The Living Universe

Religions are created by people who have had moments of spiritual insight. As they attempt to share their discovery, they describe it as best they can, as it appeared to them.

When they try to share their moment of "mysterium tremendum" -- as William James called it -- they try to define their communion with this Great Mystery. To them, The Divine may have appeared as a single God, consciously ruling the universe. Or they may have seen The Divine as a general force which flows throughout creation. They may have seen the various things working together toward the same aim. Or perhaps they saw an independant spirit at work in every thing. They may have seen everything working together without an apparent consciousness linking it all together. Or perhaps they saw the Divine Mystery working together, but it was unclear to them if there was anything more behind It.

Depending on how the universe appeared to them, they may have believed in monotheism, or pantheism. They may have believed in polytheism, or animism. They may have seen the universe in an atheistic manner, of perhaps an agnostic one. The amazing thing is that these general patterns of religious thought are repeated around the globe. Monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, animism, atheism, and agnosticism can be found in many places throughout the earth. This would seem to indicate that quite a few religious thinkers have observed the same patterns to the universal whole. I believe, therefore, that these patterns are all valid ways of observing the Divinity.

But how can these points of view all be correct? How can God be one and many at the same time? How can God be formed and formless, conscious and unconscious? How can these vastly different beliefs all be true?

In my own personal search for understanding I labored on this for a good deal of time before finding the only logical solution I could find. I reasoned that the universe itself must be a living thing; that it was a large enclosed sytem which functions cooperatively as a life-form. And if, indeed, the universe is the ultimate organism, which we may call "God", or "The Divine", then these points of view can all be valid. Therefore, God is one: the living universal whole. God is many: the many individual parts which make up the whole -- much as the various organs and cells of our own bodies. God is formed: in the physical substances which make up the universe we can observe. And God is formless: what many refer to as the "Web of Life" -- the connection we all share to the greater cosmic whole. The matter of the consciousness of God is a difficult one, as it is most likely on a level which we can not hope to understand.

Understanding "The Divine" as the Living Universe opens up a great many doors of understanding. As we are contained withing the universe -- and indeed we are a part of it -- we are a part of God, just as the cells of our bodies are a part of us. So, wherever we turn we are looking at another part of the Divine Being. And just as the cells in our bodies contain DNA marking them as parts of our selves, so also do we each contain a part of the holiness of the Divinity within us.

Faith

My faith is sometimes a very difficult subject to put into words. I believe that the Divine -- or "God" -- is the living universe: the sum total of all that exists. I find comfort in this belief, as I have studied many of the world's religions for some time and I find that this is the simplest explanation to account for all their differing perspectives. For the theologies of the world vary, from a single God to many, from a God with form to God without form, and from personal Divinity to impersonal -- or even absent -- Divinity.

I find, that a living universe is a simple large organism we may call the single God. I find that It is manifested by the various beings and forces of which It is composed: God the many. I find that It exists as both the many formed parts which we can see and measure, and the abiding unity which binds it all together. I find that It can be personal in our relationship to It or impersonal in the larger view of Its everyday existence.

And I further find this echoed in the various traditions of the world. I hear the Tenrikyo faith say that "any and everything is all the body of God". I hear the words of Mohammed in the Koran: "wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God." And I hear the words of the Greek mathematician Empedocles: "the nature of God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere."

I find that this starting point opens us up to a much broader world of spiritual understanding. For we cannot remove ourselves from the Cosmic equation, as we are want to do. Rather, we find that we are part of the living universe; that we are part of the body of God! We find that each and every thing is part of the body of God, and therefore every thing has a tiny piece of God with it: Cosmic DNA, if you will. That is to say that that which makes God holy and sacred: a piece of that is contained within us all. And so we each have that Holy Spirit within us. There are no worthless or useless people. There are simply people who fail to live up to their potential.

As we each contain a piece of God within us we find that we should love our neighbor as we should love ourselves, for "wheresoever we turn, there is the face of God!" We may find God in nature, or in a stranger, or the eyes of a child, or in our own mirror.

We also discover that we are not the separate beings we appear to be. We are all interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent. How can we be as cruel to one another as we are? For we simply harm ourselves when we harm others.

And so I shake my head as I watch the ways people treat one another daily, from abuse and disputes and murder to the saber-rattling and wars around the globe. So many people want to destroy so many others. And we treat each other and our world as useless and disposable.

Perhaps we would get along better if we could only see ourselves in the eyes of others.

Childhood

Look how screwed up our culture is! We rob our children of their childhood and then we wonder why they fail to act like children! We expose them to killing without teaching them that all life is sacred. And we wonder why they are killing each other without remorse.

Many argue that we need to teach our children values. But they use this as an excuse to push their own religious agendas. I say that we can teach them values without forcing a particular religion on them.

We need to teach them that all life is sacred. Instead, we teach them that killing is good, killing is fun, killing is sport.

We need to teach them that all people have value. Instead, we teach them that some people are "better" than others. We divide people into upper-class/lower-class, first-class/second-class, good-Christian/evil-atheistic or Satanic. We need to teach them that all people have good in them, and that we should never underestimate the goodness of another.

We need to teach them self-worth. Too often we allow our children to be victimized by those who are serving their own self-interests. We allow them to have low opinions of themselves and to grow up unable to be responsible for their own actions -- after all, they can always blame those who have control over them, right?

We need to teach them responsibility. When they screw up we help them blame it on someone else, or we try to protect them from the consequences. We need to let them take the blame for their missteps. We need to let them know that everything they do has a consequence -- everything they do makes a difference.

Myth and "Myth-understanding"

Your religion is full of myths.

Now that I have your attention, let me explain further:

Many of the religious stories we take for granted are myths. Now, many people assume that myths are simply "fairy tales" -- that they are pointless made-up stories. However, this is not the case.

"Myth" is a writing style -- like a fable, or a letter, or a poem, or a parable. In fact, parables and legends are very similar to myths. A myth is simply a stylized story which is meant to teach us a spiritual truth.

Myths are not meant to be taken literally, however. They use symbols and metaphors to convey their message. Often the symbols used in myths are the same as those used in symbolic dreams, and rightly so: they both come from the sub-concious mind. Their message is hidden just below the surface.

For example, in the Gilgamesh story,Gilgamesh faces one of the greatest troubles of his life as his good friend Enkidu lies dying. He seeks out Utanapishtim, the oldest man in the world, for help. The old man had once built a great boat to escape the floods which destroyed the world. The old man was successful in helping Gilgamesh find a remedy which could save his friend.

In many myths water represents the world -- the current state of affairs of people. "Troubled waters" represent problems with the state of things -- in fact, we still use the term today! In this story, Gilgamesh faces his own "troubled waters", so he seeks help from someone who has defeated similar problems. Perhaps this is a message for us, the readers. Maybe, the author(s) of the Gilgamesh story want us to understand that we can get help with our crises from others who have faced similar problems.

In other myths a person may command the "troubled waters" to become silent -- which they do. This shows us that this person is able to solve the problems simply by speaking or teaching. These myths hold greater meaning than they, at first, appear to. A spiritual leader may walk upon the waters, or build a great boat to remain alive as Utanapishtim did in the story above. By rising above the waters the leader is able to keep from drowning in the troubles of his time, as we are supposed to do – being the audience for the myth.

Still other myths may teach us to avoid getting bogged down in the trappings of tradition. A spiritual teacher may attend a festival, when suddenly those holding the festival run out of wine. Well, according to tradition, the festival may require wine. And so the teacher may instruct them to use water instead – the water becoming wine. The purpose of this story is not a literal miracle where the water turns into fermented grapes, but rather that the water symbolically becomes as wine. The point of the myth is that the celebration of the festival is important, not whether there is enough wine to go around or not.

A multitude may approach a teacher to hear his words of wisdom, and those with the teacher may notice that they are unable to fee them all. The teacher may simply state “I will satisfy them”. The multitude leave satisfied, not because the teacher miraculously turned into a taco stand, but because he gave them what they came seeking: spiritual food. Again, the point of the myth is lost if it’s take literally, but becomes apparent when we examine the symbols.

Every faith contains myths. These are the stories that help illumine our spiritual lives. They teach us about our spiritual teachers, our relationship to the world around us, and about ourselves. If we only dig at them a bit more deeply to understand the symbols and metaphors contained within them we can gain a much better spiritual understanding.

A Matter of Perspective

I believe that religion is shaped by our perspectives. If I live in the desert and you live in the jungle our views of the world would be quite different. I may believe that God is a fierce and demanding God. You may believe that God is bountiful and always-giving. Yet each view would be true, from our certain points of view.

When I began searching for spiritual meaning I began to examine the various beliefs people have concerning God. These can be classified into various ways of conceptualizing the Deity. Some believe God is one. Some believe God is many. Some believe the Spirit of God flows throughout the universe. Some believe that each person, each animal, each plant, each inanimate object -- that all things have a spirit associated with them. Still others believe that God doesn't exist: at least not in a form that can easily be recognized. I examined these beliefs and wondered how they could all be true. I wondered why people would have so many vastly differing beliefs as to what the Deity is.

I then began looking at how the universe works together. I looked at how things are organized. I saw the atoms as reflections of solar systems and galaxies -- spinning as greater and greater wheels. I looked at how our bodies work: how the cells of our bodies do the many things that they do in order that we may survive. And I looked at the thoughts of other pioneers in the religious, spiritual, and scientific worlds. I looked at the works of Carl Sagan, Joseph Campbell, and Stephen Hawking. I looked at theories such as evolution and the Gaia Hypothesis. And, as always, I looked to the patterns which shape the world we live in.

Perhaps the greatest revelation I had came to me one night as I contemplated these various views of the world and of God. I thought for a moment about how the many parts of the universe work together as the cells of a living body: all interconnected and all interrelated. I thought about how a tiny pebble thrown in the ocean ripples across the entire ocean, even as small as the ripples become. I wondered how God could be one and many, formed and formless, spirit and host. And the conclusion I came to was a radical one indeed: that all this is God. My solution was a simple statement: the universe is alive!

I began to understand the universe a living organism -- in fact, the largest conceivable organism. And I began to think of God, not as a being outside and in control of the universe, but as the living and creative force within the universe itself.

And here is where my re-conceptualization of divinity began to make a lot of sense. All of a sudden the many different ideas about God began to fall into place.

God is one: the largest organism which exists. All things are contained within the universe. In fact, "universe" means "one word" -- the one word which describes everything, both the known and the unknown. The Living Universe has countless parts to it: all which effect all else in a continuous chain of actions and reactions.

God is many: the many faces and voices of which the Living Universe is composed. Every person. Every animal. Every plant. Every grain of sand. Every drop of water in every ocean. Every distant star. Every force of nature. All are different aspects, or faces, of the Divine.

God is formed. For all that exist are parts of the body of God.

God is formless. For as all things which exist are part of the body of God, so do all things have part of that Divine Whole within them. That is to say: just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle each have a piece of the whole picture in them, so also does each piece of the Living Universe. Just as each cell within a living body contains DNA: the blueprint to that organism, so also does each thing existing within the Living Universe contain a piece of that (w)Holiness. So it stands to reason that every place, every thing, every plant, every animal, and every person -- we each have that same Sacredness within us which is a part of the Body of God. And so there is Holiness every where if we but look for it!

In the Q'uran it is said "everywhere you turn, there is the face of God!" And rightly so. If we can but find it ourselves, our neighbors, and our world perhaps our future history may be a bit less bloody...

Pathwalking

Each one of us walks a path. Our path determines who we are and what we will become. This path is shaped by our choices and by fate.

A path is a means of getting from here to there. In our spiritual lives we walk a path which can lead us to our spiritual goal -- whatever that may be. We may be walking the road to heaven, or to Nirvana. We may be searching for completion, or simply looking for meaning in our lives. Whatever it may be, our spiritual path can lead us there, if we will but let it.

The road to Spirituality can be travelled in a number of ways. We create religions as vehicles to help is travel it. Religions are methods we use to help us reach or spiritual goals. As they are created and shaped by people, religions offer spiritual tools based on a particular mind-set, or point of view.

The danger in religion is focusing on the vehicle, rather than the road; focusing on the religion, rather than the spiritual goal. This is akin to a person who has a car he is very proud of. He invites friends over to look at his new car. He revs the motor and turns on the radio. But his car never leaves the driveway! He focuses on the car, but forgets the road entirely. He will never get to work. He misses the point of the vehicle entirely.

Religions contain tools we can use to reach our spiritual goals. These come in two forms: personal and community processes -- or Inner and Outer processes. Inner processes focus on the individual. And Outer processes focus on the community.

Inner processes focus on personal spiritual development and interaction. These include meditation and prayer, among others. Through these processes the individual has a very personal spiritual experience which can have the effect of shaping his/her spiritual growth. These processes work spirituality on the individual level.

Outer processes include worship services and other community rituals. These are the processes where the individual "gives back". These processes work on the community level.

Inner and Outer processes are like the breathing process: we take in and we give back, just as we breathe in and back out. On a spiritual path we first experience our own spirituality and then we share it with others. That is, we connect with the Sacred and then we help others to connect with it, also.

Divine Will

There are patterns in the ways our lives are lived. I have devoted much of my life to observing and trying to learn from them. The patterns are repeated in everything from the organization of the universe to the makeup of our bodies and the subatomic particles which make up all things.
Yet the patterns do not stop simply with the physical organization of things. There are patterns of belief among the often-warring religions of the world. There are patterns in the ways our lives are lived and in the history of people. And there are patterns in the ways our lives flow and interact, one with another.
I concluded long ago that I do not believe in coincidences. For too many "random chance" happenings seem to populate my life, much more than I could account for as being simply "random". At one point I believed, as so many do, that a human-like God was orchestrating the many melodies of my life in strange and sometimes surprising ways.
And then, the world stopped making sense.
When I decided that the faith I had been raised in made little sense in the modern world, I lost the simple explanation for the "Divine plan" which guided my life. My spiritual journey took me through an understanding of many faiths. And I eventually concluded that all this, and perhaps more, is the Divine Being; that is, God is not separate from the universe: God is the living universe.
This revelation brought with it baggage all its own. For the question of Divine Will again became an issue once again. I had concluded that the Divine was not conscious in a way that we can easily understand. I had concluded that it is interested in our well-being as we each are interested in the health of our various body parts. But the "Divine Plan" idea died terribly.
Yet there are still these patterns, as currents in the river of time. Perhaps they are just as sentient as that river. And perhaps there is more.

A Pantheist Song...

We were treated to this at the Unitarian Universalist Church this past Sunday morning. Every so often I find a song which is directly on target for my beliefs. Here it is!

Religion is Not the End-all

Religion is not the goal: it is the journey.
Religion is not the answer: it is the process.

Religion is the discipline we use to answer the great question of "Why?" It is a toolkit with which we try to get at spirituality. And the spiritual moment is the goal of our whole endeavour.

Religion and Spirituality

There is one question we all ask: "why?" This is one of the great questions of humanity. We want a reason for our existence. We want to know what our place is in the universe. And so we create religion as a methodology -- a tool -- to help us find this answer.
Spirituality is the meaning we seek. Religion exists to help us find spirituality. And this answer is an experience which cannot be fully described by words. It is the answer we find when we "plug in" to our proper place.
The problem in religion comes when people become blind-sighted to the machine -- religion. They look to their religion as the "end-all". They get caught up in the behaviors and habits of their religion, and they miss the spirituality altogether! They behave in certain ways because the believe they are supposed to. They live their lives as though they are following some sort of cosmic checklist. And they believe that their actions can purchase their spiritual goal for them.
In sharp contrast, spiritual people find the same experience no matter what their religious tradition. They behave in certain ways because they feel moved to. And they are much happier people. Although they may differ as to the specifics of their religious practices they agree on matters of the spirit. They find the same strengths and the same faults in humanity.

The Religious Machine

We all ask the great question: "Why?". We want to know why we exist, why things are the way they are, why the sky is blue... And we create methods to help us find the answers.
The moment when we find the answers we seek is something we call Spirituality. This is a moment of epiphany -- "born again" -- "enlightenment". Suddenly, everything makes since, although we have great difficulty explaining to others what these answers are. This is a state William James described as "mysterium tremendum" -- the great mystery, where we are "filled with the Holy Spirit" -- "the lights come on". Spirituality is the goal of our search for meaning.
The tool we use to find Spirituality is something called "religion". Religion is the method, the machine, which helps us find Spirituality. Now, religions are made by people, each from the perspective of its creator or creators. There are so many different religions in the world because we each see and understand the world a little bit differently. Yet each religion can lead to Spirituality.

The Religious Toolkit

Many of our religions hold the idea that things were once harmonious and perfect. But something happened which upset the balance. And so today, they maintain, we are constantly searching for some way to recapture the peace which we've lost.
From a purely scientific viewpoint, we lost the harmony the moment we came down from the tree, stood upright, and began to reason. Previously, we had been like every other species on the planet: governed primarily by passions. And so, when we stop behaving primarily by our passions, we upset the balance. We "ate from the tree of knowledge" and separated ourselves from the natural order. We stopped being animals and we became human.
And so we are forever on a quest to recapture what we've lost: the peace, the harmony, the balance. We search for it as a species and we search for it as individuals. And because we are a reasoning people, we ask a great many questions in order to try and make sense of it all.
Our search follows the pattern of six very basic questions: who, what, where, when, how, and why. Since we are very young we ask these basic questions. And we have very specific tools to try and answer them.
We have created disciplines -- special thinking tools -- to help us answer these basic questions. If we wish to know who we are we consult a biography or family tree. To understand what life is we have created philosophy. Where we are is explained through cartography and astronomy. When we are is handled through the elaborate histories we write. In order to understand how things works we have created biology, chemistry, and physics, among others.
Religion is the discipline we use to understand why. Religion is simply a toolkit for opening the soul. And the meaning we find is what we call spirituality.
Spirituality is the moment when we "plug in" -- when we become enlightened, or "filled with the Holy Spirit" -- when everything falls into place and makes sense. Spirituality is not a thing which can easily -- if at all -- put into words. Spirituality cannot be taught, only discovered. It is a thing which can be pointed to, but never fully described. This is the moment when we regain the balance we so desperately seek.
No one religion contains "all the answers" and no religion should have its myths taken at face value. Religion is a set of tools which can lead us to spiritual freedom and rebirth, but only if we use these tools correctly. There is no guarantee that we will find spirituality if we only practice our religions for what they, at first, appear to be.
Myths are specialized stories meant to teach us spiritual truths. Since spirituality cannot be easily put into words, we rely on myths to help us find some spiritual meaning. At first glance, myths appear to be miraculous stories of gods or messiahs performing impossible tasks by supernatural forces. Modern-day skepticism teaches us that myths are simple "grand fairy-tales" which are entertaining, but best ignored. But for those who study myths they are treasure chests full of spiritual gold.
Myths are central to religions. They are written in a special form known as mythological language. In mythological language very little is what it appears to be. Symbolism is the language of myth, with many items being representative of something much greater. And often mythological images are the same as dream images. For example, in myth water often represents the situation of the world. "Troubled waters" represent turmoil -- an image we use even in our every-day language! When someone rises above these waters, either by boat or by foot, they transcend the problems of the world. Often, there are signs that the myths contain hidden meanings and are not to be taken literally -- either through their use of "miracles" or even through statements such as "the people did not understand what had just happened."

Religion Is A Toolkit

Religion is simply a toolkit for unlocking the soul. Through religion we learn disciplines which can help us to lead spiritual lives.
Religions are composed of disciplines and myths designed to help our spirits grow. Often in religion, we are given examples of how one should live if he/she is a spiritual person. Many times we are given guiding principles to live by, and often we are even presented with a holy person to emulate.
So often in religion it is so easy to take the guidelines we are given and to use them as a checklist -- believing that we are successful so long as we do the things on this list. But when we do this, we miss the point of religion entirely. We become focused on the habits of religion rather than the rebirth of spirit. Often persons of religious habit grow very bitter and judgmental, because religion provides such little fulfillment as its own goal.
Often it takes conviction to find spirituality through religious practice. Religion offers guidelines, but cannot force a person to open his/her spirit. The spiritual journey must be undertaken by the individual. And so, each of us can find meaning in our lives through religious discipline, if we so choose.

There are so many different religions in the world. And each of these has been shaped around the culture in which it was born. This doesn't make any one religion more valid than any other. Rather, it offers differing viewpoints so that a person may choose what works best for him/her.
Among desert peoples religion often focuses on a harsh god or gods who demand strict obedience. But in the East, where life is not so harsh, often there are no gods in religion, and when there are they are often seen simply as embodiments of a greater all-pervading spiritual force.

Disciplines

When discussing religion a good place to start is by defining what religion is. This is not as easy as it first seems. For many years people have tried to define what religion is and what it is not. Even today people argue whether the eastern religions are really religions or simply philosophies. Also, people of the Eastern beliefs argue that they cannot find religion in the Bible of the Western world. Clearly, there is no consensus for defining what religion is.
When I try to tackle this problem I go about it by trying to understand what drives us to have religions -- or, more simply, what function religions play in our lives. It is helpful to try to understand the history of religion.
Anthropology shows us that the many ways we have to understand things were originally all parts of the same thing. That is to say that there was no difference between science and religion or religion and history -- it was all the same. Each culture had its own version of what seemed to be the truth. But as time has gone by we have diversified our understandings.
Now, when did we become human? At what point did we begin to distinguish ourselves from the other animals on the planet? We notice that we began doing uniquely human things at about the time when religious artifacts began to appear in our burial sites. This is what anthropologists see as the first signs of religion. It seems that we became human when we began trying to explain what happens after death -- trying to explain the unexplainable. I would argue that the one thing which makes us human is simply our ability to question -- to seek -- to try and understand things. After all, we are not the only animals who communicate, or even who use tools. Yet, we seem to be the only ones who spend our lives trying to figure things out. Perhaps in our prehistory something happened which piqued our curiosity.
In any case, it seems clear that our questioning was pretty basic until about the time of Classical Greece, when we began to specialize the disciplines for answering our questions. The Greek thinkers advanced the schools of Science and Philosophy as their legacy. They were the first to discover that the world is round, for example. Sometimes they were sentenced to death for their varied ways of thinking and teaching.
Since that time we have continued to refine our disciplines to make our answers even more specific. In the past few centuries we have honed our questioning skills, so that now we can ask very specific questions and get very specific answers.
So what are the basic questions we ask? From the time of grade school we have had these six questions ingrained in our minds: Who? What? Where? When? How? and Why? These have become our most basic questions. And we have made disciplines to answer them:

Who are we? -- This question is best answered by Biography. We learn about ourselves by learning about those who have gone before us. We spend so much time tracing our family histories. We look to the people of the past to help us define the people of the present.
What is reality? -- This is the realm of Philosophy. The Classical Greeks invested a great deal of time asking this question. For centuries people have tried to understand what reality is and what it means. Views on reality vary from the very solid view most people have to the idea that everything is an illusion -- a shadow of the way things appear to be.
Where are we? -- Geography defines our location. We map everything: our states, our planet, and even the stars! We like to know as much as we can about our neighborhood and the distant places beyond.
When are we? -- History is the study of past decisions and actions. We look to the past for direction for the future. We try not to repeat past mistakes. But we do try to build on our past successes!
How does anything work? -- Here we ask the question of process. We attempt to understand the building blocks, rules, and actions which govern reality. These are the sciences. We look to Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, among others, to understand our physical reality. We have become so good at asking How questions, in fact, that science has become broader than the other disciplines.
Why? -- Finally we ask the biggest question to plague humanity: Why are we here? Here is where Religion enters the picture. It seems that Religion is our way of answering the Why question. Or, for the purposes of this book, Religion is our feeble attempt to understand the universe around us and our place within it. That is to say: Religion is made by humans to try and make sense of everything. It is perhaps our greatest and most mysterious discipline. It has caused more happiness and more misery than any other thing in human history.
Religion is both a personal and a cultural thing. It is defined by how we see things. It depends on our environment, our history, the influence of our neighbors, and any number of random things happening in our lives. The very way we understand things is so fragile that one tiny mistaken idea can mess up the whole thing. We build upon the beliefs of others: often our parents, teachers, and friends. Any misunderstandings along the way get ingrained in religious teaching until they are almost impossible to correct. Centuries down the road our misunderstandings may be repeated as facts.
Perhaps the greatest problem in Religion happens when people try to use it to answer questions it is not suited to answer. For many years people thought the Earth was flat -- a broad, round circle. This is reflected in many religious teachings throughout the world. However, Geography has taught us that this is not the case. Still, many of our religions talk about "the circle of the Earth" or even "the four corners of the world"! A more disastrous thing happens when people use their religious teachings as History or Biography -- to answer other questions it is not able to answer. Religion often clashes with Science when it tries to answer the basic How? questions. We need look no further than the Scopes Monkey Trial to see the problem. This is echoed by those who would try to answer Religious questions with Science -- it doesn't work because these are not the questions it was designed to answer.
Religion exists because we want to make sense out of life. We create religion. It is not given to us on tablets written in stone, or on scrolls handed down to us by the gods. Religion is a human way of interpreting the most important questions of existence.
Religion uses some specialized tools to achieve its goals. Myths and rituals are perhaps the two biggest. The lessons we learn in our myths can fire our soul, and our rituals help us connect with that which we call Sacred. These are some of the ways through which can find our spirituality.

Being Human

We like to differentiate ourselves from our animal brothers. But there really isn't that much difference between us. We share the same chemical composition as all other life on the planet. And we even share much of the same DNA with them as well, sharing more and more as we get closer in the evolutionary chain. Our behaviour is likewise very similar. Many times we accuse one another of "acting like animals". And there is a reason for that.
For we carry within us the baggage of millenia of evolution. The instincts and emotions which enabled our ancestor-creatures to survive are very much a part of us today. But in our modern world we are often held back in our development by what I like to call "evolutionary holdovers'' -- that is, survival instincts which are more of a hindrance than a help to us today.
We want peace and prosperity for ourselves and perhaps for all people. Yet we are constantly held back by strong emotions which rule our lives. And perhaps the strongest of these is fear.
Fear is an emotion and an instinct based on protection from things which may prove to be a threat. Fear responds to things which we know are a threat, things which we believe are a threat, and things which we don't know about. We can be afraid of people, animals, issues... even beliefs! And fear is an emotion that is easy to feed. Once fed, it grows first into anger, then hatred.
And strong fear requires a strong response from us: we can either fight against the thing which frightens us, or we can run away from it: fight or flight. Fear divides us one from another and helps build the world of mistrust and war in which we live.
So often fear is fueled by misunderstanding. We may believe the wrong things about other people, or perhaps we simply do not know anything about them, and so we fear them. As with all evolutionary holdovers fear is often irrational.

Now, we have seen how passions such as fear make us like our animal brothers. But just what is it that distinguishes us from them?
Many people would argue that it is our ability to communicate that makes us human. Yet, as anyone who lives with a pet knows, animals also communicate. Often their communication is through what we call "body language". But many times it may also be verbal. Animals have no trouble making their wishes and moods known!
Some may also argue that it is our ability to make and use tools that is the key to our difference. Yet, animals also use tools. I remember watching a nature special with an ape using a stick to ensnare some delicious locusts in a tree stump. Clearly a tool.
Is it our ability to build communities? We only need to look at the ants for that answer. For they are some of the most auspicious builders in nature.
Finally, we come to the argument that we are sentient. And that I can neither prove nor disprove, for sentience is not a concept we can measure. But there is a thing which I believe is key to the development of our thinking abilities.
It is clear that we think about things. More than think: we wonder. Our animal brothers are content to live life as it is handed to them. They react to the world as it changes around them. They respond to the stimuli of life. They do not make decisions about things as they happen, they simply respond to them.
Yet we act on our world. We do things because we want to, not because circumstances force us to do them.
And I believe the key to all this is our ability to ask questions. For this ability breeds the opportunity to not simply accept things as they are, but to try to understand them. We seek meaning. We seek understanding. And we base our actions on the answers we discover, whether they are correct or not. Questions unlock a whole world of possibilities for us that our animal brothers simply do not have.
Our questions tend to fall into six general categories. I call these the Six Great Questions. They are taught to us as early as grade school. They are: Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why. These questions help us to define the world in which we live and our place within it.
And for each Great Question we create a discipline: a method for answering the Question. Disciplines are like tool kits: they contain many tools we use to explore the Great Questions. And when we begin to ask more specific questions, we may change the tools in our tool kits in order to ask those particular questions.
Now, the disciplines for each Great Question fall into general categories of study. And we know these well.
For the "Who" Question, we use the Biography Discipline. We study our family trees; our family histories. We study the lives of our friends and people in our communities. And we learn all we can about the famous people who have shaped our world. For, their lives touch our lives. And they help to define just "who" we are.
The "What" Question is answered through the Discipline of Philosophy. We seek to understand the nature of reality. And many times we get more questions than answers. But the questions help us to define our personal philosophies of life, and help us to explore the nature of being human.
We use Cartography to understand the "Where" Question. We map everything. We map our living room to figure out where to put the sofa. We map our neighborhood to locate the nearest grocery store. We map our cities, our states, our countries, our world. And we map the stars! We need to understand where everything is in relation to where everything else is. And by locating ourselves we know which things will influence our lives.
Likewise, we map events with the answer to the "When" Question. This is the tool we call History or Time. We look at the past and how it influences where we are today and where we are going in the future. And we are swept along in time, just as if it were the currents of a great river. We have some control over where we end up, but the general currents sweep us in certain directions. And we believe by seeing where they've led us before we can control where they will lead us in the future.
The How Question is perhaps the Question we are the best at answering. This is the realm of science. We try to understand how things are put together and how they work. We have created many different toolkits to answer the many different questions we have in this area. We have physics and astronomy. We have chemistry and geology. We have biology and medicine. And we have even created sciences to help us understand things we've created. We have such things as astronautics and computer science for these.
Our final Question is the Why Question. And here is where Religion fits in. Religion is the process of trying to find meaning to the universe around us and our place within it. It is an attempt by us to understand the order of things.
As with any of the Great Questions, the discipline we use to understand it vary. That is to say, there are many approaches to it. And often, these are shaped by our own experiences: by our environment, those we encounter, and the changing circumstances in our changing world.

In Part

God is known, in part, to all the religions of the world.
I say “in part” because our faiths have been formed by people who could only understand the world as they perceived it. Without a complete understanding of the diversity of our world it is impossible to fully understand our world. And likewise for understanding the Divine.
And so our world is full of people who lived in harsh climates who believed God to be an angry storm god. And in the prolific jungles, a mother-like spirit of fertility. In some places the divinity is understood as being many gods who influence the fate of the universe. And still others see no god-forms at all, but a unifying Whole to the universal whole.
I submit that our modern world of amazing communications makes it much easier to understand these many differing views of the Divine – and perhaps come up with a more complete view. For over a century we have been able to communicate with telephone and telegraph over incredible distances. And we have been able to travel by plane and boat to these places as well. More recently, we have been able to have images from distant lands on our televisions in our living rooms. And now we live in the information age. All one must do is touch the World Wide Web to hear the voice and thoughts of someone far away in the world. And we have access now to so many differing perspectives of the Divine.
And I believe it is now possible to gain a more complete understanding of “God” than our ancestors had. For religion is created by those who have lived before us. And they have only left us understandings of the world as they saw it.
Today, it’s like picking through a jigsaw puzzle of faith: trying to find out how all the pieces work together for a better understanding of the whole. I believe we can learn from our ancestors by understanding the many things that affected their world-view. If we can understand their climate and culture, and the peoples they interacted with, we can begin to unlock the mystery of why they believed the things they did.
And I believe that once we begin investigating, we won’t necessarily lose our belief in the Divine, but rather gain a stronger understanding. So many have believe that God is One, or God is Many; that God is formed, or that God is formless; that God is knowable, or that God is unknowable. And I believe that we can understand why they believed these things and maybe even understand how these things are not at all in conflict.
After many years of exploring these issues myself I came to the startling revelation one night that perhaps all these views are right after all. The solution I found was that God is the Living Universe: the sum total of all that exists. I came to understand that the universe is the largest living organism and that everything exists within it as a part of that much greater Body. God is One: the One of which we are all a part.
All the big things are made up of all the little things. Our bodies are made up of so many component cells. Our communities are made up of so many people. And our world is a diverse collection of many different living and non-living things. So too it is on the universal scale. For the universe is made of countless stars, worlds, and so much more. God is Many: the Many that we all are.
God is made of these many things: God is formed. And God is the Spirit which connects all these things together: God is formless. We can know this general view of God, but God is unknowable completely, for we are contained with it and therefore unable to see the whole picture.
The implications are enormous. Suddenly we are no longer the separate beings we appear to be: we are interrelated, interconnected, and interdependent. Many faiths use the phrase “The Web of Life” to describe this. Everything we do affects everything else everywhere. It’s like so many pebbles tossed in the Cosmic pond: the ripples may get smaller as they spread out, but eventually they reach every shore.
Another discovery is that we are all sacred people. If we are all a part of the body of God, then a tiny piece of that sacredness is in the heart of each one of us. There are no worthless or useless people. Indeed there are no truly evil people. Rather, there are misguided people, and those who fail to understand their potential and live up to it.

The Human Condition

The one unique thing we do as humans is to question. Every other thing we do is mimicked by at least some other animal. But it is the entire questing process which separates us from every other species on the planet. We seek, we find, we make informed decisions based on the answers. And so we are able to change our environment and ourselves.
Our questioning is based on six basic questions: Who are we? What is life / existence? Where are we? When are we? How do things work / are things put together? and Why: What is the meaning of it all?
To answer each of these "Great Questions" we have devised several disciplines, or studies. To answer the Who? question we have Biography -- we create fantastic family trees and histories of famous persons in an attempt to try and understand who creates and shapes our reality. To answer the What? question we have Philosophy -- we try to understand just what reality really is. To understand Where? we have Cartography -- we map everything to try and be rid of the unknowns in our space, and to find our physical place within it. For How? we have History -- we map out causes and motivations to help us understand the events which shape our world. How? is perhaps the question we spend the most time understanding: here are the Sciences -- Astronomy, Chemistry, Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics -- we take things apart to understand how they are put together and how they work. Finally, we ask the Why? question to try and find meaning for our lives, and so we create Religion.
Religion is our feeble attempt to understand the universe around us and our place within it. It is the process of answering the Why? question of existence, and the attempt to create meaning for our lives.
Religion is the discipline which can lead to spirituality. It is, therefore, a "spiritual toolkit" which can enable us to find spiritual meaning for our lives.
Religions generally contain some sort of focusing mechanism to help their followers gauge their behavior. Such codes as the Ten Commandments and the Wiccan Rede help to define how one should behave if living a spiritual life. These are generally not so much rules to live by as guidelines as to how a spiritual person behaves.
Now, religion and spirituality differ a bit. Religion is the "toolkit" and spirituality is the experience. But persons who follow only the religious code, persons of "religious habit", differ greatly from spiritual persons. A religious person behaves the way they think they are supposed to. It is as though they are following a list of do's and don'ts whenever they do anything. But a spiritual person does things because they feel they should -- there is no cognitive process. A religious person may decide that they should help someone cross a street, whereas a spiritual person may help someone with their groceries "out of the goodness of their heart". Love is the motivating factor here, as we'll see later.