial limits to rein it in. For centuries the patriarchy asserted that only those in power -- lords, kings, and popes --  had the right to exercise their free wills while everyone else had to obey, and even those in power were constrained in a variety of ways. In our society the government says that we cannot exercise our free wills in ways large and small. If children go to public school, they are required to receive vaccinations despite parental objections. We are not allowed to drive as fast as we please except on the German autobahns. Some substances such as LSD, XTC, and even marijuana are deemed too dangerous to allow anyone to consume them. We lost our religious freedom in 1878 when the Supreme Court ruled that Mormons could not have more than one wife, not for the good practical reason available, but because it was an affront to conventional morality. The practical reason is that if some men take more than one wife, other men may not be able to find a wife, and that is a denial of their right to marry and procreate. Why should “conventional morality” trump one’s religious practice? -- but that is what the Supreme Court said. The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution says that all the rights not enumerated in the first eight amendments are reserved by the people. As early as the 1830’s, the Supreme Court started to determine that the amendment didn’t mean anything, because too much free will jeopardized the fabric of society. On and on and on. Perhaps it is time to respect this great gift of free will and grant it the maximum scope consistent with preserving the rights of others. Once we realized that we are all equal beings, as so clearly announced in our Declaration of Independence, then it became a matter of simple justice that we should have a right not to be unduly controlled by others, in ways ranging from slavery to profiteering.

For those who say we have no free will because we’re simply a product of our conditioning and our conditioning determines what choices we make, I respond that free will is always within a matrix. The physical matrix allows us do to certain things and does not allow us to do others. Likewise, our conditioning may enable us to do certain things and not do others, but anywhere there is choice, we have a degree of free will, even if that choice is determined by our conditioning and our culture. If you can decide what you are going to eat for dinner tonight, you have free will in that regard. If you can decide what college you want to apply to, you have free will in that regard. If you can decide whether you want to marry a particular person, you have free will in that regard. Free will is so obvious that to me it seems foolish to debate whether we have it or not. If we are capable of debating whether we have free will, that in itself is proof that we have it.

The time-space matrix in which we live provides natural limits to our free will. No one can run a three minute mile. No one can fly by flapping their arms. No one can live without breathing. No one can go for very long without sleeping. No one can live forever. Etc.

The matrix also provides two natural restraints to free will. The first is the great Law of Karma. We get back what we put out, and thereby learn the consequences of exercising our free will. The second is the element of indeterminacy, of randomness. There is a random element in our world, ranging from the evidence of quantum physics to the behavior of a fly or the moods of a baby. Much of the time the Great Mystery will answer our dreams, but sometimes, purely by accident, It won’t. Much of the time the Great Mystery will bless us with all kinds of abundance, but sometimes It won’t. Thus we learn to deal with surprises, which may be inexplicable disasters, like a forty year old freeway bridge collapsing. Of course the surprises can also be wondrously good. Then we may think the Great Mystery did it by design, but it may still just be randomness. We often cannot tell whether our great good fortune or great misfortune is a product of design such as an application of the Law of Karma, or simply the element of randomness. As we learn to deal with this challenge, we take a major step in understanding and appreciating our relationship to the Divine. We are not simple beings, and we do not live in a simple reality. Reality is so much more mysterious and interconnected than it seems.

Does the theory of indeterminacy mean that God never intervenes in the affairs of humans? Not at all! Humans have recorded innumerable instances of miracles, of seeming divine intervention.  I discuss my ayajuasca miracle and others at length in the chapter on Guidance. We don’t know the how of this, and can only speculate on what actually happens. For all we know, our own energy is somehow creating these miracles. It’s good to separate what we know from what we don’t.

We are always subject to randomness, to indeterminacy, and no matter how much we process, we always have a dark side, an unconscious part that may rear its usually ugly head at the most inopportune moments. If you look at the biographies of Mother Teresa or Gandhi or Martin Luther King, you quickly discover that they were acutely aware of their dark sides, considered themselves to be constant failures, and continually struggled to do God’s will as they saw it. Gurus like Rajneesh or Jim Jones or Chogyam Trungpa have been brought down by their dark sides. The combination of the random indeterminacy of existence and our own dark unconscious parts makes exercising our free wills a considerable challenge.

It seems fair to say that we are God’s experiment in free will. Can the Great Mystery make a creature that acts independently from Itself? The evident way to do this is to create creatures with free will. Consequently, the Adam and Eve myth might be redeemed from the view that they were sinners and were punished by being cast out of the garden:

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God created Adam and Eve, and created the luscious, lovely Garden of Eden for them to live in. He told them not to eat of the tree of knowledge. For a period of time Adam and Eve enjoyed themselves, exploring the various beauties and delectable food that the garden offered. After awhile they grew a little bored, and became curious about the wondrous red apples on the tree of knowledge. One day they said why not? and both tasted the delicious fruit. They played with it. Adam squeezed apple juice over Eve’s body, and then licked it off. “Hey!” Eve said, “That feels really good when you lick me there. Do it some more.” Adam did, and was soon exploring all parts of Eve’s body. They worked into a frenzy of enjoyment, and discovered they could make love just as they had seen some of the animals in the garden do. Wow! They had never experienced anything like this. Like any newly married couple, they wanted to do it all the time. Eventually they grew tired and sore. “We’ve got to stop,” Adam said. “Yes,” answered Eve, “I wonder ... most of the animals have fur, so their sexual parts aren’t quite as prominent as ours are. Maybe if we covered ourselves we wouldn’t be quite so eager.” “Great idea!” enthused Adam, and they wove themselves some skirts out of fig leaves.

After a few days God came down to check up on them. “What are you doing with those fig leaves?” God asked. Adam and Eve happily told them the whole story. “Wait a bit,” said God. “Didn’t I order you not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge?”

“Yes,” answered Adam, “but we couldn’t see why we shouldn’t. Everything else is so wonderful here, and now we’ve discovered the most wonderful activity of all.”

“So you’ve disobeyed a direct order from me?” asked God, double checking.

“We sure did,” said Eve smiling. “It didn’t seem like any big deal, and it turned out to be the best treat yet. Why did you forbid us?”

“Eureka!” exclaimed God, ignoring her question. “I’m a success! You have ignored a direct order. I have finally created a creature with genuine free will. You are now complete human beings, just as I intended. But I warn you, free will is a double edged sword.”

“What’s a sword?” asked Adam.

“You’ll find out,” sighed God. “Go forth and celebrate, become caring stewards of this land. Remember that I am always available for Guidance any time your way is not clear. All you have to do is ask.”

So Adam and Eve went forth, to conceive and raise Cain and Abel. Unfortunately they all forgot about asking God for Guidance, and what ensued was an exercise in free will characteristic of very young beings, like two year olds, but very often not what is joyous, compassionate, or honorable. The unguided use of free will has brought humans to the brink of utter catastrophe. It is time to remember.

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We can be aware that we are parts of God, and what God told Adam and Eve still holds true. Any time we ask for Guidance, we can receive answers. But this is where the Catch 22 begins. We can only hear God through the filters we have programmed inside our heads. If we ask what would Jesus do? and our concept of Jesus is the son of God who lived 2000 years ago and all we know about Him is what the Bible says, we may not get very good answers. If our concept of Jesus is the 2000 year old wise living being that he may actually be, we may get much better answers. Such concepts are our filters.

If our filters suggest the best way to get to Heaven is to put cyanide in the Kool Aid and kill everybody, we will think that is God’s advice. God is not just the God of Love: God is the God of everything – love and hate, justice and domination, beauty and horror. Osama bin Laden considered himself a sincere, spiritual man. He asked God for Guidance and got it. He may have thought he was appealing to the God of Justice or Retribution. When asked how he could reconcile killing innocent men, women, and children, he said he was just following the example of the United States, as demonstrated during World War II in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

So the question becomes, what aspect of God do you wish to receive Guidance from?  So many of us worship the Gods of Greed and Gluttony; so many practice patriarchy and think of God as Lord ruling over us. Because we have free will, the aspect of God we choose to tune in to is entirely our choice. But the great Law of Karma always applies. Currently the Law of Karma is spruced up and retitled the Law of Attraction – “The Secret.” It seems primarily concerned with greed, relationship, and health, and this is a debasement. The Law of Karma applies to everything. Of course if you put out good vibes, you’re more likely to get back good vibes. But the Law of Karma has a challenging corollary. You may get back what you put out, but every value has a dark side, and unless you fully process that dark side, you are likely to get that back as well. Thus if you seek wealth, you may get wealth, but you may also get a subtle discontent that says no amount of money is enough, nor can you ever buy enough to make you happy. You may seek health and find that you have cancer. You may seek relationship and discover that hell is other people.

Most religions teach that the highest path is the Path of Love. Love is the lubricant that makes all things in life go well. Does it have a dark side? You may be practicing love as best you can, and still be murdered by those who do not practice love. Witness Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, even John Lennon. Other than that, and occasionally not having your loving efforts returned or appreciated, the Path of Love is our best hope of returning to the Garden of Eden. It has the most positive and least negative karma associated with it.

The different aspects of God can be represented by different values. I have been talking about the value of love, which is guided by the God of Love, or that aspect of God which is love. If you give God your love, it is returned ten fold, a hundred fold. You can feel directly the exquisite love God has for us. Some honor the God of Justice, and while justice is an excellent and important value, one person’s idea of justice is another person’s idea of utter barbarism. Witness the American so-called justice system, which works so well that two-thirds of released prisoners are returned to jail. Or witness the Zionists who think it’s perfectly just to continually steal the Palestinians’ lands and treat them like dirt. Some choose to serve the God of War, and as Christ said so eloquently, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. Some serve the God of Progress, but this god does not seem to be very clear about defining the direction, and consequently much of our so-called progress is counter-survival. Is it truly progress to use up all the oil, catch all the fish out of the oceans, or destroy so much habitat that we are experiencing the biggest die-off of species since the dinosaurs? Those who are into progress have built bigger and more efficient oil rigs, trawlers, and methods of clear cutting. To say nothing about the evils of plastics, the challenges of recycling computers, or the 250,000 year horror of using depleted uranium in warfare. Some value scientific inquiry for its own sake, and there is certainly considerable virtue in this path. But unless linked to other values of love and respect and harmony with Nature, the fruits of science can be global warming and bigger and better wars. Finally, some honor freedom as a most significant value, but unfortunately few understand freedom and its limits. Freedom is the right to do whatever you want, as long as you do not harm anyone else or harm the environment, which harms us all. So freedom only works when coupled with love and respect. Everyone chooses their own values, and I can only urge that you choose with great care and understanding. I choose the Path of Love, and as George Harrison said, I’m sticking to it. All you need is love.

God is everything, both laughter and tears, good and evil, life and death. A cursory look at nature shows us both deadly competition and various cooperations. We have to learn to love within a context of deadly competition – wars and all the lesser violence we inflict on one another. Loving cooperation is vastly more efficient than deadly competition and develops us in a far more beautiful direction. Changing from one mode to the other involves a revision of a very basic driver in our hard wiring. The driver is self survival. It says something like, “look out for number one at all costs.” Developing cooperation is a so much better, joyous, cleaner operation than fighting tooth and nail. Characteristically we have done a little of both. It’s good to realize that we may occasionally choose to give up things we like or desire in order to achieve things we could not otherwise manage.

Where does this leave us? We may understand that we are parts of God, and we may know that we can ask for Guidance any time and get it. We can live our lives as best we can on the Path of Love. We may strive for union with God if we choose, but it may be quite sufficient to encourage the light of the God of Love to shine through us. We are thus God’s experiment, answering the question, can free will work? Despite the several thousand years of calamitous history thus far, the jury is still out. We have made great and beautiful noble achievements, from Greek temples and gothic cathedrals to the Sydney Opera House, from Bach and Beethoven to the Beatles, from the Declaration of Independence to the theory of relativity; we have also achieved the horrors of Buchenwald and Hiroshima, Twin Towers and Abu Graib, Rwanda and Darfur, the medieval witch hunts and the Ku Klux Klan. It appears there will always be a light side and a dark side to our existence, but there is no reason why the dark side should be running our governments. When government dedicates to the Path of Love, we will have made a major step forward.

I see no problem in understanding ourselves as God’s experimental creations. It’s not as if God were a farmer and we are His sheep. No. We are the farthest outpost in the Great Mystery’s exploration of Itself. We are the developing edge of God’s consciousness on this planet; we are God’s explorers. Furthermore, we have been wonderfully blessed. God has given us the ability to love, an appreciation for beauty, great joys and humor, a sexual connection that can be a transcendent union of Spirits, a high degree of comfort, bounty of all kinds, a brain capable of the most exquisite sensitivity and logic, emotions for all occasions including a capacity to grieve and shed tears, physical agility and stamina, a capacity to live longer than almost all animals, turtles and parrots being the most obvious exceptions. The Great Mystery has given us a fascinating universe to explore and develop our talents. In short, we have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives. We can climb as high or dive as deep as we choose. Every day I thank God for life and for all my many gifts. It is a glorious adventure. “Rejoice, rejoice! It feels good to be here! Rejoice, rejoice, it feels good to be!”

Please send questions or comments to:

donangelo@spiritualadventurer.com

Question 1: How does your account square with the scietific theory of the origin of the universe?

I can offer you, shall we say, a pseudo-scientific explanation. Imagine that originally there was just a mass of energy, before time and space. For convenience, let’s call this mass of energy God, or the Great Mystery. God was trying to explore Itself. What am I? What can I do? God put some of Its energy here, and some of Its energy over there, and lo! God created space. God moved from here to there and found it took awhile, and lo! God created time. God got so excited by these discoveries, that It sent bits of Its energy out into space as far as It could go. We call that the Big Bang.

So God became the universe as we know it. God continued to explore what It could do. The big configurations of energy that God created out of Itself we call stars. Around some of these hot stars revolve globes of cooler matter that we call planets. This was all very interesting, God was creating a magnificent show. But as God continued to explore what It could create, God got to wondering if It could create agents to do Its exploring for It, agents somewhat separate from Itself, altho of course entirely made from Itself. God created some very small agents, robots if you like, that were programmed to take in energy, excrete waste, and reproduce themselves. God spent billions of years exploring what these little robots could do, because of course God’s robots were far more sophisticated than anything we might be able to imagine. At some point God added an element of randomness, so that reproduction would not always be exact. Some of the variations which resulted were able to interact a little better with their environment, so that these agents survived and thrived while less adaptive agents died off. God thus created evolution. Gradually, the agents became more and more complicated, with ever more automatic programs on how to interact with the environment and one another.

Very gradually, it became evident that those agents that remembered their experience and developed new programs survived better. Thus, Agent A might notice that Agent D was eaten by a praying mantis. Agent A developed a program to avoid praying mantises. As the random variations continued, some went in the direction of evolving an internal monitor to choose which programs to run, and they survived even better. Thus consciousness was born.  At first consciousness was very primitive. If a tree noticed more sunshine in a particular direction, it might choose to send out a branch that way. The basis of consciousness was simply the ability to tell one thing from another – sun from shade, food from not food, friend from foe. Agents were still primarily run by their inherited programs, a little bit run by the programs they developed. Eventually consciousness became the capacity to connect the dots. If you hang a piece of meat on a string from a tree branch that is roughly parallel to the earth, a crow can’t get it. But a crow will stand on the branch and gradually pull up the string with its beak, a little bit at a time, holding the string with its claw, until it captures the meat. That’s connecting the dots in a fairly big way. Some say the highest ability of the brain is the capacity to think consequentially.

Thus, any organism that has some capacity to choose one program over another has a fair degree of consciousness. Organisms that can connect the dots have a higher degree of consciousness. Organisms that can create or delete programs and choose among options have the highest degree of consciousness, which is most fully developed in humans but is present to some degree in dogs, dolphins, primates, and some other animals. At our base we are all robots, programmed to respond in certain ways. We are agents of God, exploring what we can do. When we can break free of our programming and choose which programs to run, we have the greatest capacity to explore what we can do. We are thus God’s experiments in free will, able to explore space itself, or subatomic particles, or alternate dimensions and realities. We are no longer robots, but co-creators with God. We are able to explore love or joy or beauty or the earth’s bounty, virtually anything either inside us or outside us, and that is what makes life such a glorious adventure. We can know that we are doing God’s work by simply exploring what we can do, whereby the greatest among us have achieved remarkable accomplishments, creating this many splendored civilization. “Onward Christian Soldiers” becomes “Onward Outriders, exploring for God,” and finding many delicious fruits along the way. We are destined to become the nervous system of the planet.

Question 2: How can you claim the universe is alive, or our Mother Earth is alive, when we clearly live for awhile and die, as do all animals and plants?

I can only answer that there appear to be different degrees or types of life, and this is an area we are largely ignorant of. In my own experience I have communed with the spirits of mountains, rock formations, redwood trees, a clump of beach grass, even the ocean itself, and Mother Earth. I have also communed with the spirits of the dead. Some of this is written up in the chapter on Guidance. I only say what my experience suggests. I look out over a vast vista of possibility which few have explored but is awaiting our careful examination. We will eventually reach deeper understanding, as we consistently have down thru the centuries.

Question 3: Why can’t we say we are children of God?

Well you can, if it pleases you. I like to say we are parts of god, not children of god, because “children” implies a separation, a difference. On the one hand, there isn’t any difference. We are parts of God. On the other hand, there is an obvious difference. Up to now we didn’t know we were parts of God, we didn’t know what we are. We were stumbling around in the dark and now we’re beginning to get a sense of direction.

You are a part of God, you are this wondrous Creation that God in Its wisdom and Love has made. Take great joy in what you are! Love yourself! Wow! What a vain idea!

The more you can realize you are being embraced, the more you can radiate love, happiness, and peace. So know that we are embraced. Embrace that we are embraced! Thank God for embracement! It’s a reciprocity, a complete circle.

Dancing the Path of Love