Reclaiming the Divine

It’s relatively unpopular to openly discuss one’s spiritual or religious beliefs these days; lest one be read as socially conservative, and out of sync with the repressive potential of some religious paradigms. Yet, I am convinced that reclaiming our shared divine inheritance has the potential to transform our lives, and power direly needed social change. At the most basic level, reclaiming the Divine in all of us requires drawing a clear distinction between exclusionary religions that are egocentric, and a spiritual model that is rooted in the principles of interconnectedness and no-self.

The former traditions, the most obvious being the Abrahamic religions, are hotbeds of conflict precisely because they have come to disavow the Divine power and goodness that is intrinsic to all beings and things in the universe. They form static identities with hard boundaries that compel the rest of us to reckon with the material effects of our imposed outsider status: We are the “Children of God,” the chosen few, and you are not. The source of their certitude, the veracity of their claim, is anchored in a transcendental figure with whom only they are acquainted, and from whom only they receive revelation. This is a convenient turn of events indeed. Others are thus made to live in the shadow of such an exclusive relationship.

By withholding Divinity, by claiming that some are “chosen” and others are damned, such traditions disavow the reality of the interconnectedness of all beings with Divine Being, and the inter-being of earthly beings with each other. If we can agree that Being as such is the Source, if we can agree that all that is comes from, and is infused with, the divine creativity of the Source, then no special relationship to the Source can really be claimed. Well, choseness can be claimed, and surely it is, but it cannot be proved to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

What we can be sure of is that we are all here, we all are, and must find a way to live together. Thinking “we” rather “me,” seeing “you” in “me,” moves against our atomistic existence and the Western insistence upon the rights bearing individual. We move toward a notion of collectivity, toward a notion of responsibility for others and for the environment in which we live. We inter-are with the earth, and with each other. Our ability to flourish is contingent upon the happiness and flourishing of all that lives in and around us. For example, to the extent that the earth lives, so do we. This should be obvious: without food we cannot live. If we ruin the environment that enables food to grow we perish along with it. I have no illusions about the arrogant pretensions of some to create synthetic food-stuffs (read: processed food) meant to replace the divine nutrients that sustain us. However, incidences of various cancers, immune diseases, arthritis, kidney disease and other ailments continue to be linked to synthetic foods and the chemicals used to bolster meat production and preserve vegetables and fruit. In short, the “replacements” and additives are killing life rather than sustaining it. (GMOs are equally problematic, but I’d digress to much if I got into it now.)

The spiritual model I have in mind does not propose a God that is anthropomorphic or separate from you and I. Quite the contrary. The “God” I have in mind (if it can be called that) is dispersed energetic light radiating through all things as all things, sowing the seed of Divinity in each of us as its Being exceeds our own. In reclaiming the Divine we re-member, that is, put back together, our awareness of the Divine inside of us.

Such remembrance has had enormous implications for how I move through the world, how I relate to other sentient beings, and how I engage with the natural environment. I no longer feel so separate and alienated from everything around me, and as such, I no longer regard human being as a form of being meant to instrumentalize everything to my own ends. My impulse is to think connection, integration, affinity, and cooperation. As a spiritual practice, my reclamation of the Divine is a living-belief system: it is alive, active, mutable and an open-ended way of being in my daily life. Being open to my own potential to touch the Divine in me has transformed my life from one of intense suffering, addiction, and fear to a life of joy, understanding, peacefulness and courage. I invite you to come along on the path toward the Divine, toward that which is majestic, formless, and noble in you. From our internal, personal transformations we can effect a change much grander, one that may bring a suffering world back to the basic goodness already within itself.

I’m Pointing At You, But Pointing At Me

One of my lojong cards reads: Don’t talk about injured limbs.

That’s it. Well, that’s it for the ‘slogan’ side. On the commentary side the card instructs us to avoid maligning others, particularly when they’re already down (eh-hem, which would be waiting in ambush), but to generally avoid talking shit about – and to – other people because it’s a jackass thing to do.

The card doesn’t say it’s a jackass thing to do, that’s my opinion. The teachings would say, much more eloquently and without the explicatives, that when we negatively assess others we’re really talking about ourselves.

How so, you ask?

Simple: there’s really only one of us here. If you buy this argument (which you should), then you’ll agree that there’s a bit of me in you and vice versa. Typically what we despise most in our adversaries and loved ones alike, are those parts of ourselves we’d rather not embrace, recognize or work on.

So, as I replay the argument my (ex?) girlfriend and I had on thanksgiving, knowing that she was really talking about herself makes me feel a bit better. She’s pointing the finger at me to get to herself. The same, of course, can be said of me.

This is the major insight. No one gets off the hook. We are both embattled; we’ve been bruised and abused for many years and in many ways. Often, when we feel assaulted (and I’m using the universal ‘we’ here), we are not only responding to the current infraction, but to a host of past hurts that are knowingly or unknowingly, rekindled by our current situation. The response I had to her was both about her and about so many other people. I like to think about this in terms of the palimpsest, or that writing pad we used to play with as kids that was carbon on the bottom with a film on the top. When I’d write or draw on it I could see the image I made, but when I lifted the film the image would disappear. Here’s the important part: though the image disappeared on the surface layer, the inscription itself remained just below the film.* Our lives are just like those pads. Everything makes an impression, even if we can’t see the lines on the surface.

Every now and then something triggers the old impressions, reminds us of something from the past or hurts us in a similar way. There were patterns in my relationship that fell into both of our old grooves, old patterns which were often ways of protecting ourselves against past assaults. The argument we had was just as much about my old hurts and her old hurts, as it was about the new ones we inflicted on each other. What we weren’t attentive to in the moment was that all of the finger pointing kept us from accounting for how our behavior toward each other revealed more about who we are, what we’ve been through, and where we need to grow, than it revealed about the other person. As I pointed out and screamed about her “injured limbs” I was really pointing at my own.

*For all my Freudian friends out there, you’ll remember Freud’s writing about the mystic writing pad. This is exactly what he had in mind.