Belief Integration

As a step to help integrate our faiths such that they might agree with each others', consider the question of whether God is speaking to us, if you are religiously inclined, or alternatively the question of what is the source of knowledge, if maybe you are scientifically inclined.

There are experiences within religion and science that share many characteristics and that with a bit of change in perspective can be seen as the same essential pursuit. Consider how religious prophets play a similar role across religions and are also similar to those scientists with great and subtle minds. They both "speak" "truths" "revealed" to them by "God" or "Our reason about our world". Meaning, a prophet sits around all day and contemplates God incessantly, devoting all mental energies to understanding the received traditions in an attempt to get at the object of those traditions, God itself. An epiphany is allowed, and the prophet is vivified to speak it to all who have ears for it. So too a great scientist.

This issue of God speaking, of God as a presence, the question of the Nature of Truth... is... perhaps not about what is the answer, but rather who is the answerer, by what power are we given to know anything at all? This, it seems, is a question about the esoteric nature of the path of the seeker. In any tradition, religious or scientific, from any culture, an open and questioning mind, looking for knowledge/faith must confront itself on the way. What it finds will color its experience of God.

A mind immersed or concerned with its culture will find there are guardians of the truth. Our collective mind has an accumulated version of the truth, which it both defends against attack and to which it may welcome additions. These forces can be viewed as tempters, angels risen or fallen, austere or personable.. but their role is to act as interlocutors for us in our pursuit inwards and judges on our way back towards social relevancy and integration. They are the voices which can shoot us down or buoy us up as we engage in prayer, introspection, reasoning, and insight. We are not born with this, but are encultured with it soon enough, being taught its ways by our family and society. They are our Zeitgeist. Each culture's spirit.

But not all questions or questioners are so moderated. Even for those that are, at some point the scope of a culture's mind is limited and must allow growth. Old traditions and contingencies strain against change. But this time there are no interlocutors, no mediators or guides to help us along. A mind open to this kind of experience must be prepared to leave its whole sense of self behind and approach as a beginner the basic situation of knowing, the beginning of experience.

Think of it. The electro-chemical firings by millions of millions of brains interacting to the world around them for aeons. To what end? From what source? From what common consistency does thought yesterday and thought today live in accord with each other? And why did it ever care? Finally it must be that the universe, and we embedded in it, can itself know and know itself. For through our lower living bodily selves, from our older simpler forms and all the way back through furriness, fishiness, small cellular shapes and microscopic barely sensing chemico-mechanical primordial soupish mineralic gas and plasma mixture, we have only really changed the pattern of our flesh, not its substance:

"We are made of stardust"

and the stars themselves just small condensations of matter left from the beginning of everything in ultimate singularity. Any insights we have into this affects our situation, pragmatics, ethics, morals and reasons for being.. when we are lucky enough to have them, are allowed to change our mind, change our actions and change our universe.. is the universe acting on itself, continually, for all ages. This is the mind of everything, the mind of God that at last situates our entity in relation to the all entity of everything.

"For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life,
as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body,
as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food,
and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor
gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more
than they?
And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?

And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of
the field grow;
they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even
Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field,
which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace,
will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!

Our eternal being is present and need only be sought unselfishly. Our life must access this source of being to move beyond its pain of worry and conceit of isolated self. The actual source of truth and the way of knowing are immediately available in the basic nature of being.