The Languages of God

Hello all! Today I would like to write about what I am calling “the languages of God”. Please allow me to, first of all, put this somewhat colorful title in perspective by defining what I am calling God under this scenario. Regardless of what religious or philosophical movement one decides to follow in order to deepen one’s pursuit of God, it is undeniable that one idea is in the forefront of every single one of those movements; the concept that God is immaterial and purely spiritual.

Another concept that is almost unanimous amongst the existing religious movements is the idea of Trinity as a symbol to represent the relationship of the Creator and its creation. This Trinity being the Father, Son and Holly Ghost of the Christians; Matter, Mind and Spirit of the New Age movements; Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus; the three bodies of enlightenment, or Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya, of the Buddhists; the Super-Consciousness, Sub-Consciousness and Consciousness of the psychologists, and on and on we go.

Amongst all these different nomenclatures and definitions, the consensus around the plane, or dimension, or reality, which is closer to the origin of consciousness, or sort of speak, closer to the roots of the creation, seems to be Spirit, Spirit being one of the legs of the three legged stool we decided to call Trinity. Going back now to the beginning of this post, what I am calling God for the intents and purposes of this discussion is Spirit, or Father, or Brahma, or Super-Consciousness. Again, I don’t want to dive into the discussion that by doing this I will be trying to limit the unlimited and define what can’t be defined. I get that we can't divide the indivisible, and that proposing a split of the Trinity would be a step back in trying to reach unity. What I am proposing is to use this archetype for God, just for the sake of this discussion so I can better explain the point I am trying to make.

Since I mentioned archetypes, let me use this as a hook for the next concept that we will need in order to get to the closing arguments. The psychologist Jung is the one we need to thank for the idea of archetypes. An archetype, in very high level terms, is a type of symbol. A symbol is something that carries meaning. Words, for instance, are symbols, as the concatenation of words carries a very specific meaning. Assuming two people who can read in English are presented with the same collection of words, both people will agree to the meaning carried by those symbols. Well; at least that was the intention behind the creation of writing, though politicians and lawyers seem to have an uncanny talent to read different things out of the same collection of words, based on their hidden agendas.

At any event, what Jung proposed is that the human race has created a set of archetypes, in the sub-conscious level, that are basically understood by the race. He called this the collective sub-conscious. What he proposed is that the human race sort of agreed on a group of archetypes to mean things that would be understood by our minds when functioning at this level of consciousness. This would be much like the same as a language, where every word is conventioned to carry a specific meaning that is understood by the people who can speak that language. In a sense, we can then expand this concept to say that archetype is the language spoken by the sub-conscious mind.

One might say; well, the title of the article is “The Languages of God”, and you have defined God as being the Super-Conscious mind not the sub-conscious mind. To the one who says that I respond; very well, you were paying attention and following the discussion. Let me introduce one more piece of data that comes from personal experience before I address this point.

I am a study of different religions and philosophical movements. The word religion, as I probably already mentioned in a previous post, comes from the Latin word “Religare”; which means “to reconnect”; the reconnection of our individuality with the Wholeness; or with the Creator and all creation. Our individuality seems to be in a constant and almost frantic pursuit of this reconnection. From what I have been gathering so far, it seems that the very definition of the so called “evolution” is the pursuit of this reconnection, and the closer we get to it, the more “evolved” our consciousness becomes, and consequently, the happier we become as individuals.

Religion in itself, thus, could be seen as the activity or facilitator to this reconnection between consciousness and Super-Consciousness. Each religion has a multitude of symbols, or archetypes, to define their understanding of what this reconnection is. Utilizing the metaphor I used above, the adepts of each religion and philosophical movements utilize their own language in their sub-conscious minds, when in the midst of their religious activities. One fact that would serve as reinforcement of this statement is the reported religious dreams by people from different religions. Christians seem to dream of angels with wings and heaven exactly as carried by the Christian archetypes. Buddhists seems to dream of Buddha. Hindus seem to dream via their own archetypes; and so on and so forth. One simple question that comes to mind would be; why is that so? Would it be possible that by becoming an adept of a specific religious movement those individual’ sub-conscious minds are learning to speak the language of that religion that will provide them with tools for the work of reconnection?

Another fact that I will use to make my case is the meditation upon specific archetypes. Meditation, as probably known by the reader, is the activity of silencing the conscious mind and creating a conduit from which information from our higher minds can flow through and get known by our conscious mind. This is one subject that I can throw my two cents of personal experience on. I have been meditating by utilizing different archetypes without realizing. I have been trying to improve my meditation techniques, and in order to do so, I have used the aid of different religions and philosophical currents in search of the best meditation technique. By doing that, I was training my conscious mind to better interpret the archetypes that would be associated to those religions. The thing I realized not too long ago is that, depending on the system that I was trying to use, my meditation experience would come with the symbols that would be corresponding to the system in use.

As one fresh example, I have been lately meditating by utilizing what is known as the Sephirah; from the Qabalah. Guess what; when I meditate I get imagery that is filled with archetypes that have their origins in the Qabalistic roots. This is when it finally hit me; the Super-Conscious mind would respond to me by utilizing the archetypes that I used as concentration aid to focus the conscious mind in meditation. It would be much like the Super-Conscious, or God (to make sure I provide some closure to the title of the article), would respond to me in English if I asked It questions in English, or in Spanish if I used that language for my inquiries, and so on.

Like Jung proposed, archetype is the language of the mind; and what I am starting to realize is that it is also the language of God. The main difference being that, our mind being finite, it needs an object to focus the attention in order to reach higher realms of our own consciousness. Therefore, having a specific set of archetypes is a good mechanism to provide that focus of attention. We need to be able to listen and understand what the Super-Conscious mind responds to us though. The way to listen and interpret the responses is by making ourselves consciously aware of the meaning of the archetypal set that we selected to use in this activity. This allows us to best filter what we get back from all the noise that our minds usually carry, and make sure we understand what is coming back from our higher anatomy.

In my specific case, I have been successfully utilizing the Qabalah archetypes lately; however, as this article proposes, any set of archetypes would be equally appropriate. We just need to put on the work to get familiar with their meaning so we can learn to speak the languages of God.

THE MIND OF GOD

Hello all. It is definitely interesting how this amazing construct called time works. I just realized it has been almost ten months since my last post, while in my head I can swear I just completed one a couple of days ago. At any event, I got an e-mail from a dear friend of mine from Brazil letting me know he came across my “blog” and decided to shoot me a note to let me know he has read it. I put the word blog in quotes above since, after my epiphany of realizing ten months has elapsed since the time of my last post, I cannot really with a straight face call this space a Blog. It is more like a quick fix for my writing addiction.

Funny thing is that I couldn’t really tell whether people were getting to this space or not, as I never invested the needed amount of time making sure the blog is properly published, or to monitor the number of people who access this link for that matter. Now, my good friend’s e-mail worked as a much needed shot of adrenaline for me to get out of my inertia and get going on this again, as it is good proof that though it might not be TheNewYorkPost.com in number of readers, there will always be people coming through this space.

What I would like to talk about today comes from another epiphany of mine, this one a tad more serious than the one described above; thus the title of this text. Several prophets throughout our history have mentioned that nothing that happens in our Universe escapes the knowledge of God. We can take the Koran as an example, where it reads: “Not a leaf does fall but with His knowledge..." Al-Qur'an 6:59. Now that I quoted the Koran, let me make a quick disclaimer for the ones of you who are not used to my line of thinking. I am not affiliated to any religion. In fact, my previous post to this space talks exactly about that. I am a student of all religious thoughts and philosophical currents; therefore I will here and there cite religious passages and quotes in order to exemplify some points. So, fear not, you who get really turned off by religious bias you. You can keep on reading.

The passage above was always stuck in my mind. One that, to me, was always practically impossible to rationalize and understand. Intuitively, I did accept this as something very much possible. Moreover, the very concept of omnipresence and omnipotence of God is something that I do believe in. I could go on about the rationale that makes me believe on those two concepts, but that in itself would probably be enough to fill the space of this entire text, so it is best if I save it to another post. Let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion, that we do accept the notion of omnipresence of God. What that means is that the very definition of the term implies that He/She/It does have knowledge of anything that happens in this Universe.

The question than is: How? How can we start to understand this question? Is it one of those questions that we should dismiss by saying that there are things our minds can’t comprehend? I flat out don’t accept that. I really don’t believe that God would be so secretive to the point of concealing something as fundamental the relationship Creator/Creation from His creation. Something that came out of the Perfect One cannot be imperfect. Definitely finite, which is a totally different story altogether, but not imperfect. Again, we are starting to venture onto another philosophical point about our own perfection that I will also save to another time. Going back to the heart of the matter at hand, I just couldn’t accept this as something my mind couldn’t comprehend, along with a list of things that I have in my mental list of things that need to be understood about the Creator/Creation relationship.

This went on until very recently, when I got my hands on some material credited to Hermes. Hermes is named by many as being the precursor of the philosophy that was used by the great prophets of our history; the ones that became figureheads of the multiple religious movements of our time. When I started reading a little about the history behind this figure, I started to get a little excited as, if this indeed carried some merit, his texts could contain all the answers I was looking for. I was preparing myself for years of reading. In my mind, if he was indeed the source of all religious movements, I was to expect volumes and volumes composed of thousands upon thousands of pages. What wasn’t my surprise when I discovered he left nothing but seven principles? The whole content of the so called Hermetic philosophy is composed of a whopping sever principles!

At first, my excitement became disappointment. My avid reader self was already drooling over the prospect of getting my hands on some sort of Hermetic Encyclopedia, or something of the likes. My mind was set to tackle the potentially daunting task of reading the “entire Hermetic material”. Well; that was much less time consuming than I thought. The entire material filled a grand total of one page. Once I got over my initial disappointment, I decided to actually ready what the seven principles were. The very first one came about so called the Principle of Mentalism that reads: "THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental."

This dropped like a bomb in my mind. I have came across several lines of though, religions and philosophies along my years of constant research implying the Universe as we perceive is nothing but a mental creation. All the way from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave through Pythagoras who suggested the Universe was nothing but numbers, culminating in my own conclusions that since our five senses are nothing more than signals interpreted by the brain, the idea behind a mental Universe was starting to make sense. Now, when I read this one sentence, since it was it, one sentence, I decided to meditate on it. Literally meditate on it, on the literal sense of the word, not the metaphorical one that we overuse sometimes. I was going to purposely try to take my consciousness to a different state by meditating, while keeping this sentence in mind. I wouldn’t take the easy way out this time and read one of the hundreds and hundreds of interpretations to this line. Since this supposedly is part of the source of all religious thought, these thoughts being nothing but interpretations of this concept, it wouldn’t do me any good to try and use an interpretation to interpret the source of the interpretation. Get it?

Now is when I come back to the epiphany. What I came away with from that exercise was that our Universe and everything in it, including us, in something that is currently happening in the Mind of God. Mind you that when I include us in this mix, I am not just saying the physical body us, but also our own minds us. What I believe it is happening is that God holds all creation in His mind. Think about it from a moment. Have you ever had a dream whereby you are not necessarily part of the dream itself, but a mere observer of it? You are aware of everything that happens within the scope of the dream. You know what everybody is doing and even thinking. You know the state of mind of every character of the dream; their intentions and feelings. Everything in the dream is really a part of you as it is a creation of your subconscious mind, being therefore a part of your own mind. Also, you are part of everything in the dream, as you created the dream.

This jives perfectly with what the great sages of our history have tried to teach us. This explains several religious/philosophical passages stating we are the image of God, God is within us, God dwells in us as us, we are Gods, we are all connected through consciousness, all is nothing but One, there is nothing else other than God, the Universe is an illusion, and I can go on and on for pages and pages of passages that fits this scenarios. Obviously I am not saying necessarily that God is sleeping in a bed and is dreaming the Universe as we speak. Though, based on how our planet has been suffering lately, some may say He might be indeed sleeping. Jokes aside, what I am proposing is that all that exists is currently happening in the Mind of the All. The specific mechanism of how that is happening I believe is finally one of the things that is beyond our power to comprehend as I don’t think we can’t really expect to grasp something of this level of abstraction. Going back to the dream comparison, knowing how this is happening in the mind of God would be similar to have one of the characters of our dream figuring out they are part of a dream that you are having and that you sleeping in your supper man onesies while doing it. However, I think the main concept is something that made sense to me and we should not dismiss.

When I came to this realization, my first reaction was to think: “Well, this is really dandy. That means not only all my surroundings are nothing but an illusion as I myself am not real.”. It took me some thinking in order to dismiss this line of thinking and calm my disappointment that was quickly becoming anger. If nothing else, the one thing I am sure is that I am. I am not an illusion in myself. I am a conscious being, who think, or at least I would like to think I do, and rationalize things with my mind; therefore I am not an illusion. I am real. The second part I needed to make my peace with was the potential illusion of the Universe. I really don’t think it is the case, as much as I do think it is a matter of reference point. I’d say that if we put the reference in the Mind of the All, than the Universe is indeed an illusion, in the sense that is not really real to Him but a development inside his mind, much like your thoughts are not real to someone else who is not you. However, if we put the frame of reference in our own minds, the Universe is as real as our own minds themselves. The Universe is where our minds dwell and, under the premise that all is happening in the Mind of the All, is made of the same essence as our minds. Since we already established that our minds are real, by association, the Universe is also real; considering our minds as the reference frame.

There; no need to panic. Things are back to the way they were. Or, are they? This realization put me in a state of awe even deeper than the one I had simply by contemplating the Universe and its laws. The Universe always amazed me on its level of interdependency and perfection. By proxy, the Mind of God always amazed me for being able to create the fundamental laws that are the foundation for the Universe. Now that I believe that not only He did create the laws that govern the Universe, but that everything that we perceive as well as the things that we intuit that are happening but can’t perceive with our five physical senses are actually unfolding within the Mind of God! Now that is just flat out mind bogglingly incredible! Once we start to grasp these concepts it becomes absolutely impossible not to be totally in love with the Mind of All, and surrender in state of pure admiration to Its Infinite reach. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said: "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

The Best Religion

Hello to all of you who, like me, keep their own searches for the truth about our known Universe and also about potential others that might exist and are out of reach for our current senses. I have a published book back in the home land of Brazil. That adventure happened before the wife and I decided in favor of having a second child. Life was reasonably under control with one kid only. Job was not too taxing. I had enough free time and energy that I could devote to this passion of mine, which is not necessarily writing per say, but sharing my thoughts with the other members of my extended family, the human race. Then we got pregnant again. Not only that, but the economical rough times came down on all of us with its entire wrath. We didn't loose our source of income, but now I have to perform the work of four or five. Life at work became complete chaos. Life at home, now with the two kids being more aware of their own individuality, is a delicious uncontrolled chaos. With all that, I have decided to, instead of suppressing my everyday high of writing altogether, start venturing on the uncharted waters of blogging. I'm not even sure if these lines will ever be read by anyone else other than me, however, the simple fact of having the opportunity to express myself is exciting enough to get me going.

This will hopefully be the first of many posts where I will be expressing my thoughts about multiple topics: science, religion, philosophy, psychology, spiritualism; and anything else that you wish to label. I, myself, prefer not to label them since I believe that the simple act of labeling is enough to constrain. I also believe the ongoing constraints we impose upon ourselves are reasons why the members of the human family seem to be so disconnected from each other, so fragmented. Fragmentation that I believe to counter our true nature. Nature such that not only we are one with the Superior Consciousness, or God, or The All Mighty, or however you wish to call the Creative Force that is in all there is; but we are small fractions of Him/Her/It ourselves. I strongly believe that every single one of us is actually an individual expression of the same God, giving different colors to the infinite kaleidoscope that is our collective existence.

Today I will focus on one are of this fragmentation: religion. I've always considered myself a religious being. I was born and raised by a family that chose to adopt the Spiritism religion as its life compass. Being from Brazil myself, it is not an unusual choice for religion the Spiritism. This religion has been growing in a very accelerate pace in the last half of century or so. It does indeed have some concepts that in my view would be rather difficult not to agree with; such as the immortality of the spirit that leads to a natural continuation of existence after death; consequent reincarnation of the spirit on multiple personalities that exist sequentially on different historical periods; and a natural ability of communicating with individualities that are not necessarily incarnated at the same time as ourselves.

I understand I might sound too out there for the ones of you who never really spent too much time reflecting upon topics such as this, or for the ones that have been poisoned by the opportunism of false mediums and psychics who take advantage of the laziness of the unprepared mind to obtain financial or other type of gain. Believe me when I say this, I totally understand your concern and skepticism. In fact, I salute you, free thinker, who don't simply comply with the opinion of others without pushing every incoming idea through the filter of your own reasoning. I believe you should never, ever, take at face value anything that is proposed to you as the only truth. I think this very fact is the main source of fragmentation of our humanity. We have countless different religions, philosophies and ideas that claim they carry the one truth; and they only exist due to the people who fuel them as such.

Let's start our discussion with that last statement in mind. Every different religion claim to carry the one truth. I started noticing that tendency when I decided to really dive into the Spiritism literature. I've got somewhat tired of answers such as: "Well, this is the way it is because it is written in the books." Once I started getting more comfortable with my own individuality, those answers started to really irritate me; so I decided to try and find the answers myself by reading the very books they said contained the answers that nobody seemed to be able to clarify for me. The summary of my investigation is that the so called leaders of that religion were also claiming to carry the only truth themselves; even though the most respected texts didn't mention anything of that regard. On the contrary, the most exciting and inspiring reference material on Spiritism presented the exact contrary notion that the truth has many views. Those leaders took those words and distorted them into something they understood as the truth, and started preaching that no other religion offered the same level of freedom to its adopters as the Spiritism did, and therefore were wrong. Does anyone else see the irony in this?

I've went though a very difficult time since that realisation. Being born and raised in the midst of that religion, I new nothing else other than what my parents had thought me about it. My whole belief system was in jeopardy. How far back should I contest? Should I keep going back to the point where I would contest the very existence of God? Or should I stop at contesting what the leaders of the religion were telling me? Intuitively, and added the fact that I am a scientist deep inside, I couldn't really contest the existence of a Superior Organizing Force, responsible for the order of our known Universe. It seemed to me that the beauty of nature could never be devoted to a random combination of events. I couldn't help but keep going back to what Einstein had said: "God doesn't play dice." It was clear to me that I shouldn't confuse religion and God, religion being just the vehicle used by individualities to reach God. With that settled in my mind, I've decided to start contesting religion in itself. The issue was now that I knew close to nothing about any other religion in order to really conduct a valid analysis.

Once I realised that, I started reading material pertaining to other religions. The funny thing is that, at least the way I have interpreted the texts, the prophets of other religions were saying basically the same things! They were saying, maybe utilizing of different archetypes, but none less the message was that free will is the key for finding the truth and that the truth can only be found on the inside of every being. This was in my view, the underlying message behind every religion. There are, obviously, many corollaries to that message, ranging from the identification of suffering through the elimination of it, with many different flavors and paths, but the message was loud and clear. The common denominator of all of them was, in my view, the freedom in the search for the truth and that truth itself is not black and white.

I was pretty happy with that epiphany. Until I was unsatisfied again and started searching for the deeper meaning. I started thinking about this under different lenses. And that very fact struck me. Different lenses! Exactly! Every single individual understands things by looking under different lenses, different vantage points. Remember when you were in school and sometimes you needed to play an association game with specific school material in order to find a metaphor that would help you to better understand the content? That is what I think the role of the different religions is: to provide different vantage points in order to facilitate the understanding of the universe and our role in it. Now, I was satisfied with that realization. It wasn't too long though until I asked the question: "Would there be a common denominator between the religions then?"

I think the answer is one and only: reason. I believe that different religions not only serve different people in their quests for understanding, but also might serve the same person during different phases of her life. The one key point to always keep in focus is reason. I believe the main evolutionary driver for the human spirit is its ability to reasoning information; therefore, the ones that blindly go through the motions of the religious rituals and churchgoing without reasoning why that is needed, they are the ones that miss out on a golden opportunity of finding true happiness. They sleep through their lives, focusing on the things that in fact make them miserable, and guess what? Their lives become miserable. They will be the Sunday churchgoers who don't really understand what the Sermon of the Mountain is really about. They will explode their bodies on suicide bombings without understanding what Jihad really means is not war against Christians or the west, but the internal human struggles against her own demons. They might go through life in meditation trying to reach Nirvana, as if that was the end game in itself. They miss the forest from the trees, mixing the cause with the effect.

Here I will summarize my take on the best religion. I believe the best religion is the one created by each one of us for us. The one that satisfies our current and intrinsic level of curiosity about the meaning of our own existence. The one that combines all the needed information and belief system that will drive us towards a constant state of mind of happiness. Now, please close your eyes and imagine our beautiful world without any religious conflicts, since the lack of religious groups would correspond to the lack of conflicts. Imagine further, a planet populated by individuals who are, for the most part, operating on their daily lives under a state of mind of constant happiness. Now that you pictured that world, answer this question: Is there any space on such world for holly wars and genocide, hunger, social inequality, suffering, racism, fragmentation?

I know that world is probably called Utopia at this stage of our evolution. However, I do believe that the more we fight fragmentation, the closer we will get to that world. The more we will understand that selfishness is nothing but a response from our subconscious mind to the idea we have that our happiness can only be at the cost of somebody else's sadness. Our fortune can only materialize at the expense of someone else's misfortunes. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I see fragmentation as counter intuitive to what we really are as I believe we all are connected on a deeper level that what our physical senses can catch, and the more we fight to keep our distance from each other, just like the swimmer who decides to go against the rapids, the more tired and unhappy we become.

Maybe the first step in that direction is based on tolerance. If we, under our current stage of evolution, can not really accept the merit of different points of view and understand they are nothing but a different vantage point; maybe we should try and condition ourselves to being tolerant with each other. Maybe this conditioning of our minds will turn into the deep understanding that every single one of us see the Universe around us under a particular and different light. Hopefully this tolerance will turn into respect; and in turn, respect will turn into love. The same love that was preached by the great personalities of our history as being not only the most noble of the feelings, but the only true feeling.

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