Christmas Day 2010

The wind rattles our windows
reminding us there is a world
out there, beyond the warmth
and consolation of our family homes.
And if I walked the block or two,
cutting through Beacon Hill Park
down past the giant totem
and up to the slanting, crumbling verge
of the rumpled, thrashing gray...
if I looked out that way toward
the distant weld of sea and sky,
I would find the full force of this storm
which strips trees naked
and admits no light from beyond
my vague notion of a horizon.
It would be me, alone, with my creaking dog
who knows perhaps a little less than I,
and is a little less prone to prognostications.

It's times like these I think of Christ
and Buddha, and Allah, and Einstein,
and all those who have come and gone before.
It's times like this I realize
the mighty wind may knock things down,
uproot them, tear them away from clinging arms,
but really it passes through me and around me
with a shiver and sigh that bespeaks
an eternity not my own.

Cause and Purpose in the World

I imagine myself standing alone before a room full of people, asking: Anyone who believes they have absolutely no purpose in life, raise your hand. How many would seriously do so? My guess is very few.

Intuitively most of us sense a purpose to our lives and would feel lost without that underlying influence. Most of us believe we are the result of some kind of purposeful unfolding rather than the latest state produced by an incomprehensible chain of soulless reactions or causes.

That sense of purpose lies at the heart of the first statement in my personal creed: I believe I am a manifestation of divine spirit.

Although I can only affirm that for myself, I also believe everyone else manifests the divine.

It is important for me to qualify that statement right away. I am not a foot soldier in the army of the Old Testament God. Rather, I am an expression of Intelligent Desire, the influence of divine spirit unfolding in the universe. God does not command; god wishes to know and express himself through the cycles of becoming, and I am a tiny instance of that eternal, wondrous process.

I believe!

Is there spirit in the wind?

A strong southwesterly sends clouds scudding
and sets the trees dancing this morning.
It speaks to me and sings
in the rattle of leaves and the bong of chimes.
It says: 'I am spirit. I live. I animate your world.
Feel my cool caress on your skin,
the tingle of rain drops driven against  your exposed flesh.
Know me for the soul of the world.'
Sensation and emotion join in the whispering refrain,
amplify it through the neural network
and the pulsing chambers of my heart.
All is motion, and excitement, and change.
And I thrill to it.

But reason casts its doubts,
muttering its tattered logic
like old King Lear mad on the heath
rocked by a disbelief as profound as age and gravity...
and Mr. Hawking.
'This,' reason informs in his torn shirt,
from under his shock of tousled hair,
'is pure physics, the movement of air,
mere molecules rushing into a relative vacuum
in the schema of your so-called creation.'
Then he pauses to think, and think, and think again,
dissecting atoms of truth right down to...
Their uttered joy,
to the force that impells them.
And reason asks:

'Why?
Why this perpetual motion that disturbs
the very notion of rest?'

It seems to me that perhaps
all the world must live
and that I myself am a formulation
of the living breath which
shouts, and sings, and booms
and staves off the contrapuntal silence.

Life Cycle

Conception, Birth, Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, Death. These headings represent the human life cycle and form the basis for understanding the 'maturity' of a character. Many different attributes can be juxtaposed onto this scale. For example, the notions of Independence and Free Will. Or personal responsibility. But the life cycle has to be placed in a broader context before it's strands and stages can be described.

I believe individuals are manifestations of a universal life force. In some religions this life force is called God. Many religions - in fact, most of them - idealize God into a distinct, separate substance. He exists outside of and separate from his creation, and can be pointed to as the divine being. I do not believe in such a distinction. God is the sum total of His individual, spiritual manifestations; the individual spiritual manifestations are facets of the sum total, God.

Through the life cycle individual expressions of God emerge, realize their purpose, and are then subsumed. By 'subsumed' I mean the life force of a dying entity is conceived instantaneously in new life forms. My view is not analogous to 'reincarnation'. I do not believe the individual spirit retains any psychic memory of who or what it once was. The life force manifests in completely new, completely distinct beings that express God in their own unique ways.

There is no such thing as a God, distinct from his individual manifestations; nor is there any such thing as a living entity separate from God. And yet, the notion of God is the culminating achievement of evolution. In fact, the life cycle is God's way of becoming 'real' and 'self-aware'. Without the life cycle, and individual expressions of God's will there can be no God.

One of the most important logical consequences of my particular spiritual outlook is the denial of a personal 'life after death'. When I die my spirit re-manifests in ways I cannot be aware of, and in entities that will have no personal recollection of me. The life force is eternal, omniscient and ubiquitous; I exist for a time, have limited knowledge and am located in space. If I survive at all, it is only as a being that has made an impression - for good or ill - on the world I once inhabited: that is to say, as a memory in consciousness world that continues on after I am gone.