Evil Revisioned

Humanity has been caught up in the story of the first transgression as a means of explaining our traumatized reality since people first began to wonder why human lives were dominated by suffering in a world of so much beauty and harmony. Our existence has been almost entirely dictated by religious thought for thousands of years, demonstrating the absolute need for a sense of meaning and purpose at the core of our being.

But the western world moved on to a purposeless model for life, based on a materialistic paradigm within which science could grow, and current developments have brought us to a singular challenge in time, in which our choices today determine whether we move forward to a true spirituality, or whether we hold on to the flaws in thinking that have designed our past. As part of that, we have to make decisions about the myth that has existed as the root of so much of our troubles. Therefore let’s look at an alternative telling of the story of our original ancestors.

Eve was feeling confused. She really loved their teacher Lucifer, and he seemed so incredibly wise and knowledgeable, but she had to admit what he was teaching her wouldn’t pass the Adam test. But then since Adam hardly ever even turned up for their lessons any more, she felt annoyed that she should even think about how Adam would react. He was missing out on so much stuff that was really fascinating, and he would just never know how the universe came into being, for one thing.

But Eve had to admit she sometimes felt that Lucifer was teaching her things that maybe God wouldn’t have brought up, and at times she even felt like he didn’t seem to think God was as incredible as she’d always believed without question. The angels had done most of the work in creating the universe, from Lucifer’s perspective.

And gradually over time, this situation became more extreme, and Eve forgot that she’d felt uncomfortable on occasion, and came to believe everything Lucifer told her. If she occasionally worried, she argued with herself that God wouldn’t have put her in the care of a teacher if it wasn’t all OK.

So when that terrible day came that Lucifer seduced her into eating that fruit, and she realized the depth of his betrayal as he laughed at her ignorance and gullibility, she was beyond devastated. He told her that her actions were unforgiveable, and she had taken the whole of creation away from God, who would judge her forever and ever.

She sat at home, deeply miserable, not knowing what to do, and trying hard to avoid Adam, knowing he would see her state.

Then one day Adam came by looking for her, since he hadn’t seen her for a week or so. He came in and immediately saw how she was feeling, and he knew right away that it was Lucifer. He was about to explode and accuse her of being so stupid, but he saw tears fill her eyes, and his heart was touched.

He reached out to her, embracing her like a big brother, and told her, “Eve, I don’t know what happened, or what’s right and wrong here, but we can work it out. I’m here for you no matter what. It’s OK, we’ll go ask God, She often takes a walk in the Garden round about this time of day, She’ll know what to do.”

Eve was pretty scared, but Adam took her hand and she let him tell God they needed help, and gradually she let it all out, how things had progressed, and how she’d felt bad at first, but then let herself be led because Lucifer seemed so powerful and convincing. And Adam was shocked as the whole story came out, but he loved his sister and stood with her, even when God told her she would have to go through a difficult course to put right all that had gone wrong.

And after a few years, Adam and Eve had their first baby, and they were deeply happy, and felt deeply loved by God. 

Sometimes she would sit and think back to that awful week, and feel so overwhelmingly grateful that she wasn’t trying to raise children with that terrible feeling inside. She knew she would never have been able to love her children fully as they needed with such a heavy core of unresolved guilt and betrayal. She would find herself looking over at Adam, and realizing how he had come through for them at the right time, no matter how much he seemed to space out here and there when household chores needed doing. And if he didn’t know much about how the universe was made, well, she could always teach the kids herself.

Here we meet Adam as true hero and lover, quite different from the archetypal hero of warrior and winner of fair lady, who thereafter worships him and lives to make him a success. The alternate path of overcoming the depth of guilt while bathed in a universal sea of accusation and dismissal has taken women thousands of years at least. The monotheistic religions no doubt helped in the sense of making the accusation explicit, plunging the world into the reign of the “Sky Father”, who suddenly cared above all else about the actions of His creations, in contradistinction to the lax acceptance of the “Earth Mother.” But neither would be enough to lead humanity into a realm of spirituality that could bring a simple healing of the heart. Only today as women reclaim their true authentic power are we seeing developments that can lead us into a future of beauty and love.

People commit crimes as the result of a long process, maybe an ancestral process over which they have no control, but simply find themselves born into. With women’s power severely constricted there has not been enough kindness and deep acceptance in the world to bring about real steps towards an ideal that still exists deep in the philosophical core of each and every being on earth. Men’s power has been twisted toward methods of external control and physical force, and history has been the history of war and conflict.

However, we can see that the root of the problem today is accusation. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences for mistakes or criminal actions, it means we have to find a way to deal with these that is not simply punitive, but also restorative and healing. Some parts of the world have made major steps towards humanizing their criminal justice systems, some have made backward steps, like America in recent decades. But the consequences of these choices are being made clear, as the criminal justice system threatens to take over almost every other aspect of life in many communities.

We are discovering that an excessively male-designed style of government, while having served America well in the past, has serious flaws when the majority of the people are excluded from meaningful input. Impasse has effectively settled in to reign in Washington DC, and in the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, except for where enough power is centered in one person that human rights can be ignored with impunity. And all the current dysfunction on display worldwide could have been avoided by simple kindness, humility and love as the response to mistakes, rather than heaping on the accusation.

As long as humanity is connected to God, because God’s input was necessary for Eve.

A real connection to God is not the same as reading a list of laws and punishments from a holy book. The time for such an intellectual approach to relating to God is over, as masses of people have already in their hearts walked away from this. The time has come for knowing that deep within each person lies the indivisible consciousness of God, the universal oneness from which our whole being unfolded. God is indeed the ground of our being, not primarily the ruler and lawgiver.

God cannot truly be known except insofar as God’s real nature and heart has been manifested within the physical universe. Without this caveat, there would be no need for a physical world, everything could have existed within the mind of God, and everything would have been harmonious and perfect, and from God’s perspective, boring and meaningless.  It would have been like having just nature, a great science project, but not much more. We are required to go deep inside to discover the nature of God, and live what we find there. Finding God is the same as finding the deepest, most meaningful self within, and then making it real. 

Those We Have Imprisoned Will Liberate Us

The black community in America is dealing with issues within the criminal justice system that derive from a complex history of loss of every basic human right; identity, freedom,  the right to protect one’s own family, even self-determination. Resolving some of the disparities in policing, in sentencing, in ascribing guilt or innocence, is only a step towards justice. The bigger issues cannot be disentangled from the daily lives of African Americans without being addressed at the deepest levels. And the white community, those who show up now as descendants of slave owners and benefiters from white privilege, can only really offer opportunities to allow for healing. The healing must take place from within the abused community, as reclaiming their right to power is one huge step that must occur through the process.

With that realization we see that healing is already taking place, as African Americans have demonstrated their undisputed ability to hold positions of power in this country. And on top of that, they are demonstrating a heart of overcoming resentment in reaching out to the white community; the relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama clearly demonstrates this willingness to move forward and leave behind the past. The mutual respect and even affection are indisputable.

However, the legal system which focuses almost exclusively in many urban areas in America on the black population serves by its very nature to separate and hence try to destroy the black community. White privilege is so deeply ingrained that it is invisible to most white people. It is just assumed, for example, that following the expected norms within a company will result in promotion and advancement, and white people do not see that as privilege. But black people have not been part of that automatic advancement. Even today the black person who advances in his or her career is too often seen as something of the exception to the norm, one who has overcome a disadvantage.

Often advancing in the career world is accompanied by leaving behind one’s origins in community. Joining the world of privilege has consequences far deeper than simply economic benefit, because it generally requires a person to adopt white values, and see themselves as part of the white community. Giving up one’s own heritage is accompanied by all sorts of unacknowledged wounds, a slicing away of much of the depth within the self. In the same way, living as though the natural world is simply a source of economic wealth has separated those with European ancestry from humanity’s own deep identification as part of nature.  Had the original settlers embraced the native peoples when occupying this land, this self-identity could have been preserved and even revered.

The land of opportunity, the land that promises government by the people for the people, has abandoned some large part of the people. Until black people occupy enough positions of power within the criminal justice system as representatives of the black race, so as to transform the system itself in the direction of community values, reformation that accomplishes real healing seems left to the community itself. And that entails a clear expression of the deepest values from the ancestral heritage, and creative analysis and application of these values to transport them from Africa of hundreds of years ago to America of the 21^st century.

Traditional values must be meshed with western science, creating a synthesis able to absorb today’s technology without destroying yesterday’s deep inner self. They must be able to offer help to any people trapped in today’s shallowness and materialistic value system that leaves us vulnerable to losing the deeper values of this country itself. And reclaiming historical depths of character is probably the only way to bring us out of today’s crises, which leaves us to look within to rediscover ourselves.

The way a country conducts its justice system has a great deal to say about its values, and we are failing on that very point, how to handle accusation without losing love. Accusation has taken over this country, and we need to look at each other without contempt again, to respect each other and accept that we cannot know another’s thoughts and motivations enough to simply condemn them. We cannot just follow killing with killing in return. We cannot impose life sentences without self-examination to determine if we are not already sentencing people to lives of injustice every day.

We have a very bright future just around the corner, but our very technological progress can also be what kills us without a healing within the whole of society itself.

Justice Requires Heart

Delaware’s criminal justice system is facing pivotal decisions. Over several decades, Delaware has been attempting to solve many problems by criminalizing a vast new array of actions, resulting in a hugely expanded prison population, with crises at every stage in the system.

In a high trust society, people have a strong role in judicial proceedings, and generally speaking the need for the proliferation of laws doesn’t exist, because there is confidence in the ability of a human being to interpret existing laws, and recognize motivations so as to administer justice. However, in recent decades, the laws have proliferated in an effort to define more and more precisely every possible action that is deemed unlawful. Justice has been replaced with the quest for law and order.

The rule of law may have run its course, in its present form. Delaware has many people in high positions within the criminal justice system who have recognized that our system has serious problems, and are working hard to make positive changes: our Chief Justice Leo Strine, our Chief Magistrate Alan Davis, our Public Defender Brendan O’Neill, even our Attorney General Matt Denn.

Our law is based upon Roman law, which derives partly from the laws of the Old Testament. However, there has always been a law with a different base, the law of indigenous peoples, which is based on one’s identity as part of a community. Today we see the need to reclaim something of this approach, because if we don’t move into a law based on heart and universal love we cannot solve our current dilemma.

The fundamentals of our law are unbalanced, heavily skewed towards the masculine, punitive approach, expressing in no small degree the doctrine of survival of the fittest. Native American law is based on the ideal of the harmonious society. Elders of a tribe are involved in seeking ways to restore balance between the perpetrator and the person wronged. When Europeans came to this new world, they could have embraced the best of both justice systems, instead of which the adversarial and punitive approach won out completely.

We are living with the results of that decision right now, and have reached the limits that a society can maintain and still remain a nation.

Before we move any further along the road towards greater punishment and stronger laws, we need to stop and take stock of where we are, and how we can express in our justice system that each person has intrinsic, unique value. We need to ensure that the feminine voice is heard loud and strong, reflecting the realistic and fundamental change in the role of women in our society. Wherever you look today in Delaware you will find women on the front line of change.

Given the lack of confidence in the current state of the criminal justice system, why are we in such a hurry to resurrect the most extreme and irreversible punishment, the death penalty?  There was no outcry from the people when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional last year and yet immediately a group of lawmakers vowed to reinstate it. It would seem we have a great deal of work to do to restore justice to our justice system, which makes it very premature to focus on killing criminals.

The culture of policing today tends to define reality for a young law enforcement officer more than any ideals which drove him or her to enter the profession. Guns on both sides, the use of force as routine, the conscious or unconscious racial biases, all affect what can be achieved in terms of justice. It is understandable that those lawmakers who are ex-law enforcement officers may feel the call to restore the death penalty, because it feels like every effort has been unsuccessful, but maybe that is because we need a restored sense of community, based on reconciliation, not more punishment.

We need our legislators to be the ones leading the reforms, so that huge numbers of Delaware residents do not routinely find themselves in desperate situations which can drive them to desperate acts. It seems morally questionable at best to focus on the death penalty while there is real desperation in so many of Delaware’s communities. After all, the death penalty itself can be resurrected later, if people still feel the need after reforms have been implemented, unlike those put to death in such excessive haste.

Society Growing Up At Last

Women were only just starting to realize they were in prison – or rather in the dolls’ house – back in the middle of last century. They certainly weren’t ready to get out there and take on the world, because they hadn’t yet taken on their own self-images. In other words, they still blamed themselves and hated themselves, and they still thought the way to become equal was to become like men, to emulate all the broken behavior that man exhibited in their quest for power, control and riches, because that brought the rewards society offered. 

But here we are two generations or so further along the path toward true freedom, self-acceptance and manifestation of our own true inner power. It looks quite different from that of men, and it is going to change the world.

Young women of today exhibit a caring that comes solely from within their own beings, and experience a willingness to judge according to their own opinions, not according to opinions that would be approved by men. Young men of today have become far more comfortable with their own inner femininity than one would ever have thought possible within a generation or two. The older generations are denouncing most of this, desperately trying to draw back the youth into the failures of previous times. But it’s difficult when just about everyone agrees what previous times led to was the chaos we see today, the inequality, the over incarceration, the desire to step back from the position as leader of the free world and focus on making the rich richer as a good American should do.

We should have been able to claim our freedom to be ourselves back then after the sixties, but all this inner searching takes time. At that time it proved quite easy for authorities to clamp down, for assassinations to dispel hope, for unthinking politicians to jump on the tough on crime bandwagon to avoid defeat at the polls. Today women everywhere are speaking out, minorities are not just accepting that they can be imprisoned, shot and killed by bad policing, and even those in top positions in many states are working toward reform, because they see the harm that is being done.

The biggest barriers to positive change come from the lawmaking community, the rule of law, and those addicted to the profits that have accompanied the growth industries of criminalizing everything and taking away most controls over the financial services industry. Letting go of these addictions will be a long process, maybe made unnecessary if we have another collapse of the financial system which is certainly a strong possibility, but anyway something we have to deal with in a different way from the past, because women’s values are different. 

Where the law contradicts love, we must go with love. Not the urgent need for love that mimics love, but a real love that extends to everyone on the planet. Where people are thrust into poverty and homelessness, we must provide a basic income and a home. Where people lose their source of support, we must find a way to provide for all of our needs together.

The Future of Religion

Transitions are difficult, as the world is discovering right now. The former focus on sin and salvation has given way in emphasis to further revealing of the universe, and science is now coming into its own as a source of new insights for a new age. While it may be challenging to let go of previous modes of operating as a church or a spiritual movement, we find deep truths emerging today in many fields which must be incorporated into any realistic and comprehensive future for religion itself.

As women have become more involved in the academic and scientific world, a general picture is emerging of the differences between a man’s perspective and woman’s perspective. I remember my boss asking 20 years ago, “but what is women’s science?” I couldn’t tell him back then, but now I would be able to reply, based upon reading and observation, that women see things from a more holistic perspective, they often think more in pictures, more intuitively, and take in the whole of a situation at once.  Men tend to think in a more linear fashion, work out truths sequentially, and build up a worldview according to this method.

As a means for freeing people’s minds from the domination of the church in the early days of Western European science, the more male-oriented methods worked well, cutting out an ever-expanding corner of truth that held its own in rational circles, and gradually taking over as the predominant worldview in the West. However, its own success has brought us to a day when it is not unusual to find accomplished scientists asking if maybe science has simply tied itself up in its own strings. With uncountable solutions to the currently popular string theory (a highly theoretical mathematical scheme that regards a one-dimensional string as the most fundamental building block of matter), and no way to distinguish between these solutions, this has to be a valid question.

Even in the West, certainly since the early days of quantum physics and relativity, there has been a secondary track within science, based on the idea that matter itself is in some sense conscious, or at least has some kind of internal nature. Alfred North Whitehead, Henry Stapp, Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as scientists who have been willing to investigate paths that have challenged orthodoxy in many ways.

Newtonian science presented matter as inert, purposeless small billiard-ball type pieces moved around at random by a similarly purposeless array of forces. The universe was deterministic; even humans were simply living within this scheme of purposeless and meaningless activity.

This perspective is long gone, replaced by various developments of the 20th century, such as quantum physics and chaos theory, and today certainly superseded by theories that resonate with molecular biology and epigenetics (a biological theory, confirmed by experiment, that our life experiences affect the expression of our genes, replacing the old view that genes essentially controlled everything).

Of greatest significance today is the emergence of a worldview that recognizes the internal nature of matter itself, because that deeply resonates with the natural intuition of most women, and indeed the femininity within men. Most of the world easily accepts that consciousness preceded the material world, and can accept that at the basis of all matter is some aspect of consciousness. It is not a new concept that the universe was created with a purpose, and that every aspect of reality has meaning and spiritual significance.

Throughout the last century, most scientists accepted the common view that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of the organization of matter, according to the action of universal laws. Today this is brought into question, and seeing the incredible coincidences that would have been necessary to bring about a universe so perfectly designed for the emergence of life, more and more hardcore scientists suggest that such a universe simply had to be in some way designed for this. Science has been driven to the extreme of positing the existence of an infinite array of universes, a multiverse, in order to avoid having to recognize meaning behind the uniqueness of the physical world. If there are infinite worlds in existence, the reasoning goes, then it is not so unusual that we would find one in which life can evolve.

Our current impasse in science certainly allows the possibility that all existence emerges from a universal consciousness. Mathematically we might propose an infinite dimensional, although undifferentiated, universal field, giving rise through a process of narrowing down into a finite dimensional reality to a material world. For a spiritual person, this consciousness would of course be identified with the mind of God, but there is no need to impose such a thought on everyone.

And there is good reason for that last sentence. If at the very core of our being we exist within the consciousness of universal divinity itself, when we start to look within, that is what we are going to find.
Prior to this time in history, looking within was likely to find a great deal of chaos and what was formerly understood as sin. Now, however, as the feminine perspective grows worldwide, when we look within we find more pain and urgent need for love, built upon a strong philosophical core of acceptance of universal oneness and universal good. Our younger generation embodies this: their inherent goodness and deep search for spiritual truth, along with their often ruthless rejection of our guidelines for how to actually be good.

If human beings emerge from within the consciousness of God, however, and we find deep pain and loneliness within, then that is likely to reflect the real situation of God, both the feminine and the masculine aspects of God. The long, tormented history of restoration in which people judged each other, committed violence upon each other, and sought to dominate by physical force cannot possibly have been what God was expecting when She created the world within Her own being. Never being able to cut off from what was happening, God went through the most terrible of tortures along with everyone in history.

Restoration required gradual shaping of humans through truth and religion (which sometimes managed to manifest truth) and this is why the masculine nature of God was so necessarily dominant. But today we are beyond such a time, so that we no longer need to be dominated by laws and religious doctrines.

In fact, it is a time when Heavenly Mother Herself can reach directly into the world and into our hearts and begin to live in our relationships of love. It is a time when we can start to look within and discover that we are, in fact, divine, although not yet mature, beings. The search for truth on the part of our young people can be our greatest liberation as long as we support rather than judge them.

The basis for oneness then is not our beliefs so much as our very identity. Our challenge right now is simply to know ourselves as manifestations of the one God. Religious differences are nothing compared to this self-knowing. Religious teachings of course are often helpful, but once we know our identity and trust that knowing, we can allow our real selves to emerge without hiding or fear, knowing our deepest core is much stronger than our psychological shell.

While consciousness is at the core of our own being, it is also at the core of every being, even every elementary particle, planet and star. Elementary particles may not reflect on the higher mathematics of their choices, but there are scientific voices now calling for a new model of the actions of elementary particles as due to choice, as part of their seeking relationship in order to allow the emergence of life. Women and men in physics and the philosophy of science are suggesting we have been too quick to identify the mathematical time parameter within relativity with the psychological time of our human experience, and of course there would be no reason to accept the “twin paradox” of relativity if the material world truly existed within consciousness instead of the other way round.

Other scientists are beginning to explore the possibility that the laws of science emerged within evolution, rather than driving evolution. After all, it is hard to reconcile the pre-existence of eternal laws with the emergence out of nothing of a universe obliged to follow these laws. We are at a turning point in our understanding of the universe just as we reach a turning point in our spiritual self-knowledge.

No one can dictate to a divine being. Authoritarianism is not such a relevant course today for that reason. If we discover a desire to still obey someone outside of ourselves, it might be appropriate to ask if we may be just trying to avoid self-knowledge and the process of self-exploration. Obedience is appropriate for a time period to learn from someone and inherit their wisdom, but not as a permanent state of being. Relationships can manifest the masculine and feminine within God, and that balance has seen significant change in its expression on earth, facilitating a much greater expression of original consciousness as a result of our spiritual growth and evolution.

Suddenly the idea of simply following received doctrine is no longer generally valued in the same way, and we find ourselves searching for a new Prime Directive, one that can unite, not divide. The emergence from within one consciousness shows us the oneness at our very core. So while we are in search mode, we can retain the confidence in knowing that fundamentally we are still brothers and sisters no matter what cracks appear on the surface.

Let’s be kind, patient and respectful of each other’s search. The universe itself urges us to take that path.♦

A Time When Full Consciousness is Emerging

Since the origin of humanity on earth, we have lived as though there is no spiritual world. Our focus has been almost totally upon the external world, and we have lived without meaning and without eternity. Religion has in various ways attempted to bring to our attention an awareness of spiritual reality, but it has for so many focused on an attempt to stop humanity from performing certain “sins”, through various threats and punitive actions. The idea has always been that to enter into some sort of spiritual reality, however that has been conceived, one has to be “saved” and approved by God.

Now in the present day we have reached a state where we know clearly that there is another side to this, that “sinful” actions cannot be eradicated simply by forbidding them, but only by clarity of vision of wholeness, and by healing the hurt within.  We have, as humanity, reached the place where the motherly nature of God is being expressed by women on earth, and often even by men on earth, and this means that Mother God is able to manifest that part of Her nature which has remained unexpressed throughout so much of the history when men dominated all things.

Uniting the physical and spiritual worlds requires us to be able to perceive the deep meaning in the nature of all things in creation. Perception of the internal nature of all things requires us to accept that the earth itself is not just a commodity which we can use to make profit to enhance our personal small economic life, but is our earth-mother. The earth yearns to supply us all with resources to express the love of the mother, to guarantee us all survival, and to be the basis from which we grow to express our unique, eternal, human and divine natures. 

Humans live as though they are animals with reason, and miss the beauty, the infinite potential all around at all times. But science is truly on the verge of making the step into a vastly greater vision of humans and all of reality.

It is time now for us to look at the land and see the spirit within, as has been practiced by indigenous peoples worldwide. We have destroyed our greatest treasures in the quest for recovering the spiritual world and recovering our awareness of the spirit within us and within nature and all things. Now we can clearly recognize the forces of violence and unchecked desire for power through material wealth and position that have so impoverished our lives in recent centuries. 

No one is looking to take away what so many people rely on for their security, but rather to establish the value of all people, and to ensure that every single person is valued, and able to inherit the earth’s promise of life and security in the physical world, as preparation for eternal joy and life in the spiritual world. We are God becoming, both men and women. Even God lives in potential without manifestation of God’s full nature within the universe, and for the feminine heart of God to have been hidden from humanity, unable to develop within humanity due to the damage done in history, is tragedy.  We are beyond that. 

We can now expect to hear the voices of women, to see the values of the mother gradually emerging within the nations and communities of the earth. 

I want to see the emergence of full health, the overcoming of all disease and the enabling of people to reach spiritual maturity before moving on to the spiritual realms. I want to see much greater ease of travel within the physical world and the universe in the near future, including the revelation of faster-than-light travel. I want to see two-way communication between people in the spiritual world and physical world emerge rapidly in the coming years. The idea that a human can just be dismantled and done away with is so devastating that no one who believes that could ever truly know that God loves us, and yet so much evidence seems to endorse that point of view. This has to be overcome immediately, not as a point of belief but as an actual accomplished fact.