Retina Shadow

A commonplace minor moment in daily life brings back a life-changing experience:


Retina Shadow

The blinding resplendent brilliant blaze of sunfiring
In the translucent window
at the 'peak' of our old stairs,

Lighting to my eyes glaring defects
In the polished stairstep walls.

And afterward, for an hourglass,
That irised rectangle of remembered light
Luminous shining

Bright-blinds me to all lesser
Things than transcendent,

A euclidic image in front of my vision,
The 'optic mystic' nerve gleam
Of photo-receptors

Turned into lighted-ecstasy in my mind
As I trudge about the hectic scurry of my hour'd day,

That brilliance of aperture at the center
Blaze-blinding
Finite briefness

(Me, muddled primate
In this pit-caved depression
Of emptiness, and not.)

Yes,
The after shadowed light of Reality
Far brighter

Than temporary nature's harsh survivor'd death glare
Or the gray-dusted rituals of our
Decadent cultures of shame;

Look, not to this dark cavern,
But to the sun-resplendence,
Of eternal goodness, truth, and beauty.

Oh, the after-glowed
RADIANCE!



--Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in The Greensilk Journal
in different form

We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
-Plato


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Monads, Quarks, Planks, Patterns, "I," and God

To use turns of phrases--
What’s in a name?

Why speak of a prank, er. a plank?

Names and terms change meaning, often from generation to generation, but sometimes within months.







Which is more real, an object/fact or a pattern/process?


What’s God got to do with it?

“Imagine your uncle died and in his will he left you his beloved old wooden boat. You love your uncle and out of respect for him you decide that you’re going to fix up his old boat, making it good as new."

"And so you start with the hull, replacing old boards with new ones. But as you work rebuilding the hull, you realize that the deck needs replacing as well. And so the next year, you remove all of the boards on the deck and replace them with new ones, plank by plank, until the boat has an entirely new deck."

"But spending all that time working on the deck convinces you that the hardware isn’t reliable; you’re not sure which pieces would work if you were to actually start the boat, and which would snap with the slightest strain. And so you set out to replace all of the hardware..."

"If you keep this up, at some point you will have replaced the entire boat, and yet when you take your friends out for a ride, you will tell them that this is the boat your uncle left you in his will."

"The enduring reality of the boat, then, is in the pattern, not the planks."

"The planks come and go, but the pattern remains."
Rob Bell

Objects, things, facts, cells, atoms and so forth come and go.

But patterns remain...well they come and go, too, but they usually last longer in one 'place' than cells.

Bell, again:
"You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet precisely consistent. Some have said we’re like ‘light at the end of a spinning stick.’”
Rob Bell
-What We Talk About When We Talk About God(3)

Think about what Bell said. It’s so true.(4)

From scientists, facts about 'you':

"Your Body is Younger Than You..."

"Whatever your age, your body is many years younger. In fact, even if you're middle aged, most of you may be just 10 years old or less."

"The cells lining the stomach, as mentioned, last only five days."

"The epidermis, or surface layer of the skin, is recycled every two weeks or so."

"An adult human liver probably has a turnover time of 300 to 500 days."
Markus Grompe, an expert on the liver's stem cells,
Oregon Health & Science University

The entire human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/your-body-is-younger-than-you-think.html

"Your body is constantly replacing old cells with new ones at the rate of millions per second. By the time you finish reading this sentence,
50 million of your cells will have died and been replaced by others..."(5)
--

"In a year, 98 percent of the atoms in us now will be replaced by other atoms that we take in, in our air, food and drink. So that means 98 percent of me is new - every year...If you eat a hamburger one day, then the atoms and molecules in that hamburger will end up making up your cell walls and different organs and tissues."(6)

So does that mean, I'm long gone?

No.

Despite all of these changes in my body in the last 70 years
(I wonder how many atoms from Wild Alaskan Salmon), I'm still me--
different "planks,"
different cells,
different atoms,
but still my same consciousness of self.

Glad to meet you, my name is I-Process;-)

I am still becoming at this very moment, even in the midst of my receding into old age.

My conscious, creative awareness transcends my physical body.

"Since we moderns are accustomed to thinking in materialistic terms, and assuming that the human body is somehow the most real aspect of humanness,
we are caught off balance by the claim that what is most distinctively human is, in fact, independent of the body...
a process which is essentially independent of any one of us."
Dwight Brown, UU minister

I exist in that stream of consciousness, moral choice, and creative endeavor. We all are a part of a creative process in which we get to participate for a very brief span of time. We are the opposite of puppets; we can be creators.

What is happening is far more than matter--trillions of atoms--moving around.

We as finite creatures, become aware, can knowingly participate and bring changes to existence.

So the materialists are wrong.(4,7)

Monads, quarks, and atoms don't drive us like shot bullets.

Contrary to what most atheists say, consciousness isn't only the result of millions cells
hard-determined at the tail ends
of 14 billion-long puppet strings.

Unlike plant biologist Anthony Cashmore's claim that we humans are "bags of chemicals" and have no more choice than "bacterium" or a "bowl of sugar,"
other scientists strongly disagree.

For instance, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. and Rebecca Gladding, M.D. both
wrote an entire book explaining the exact opposite:
You Are Not Your Brain

Schwartz is a research psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine and Gladding is a psychiatrist at the UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital and the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. They are authorities in field of neuroplasticity.
--

Consciousness is an aware process that enables each of us intelligent primates to transcend our circumstances, to change our behavior, to seek new goals, choose good ethics.

We are sentient beings, able to take situations and things--and through new combinations of ideas, methods, and actions--to bring new ways into existence that never existed before.

Consciousness enables individuals to make creative choices, not repeat the same unjust, immoral actions of humans in the past,
whether the dysfunctional behavior of an alcoholic father or that of exacting revenge against a different human group by one's 50,000 years-past ancestor.

Consider one last analogy.

The squiggles on this virtual page are made up of pixels like the body of mine is made up of cells. But the squiggles don't determine what I write.

I do.

I as a conscious creator do that.

Then squiggles (with their attached meaning) follow.

The same is true of atoms and cells.

They don't determine whether or not I choose to do wrong or right.

But when I decide to send money for the impoverished refugees of Syria,
OR
when I decide to squander my money on things I don't need,
then the cells and atoms of my hand go into action, pulling out my credit card.

Our future is hope
because we can influence that future, not yet here.

We aren't "bags of chemicals" fated by senseless energy, going no where for no purpose.

We can create poems, digital art, construct beautiful buildings, send probes on 10-year missions to Jupiter and beyond, and make many other significant differences.

That's what Enlightenment theism means.

Openness!

Openness to God-- to speak of friendship with God, to love the good, true, just, and beautiful.

Now speaking of God--

The Divine Process

The Ultimate Becoming


To be continued--

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

1 monad: According to Hippolytus, the worldview was inspired by the Pythagoreans, who called the first thing that came into existence the "monad."

2 quark: "any one of several types of very small particles that make up matter" M-W Dictionary

3 Too often in new books, Rob Bell is too new agey. You finish one of his books, which is delicious to our readership taste, but at its end all that’s left in one's mind is mostly a cotton-candy afterward.
Sugar and air.
And throw a away a sticky stick.
No substance, except unusual word placement on the page, and fleeting good feelings.
But with this plank-not-dumb story, Bell struck gold, the sugar-load.

4 Well at least to most people, though not for the Sam Harris atheists of the world who claim that every person’s “I” (each of one of us) is an illusion, that the only reality are atoms determined since the Big Bang.
And such determinists state that if you harmed another person, you would always commit such abuse again, even if you had a chance to face that ethical moment a “trillion” times because you as a person have no real choice.
Your every thought and every action are totally determined, lockstepsecular-fated.
It's “tumors-all-the-way-down” claims Harris in his most fatalistic example.

Harris: "If determinism is true, the future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior...each of us is moved by chance and necessity, just as a marionette is set dancing on its strings."
"There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will."


5 http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/whoami/findoutmore/yourbody/whatdoyourcellsdo/howoftenareyourcellsreplaced

6 Copyright © 2007 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=11893583

7 "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
Francis Crick

Deleting Empty-Bucket Words: God, Spirit, Love

For a long time, I and many others have been frustrated with 3 words: God, Spirit, and Love.

So much miscommunication with only 3 terms!

Because each of those words has so many different contrary meanings--so many contradictory fillings, that in articles, books, debates, group conversations, and dialogues, they almost mean
both nothing and everything.

Each is an empty bucket.

God, for instance, is a series of squiggles and a sound that various groups of humans pour/dump/force opposite stuff into whether it’s gold, pyrite, sludge, or manure.

And this has been going on for thousands of years among billions of humans in various diverse societies and social groups.

Repeatedly, when I’ve stated why I think God is real, atheists have belittled and denied the term as fallacious, while all sorts of religionists have strongly agreed and affirmed the Supreme Being.

But then confused chaos--semantic hell hurricanes up.

What the atheists and the religionists mean by the term is totally contrary to everything I think.

Indeed, often their negative or positive definitions of "God" are so horrific, they exceed all of my worst nightmares.

In the last couple of years, I have documented many detailed examples of this semantic confusion, this empty-bucket-ness. And it only seems to be getting worse.

While the basic definition in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary:
"God: 1 capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality,"
is denotative and open enough for myself, it doesn't work for many others.

Since, there is plenty of evidence already given on the confusions, I am going to jump right to suggestions for new terms.

God/Spirit:
Transcendent Reality, (or Ultimate or Essential) with an emphasis upon the concept that T.U.E.R. is “beyond” matter and energy.

Of course, already a few atheists have responded with the question what is “ultimate”?

That’s why I also mention “transcendent” and “essential,” and then recommend such questioners to the dictionary.

At least “ultimate reality” dispenses with the caricature that most atheists insist

the word “god” means—an “invisible super-omni-man in the sky.”

Where they got this simplistic, anthropomorphic view of God, I’m not sure,
but most theists don't think that is what God means.

I never thought God was an invisible powerful man in the sky,
not even when I was 8 years old, and a devout fundamentalist Baptist.

My new term will also, hopefully, unsettle religionists, and help them realize that I don’t believe in the God of creedal Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism.


Love: Compassion, empathy, kindness, benevolence, altruism.

When I say that all humans ought to focus on ultimate reality and be compassionate and empathetic to all others, hopefully, that will be more clear than the old words and phrases.

Wish me luck;-).

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Thinking About "i/THOU" This Morning

PREFACE:
(If you are in a hurry,
skip this.)

Do you find your eyes rolling over into the back of your head when you read the doctrinaire pronouncements of religious people? I admit I do, yes, have done a lot of “eyes to the back” in my time.

Many humans, not only atheists, repeatedly ask, “But how do these spokespersons and writers possibly know all this dogma about GOD, about Ultimate Reality? Aren’t they putting a broken verbal cart before infinite horsepower?"

And why do so many of these ‘know-it-all theologians disagree and contradict one another? There are over 200 different Baptist denominations alone.

Besides, becoming inspired by and thinking through and figuring out, and then applying Christ-like ethics to everyday situations and controversies--THAT is what the essence of humanistic Life is primarily concerned with, not abstractions and philosophical speculation.

So it’s with trepidation, and a strong sense of ‘what use is this’ that I begin to theologize. How could ‘i’ possibly have any sense of GOD’s ultimate nature when ‘i’ can’t even fix my broken HP printer?:-)

CUTTING TO THE CHASE—Thinking about “i/THOU”:

Variation of Jewish philosopher’s Martin Buber’s
famous phrase for our relationship with God.

God is transcendental becoming as well as being.
God creates everlastingly behind all temporal causing.

“I will become what I will become” is one translation
of the one Hebrew word for God, YHWH.

Concerning this process philosophical view of existence:
"In traditional or classical theism, God was seen
as the supreme, unchanging being, but in Hartshorne’s
process-based or neoclassical conception, God is seen
as supreme becoming in which there is a factor
of supreme being."

"That is, we humans become for a while,
whereas God always becomes,"
Hartshorne maintains.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

God always becomes, is always “ought,” continually journeys everlastingly. We don’t know any facts of God’s becoming outside of our own finite existence.

We do trust that the inmost essence of God’s becoming is love. God is love according to 1 John, John 3:16, and I Corinthians 13, etc.

So God, billions of human years ago, via the “Big Bang,” began to create Existence as separate from God’s self.
Within God's creative becoming was the desire for I-Thou. Eventually, via the process of evolution, sentient creatures came into existence, and finally conscious, transcendent, rational primates.*

To quote Martin Luther King Jr.:"I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Martin Luther King

Yes, God--ultimate or transcendent reality, the Good--becomes in everlasting ‘oughtness.’ God is much more than 'is.' Indeed, the Good is often against what is.

Creativity even in us humans on our very finite level isn’t an 'is,' but rather a continuing action, a becoming, a future potential.


TO BE CONTINUED


AFTERWARD:

(If you want the reasoning for the why of my blog post…)
*If God/Ultimate or Process Reality/the Good desired a creative i/thou relationship,
why did UR take about 14 billion years in this tiny section of the universe
to bring that about?

I have no idea. Remember, I don’t normally write speculative theology
or cosmology or metaphysics. So what am I doing here then typing on?

Also, we don't know whether or not there are other conscious, rational beings
in other solar systems. Carl Sagan and some other scientists think that
alien life must be abundant given the cosmic size of the universe, but
other scientists disagree. I don't know.

It's Monergists and other determinists (Augustinians, Muslims, New Age,
Atheists, etc.) who are thoroughly poisoning the human well with their fated views.

Their worldview which denies all human choice and all creativity, which makes
the universe a hard block of cosmic amber with us stuck in one tiny corner like
microscopic termites is nihilistic.

I experienced a strong need/desire/leading to give a different perspective.
That's all.
Amen;-)

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

The Nature of Reality: Step #3

How does one explain the nature of reality according to the Society of Friends? After all, early Friends didn't think much of theological abstractions or obtuse dogma. Unlike the Puritan/Reformed or the Catholics who wrote volumes and long tomes on theoretical topics such as God's sovereignty, election, and hidden decrees, the Trinity, the Atonement, original sin, the nature of Christ, etc., Quakers most often wrote practical exhortations, ethical warnings, prophecies, and spiritual journals. They did so partially, because at heart, the Society of Friends was and is a deep movement of spiritual experience of God, not abstract analysis or theoretical explanation.

Ultimate Reality is seen relationally and intimately, not primarily intellectually. After all who can know the mind of God? How can we the finite know the Infinite except by the Spirit, by personal transcendental experience?

Secondly, Friends saw from day to day that professing creedal Christians who focused on theology and dogma didn't often practice basic human virtues, let alone the ethical truths of the Spirit--peace, compassion, patience, purity, and joy. On the contrary, the professors of Christianity were hypocritical and intolerant; their leaders used their clerical office for greedy gain, to oppress others, even to slaughter their own neighbors in the name of Jesus Christ.

For the Friends there was no good news in the religions they saw around them. George Fox when searching for God despaired of finding any succor. "But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition"; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus when God doth work, who shall let it? And this I knew experimentally.

When it comes to intellectual knowing, there is some truth in a poem I wrote "Less Is More":

When young
I knew so much
So I thought
But the less time
The less I know
By the time of my death
I will know nothing
But will be known
By God who knows all

from Western Friend
December 2008


Our Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice says, "The Quaker way emphasizes experience over religious belief or doctrine. It is difficult to capture the essence of that experience in words. Yet every Faith and Practice attempts to do that very thing...The religious practices of Friends are founded in direct communion with God and the conviction that the Divine Light is accessible to each person; Yet it is one Light, one Truth. We wait with hearts and minds open to the Divine so that Truth will be made known among us.

Key Truths Friends Have Experienced:

#1 God is love and desires all humans to come to the Truth.
John 15: 12-15 The son of man says, "Love each other as I have loved you.. I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father."

#2 Truth is primarily relational.
from PYM's F.&P. "Truth is tested, not by the degree to which it conforms to dogma, but by its power to transform our lives and the lives of others."

#3 Truth starts within us and moves outward.
"All life is sacred." PYM
"True religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart does love and reverence God the Creator, and learns to exercise true justice and goodness...I found no narrowness respecting sects and opinions, but believed that sincere, upright-hearted people, in every society, who truly love God, were accepted of him."
John Woolman

#4 True faith creates within us Life contrary to the "world."

#5 Worship is expectant openness to the Divine--beyond forms and rituals, is sometimes hindered by forms and rituals, especially if the latter are done by rote rather than a Divine encounter.

#6 True values are not relative customs according to time and place and culture, but are eternally true and come from the inner essence of God. From God's Spirit come Equality, Honesty, Purity, Community, Peace, Love, Justice, Mercy, Humbleness, Simplicity, Kindness, Expectant Silence, Temperance, Goodness, and Joy.

#7 Individual leadings should be brought before the Body for corporate discernment.

#8 Worship leads to service.
There is an old Quaker joke about a stranger who came into a Quaker meeting. Nothing was happening, so the man leaned over and asked one of the Friends, "When is the service going to start?"
The Friend whispered back, "The service will start outside after the end of worship."

#8 There is no professional clergy. All Friends are active ministers of various kinds.

#9 Scripture is interpreted by the Spirit within the gathered body of the faithful.
"...tell them in the name of God that there is to be no wrangling about words: all that this ever achieves is the destruction of those who are listening." 2 Timothy 2:14 NJB

#10 Receiving love from the Light within the community of the faithful leads to the living out of testimonies among all humans and in nature.

All Friends may not hold to every one of these key truths, but most have in the 360 years of the society's existence.

To be continued

Despair and the Ultimate

At tragic times in my life, when disastrous circumstances overwhelm and all hope seems lost, I drown in despair. And I feel, unbelievably, even worse, because as a Friend, a follower of Jesus,I am supposed to be one living in hope and joy.

The Good News of Christian hope is the answer for the world of despairing humankind, of those who suffer in agony. So why am I still caught in suffering and despair?

In the last several years of my life, I've reached a final nadir, lower than my own worst pessimism could have ever imagined. Keep in mind that I don't have terminal cancer, haven't lost loved ones in a tsunami like the one in Asia that killed hundreds of thousands, haven't lost my home...

No, my own despair is in the midst of the relative comfort of California where most citizens live with more physical necessities and amenities than 99% of humankind ever had.

But my particular despair is still genuine and debilitating and
destructive, keeping me often from accomplishing more in the world to reduce others' suffering.

However, rather than dwell on the ugly facts, let me hasten to a wondrous discovery that came to me one day deep in my bereft hopelessness.

It suddenly dawned on me that Jesus, though the messenger of God--is here with me--with all of us who suffer and agonize. I am not talking about his triumph but of his own despair, his cry from the cross--"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Matthew 27:46

In the past, I had read that verse umpteem times in my life before, but they had been words to study, to ferret out their literary relationship to previous texts in the Old Testament, to understand their abstract theological meaning...

But now, suddenly, they were words for me, to me...words that made me realize Jesus has been where I am, has felt that hopelessness that totally empties and yet gluts one with agony. He has gone deeper into hopeless despair than any drowning of my own, down more into the abyss of loss.

Not only did he lose his career, his relationships with others, his family, then was betrayed, and finally endured excruciating physical pain--he suffered all of those--but in the end he was executed, numbered with the criminals, the terrorists, the rejects on a cruel Roman torture device where the pain was unbearable. In Roman justice only the worst of the worst were assigned to the cross.

And with this shocking discovery--that the son of man experienced ultimate despair and felt totally abandoned--I realized that there is still hope for me (and for all others who suffer much worse than myself).

And then there came back to myself historical memories of the many spiritual leaders who also at times lost any sense of hope, who felt abandoned by the very One who was center-most in their lives: George Fox, John Wesley, Mother Theresa, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen...

It never ceases to trouble and shock when I re-read in the Gospels how even John the Baptist, who had first announced Jesus as God's Chosen One, later in prison became so devastated in his grief, so hopeless, that he severely doubted Jesus was truly God's answer to human suffering and evil.

From the "dark night of the sou" of St. John of the Cross to the present, so many Christians who have lived for hope have gone through the abyss when all assurance has seemed lost. George Fox at one point spoke of how he experienced an "ocean of darkness." As I recall, he suffered with despair for at least two weeks, so bereft that he lay in bed unable to function.

Now at this point in my reflection I could launch into the traditional good news message of salvation that energized the first Quakers so deeply they traveled across the known world to share their faith--and I do, very deeply, have faith in that wondrous story--but my intention in this meditation is of a different sort; it's to communicate the vital truth that no matter how deep our loss, how terrible our agony, how absolute and ultimate our despair, God is there for us, with us, within our terrible loss.

Indeed, God suffers all that we deeply and so ultimately suffer; God carries within God's essence the pain and suffering of us all, indeed of all the pain and suffering of the Cosmos. Before God saves, God loves, identifies, experiences, suffers with us.

Of course, this makes no sense from a scientific or mathmatical point of view. It is spriitually discerned, an ethical truth not a sense observation. God is not an object that can be weighed in objective scales. God is the source of all being and becoming, so can only be known subjectively.

Furthermore, such incredible hope does seem when looked at rationally to be absurd.

Still, I think we ought to seek to love God with all of our mind, even though ultimately God is beyond human comprehension.

But the wonder of wonders is our hope that Ultimate Reality actually cares and suffers with us and for us--we finite beings, conscious primates on a small planet in minor solar system in one small edged swirl of the cosmos.

Despite the ruthless nature of the observable world, the good news is first and foremost that Ultimate Truth experiences what we experience and most deeply loves us even at our worst.

Despite my best efforts, I've never been able to give myself to God ultimately, except in fragmented inspired moments. But thankfully, the Divine in contrast, has given ultimately to us.

Hope in the Light,

Daniel Wilcox