The Freeman brothers commissioned a series of books called “The Fundamentals,” written by people like Thomas Spurgeon and Reuben Archer Torrey.

In the books, they defined five fundamental precepts, without which you were not legitimately a part of the Christian faith. Here’s what they were. Just five—and five ain’t bad, by the way. Imagine being an Orthodox Jew, or a Moslem, where you’ve got about a thousand fundamentals between the two of them—

Christian fundamentalism, thank God, only had five: One, the virgin birth, you had to believe that Mary didn’t fool around. Two, the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. That’s the big one, the one everybody remembers.

Three, atonement through the cross, the idea that Jesus’ blood somehow paid for our sins. Four, the physical resurrection. And number five, the historical truth of Jesus’ miracles.

That’s it. Those are the fundamentals, those five. Inerrancy of the Bible, virgin birth, atonement of the cross, the resurrection, and the miracles.

The fundamentalist movement said, and still says, I guess, that you’ve got to believe in those five truths in order to qualify as a Christian.

You know what? That still leaves a whole lot of wiggle room. For example, there’s nothing about God or the Trinity there. Nothing about heaven or hell, reincarnation. Now, the fundamentalist would say that all of that stuff is covered in the Bible, as stated in clause number two.

But here’s the kicker, if believing the fundamentals were necessary to prove your authentic Christianity, guess who wouldn’t be a Christian? Saint Paul for one. He didn’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. Why not? Because there was no Bible. There was no New Testament—and as far as he was concerned, he was writing letters, not scripture.

And if he ever believed in, or had even heard of, the virgin birth, he doesn’t mention it. Unless the virgin birth is what he’s talking about in our text this morning, from the book of First Timothy, where he says, “I urge you to stop people from preoccupying themselves with myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations instead of divine training that’s known by faith.”

Unless I’m very much mistaken, and I could be, Paul is talking about the emerging myths of the virgin birth, just like Hercules, that were cluttering up the pure Christian message. What else is linked the genealogies? And apparently he thought they were harmful to the church.

And as for the miracles, they’re not even mentioned in any of his letters at all, not even in passing.

That just leaves the atonement and resurrections—that’s about all that he did believe in. That’s two out of five. I don’t’ think that would qualify him for membership in the fundamentalist church.

Even Jesus himself wouldn’t have passed the fundamentalist test. Because the only one of those five things Jesus ever talked about were the miracles. Those Jesus happily acknowledged. But the works he did were easy, he said, anybody could do them, and inevitably would, because his way was capable of leading anyone to the Father.

That’s all he said. Pretty much. He didn’t even have a list of his own five fundamentals. He said “Love one another. By this people will know that you’re my followers, if you love one another.”

So for Jesus at least, religion, if you follow one, shouldn’t be about rules and structures, prohibitions, purity laws. And not just the rules that we don’t like. The religion of Jesus wasn’t about orderliness or conformity of any kind. It’s not about religious correctness. It’s not even about doing the right thing.

It’s not about voting right or eating right or wearing a helmet when you ride a bike, it’s about having a right mind.

See, Jesus came down pretty neutral on the body, he allowed his to be destroyed—so obviously there was a lot more to Jesus, in his own estimation, than metabolism. Eating, breathing, staying alive.

For Jesus, and he says this time after time after time, it’s all about being mindful, about being aware of something. What was it? Because it was only one thing.

It wasn’t to be aware of your neighbor and your neighbor’s wife, and his house and lawnmower. It wasn’t stay aware of your career—because if the spiritual question thing doesn’t work out, you’ve always got teaching to fall back on. It wasn’t anything temporal or practical.

Jesus says, behold, look around, the kingdom of God is everywhere. The presence of God is everywhere. And you’re a part of it, and so is he, and her, and him over there.

If that’s where your mind is focused, then everything else, if there really is anything else, will just take care of itself.

And people say, that’s no way to live, you’ve got to be anxious and scared and angry about the future, and the economy, and the state of civility in what we call civilization.

But that’s not true. You don’t have to worry, or attack, or defend anything. You know what you have to do? You have to focus more on the kingdom of God, and so do I.

That’s the only way we’re going to change the world—not by critiquing it to death, not by force or violence or even reason. The only way to change the world is to see it for what it is.

Do that—see the world for what it is, and the kingdom of God for what it is, and your mind will tell you what to do, who to choose, how to steer your way through the turmoil of life.

You know how? By showing you a better way to go, a way that’s free of strife and indecision—a way that’s shown to you alone, because your paths are all different, and yet it’s always the same way, the way of truth he way of the kingdom of God.

Now, Jesus doesn’t spell out that way, the way. Buddha did his way—Jesus doesn’t tell you how many time to pray—he doesn’t tell anybody how to pray until they asked him, and then he said, call God your father, thank him a lot, and invite him to sow his kingdom in your consciousness.

But he never gets into the details of the disciple’s life, like how to walk, how to dress, how to eat, how to wash, how to brush your teeth; you start with the upper left hand molars and work your way counter clockwise around your mouth.

Now, a lot of other religions did spell it out—sometimes down to the kind of underwear you were supposed to wear, or how long your hair should be. Even Buddha had the eightfold path, right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right meditation.

Jesus never went in for that stuff—even in his only extensive document or speech about the kingdom of God, he doesn’t’ offer any guidelines for living in the kingdom, he tells you how suffering is resolved in a world aware of its inner core holiness.

He says, in the kingdom of God, there are no losers, because everybody’s happy. In the kingdom of God, there are no sufferers, no mourners, because everybody’s happy.

In the kingdom of God, there are no people whose voice isn’t heard, no one who stands at the back of the room watching the banquet, because in the kingdom of God, everybody’s mindful, everybody’s aware, everybody’s happy.

And happy doesn’t mean, I’m happy because I’m getting my way. Happy means, I’m happy because I now see how God’s creation, His whole kingdom, operates. And it’s perfect.

What isn’t perfect is what people still hold onto as a mistaken policy and practice of greed or anger or self righteousness or egocentricity—they really all amount to the same thing: letting the ego self take predominance over the God self.

But the ego self is an illusion, it dies when your body dies. The God self runs on auxiliary power. It doesn’t die. And if that’s the part of you where you’ve focused your consciousness, then neither do you.

Now, that’s pretty much the religion of Jesus. There’s no salvation. There’s no heaven or hell—not that Jesus didn’t believe in them, he just didn’t talk much about them—there’s no atonement.

Jesus doesn’t talk about the magic of the blood sacrifice. He doesn’t say that his blood will set us free. Then what does he say sets us free? The truth.

And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Jesus’ religion was a mental religion—everything that happens, happens, not in a church or on a dirt floor, at the beach, in a Chinese restaurant—it happens in your mind. Who’s in your mind? You and God. Nobody else.

Jesus said, I and the Father are one—where were they one? In his mind. He said unless you are born again, you can’t enter the kingdom of God. Where are you reborn? In your mind. It’s the result of a decision you made in your mind.

Jesus’ religion from top to bottom was about consciousness, the transformation of human consciousness into God consciousness.

And by the way, any religion, any spiritual methodology that transforms human consciousness into god consciousness is the religion of Jesus.

No matter what it calls itself, no matter what the language or mythology or symbolism is, it’s Jesus’ religion—because it accomplishes the same goal. Unification with the Divine.

Divine consciousness is divine consciousness whether you attain it in Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity, it identifies the truest true you there is, with the only onliest God there is in the universe. Same religion. End of story.

All of the other stuff, the rites and rituals and doctrines and dogma—they’re just ways to contextualize the one truth.

And all of that junk about heaven and hell? When you move your consciousness from human to divine, you are immortal—because you realize your immortality.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life, nobody gets to the Father unless they get there just like me, on their own two feet, moving ahead, with their eyes and minds wide open.

So embrace, if you want to, the myths and traditions and customs of the Christian faith, but see them for what they are. They’re not the truth, the truth isn’t in icons or metaphors, as lovely as they are.

The truth isn’t even in the words of Christ—the truth is in the life, his life and yours, melded into God, and buoyed by the Holy Spirit through time and space to God only knows where he intends us to be.

Don’t be persuaded by the prettiness of religion—be convinced by the inner experience of the presence of God. And let that guide you into recognizing true religion, if and where you find it.

7/16/11: The Uses of Religion

(Acts 17:22-34)

I think that I may have mentioned that my summer reading program, which is proceeding very nicely thank you, my summer reading list has two recent baseball books on it—

One a book about the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball, Charles Old Hoss Radbourn, who in 1884 pitched the Providence, Rhode Island Grays to their only national league pennant, with an unprecedented and unsurpassed 59 winning games.

The other is a book that purported to be a book about the secret history of baseball, and it proved to be pretty much just that. It reads like the Da Vinci Code, with its own secret society lead by a fascinating villain, from the background—

And you know who the villain is? Theosophy—the Madame Blavatsky creation from the late 1800’s—it turns out several presidents of major league baseball, several owners of ball clubs—even Abner Doubleday, the alleged inventor of baseball was a theosophist.

As was Albert Spalding, of Spalding Sporting Goods, the inventor of Doubelday’s claim to have invented baseball. He was also a theosophist—so the book makes a pretty good case for heavy influence, if not some outright chicanery, in the theosophical retelling of baseball’s history.

So that was all cool stuff. But the book then goes on to state that right from the start, there has been an effort to have baseball seen, not just as the national pastime, which is its longstanding title, but also as America’s secular religion, which is something that I think a lot of people believe it has become. And this is the issue that reeled me in, I think, as I read on.

It helped that there are a number of quotes from, of all people, Walt Whitman who would, I guess, have been a theosophical fellow traveler. Quotes like this one: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game.

“It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be blessing to us. The game of baseball is glorious.” Well, that sounds like religion, doesn’t it? It does to me.

The book even suggests that baseball contains in it an echo of Homer’s religious epic, The Odyssey, in which Odysseus, or Ulysses, leaves home to touch upon a series of island bases, usually guarded by ferocious opponents, experiences a series of challenges, before finally dashing home again.

So if you wonder what kind of a religion baseball is, it’s a kind of Homeric religion, with Odysseus as its chief cultic figure.

And this was a kind of an unexpected benefit from the book for me, because it started me thinking about religion in a way that I don’t know that I ever have.

I started thinking about not just the theology of religions, working out a definition of religion, but more than that, I started thinking about the purpose of religion. Who is it supposed to serve? The community I suppose. But we call it a worship community. Is it absolutely necessary that you worship something? Something that is other than yourself?

So does that disqualify baseball as a religion? Is a secular religion even a possibility? And if not, how exactly is God connected to us in the equation of religion? And what are the ground rules as we dash around the bases toward home or heaven or enlightenment or whatever it is that we are seeking at the end of our race?

And Jesus, by the way, is almost no help at all to us in this discussion, because he had very little to say about religion. Except how much it had been perverted by the hypocrites who ran it.

So much more informative are the words from Saint Paul in our text this morning, from the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts. And it’s kind of funny how it went down: See, Paul was visiting the ancient and revered city of Athens. He’s a tourist, so he’s met by friends, locals, who naturally want to take him out and show him around.

So first, they took him to the Agora, to the bustling, international marketplace. It was like downtown Athens.

They took him to the Acropolis, the seat of Greek religion. And in between the Agora and the Acropolis, lastly, they took him up to a hill called the Aeropagus, which means the hill of Ares, the god Ares.

It was a very special site in Athens for several reasons. It was the meeting place of the highest court, the court that tried capital crimes, murder, treason, heresy. It was the place where Socrates had pleaded his own case, some three hundred years earlier.

Paradoxically, the hill was also the hangout, the gathering place, for the Athenian philosophers. And so Paul’s hosts introduced him to a group of stoics and epicureans, who were like the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the republicans and democrats, the two main schools of Greek philosophy.

And they showed him the only sanctuary dedicated to the Eumenides, or the kindly the ones. Or as we sometimes call them the Furies, the Avengers of the Gods.

And the Aeropagus was also the place in Athens where this famous shrine that the book of Acts tell us about was located: the altar to the unknown god.

And since the philosophers had been questioning Paul, as they walked up the slope, asking him to state the essence of this new teaching that he’d been spreading through the Eastern Roman Empire—

After he had stepped up and read the inscription on the shine, Paul turned to the philosophers and the curious who had gathered, and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every aspect. Because as I went through the city and looked at all of your sacred objects and sites, I noticed that the one that you seem to hold most holy is this plaque inscribed, ‘to an unknown god.’

What you worship as unknown I now proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it. In Him we live and move and have our being. As even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ And since we are God’s offspring, we know in ourselves and through nature that God is not a creation of stone, or metal, or imagination, but a creator who interacts with and cares about His creation.”

And at some point, Paul just sort of separates from the philosophers and leaves—but the text intriguingly adds that on that day some of the Greeks joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Aeropagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

So the very first Christian community in Athens was like this really, really groovy commune of, like, philosophers and really, really cool spiritual dudes like Dionysius the Aeropagite, and like a whole bunch of other groovy, young people.

That’s who they were. They were philosophy majors at Athens University, and they were seekers, they were on a Greco-Roman spiritual path, and now their path had merged, and they followed Paul. Now, why did they do that?

They did it because the path Paul presented them with, did not significantly diverge from their own.

Remember what Paul said to the Athenian philosophers, “I found you are incredibly scrupulous in your observance of religion. You want to be careful to reverence every holy space, every inspired thought or word, every God—including the one we cannot know or make a statue of, the all-in-all God, to whom you had dedicated this plaque, ‘to an unknown go.’

“Well, it just so happens that you and I, at this time, in this place, can stand here and worship that God together. Because we are one people, one worshipping community.”

He said, And I can prove that, let me quote to you from the Gospel of John. No. The Gospel of John hadn’t even been written yet. No gospel existed. He said let me quote from the New Testament. The book of Revelation, King James Version. No. The New Testament hadn’t been written yet. Not one word of it.

He said, My God, the one that I proclaim, is the same one you worship, and I’ll prove it to you in the words of your own theologians, the poets, who said, for example, “In God we live and move and have our being.” That’s my God too.

The poets also wrote, “For we too are that God’s offspring.” And he said, that’s my God too. They’re one in the same.

So Dionysius and his old lady, Damaris, and all their friends joined Paul, because he convinced them that they were already fellow travelers.

And you notice that he talked to them without calling their religion heathen, or misguided, or evil. He did not call their statues and their myths and their names for God abominations. Because he didn’t believe that.

And he didn’t preach them a long sermon about the Bible. He demonstrated to them that what they were thinking was approximately right—but, being Paul, he said, but I can make, I think, a few clarifications. See, Paul was a Pharisee, and a Pharisee is a Jewish stoic, or cynic.

What is this religion that Paul is suggesting they share? It was the same religion that they were teaching in the sanctuaries and the temples on the Acropolis. Based on the same principles handed down from esteemed Greek poets who were the interpreters of the divine.

In fact, the first of the two quotes that Paul uses is from Epimendes. The second is by Aratas, a Greek poet, who was also a stoic. So what could be more accommodating?

And what Paul is pointing out, is that if we can use quotes from the other guys’ writing, their Bible, to talk about our God, which, by the way, become quotes in our Bible—that’s a strange factoid if you think about it. Those words, quotes attributed to Epimendes and Aratas are scripture, New Testament, Biblical, holy writ, aren’t they?

A fundamentalist, an inerrantist, would say that every word in the Bible is God’s word. If that’s true, then part of God’s word is about Greek gods written by Greek religious poets. What a funny turn of events.

But then, there is only one true religion, and we are all sects of it: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Islam. All the same. We are all offspring of the same God. And that makes us brothers and sisters. So our Creator, our Father, is the same guy.

If I talk to my dad a little different then the way my brothers Earl or Michael or Richie do, why should that bother anybody—they’re my brothers, he’s their dad. If they call him Allah, or Divine One, or Zebra Boss, what’s the big deal?

We are all sects of the one true religion, but no one of us yet, has become identical with that one true religion. We all have feet of clay. All religions are human constructions made up to resemble us, not God.

Isn’t that true? Don’t all religions look like the people who created them? Hebrew, Greek, Aztec—they have the family structure, the imagery, the power pyramids of the people who built them.

But within every one of our sects, there is a pathway, a strand of consciousness leading back to the one true religion, and when we cling to that strand of consciousness, no matter what the words we say, what our language is, what our names for the gods are, we share the mutual experience of approaching the same divine parent, we worship the same God. Differently. But the same.

And when we cling to that strand, and climb hand over hand back to its source, we discover an inner secret: that we are of the same mind, that we are equally conscious of being one, of being God, of being each other, equally conscious with every other consciousness to our unity.

And that’s the mystic’s vision. We are all just contours in a plastered wall. Scrape off the surface and there’s nothing but wall.

And that’s what Paul was telling the Stoics and the Epicureans that day on a slope in Athens, near the Sanctuary of the Furies, was that their religion mattered to him. That’s why he wanted to share his experiences with them. Because it might help them understand their own experience.

I don’t know about you, but I kind of like that as a ground zero for a theology of religion: a religion is a place where you can turn to for information and treatment and sustenance for your spiritual life. A clearinghouse for state of the art, state of the age, spiritual technologies like prayer, mediation, compassion.

One last thing I noticed about Paul’s speech to the philosophers. He never once, in the whole long thing, ever mentions Jesus by name. He alludes to him, he tells the story of a man who is wholly embraced by the will and the presence of God, but he never tells them his name.

It didn’t seem necessary to him. It was better, more important, that each one came to the inner one on his or her own terms. I like that.

If I were Paul, and I was taking one of these economy vacations to the Greek Islands, to Athens, and a bunch of crazy philosophers asked me what the teaching was that I followed, I would tell them—whatever religion you practice, the religion of Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad, seek the inner Christ, just like Jesus did.

Seek the inner Christ. Connect to the identity of the divine within yourself. Forget about what your name is, who you are, assume the identity of the one you find within yourself, and live out that life.

3/20/11: The Hero's Journey

(Zechariah 9:9-10)

One of the most prevalent themes that we encounter in our observance of the Lenten season is the symbolic journey of Jesus. On several levels at once, in the gospel story of the passion, we see Jesus as the hero/sacrificial lamb who’s being pushed almost against his will into an adventure.

It’s a journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem, from freedom into bondage, from life into death, and in the songs and readings of the season, it’s usually described as Christ’s journey to the cross.

Or, if you’re a little more spiritual, and you don’t want to concentrate on the suffering and gore, you call it the journey to the resurrection.

I think that if we see it in the context of a classical hero journey, then we’d understand that death and resurrection are only a part of the journey, the ultimate treasure that Christ obtains, and brings back to us alive, is new consciousness.

Now, the exact way in which he brought that new consciousness back to us alive is anybody’s guess, but if our attention stays focused on the death and resurrection as the pivotal event, we’re going to miss the real point. And the point isn’t where Jesus went, the point is what he came back with.

There’s that wonderful story though, it’s in one of the Peter letters, about Jesus going during the days between the crucifixion and the resurrection to hell, or Hades I guess they would have called it, and preaches to the dead, to the prisoners of Hades, kind of like Orpheus, and leads them up, out of hopelessness, into the light.

In fact, it’s a lot like the myth of Orpheus if you think about it. Jesus descends into Hades to bring back his beloved, not Eurydice. Who then?

Us. You and me. In terms of the story, Jesus descends into hell to bring human beings out of the darkness.

Jesus is the hero who dies for his beloved, and yet at the same time, he’s the rescuer who brings back his beloved from the dead. And how does he bring her back, how does he come back himself? How does he come back to us today? How is he alive with us today?

In consciousness. That’s what he brought back with him. A consciousness that transcends time, and even death. Because it realizes that all time, past, present and future, is contained in the now. In transcendent consciousness.

That’s how Christ is alive in the world. Christ consciousness. That’s how you turn human nature into divine nature, turn anger and hatred into peace, Christ consciousness.

Christ consciousness is the catalyst, the alchemy that transforms what we see around us, into what we know in our hearts to be true. And when you can do that, you can live, consciously live, in the kingdom of God.

So what Christ brings back to us at the end of his journey, when he returns from the depths of Hades, is a way of seeing through the illusions of death and darkness and negativity.

Which means that the purpose of Christ’s journey, the Easter journey, was not to save us or rescue us from hell, but was to bring us enlightenment. But to what end?

He brought us enlightenment so that we might become beacons to the paths of those around us. Family, friends, neighbors, enemies.

So that we might participate in the divine project of moving the human consciousness away from the natural, from survival of the fittest consciousness, to Christ consciousness, toward awareness of, and concern for, the survival of the weakest, the meekest, the most vulnerable.

He brought us back the light so that we might become like him, and in doing so, carry his light, which becomes our own light, on our own journeys of spiritual discovery.

So that when Jesus says to his followers to take up his cross and follow him, he’s not luring them to their deaths like some kind of a cosmic pied piper, he’s inviting them to embark upon a quest for self understanding and merger with the Godhead.

Now, isn’t that consistent with your theology of Christ? And entirely in line with his role as the hero, the hero who goes to the world beyond and returns with a treasure.

And not only does the treasure benefit the community, but in his coming and going, he picks a successor to make sure that the hero’s journey is ongoing, which ensures in turn the well being of the community. And you know who the successor is? It’s you. Not the pope. Not a minister. Not a teacher. It’s you, it’s me.

That’s why Jesus is always saying things like, “What I have done, you will also do, and greater works than these.”

We are Jesus’ successors, not his followers, not his worshipers. His successors, his colleagues, his sisters and brothers. We are the heroes who carry his flame.

I used to run track in high school, which would be starting just about now. Football season was over, baseball hadn’t started yet, so it was track season, and I was on the varsity team from my sophomore year on.

And the great pride of my athletic career was that I was on the four man relay team that won, and held, the California high school state record for the one mile relay. That’s four 440’s.

And I remember all the training that we had to put in to become the championship team. Not so much in running really, as in the execution of the hand off.

Because the way that you passed the baton—running at full speed, crammed into the same tight lane—meant whether you were going to take the lead, or whether you were going to fall behind. It was all about precision, and I saw lots of teams lose the race, and lose the championship, because they flubbed the hand off.

The first and most important thing that we need to know about our spiritual journey is that it’s actually the journey of the Christ. Whoever travels the path, carries the light, and returns from the dead is the Christ, the hero.

See? It’s an archetype, like the Greek gods. The hero’s journey is a pattern to which our own lives can if we let them unfold. And the greater works than his, are ours to be claimed not at the end of the journey, but from the moment that we first set foot upon the path.

The journey of the spiritual hero always begins very unexpectedly. Sometimes when you’re not even seeking it, when you don’t even want to go on a journey. You look around and you discover that you’ve already begun it.

Has that ever happened to you? You find yourself in a situation, a job, a relationship, a cause that becomes the best, the most compelling thing in your life, but you’ve got to stop and remember how it all got started? Because you weren’t looking for it where you found it.

God did that. God took you there, God let you obtain what you needed, even if you didn’t know you needed it.

Which means that all you have to do to begin your own spiritual journey, all you have to say, straight from the heart, is, “I’m ready.” At that moment, life will start showing you signs, some people call them coincidences, which indicate to you that the creator of the universe hears you, and is responsive to your voice.

And by the way, by signs, I don’t mean mostly metaphysical, all mystical-schmystical signs. I always say the most important signs that God gives you are the ones in yourself. Your gifts and talents and attributes, those are the signs. God will always show you signs that you can understand, signs that are close at hand.

Because the closer the signs are to your own field of vision, the more you’ll see and hear and think and feel, and the more you’ll solve the riddles, the more you’ll fill in the blanks intuitively. Look for those signs because it’s God showing you your answer.

Be open minded to all the working in the universe. Be attentive and watch for the patterns that start emerging in your life. Very often those patterns are the universe’s way of feeding back to you what you’ve been sending out.

Once you recognize the patterns and the way that the universe is communicating to you, that’s when the adventure really begins. As God starts to unfold a whole new world for you. And all you have to do is to relax, open up your mind, and let God do what God does best.

So you see, it really doesn’t take a lot of effort to embark on a spiritual journey. It’s more surrender than anything else. Only you have to keep a clear mind, and a clear heart. Otherwise, you might misinterpret the signs or block the feedback that’s being relayed to you by the universe.

And know how to make as good a hand off as you can. Pass the information along. Be as clear a channel as you can be. If that sounds too hard, just be the best you that you can be. Because God created you perfect, and perfect is good enough.

And here’s one last warning to anybody who would undertake it, the hero’s journey is not a game. And a spiritual path is not a fad, or a hobby, and it’s definitely not for the impatient or the irresponsible, or the faint of heart.

But once you’ve made your mind up to do it, once you’ve opened yourself up to the light, once you’ve declared that you’re ready to embark on the path, the universe itself will guide you through , that’s the way it works. It guides you through experiences, good and bad.

And if you’re listening to the universe, if you’re reading the signs, if you’re embracing the cross of Christ, which is things like love and mindfulness and inclusiveness, then you’re moving in the right direction. It’s that easy.

And you know what’s going to be an issue? Just keeping on the path is always going to be an issue. Because distraction is the number one killer of the great, big, dramatic enlightenment moment. But it’s all a matter of focus. It’s like meditation.

Even more important than the focus is openness. If you are open to the intentionality of God, then it is irresistible to you, and you are irresistibly drawn into its orbit. You can’t help yourself.

Christ’s Easter journey is not a desolate road to a lonely death, it’s not a path strewn with suffering and self-sacrifice. It is a journey of awakening to the presence of God in everyone, everything on earth.

It’s a journey toward balance and peace and acceptance, it leads to healing and reconciliation. And its path is strewn with garlands, not ashes.

It’s a journey that will transform your life, if you can only see beyond the cross, beyond the tomb, to a place where more of that matters, because it’s light, not blood, that leads and redeems and teaches and heals and immortalizes.

It’s the consciousness of Christ before, during and after the crucifixion that matters. Not his blood, not his atonement, but the awareness, the light of life, the mind of Christ, the consciousness that awakens to truth.

Let’s set that as our agenda during this Lenten season: to let Christ consciousness fill up the space that religions have previously sought to fill up with guilt and fear and regret.

1/6/11: The Golden Age of Human Consciousness

(Micah 6:6-8)

The kids at the school have been studying the golden age of Greece, the age of Pericles, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato.

Which is always really exciting for me, because I can remember when I was in high school, and I read Plato for the first time, it was like a door opened to me.

So I was listening to their teacher lecturing, not eavesdropping mind you, but listening, and I thought—and this is what happens when you’ve had way too much education, you get to be a big buttinski, I thought, hey! Wait a minute! There’s something you haven’t told them yet.

And it’s the most important thing that they’ll ever hear about the golden age of Greece, because it will change their lives forever.

Now, I didn’t do that. I didn’t burst into the classroom and take over their history lesson.

But if I had, this is what I would have told them: that the golden age of Greece didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t just an isolated occurrence, the way we’re often taught.

The golden age of Greece was just one brick in a great wall that we could call the golden age of human consciousness. Because that’s what it really was. A wave of spiritual enlightenment that swept across the civilized world, and Greece was only one part of it.

The golden age of human consciousness was a long, nearly two hundred and fifty year, period from about 650 to 400 B.C., during which the arts and philosophy and religion all flowered spontaneously in the hot houses of Persia, India, China, Greece and Palestine.

Everywhere civilization had taken hold, there was a sudden evolutionary psychic growth spurt, as though the mind of humanity had come rapidly come alive after lying dormant for thousands of years.

And for religion wonks like me, and maybe you, for whom the study of religion is a passion, it’s important because it was an age that witnessed the birth of all of the major religions of the modern world:

Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Greek philosophy, Taoism, Confucius, the messianic prophets of Israel, which led to Christianity, all within that two-hundred and fifty year growth spurt.

What really knocks me out is the vague, weird possibility that there is a moment in time at which Socrates, if he’d gotten around more, could have met the Buddha, Confucius or Lao Tzu.

I always say to Colin, there’s your movie. I think that would be the most amazing story, Confucius, the Buddha and Socrates walk into a bar. And all kinds of crazy antics break out.

And that’s the story that people ought to hear. That there was such a moment.

That once there was a time when human spiritual awakening was a treasured value, something that people in cultures all around the world, individually pursued and discovered for themselves.

It reminds us that evolution is not just about refining biological species, it’s something that happens spiritually as well.

Humanity takes a simultaneous spiritual leap forward, and that’s what happened in the golden age of human consciousness, almost three thousand years ago, it became the matrix of all the religions that we practice today.

And then, by the way, the golden age of Greece and India and Persia ceased to be. And that’s the way it happens, isn’t it? All golden ages come to an end. Does that seem cruel somehow?

Or, is it important that a golden age does come to an end, so that we can see what a civilization is capable of? So that we can aspire to the optimum forms of human thinking and behavior?

The golden age becomes a model, I guess, for what we want our world to look like, how we want our rulers and priests and families to pass on our traditions.

A golden age is kind of like an adventure, the minute that you realize that you’re having an adventure, instead of just a really strange day, it’s over. Have you ever thought about that? It’s true.

Because, while it’s going on, while the adventure is happening, you’re in adventure mode. You’re much too busy being scared, or making quick decisions, or improvising, to notice that you’re presently having an adventure, and probably the time of your life.

And sometimes I think this is equally true about romance. Do you remember when you were first in love? When love was like a psychedelic experience? But the minute that you realize that it’s a romance, and start analyzing it and plotting it out, and talking about it, it’s over.

Or at least one phase of it is over. The breathless, heart pounding, can’t remember your own name or where you’re at phase of the relationship is over. And you’re doing something else now.

Perspective is what makes an adventure an adventure. And that only happens in retrospect.

For example, until it was all over, and we’d won, World War II was like that. World War II was probably a horrific nightmare for most people, fraught with danger and sorrow.

But, when everybody’s dad came home alive, the horror and peril had been transformed into an adventure.

For the children of Israel, the Exodus was an adventure, the Babylonian captivity was not. It was a brutal interruption of their culture, like Nazism. For white America, the old west was an adventure. For the Native Americans, it was not.

Take the life of Jesus, either one, the revolutionary Palestinian peasant, or the son of God incarnate in human flesh, take your pick, either one is an authentic adventure story.

In fact, a lot of people think that that’s why the story of Jesus became so spreadable, so easily integratable into the idioms and symbols of Greco-Roman culture. You know why?

Because it fits all of the categories of a hero/adventure story. And the truth is, the way that it’s told in the four gospels, it’s very much like the story of Hercules, with a little bit of the myth of Orpheus. And maybe a punch of Apollo. And if you think about it, that’s the Jesus that a lot of people pray to.

In fact, some scholars talk about the Gospel of Mark as being literally structured along the lines of Greek tragedy. Aristotelian tragedy. And I think they’re absolutely right. And I’ll tell you why I do.

In the Gospel of Mark, the story of Jesus is told without a birth narrative, without post crucifixion appearances of Jesus. Instead, it’s told as the story of a great man on a heroic, on a tragic journey. From Nazareth to Jerusalem. From a village carpenter’s shop to the cross.

And if I had a chart or a blackboard, I could show you how the book has six hundred and sixty four verses, sixteen chapters, eight leading up to the apex, and eight leading down to the climax.

And right in the middle, in the very center of the gospel is this one towering, defining event, and then everything goes wrong, dramatically speaking.

What is it? What’s at the heart of the experience of Christ? It’s not a miracle or a healing. It’s not even a pronouncement or a teaching. It’s a vision. It’s a vision of the way things really are in the Kingdom of God. It’s the transfiguration. Remember the transfiguration from Sunday school?

Right in the middle of the journey, the happy, carefree, radically surrendered, golden age of Jesus’ spirituality, he leads a few of his closest followers up a mountain side, where they see him transform into an alien creature, from another realm.

A creature who consorted with avatars from the past, like Moses and Elijah.

And then the disciples do an incredibly stupid thing. They stop to think about it. They stop and analyze their feelings, their reactions.

Instead of living out their adventure, and reflecting on it when it was over, they stopped and considered what an important moment this was in their lives, how it was affecting their life, and what it meant.

Instead of going with the adrenaline rush of pure transfiguration shoved right into their faces, they formed a committee and voted on a plan of action. And they decided.....to worship Jesus. Can you believe the idiocy of this?

The first thing that comes to mind isn’t “Whoah! I’m, like, tripping, man! This is so cool.” No. It’s, “Jesus is God, Jesus is God! Fall down, be scared!”

And that’s what always happens when religion takes away from you the direct, personal experience of the divine, and replaces it with dogma.

So instead of consorting with avatars, you find yourself consorting with theologians and priests and bureaucrats.

And here’s why this is so important to us. Because if we’re serious about spirituality, if we’re serious about living our lives as though the divine really matters, lives radically surrendered to the presence and the will of God—then we need some hints for playing in that zone.

What happened during the golden age of human consciousness, if we let it be, is our model for what we can accomplish as spiritual journeyers. And so wouldn’t it make sense, wouldn’t it be the wisest thing to do, if we accomplished it the way that they did: Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Jesus? Take your pick. I pick Jesus. A lot of my friends pick Buddha. I’ve got no argument with that.

Those are the people who thrust themselves into the current of the wind, the spirit of their age, and let their minds fly free, and their bodies and their lives followed.

They were people who took chances, reached out, put themselves at risk. But their reward is that they had been somewhere, and came back to tell the truth about their journey.

So, you want to know how you find your own golden age? Because you’ve got one. Just like China, Greece and rock ‘n roll. You’ve got a golden age of enlightenment and enthusiasm and progress coming to you. And if you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s never too late.

Because it’s absolutely what God wants for you. To awaken to His presence all around you and within you. To know Him as yourself. To know this world as His house. And our own lives as manifestations of His presence in the building.

So lean into the wind and let your golden age happen. Let it unfold a bright springtime of love, energy and growth in your life like never before.

Think about this. If everybody in the world let their own golden age of enlightenment happen, what sort of a world would it really be?

Would it be what Buddha talked about as Nirvana? Would it be what the prophets foresaw, a messianic age? What Jesus called the Kingdom of God?

It would be very special, wouldn’t it? We could make that happen, you and me, and people just like us everywhere. We could bring about the second golden age of human consciousness by simply opening up and allowing the God within us, to consort with the God in everyone, the other, the stranger, the enemy.

See? There’s no duality in God, for better or worse, what He is, we are that. Be there, take that truth, that identity, and carry it with you through the week.

1/30/11: Self Definition

(1 Corinthians 13:9-12)

I used to have a friend, a very good friend, who was a professional body builder. I met him on the set of a picture I was working on in the seventies. He was actually one of a group of friends that I had because I’m a night owl.

I stay up until all hours—and people who used to know that I’d still be up and moving, or at least conscious, at two or three or four in the morning, didn’t think it was an imposition to drop by.

And because he was a pretty well known body builder, he had a key to Gold’s Gym in Venice. And he’d go there all by himself when he couldn’t sleep, and sometimes he’d stop by my apartment in Ocean Park and take me with him to the gym.

And I don’t know if you’ve known many body builders—they can be a very noisy, sometimes low brow type, but sometimes, and I got to know quite a few through my friend Joey, they can be downright thoughtful.

Once Joey told me it’s not the muscle tone you know, people think it is. But it’s the definition. You can take and work on your muscles until they all blur and bulge into one great big hulk. But it’s really the muscle definition, defining every muscle in your body clearly, that’s what shows them what the human form is capable of.

So, I said—and I meant it as a kind of a quip—I said, so your art form is really self definition? And he just kind of nodded real seriously and says, yeah! I guess it is.

I think that one of the hardest things to do in the world, is to define yourself. Not because yourself is unknowable, it’s certainly not. In fact, knowing yourself is one of the easiest things that you’ll ever do, because it doesn’t require any effort at all. Really.

You don’t have to do anything. You have to do nothing. It’s like the formula from the book of Isaiah. Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am self.

So you don’t have to do anything except close down to all of the distractions around you, turn your eyes inwardly, and what you see is yourself. You can embrace yourself, if you like, you can love yourself.

Or you can just hang out until the distractions come back and get at you. And you lose contact with yourself.

That’s why we practice states of consciousness and spirituality. So that we know how to find them and recognize them, and get back to them when we’ve been distracted.

So knowing yourself is really the easy part. The hard part is defining that, putting it into language, and communicating it to somebody else. Am I right?

Defining yourself is like when you have to give an alibi to your parents about why you were out so late, and who those hoodlums are that you’re starting to hang around with!

It’s hard because your parents don’t know your friends, they don’t know how decent and sweet they are, all they’d have to do is ask their parole officers.

Defining yourself is different because nobody knows you like you do. And words don’t always help that much. Did you every have a long, involved conversation with somebody and you walked away wondering “What the hell was that all about?”

Words don’t always clarify things. Sometimes they just muddy the water of consciousness. Do you know what I mean?

How did you used to get to know your friends when you were a kid, before you learned the arts of subterfuge and deception? Not through words. Kids talk the silliest crap. You knew your friends through their actions. They showed you who they were. They defined themselves to you in ways that couldn’t be disputed.

Jesus was like that. He said a lot of stuff. But none of it would have mattered really, if it hadn’t been for the way that he lived his life.

He never could have inspired woman and men to take a stand against the massive Roman empire, from places of weakness and poverty, to change the world around themselves.

Only an intense God consciousness can generate and sustain that kind of hold over people. A hold that transcended even his own death. Think about it.

God was so real to Jesus, his consciousness of the presence of God was so palpable, that to just be in his presence, made his heavenly Father a living reality to those who heard him and followed him.

How’d he do it? Jesus did it by modeling a complete trust, complete reliance on God, so complete that you forget your own self interests, you own private needs and yearnings so that you become free to serve others in their needs. And you don’t take somebody to that place by telling them about it. You get them there by showing them the way.

When Jesus felt the need to define himself he reached out and touched the blistered skin of a leper, or the diseased eyes of a blind man. He become everything that they were, and included that into his wholeness.

And when he talked about himself, how did he always describe himself? As something, someone who was of benefit to someone else.

As thirst quenching water, as the way to a goal, or more often than anything else, as a light come to the world to show what? Not himself. But to show the concerns and the priorities of his heavenly Father.

And heavenly Father is just a way of saying the one who’s here, but you can’t see him. The one who reigns in the inner kingdom, where the light needs to be clicked on.

Jesus defined himself by everything that he did. Every touch, every wink, every meal that he ate, every cup of wine that he drank—everything he was, was there to be seen, for those who had eyes to see it. And it always went outward, from within to without.

His acts of healing, or loving kindness, of non-violence—none of it brought in any goodies from the outside to store up in his treasure box. Everything came from within, from the inner treasure box, and was given away freely to those who needed.

Now, that’s very, very different from the way that humans traditionally define themselves, isn’t it? I have some of the Life-Time series, the Old West, which is what I think they called it.

And I was always struck by a photograph in the volume on the settlers, the ones who made their dugout homes, carved into the prairie landscapes of Nebraska or Kansas or the Dakotas.

And you know, it’s the photographs that tell us so plainly what the old west was really like. And in this particular photo taken of a family of settlers, posed formally in front of their sod house, in a rough, dusty yard, with their very best clothes on, and all of their precious artifacts. Their furniture and rugs, their silverware, their guns.

It was all laid out for the photographer, because the settlers wanted him to get the whole picture. To see them for what they really were. 

Think of how we identify ourselves: by our exterior. By our acquisitions. We define ourselves by objective correlations, by physical symbols of who we are internally, and what we are capable of. So we choose external things to symbolize our inner selves.

And we do it with all kinds of things. We do it with possessions. We do it with college degrees. We do it with religious symbols. Catholics wear crucifixes, protestants wear plain crosses, Jews wear stars of David, Masons wear rings and that secret handshake thing. The shadus paint the words of God on their bodies.

And then there are ankhs and amulets, mandalas, peace symbols, little shiny American flags. T-shirts that define the contents of our mind for us, our convictions, our fears, our hostilities.

We define ourselves by the heroes we embrace. We American boys of a certain age were very lucky growing up because our heroes were Davy Crocket and Robin Hood, alpha males who challenged authority and skewered things with projectiles in the forest.

Jesus had a hero. His name was John the Baptizer, we used to call him John the Baptist, but it made him sound too much like the late Jerry Falwell. John the Baptist was Jesus’ guru. Do you know that? John the Baptist gave Jesus his start in the business? He was his spiritual mentor.

And yet, here’s what he said, to a big crowd, about John one day. “I tell you that among those born of woman, no one is greater than John. And yet, the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”

Now what does that mean? What kind of a backhanded compliment was that? Even the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than my mentor John the Baptist? It means that to those who have truly surrendered themselves to God, to God’s will, there is no need for acknowledgement or acclaim. Because there is no self to be indentified or defined, except the God who resides within.

And that’s not acknowledged or rewarded with physical stuff, with clothes and medals and wealth and roasts at the Friar’s Club. It doesn’t mean that that stuff is bad. It just means that it’s not a payoff for being spiritually evolved.

The good get rich, the bad get rich. It’s not how we define who we are when we’re all alone, late at night, and we can’t sleep. And we wonder what it’s all been about. What our part in the play really was.....

Something they used to say in seminary is that nobody on their death bed says, Gee, I wish I’d made more money. Or I wish I had that Maserati I wanted to buy right now. Or I wish I’d spent more time at the office.

More often than not, they say, I wish I’d spent more time with my family. I wish I’d moved a abundance around more. Shared more. Done more to throw some light into the darkness of people’s lives.

The way of Christ is one of those selfless ways. Like the way of John the Baptist. Like the way of the Buddha.

And here’s another hero thing. Were you fascinated, when you were young, by existentialism? I was. The French existentialist writers and philosophers were like rock stars to me when I was in high school, in the sixties.

People like Jean Paul Sartre, with his wall eye and old pipe, and Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and for me, most of all, of all the existentialists, there was Albert Camus. He looked like Humphrey Bogart. He died romantically like James Dean, in an absurd car accident on a lonely country road in France.

In his philosophical novel, The Fall, Albert Camus tells the story of a once famous lawyer, Jean Baptiste Clamence, a man who lives his life out as the longest sitting customer in a bar in downtown Amsterdam. And in this bar, he meets a stranger and tells him the story of his rise and fall. In a series of monologues, he lays out a whole colorful tapestry, with running commentary on the events as they occurred around him.

And what he says, while it reveals a lot about himself, about his own quirks and fears, it also manages to reach into a much bigger pool of human experience. He says things like this:

“I never cross a bridge at night. Suppose after all, that someone should jump into the water? One of two things. Either you do the same, to fish him out, and in the icy cold weather, that represents a tremendous risk! Or else, you forsake him and leave him there. But suppressed drives can sometimes leave a person strangely aching.”

See, Camus’ character Jean Baptiste has a specific problem. He’s afraid. What’s he afraid of? Is he afraid of crossing rickety old bridges? Or falling into frigid water? I don’t think so. No more than any of us are.

What he’s afraid of is getting involved. Even accidentally. He’s afraid of any situation where he has to take a chance, where he has to make a choice, where he might have to become involved with another human being. Especially in the darkness.

What he does not know is that compassion is the light that illuminates even the darkest, murkiest corners of the world. We have been charged with the responsibility of finding ways to carry that light our dark society.

Where is it right now? Where is that light hiding? It’s hiding within you. It isn’t anywhere else. At least, not until you release it, and send it out. The light of love that transforms everything that it touches. The light of love that overcomes everything, even death, even the darkness.

Right now, inside of you there is a tiny light, maybe it’s not so tiny. Because it’s growing, it grows every time you include another human life into your heart, every time you commit an act of loving kindness, every time you give into generosity instead of greed. It grows until it glows like a huge cannon ball of flame.

Let that light in you spill out into the world, through words and thoughts and actions that define who you really, truly are. A child of the loving God, the God of mercy, forgiveness and love, who wishes nothing more than for all of his children to quiet down, and share their ride through space together in peace.

11/15/10: That Same Mind

(Philippians 2:5-8)

In nineteen thirty-nine, a relatively young filmmaker named Alfred Hitchcock gave a lecture at Columbia University, in which he exposed his audience that day to a term that has since passed into cinematic history.

Here’s what he said, and I quote his speech: “We have a name in the studio called a McGuffin, it’s an element that pops up in every story. In crook stories, it’s almost always a necklace, in spy stories it’s almost always the secret papers.

“The defining aspect of the McGuffin,” he said, “Is that the major players in the story are, at least initially, willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the McGuffin actually is.”

In other words, the McGuffin is what everybody in the story is after. In the Maltese Falcon, which of course is not a Hitchcock film, in the Maltese Falcon, the McGuffin is the jewel encrusted black bird.

Later in life, in an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said that he took the word from an old Scottish joke about two travelers on a train. One of them carries a box with him, the other says, what’s in the box, Jock? And the Scotsman replies, it’s a McGuffin.

What’s a McGuffin, the other asks. Ach, it’s a wonderful thing, it detects and destroys all tigers, keeps the heather and the moors free of tigers. But Jock, the other says, there are no tigers in Scotland. And the Scot says, No? Aw well, maybe it’s not a McGuffin.

In other words, a McGuffin doesn’t have to actually be something. It might be nothing. It might be a dream, a vision, an ideal.

My favorite McGuffin in a Hitchcock movie is from a 1949 film called “The Trouble With Harry,” with John Forsythe and a very, very young Shirley McClaine. And Harry is a corpse that keeps turning up and then disappearing in the damndest places. A McGuffin who isn’t there, and then he is.

The McGuffin in the Arthurian legends is the Holy Grail. But what is the Holy Grail? Some people say it’s the mystical core of Christianity. Some people say it’s the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The McGuffin in Gilgamesh is the flower of immortality.

I used to have a professor in college, a philosophy professor, who said that every human system in the world is accelerated and propelled by means of what he called the “goodie.” Which was his own philosophical version of the McGuffin.

For him, the goodie is the goal that you seek, the reward that you receive, it’s the payoff that the system offers for the journey you make, or the adventure you go on, or the task you perform.

My professor would say that every system has its payoff, its prize, it’s the golden ring, buried treasure, the goodie. In philosophy, the goodie is insight, in Christianity, it’s heaven or salvation.

In Buddhism, the goodie is Nirvana, enlightenment. It’s what the Buddhist seeks and is willing to sacrifice everything, to achieve. In Islam, the goodie is forty virgins and a life of opulence in the house of Allah.

What was Jesus’ goodie, because it was none of the above. What was the McGuffin? I like Hitchcock’s term better. What was the thing that became the focal point of his teachings, the object that we must never take our eyes off?

What is the conveyance of the miracle of transformation? Because in the religion of Christ, it’s what the McGuffin was. A conveyance of the miracle of transformation.

Do you know what it was? I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with mindfulness. It’s something that’s not there, and then it is. Like a treasure buried in a field. Jesus’ McGuffin was the Kingdom of God.

“Behold,” he said, “For the Kingdom of God comes like a thief in the night, at an hour when you least expect it.”

Or another time he said, “the Kingdom of God is like a pearl of great price, and the one who discovers it, sells everything that he has in order to obtain it.” In other words, it’s a McGuffin!

For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was the goal, and the journey, and the reward all rolled up in one. The Kingdom of God was the father who watched and waited, and the Kingdom of God was the son who wandered and suffered.

It was the plot point that turned the story, of every mortal life that experienced the presence of the divine in the transient and the profane.

It was the surprising discovery at the end of the tunnel, when every twist and turn has been encountered and dodged, the peerless thing that lies at the center of our own being.

Jesus’ McGuffin was the God self that couched in the recesses of the human self until it was awakened to consciousness. That’s the pearl of great price and the treasure buried in a field; and the secret of the Holy Grail, the incarnation that we are all seeking in the tapestry of our lives together on earth.

When Jesus talks about the McGuffin, in his religion, he uses words like, unless a person is born again, they cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now, think about that for a moment. If your McGuffin, your goodie is the Kingdom of God, Jesus is saying that you can’t get that by being smart, and pious, you can’t get it by passing a vigorous exam. You can’t get it by purchasing it. You can’t get it by force of arms, by violence, robbery, any of the normal ways people acquire McGuffins.

You get it by being born again. Not even born again physically, like being born again so you look like Brad Pitt and think like Stephen Hawking; born again metaphysically, metaphorically, symbolically, spiritually. There’s nothing you can ever do physically not exercise, prayer, charity work, there’s not one physical thing you can do to attain the Kingdom of God.

Even if you were Stephen Hawking reborn as a strong healthy human specimen, there’s not guarantee that you’ll reason any better, discern any better, or get any closer to the ultimate truths of life.

Because there’s no physical rebirth that can attain spiritual goodies. It’s just not the way it works. It’s always the mind, the spirit, the link to the divine, the part of us that is most intimately connected to the source of creative energy from which we sprang.

Do you see how evolution works into this? You’ve never met a bigger believer in evolution than I am. To me, evolution is the only physical evidence that exists, that there is a God.

Because Christ consciousness, Buddha consciousness, divine mind, the Kingdom of God. Call it whatever you want, it’s all one thing: it’s the coming to awareness in the consciousness of the created, that the mind of the creator is in itself.

That the hand that controls the universe is the same hand that is commanded by your brain to stirs the cream into your coffee cup.

Jesus’ McGuffin, the Kingdom of God, is the mechanical element that allows us to see and experience and will and interpret the universe with the consciousness of God.

You know what it’s like? The consciousness of God is like x-ray vision. Do you remember x-ray glasses in the back of comic books? Little illustration of a guy in a bowtie wearing these glasses, passing by two girls at a bus stop, and a big, crazy grin is slobbering all over his face.

Putting on the mind of God, is like x-ray vision. It lets you see through things. It allows you to see the naughty parts, the intimate, the inner parts of the human soul, and on the other hand, it lets you see the footprint, the DNA of God wherever you turn.

That’s the McGuffin that Jesus and his followers were chasing across Palestinian landscape 2,000 years ago. Jesus never told his followers that they were on the road to glory or heaven, he never told them that they were a chosen, elite squad of prosecutors sent out into the world to sniff out phones and liars and evil does.

He said this is all I’ve got, “I have come to bring light, charity, awareness, a new era of mindfulness based on the premise that you and I, all of us, are the children of God.

Jesus came to bring awareness, and you’d think, awareness of this terrific, secret plan, that says there’s a cosmic grid underlying reality, and here’s the code that unlocks it. Memorize, then burn it.

Jesus didn’t say anything like that. He said there is no plan. Outside of the one that’s in your own mind. There is no secret, everything that’s true and useful and universal is already in your mind. And you don’t need a key to unlock it. It’s already unlocked. Go inside. Go to where the stuff, the goodies are, and dig in.

That’s what you see, that’s what you become aware of when you put on the x-ray glasses, when you begin to see things the way God sees them.

You don’t start lording over people. You don’t think you’re any better or holier than they are, because you’re not. You’re them. They’re you. Whatever God is, that’s what you are also. That’s the McGuffin.

In our text this morning from the book of Philippians, Saint Paul says, “Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Who, although he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

In other words, when God comes awake in you, God doesn’t say, “Wow! I’m God now, I’m gonna go out and hypnotize people.” It says, “Wow, how can I help people?” That’s what you get for wearing the glasses.

In every single Hitchcock movie, Thirty Nine Steps, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, even Psycho, you know what the McGuffin was in Psycho? It was the money, and that disappeared halfway through the picture, never to be seen again.

In every Hitchcock picture, the journey to obtaining the McGuffin is a journey of self discovery for the heroes and heroines, and it’s a journey that defines and unfolds their true characters, that builds them, molds them into the people they were destined to be.

Obtaining the grail, the goodie, the McGuffin in the religion of Jesus is exactly the same thing. It’s the journey that turns our vision outside in, that centers us in the Kingdom of God.

Which we know isn’t our destination, or our new address in heaven, when we die.....it’s a new way of looking at the world and really seeing what’s there. Starting with yourself, where God is holed up, and working your way out from there.

Don’t expect a plan or a miracle to appear, create the miracle. And remember, everything that you need, is everything that you already have. So trust yourself, because the God within you is your very best ally that you have on your journey.

Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Who was also awakened in the form of God’s choosing, full of imagination and light and energy. Let this same God mind come into its fullest power within your own, and then watch your treasures multiply, as your identity expands to include every living thing, every branch of creation come to life in front of your eyes.

Let God stretch his muscles in your mind today, and see what a difference it makes, for beauty, for good, for truth, for you.

8/22/10: Is God Grateful?

(Isaiah 1:11-17)

You know what’s really hard to do? It’s hard to live your life when you’re terrified all the time about something.

You keep looking over your shoulder, you’re distractable, you’re unfocused, and you’re always in doubt about the outcome of the chase, the end of the story.

Spirituality teaches us, Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tsu, the whole crew.....they teach us to stay in the moment, because the moment is where your consciousness can be fixed like a pinpoint, and entered into and experienced as an eternity, as all that there is, the universe.

But if you’re afraid, or angry, or obsessed with something, or someone, you’re pulled out of the moment, out of eternity and brought back to the world of flux and noise and desire and illusion.

And you know what? For most of us, me included, the pull of things like power or greed or obsession are much, much stronger than our commitment to meditate, to pray, to do the God thing—instead of the ego thing, the desire thing, the power thing. And that’s how a lot of lives get so screwed up, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’re seeing in the world around you? Why do we do it?.

It’s not because we’re stupid, or evil, it’s because we’re distractable, we’re vulnerable to the allure of possessions, and money and sensations and approval.

So what spirituality is always trying to sell us, in a way, is a remedy, a methodology to circumvent those distractions, while resisting the obvious attractions of the material world.

And that’s why yoga and meditation and prayer and service and rituals were all invented, to bring you back to pinpoint focus. And they all work, to a certain extent.

But then, we get bored, or preoccupied, or too busy, and we stop practicing yoga or meditation or praying;

And you know what happens when you stop practicing your spirituality? You get out of practice. You lose your conscious contact with your spiritual side. Your attention goes elsewhere. You know where?

Back to the world of flux and noise and desire and illusion. Why? Because you like it there. We all do. That’s the problem.

But there’s one thing that you can practice, that will retrieve you and return you to God consciousness, and it’s something that you don’t have to isolate yourself for.

You don’t have to read any special books, or buy any sort of esoteric equipment. No mats, or candles, or aluminum foil crash helmets.

It’s something that you can practice all of the time, wherever you’re at, no matter what else you’re doing. You can’t be too busy to do it, you can do it at home, at the job, on the freeway, in the desert or the ocean. It’s gratitude.

Now gratitude may not be the most exciting spiritual exercise that you’ve ever undertaken. It may not be the biggest psychic rush you’ve ever had. It may not be the most metaphysically profound thing that you’ve done in your spiritual journey.

But for all of its simplicity, and its easiness to accomplish, it contains within its practice, the practice of gratitude, all of the spiritual goals that God wants you to achieve.

Spiritual discipline that if you do it, no matter how good or bad you are at it, if you do it, if you’re just grateful, it will transform your life, your world, your future. Just once. You just have to turn it on once, and then don’t turn it off. It works.

Here’s why. Because whatever you do, in any part of your brain or body, in any part of God’s creation, if you’re grateful for it, it’s going to change your perception of the moment.

Do it constantly, and it opens up your chakras and puts you in a position to receive and respond to life more confidently, more powerfully, more satisfyingly than you ever have before.

Try it! Manifest gratitude while you’re eating, when you’re walking (there’s plenty to look at an be grateful for while you’re walking), when you’re plopped down in the middle of your garden. Be grateful that you’re doing something! Be grateful that God has given you gifts and talents to put to use in the world, and that you’ve got an opportunity to use them.

Live the Christ life.