We Are One With God

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Below is the first chapter from my metaphysical primer, Take Away The Stone: Resurrecting The God Within, recently republished on Amazon with updated content. 

“I and the Father are one.” John 10:30

“Now that which is that subtile essence (the root of all), in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it.” Khandoyga Upanishad

“And indeed We have created man, and We know whatever thoughts his inner self develops, and We are closer to him than (his) jugular vein.” Quran 50:10

To the average religious person – reared in the traditions of orthodox belief – the idea that Divinity dwells in the human heart reeks of heresy. Having been brought up with a picture of the Infinite as an angry old man in the sky, dispensing rewards and punishments as he pleases, they regard with dogmatic suspicion the notion that Deity is “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.” This sectarian attitude is personified vividly in the Gospel of John as the group who sought to stone Jesus for uttering the above quoted truth.

“Because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” (John 10:33)

To which the Master replied:

““Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods” ’?” (John 10:34)

Referring to the sixth verse of the 82nd Psalm:

“I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’”

This is only a reiteration of the truth given in the first chapter of Genesis:

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

When we see through our eyes, not merely with them, we discover the true spirit of the Scriptures stretched in smiling repose, behind the stumbling block of the literal letter which kills true understanding; in this instance the lesson being that, despite the seeming differences of race, language, and religion, we are the progeny of “One God and Father… who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6) whether we know this Power as Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, Tao, the All, the Absolute, Reality, Nature, or Life.

Science reinforces this idea, showing us that the myriad forms of life share the same fundamental building blocks biologically, chemically, and molecularly. “We are all one” as Nikola Tesla observed, conduits of the same vital energy in which we “live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

Beyond the bounds of biology, on every link of the Great Chain of Being, each form of manifested Life – from the smallest pebble to the human genius embodied in an Einstein or Shakespeare – possesses some form of consciousness; which modern science is increasingly identifying as perhaps the fundamental factor in our perception and experience of the physical world. It is that innate awareness animating the vibrational orbit of the smallest particle, guiding the plant towards the nourishing sunlight, serving as the instincts of our animal brethren, and spurring humanity on to greater heights of creativity and ingenuity.

This intangible but potent power has been called Cosmic Consciousness, Universal Mind, Buddha Nature, Atman, the Superconscious, the subconscious, and the Oversoul among other names, but was known to the ancient Hebrews as the great I AM or Yahweh, translated as Jehovah and rendered as the Lord and God in subsequent English translations of the Bible. The name most famously appears in Chapter 3 of the Book of Exodus, when Moses sees the essence of God in the burning bush in the wilderness and, being tasked with liberating the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, asks, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

“God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” (Exodus 3:13-14)

Throughout the Gospels Jesus expressed his understanding of and relationship with this power, which he called “the Father within” and has been dubbed Christ Consciousness by some spiritual schools, to differentiate the man Jesus from the illumined state of consciousness he attained (Christ being a title rather than a surname, derived from the Greek Christos, meaning “anointed one”):

“Before Abraham was, I am!” (John 8:58)

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples… “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:13, 15)

As shown in the first example at the beginning of this chapter Jesus didn’t claim to have a monopoly on access to this Power:

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me (the I AM or Christ consciousness) will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.” (John 14:12)

The Apostle Paul expounded upon this same point in his letters:

“God has chosen to make known… the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27, emphasis added)

“Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13:5, emphasis added)

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20, emphasis added)

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5 King James Version, emphasis added)

Both Jesus and Paul are talking about an impersonal spiritual power (Christ), rather than an individual human personality (the historical man called Jesus of Nazareth). Taking the above literally (that the physical man Jesus is dwelling in us) would leave us in the darkness of confusion, but thankfully “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” (1 Corinthians 14:33, King James Version)

We’ll discover further how the Biblical writers, using the story of Jesus, were trying to illustrate how every person could attain conscious contact with the indwelling I AM to realize “the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21) Let us begin this eye opening process by delving deeper into the nature of this eternal, omnipresent principle.

"What Is Now Proved Was Once Only Imagined" Part II

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."
William Blake
Wanderer Above the Sea of  Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons

In the first installment of this series published last week, we read weighty testimonials from a plethora of eras and thinkers, attesting to the indisputable role that consciousness plays within the schematic of Creation. With the mind blowing findings furnished by science, the age old assertions of philosophy and religion can no longer be casually dismissed as mere poetic fancy:

"I said, “You are gods,

And all of you are children of the Most High..." 

Though humankind, so slow in attaining understanding through millennia of evolution, still pays fealty to the primacy of the "real" world of sense, and remains shackled, like Prometheus of old, to the rock of "Fate".

"But you shall die like men,

And fall like one of the princes.” (Psalm 82: 6 - 7)

Nonetheless, it will be protested by the realists among us that this is all strictly conjecture – highly intriguing no doubt, but ultimately conjecture, with no basis in empirical reality, incompatible with reason, and utterly nonsensical.  But was it not once considered nonsensical to assert that the earth was spherical, since it stretches flat all the way to the horizon in our field of vision? If we were to take at face value the report of our senses, the notion of the earth rotating on an axis would be still consigned to the realm of the absurd, seeing how fixed our position in any location, standing or sitting, seems to be. And a pox on the heliocentric theory! Do not our eyes clearly show that the sun, in its rising and setting, revolves around our fair orb? 

As Blake put it so wonderfully in his There is No Natural Religion:

“Man’s Perceptions are not bounded by Organs of Perception; he perceives more than Sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.”

Again, here we see truth appearing to align with seeming fiction. Nikola Tesla, in his 1905 work “A Means for Furthering Peace” wrote:

“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.”

Recent findings in neuroscience seem to stand with both the inspired poet and visionary inventor.  Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California Irvine, posits after three decades of research that, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi’s observation in A New Hope, our senses are in fact limited and deceiving, a byproduct of our early evolution:

“The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction.”

Using the analogy of a desktop icon on a computer, Hoffman explains:

“Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not… Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer…You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know… Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.”

While this adaption was a necessary step in the unfolding of our racial consciousness - helping our ancestors to focus on the essentials of physical survival - we longer need to be bound by such limitation. The successive innovations of civilized life secured greater physical safety and financial security – the first two rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs – thereby granting us the leisure and time to ponder what lies beyond the realm of our immediate material existences.  Our collective vision, subsequently, has expanded into that mighty kingdom of intangibles (Plato’s World of the Ideal Forms) which the arts, sciences, and philosophy seek to explore. With each advance forward our reason has grown as well, so what was once considered inherently unreasonable is now considered common sense.

In the words of Blake:

“Reason, or the Ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.”

This is the great law of imaginative expansion which has governed humanity, from the earliest days of hunting and gathering to the present. It is the same law which spurred the astronomer – priests of Babylon to observe and record the movement of the celestial bodies, whose findings served as the chief launching pad for future discoveries, capped nearly two millennia later by the landing of men on the Moon.  It was this gift of vision which rendered the wheel, agriculture, engineering, writing, painting, architecture, medicine, locomotion, aviation, and the internet.

The philosophes of all ages, climes, and races have boldly tread the ground and lighted the path. It remains for us – individually and collectively – to cast the dye and venture forth across our own Rubicons. Whether we are crowned with the champion's laurel wreath or share in Caesar's ultimate fate depends upon our steering of the rudders of thought and rigging of the sails of imagination. As Shakespeare wrote in his Henry V: "All things are ready, if our minds be so."

If you enjoyed this post, check out my author landing page over on Amazon.com, for a listing of my independently published works.

"What Is Now Proved Was Once Only Imagined" Part I

"This world of imagination is the world of eternity." William Blake
The Ancient of Days, 1794, Wikimedia Commons

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein

"Imagination creates reality." Richard Wagner

"Imagination governs the world." Napoleon Bonaparte

To the above quoted luminaries - and the countless score of inspired souls down the ages, whether painter, plowman, and politician, soldier, suffragette, or scientist - the utilization of the imaginative faculty has not been merely to serve as an arena for the staging of lifeless day dreams, or the breeding ground for feverish delusions of grandeur. It was nothing less than the workshop of the mind, where grand thoughts and noble visions are forged by the fiery smith of belief into physical being. Whether it be in the fields of medicine, music, literature, science, art, and religion, all initial discoveries and subsequent advances were first conceived in the womb of disciplined, inspired imagination. For some, it was something yet grander. In the words of the visionary poet William Blake, "Man is all Imagination. God is Man and exists in us and we in Him... The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God, Himself."

Indeed, those intrepid visionaries such as Blake - who the incredulous masses and the dogmatic gatekeepers of the stunted status quo declare mad - have only articulated with forceful beauty the sentiment expressed by the inquisitive searchers of truth of all times:

"Mind is the Master Power that molds and makes, And we are mind. And ever more we take the tool of thought, and shaping what we will, bring forth a thousand joys, or a thousand ills. We think in secret, and it comes to pass, environment is but our looking glass." James Allen

Befitting her inherent ability of myriad manifestation, this creative force has donned many different masks throughout the ongoing run of Creation - God, Allah, Brahma, Yahweh, Tao, Fortune, to name but a few of her perceived forms - yet the Muse of Imagination has been ever present, working with deep thinkers of all ages, nations, races, and genders, bringing those things which are seen from that which is unseen.

The voices of glorious antiquity – East and West alike – sound their testimony to her ability, as directed by the current of individual, and in turn, collective human thought, to form "light and create darkness, make weal and create woe" (Isaiah 45: 7):

"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it." Marcus Aurelius

"If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?" Epictetus

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him." Buddha

“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.” Confucius (attributed)

Even the contents of the Christian Scriptures, when viewed thorough the illuminating lens of metaphor, parable, and allegory, stand in firm solidarity with the insight of the "heathen" experience:

"For as he thinks in his heart, so is he." Proverbs 23: 7

"You will also declare a thing,

And it will be established for you;

So light will shine on your ways." Job 22:28

"So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them." Mark 11: 22 - 24

"That is all well good," the doctrinaire materialist will say, "Yet nothing but fanciful philosophy! What does science have to stay of the matter?"

Ask, and you shall receive, to borrow a line. The miracles of science as demonstrated by her storied seekers have only verified the earlier observations of the ancients concerning the omnipotent and creative nature of inspired imagination.

There is the old story of August Kekule, the renowned German chemist known for his contributions to the field of theoretical chemistry, who discovered the shape of the benzene molecule via a day dream of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient Ouroboros symbolizing regeneration; Carl Jung believed it to be a significant archetypal image). 

Frederick Banting, the Canadian physician who pioneered the use of insulin injection treatment for sufferers of diabetes (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1923), had a dream instructing him to surgically tie the pancreas of a diabetic dog to stop the flow of nourishment. After performing the procedure as detailed in the dream, he discovered a connection between sugar and insulin. Further researches lead him to developing insulin as a drug treatment for diabetics.

The celebrated Nikola Tesla - the visionary behind smartphone technology, the alternating current induction motor, and a holy host of other ground breaking inventions – attested strongly to the role that concentrated and inventive thought played in his illustrious career:

"I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.”

Furthermore he said,"The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power."

Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park and Tesla’s rival in the fabled “Current Wars,” once remarked, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

And, of course, there is the monumental paradigm shifting work of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity revolutionized the scientific view of the Cosmos from the prevailing Newtonian model to that of an expanding, four dimensional universe. Quoth the sage, "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." 

In light of Einstein's revelations - many of which came to light through his method of imaginative "thought experiments" - the field of physics has slowly begun to entertain and accept the idea - postulated by Idealistic philosophies like Hermeticism and Vedanta for example – of a central Universal Mind, animating and expressing itself in the multiplicity of physical forms manifest in the Cosmos, including humanity. Einstein, in his 1934 book The World as I See It, expressed his own sentiment as follows:

“But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”

Sir Arthur Eddington, prominent English physicist and one of the earliest supporters of Einstein's theory of relativity, posited in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World:

"The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind... To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff...The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness... Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be."

Eddington's contemporary, Sir James Jeans, believed likewise. From his The Mysterious Universe:

"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..."

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this mind bending discussion, which will be posted next week!

If you enjoyed this post check out my author landing page over on Amazon.com, for a listing of my independently published works.