Showing posts with label Cosmic consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cosmic consciousness. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

What if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

One of the ways of thinking about awakening is the change in the self system. There is a shedding of the ego and a merging with the Divine. It is the realization of cosmic consciousness. What are the major signs of this awakening? There are several but the most apparent ones are: loss of the fear of death, a sense of contentment and imperturbability, love of others and the whole world, being present in the now with no rumination about the past or fear for the future, a joy and desire in being of service, being out of sync or on a different wavelength from one's peers and the ways of the world.

In our current age, this state of being is unrecognized, or if it is, it scares people. The awakened one is leary about talking about the change in the self system with others because the description will be confusing or threatening to others who will call it "crazy." Therefore this new level of awareness is often kept hidden or confidential.

There are awakened ones amongst us in Unitarian Universalism but our faith has no history and tradition of understanding this state. Therefore, the "living tradition" of Unitarian Universalism has little to offer people who become holy. One of the activities here at UUAWOL ministries is to teach about the existence of this state and level of consciousness, and to encourage its recognition, acknowledgement, and encouragement. The barrier or block to recognition is that people at lower levels of consciousness have no frame of reference, no mental models, that facilitate their perception of the level of consciousness above their own.

The leadership in Unitarian Univeralism does not aspire to higher levels of spiritual consciousness. It is more focused on organizational and social justice concerns on the path of the ego. The mission of Unitarian Universalism at the local, regional, national, and international levels is blind to the true function of religious organizations which is to facilitate the growth and development of saints. Without holy people the world cannot be sanctified and Unitarian Univeralism just becomes one organization among millions that works for betterment on the path of the ego. Having a better life on the path of the ego is to miss the point of religion which is to help people shed the ego and enter onto the path of the spirit. Betterment is not the same thing as sanctification. To have a better body, a better marriage, a better job, a better house, better children, better country is to fiddle around while Rome is burning.

We don't need a better church in a better world when our consciousnesses are spiritually impoverished.  As it is written  in Mark 8:36, "For what shall it profit a person if they gain the whole world, but lose their soul?"


Monday, March 5, 2018

How conscious are you of your state of consciousness?

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We are confused though about where this search should take us, where truth and meaning lie.

The fact of the matter, whether we like it or not, and usually it's not, is that our sense of self is a social construction.

Something as simple as the language we speak, the names we give to objects of our perception, are handed to us by other people.

Our self concept, self worth, self esteem, self confidence is provided to us by the things other people tell us about ourselves.

You are not your body because it constantly changes, as does your thoughts, your emotions, your social status, your personality. These aspects of the self you think you are constantly change. So what is this self that we cling to and hold so dear?

Have you noticed that the things we think we see in ourselves is what we see in others, both good things and bad things? Other people, other "selves" are a mirror of sorts. George Herbert Meade called in the "looking glass self."

What is behind the social construction? What is it that knows that the self isn't real? It goes by many names. I prefer the term "witness." There is a part of ourselves which is not a part of ourselves that can watch and observe what we call the self.

Some people have a more highly aware sense of their witness while others believe they are merely victims of emotional and social and physical forces they don't understand.

If we are to get really cute, we can also speak of the witness of our witness. So, the question can be asked, "How aware are you of your witness?"

The witness is also called "consciousness." We can ask, "How conscious are you of your state of consciousness?"

The goal of the spiritual life is to achieve pure consciousness which means our egos evaporate. They are no more, and of course they never were. They were just shit we made up.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Notes on the spiritual life: Cosmic Consciousness Is Our Destiny

Cosmic consciousness is our destiny

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part.

It is more than respect for the interdependent web, it is love of the interdependent web. It is more than respect and love, it is a surrender to the experience of the wholeness of it.

On the path of the ego, things can get really complicated fast. We humans have learned that deconstructing entities into their component parts gives us power to manipulate those entities and the things related to them.

We also have learned that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Deconstruction does not give us the whole story. In the last analysis, it is the whole story that we desire not just crumbs.

Salvation lies in the whole. Salvation comes from joining and unifying. Salvation comes from the awareness that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and it is in this wholeness that we experience peace and fulfillment.

Salvation follows from the answer to the question, "What would Love have me do?" The question is simple enough if we respond to it at face value. It is in overthinking it that we get ourselves into trouble.

Giving up our dichotomizing minds frightens us. It seems unnatural on the path of the ego for the ego would have us separate, discriminate, segregate, compare, compete, eliminate, attack, oppress, subjugate, and even kill because it is afraid of wholeness, of nondualistic awareness, because the ego would evaporate, it would cease to exist.

The ego protests against this, fights against this, becomes defensive and antagonistic towards anything that threatens its existence. The ego insists that we protect it, sometimes at all costs. The ego would prefer that we give up our souls so that it can stay intact. We come to learn, it is a sign of wisdom, that this is a fool's bargain. In the end, we must surrender our special drop to the ocean and be reabsorbed once again into the cosmic consciousness.

 

Saturday, September 30, 2017

What is the "truth and meaning" we are looking for?

The fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. A possible answer to the question "what is this truth and meaning" we are looking for is Love.

At one level I think it is easy to understand that what we all are looking for is love. And yet we are confused about what love is. I was taught that there are at least 5 kinds of love: agape, charitable love; philia, brotherly love; platonic love; eros, romantic love; and storge, parental love. It seems that these distinctions, while meaningful, still hide the deeper understanding that these different kinds of love are just parts of a larger, grander, more abiding love which is the ground of our being, what some people have called the godhead. Some people, like Jesus, simply say that God is love.

A woman asked me in a pointed way one time whether I believed in God. I answered, "It depends on what God you are asking about?" She was a fundamentalist Christian whose God was very judgmental and consigning people to either heaven or hell. If this is the God she is talking about, her God, no I don't believe in it.

Some people say, "I don't believe in God," and I ask them, "What God is it that you don't believe in?"

Some people's gods are more mature than others. In considering the concept of spiritual development an indicator of the stage of spiritual development might be the kind of God the person does or doesn't believe in.

An indicator of a higher stage of spiritual development is the understanding that God is a verb not a noun. God might be thought of as "the force" which Luke Skywalker in Star Wars described.

"Becoming one with the all" gets mocked as New Age psychobabble and yet this desire of going home, joining the cosmic consciousness is a higher level stage of spiritual development.

If we considered the stages of spiritual development on a continuum from thinking of God like Santa Claus who rewards or punishes good and bad boys and girls to becoming one with the all as in each person being a drop in the ocean who is stressed by being separated from the source of its being until it can meld back into the whole from whence it came, where are you in your spiritual development?

The UUA has an interesting handout on stages of faith development based on Fowler's model which you can access by clicking here.

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Cosmic consciousness and Unitarian Universalism

Kevin, I know that you were raised as a Christian and have taken your faith seriously for most of your life. However, when you told me that you are starting to question your faith I, for one, reassure you that this is a good thing for many of the things that we are taught by our religion can impede our spiritual development unless we  question some of the teachings that don't seem quite right to us.

You asked me about Jesus' statements in Matthew's gospel where Jesus says "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it"10:37 This teaching is rarely understood and preached on because it is so foreign to what our society's norms are and what people want to hear.

The ego wants us to put special relationships ahead of God because the ego teaches that these special relationships are what will make us happy although when we are honest we must admit that these special relationships bring us as much suffering, anxiety, anger, hurt, and destruction as they do joy and peace. The reason these relationships disturb our joy and peace is because our desire for union and completion (belonging) is misplaced. What we unconsciously are really desiring is to become one again with the universe and enjoy the enlightenment of cosmic consciousness. Can special relationships ever give us that?

When we realize that we have been looking for love in all the wrong places we feel foolish and ashamed. We think we should have known better all along. We may also be angry and sad that we have wasted so much time in the drama and enervation of trying to achieve the unachievable. Jesus tries to set us straight, to point us in the right direction, but largely, even by churches that profess to follow His teachings, His teachings are either not understood or ignored as being too difficult to act on.

Unitarian Universalism teaches the unconditional love of the creator and reassures us that the Spirit of Life would never abandon us or condemn us to punishment. UU encourages us to not get people into heaven but heaven into people and asks us to covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person not just some people or special people. One of the ways to get heaven into people is to recognize and acknowledge that all people are special in the sense that everyone is unique just like everybody else.:-)) Jesus is calling us to a higher path when He tells us we must detach from special relationships and first and foremost devote ourselves to the Holy, the union of everybody with everybody all the time which is heaven.

Kevin, this calling by Jesus is a call to a miraculous way of living in which we change our perception from the special relationships on the ego plane to the cosmic consciousness of oneness with the Godhead.

As they say in AA, "Let go, and let God." Continue to question authority on the ego plane and seek the guidance of the inner voice of God. The way you can tell the difference is if the ideas give you peace.

Uncle David
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