TruthBook Religious News Blog

Sunday January 18, 2009
Categories: Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra and Dave Stewart

It's rare enough for an incoming President to inspire such a flood of hope and optimism, or so much relief that our long imprisonment in the political doldrums should be ending. But Barack Obama has done more than that. He has become a symbol of the rise of secular spirituality in this country, a liberated set of values that exists largely outside organized religion. Perhaps he himself is unaware of secular spirituality by that name. In lockstep with all previous Presidents, Obama must be seen attending church regularly, and that church must be close to mainstream.

However, if you consider what he stands for, Obama's worldview is more congruent with alternative theology than it is with churchgoers, 70% of whom were supporters of George Bush in his two election victories. Where organized religion has opted to stand by the right wing, millions of Americans who consider themselves spiritual have longed for peace, unity, nonviolence, and freedom that isn't imposed by the force of arms. We think Obama stands for the same values. In that regard, he is taking up the mantle of Martin Luther King< jr., who should be honored as one of Obama's spiritual forebears as much as Lincoln.

One senses a blessed return to rationality and the end of intolerant dogma as Obama prepares to enter the White House, but secular spirituality has expanded since the days of Jefferson and Adams. It now includes the following principles that we urge the new President to espouse (several of them he already has):

-- A spiritual duty to be benign stewards of the Earth and to preserve the ecology.
-- A responsibility to revere Nature and to be humble before it.
-- A duty to further peace among nations.
-- A pledge of nonviolence that will lead finally to total nuclear disarmament in our lifetime.
-- A refusal to use America's super power for militaristic ends.
-- A sense of compassion for the poor and wretched beset by pandemic disease, lack of political influence, and denial of basic human rights.

If Obama can further any of these values, he will be leaping miles ahead of his predecessor. Nothing about secular spirituality is radical. Most of its principles are articles of belief for millions of average Americans who have largely been shut out of politics for eight years. Our hopes for the new President won't be fulfilled until he adopts all of them. If he truly wants to reform the ways of Washington, he must extend his vision to the Congress, which under Republican domination served basically to block anything good and progressive.

But secular spirituality isn't limited to the left or the progressive movement in general. It is a national phenomenon, one that will swell steadily in the coming years, particularly among the young. Born after the divisive culture wars that gave the right wing its main chance, the younger generations yearn for new values. Obama appeals to that yearning, and we hope he takes full advantage of it. It's not good enough that he becomes the first African-American President, the first green President, or the first digital President. Nothing less than spiritual renewal is needed across the board, and there is no one of equal stature to lead it.

Labels: Barack Obama, church, Dave Stewart, Deepak Chopra, secular spirituality, values

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Why the Paranormal is Normal

In general, it's fair to say that the popular belief in the paranormal falls outside the official picture of reality. The official picture is grounded in science, rationalism, and materialism. It takes a definition of "natural," after all, before "supernatural" can exist. God was natural in the medieval world, and thus miracles, healings, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, stigmatics, and so on, were considered natural. At the moment, it doesn't matter how many people believe in the supernatural. Until the official picture changes, astrology is bogus, astronomy is legitimate. Ghosts are bogus, apparitions of the Virgin Mary are -- well, that's the rub. Religious people are allowed to cling to a different model of reality, tolerated by the official gatekeepers but not believed in. This gives rise to the curious phenomenon of religious scientists, who manage to hold on to two totally conflicting worldviews at the same time.

Any of us can hold conflicting viewpoints at the same time -- it's called compartmentalization. If the various compartments are tight enough and separated by thick walls, a whole range of phenomena can be believed in without making them consistent. I can imagine a cell biologist who is Catholic, has seen a UFO, reads the astrology column in the newspaper, and hopes to go to Heaven when he dies. It would be far better, however, to promote a consistent worldview, one that allows the walls to come down so that official reality might open up to unofficial reality. And vice versa, since popular belief in certain kinds of totally unproven folk cures, for example, can do harm, just as the official insistence on pharmaceuticals and surgery does its own brand of harm at times.

The only consistent worldview that I've ever discovered places all phenomena, natural and supernatural, on the ground of consciousness. The noted Australian neurologist Sir John Eccles pointed out a truth that materialists, including both scientists and ordinary people, don't remotely grasp. There is no sight or sound 'out there' in the world, Eccles declared, no touch or taste, no beauty or ugliness, no sensation of light or objects. All these things are created in subjectivity, which is to say, they exist only in consciousness. The fact that your hand seems solid is an illusion. A neutrino passes through the entire Earth without encountering an obstacle. Every atom in your hand is 99.9999% empty space. Measured in proportion, the distance between the electrons and nucleus of an atom is greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun. At the next level of reality, atoms disappear into energy waves and then into pure potential, the ghostly state of so-called virtual reality. Only perception makes a hand solid. and perceptions are interlinked to create the world you and I inhabit, so that color, light, sound, smell, solidity, etc. all fit together.

In my view, paranormal events are neither fringe nor unreal. They are simply things not yet admitted into consciousness by our official belief system. Reality has this curious habit of keeping certain things under wraps until the human mind is willing to look at them, and then all at once they appear, changing the world when they do. Germs and gravity were once waiting in the wings but now stand center stage. In ancient India, astrology was center stage and now has retreated again, for the coming and going of phenomena works both ways.

Even so, consciousness never retreats. In the darkest ages, people know that they are aware, and from that basic premise they create a personal reality, and when enough individuals agree, then collective reality comes about. Trying to base common reality sheerly on material objects has been wildly successful in the West, but that means little about ultimate reality, which transcends individuals and groups. In the ultimate reality there is only pure consciousness, which can be conceived of as the modeling clay or box of paints that Nature provides, adding the simple instruction: Use as you please.

Labels: Deepak Chopra, paranormal, reality, religion, worldview

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Einstein's God, or The Hopes for Secular Spirituality

Deepak Chopra
Posted August 27, 2007

It came as a shock when the letters of Mother Teresa, long concealed by the Church, recently came to light. Suddenly it was revealed that this saintly icon -- who is on the way to becoming an official saint -- had anguishing doubts about the existence of God.

Even though she was an outsized personality and a model of immense compassion, Mother Teresa wasn't all that different from ordinary believers who come to the conclusion that God is a myth, perhaps even a fantasy created out of whole cloth. A rash of prominent books by atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins have pounded away on the theme of delusion and fraud. Using science as their chief bulwark, they insist that religion serves the purpose of blocking reality. A rational secular society is their ideal, and their fervent hope is that religious yearning will be seen for what it is, a childish, irrational, and ultimately hopeless drive. Everyone can see the result. Neither side, the atheists or the religionists, have won the argument; they've simply become more entrenched in their original position.

All of which brings me to a revelatory chapter in another bestseller, Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, which dwells on Einstein's view of God more completely than anything I've read before. At first the story of Einstein's spirituality conforms to any other twentieth-century skeptic. As a young man he rejected on logical grounds the literal truth of events recounted in the Old Testament. He moved beyond orthodox faith while struggling personally with his Jewishness. Being a scientist, he could have completed the easy trajectory then and there, ending up where Dawkins is, as a debunker of outworn superstition who saw the light of reason and used science as a weapon to combat the vestiges of belief in God.

Fortunately, Einstein was also a great mind, and his greatness took the form of a wider vision than either the religionists or the atheists who surrounded him. He continued his spiritual journey in a fascinating way. By stages he reconciled faith and science, not by offering a compromise that straddled the fence between these opposites, nor by saying that each side was right in its own sphere. Einstein took the bolder step of trying to understand if a single reality encompasses both drives in human beings, the drive to believe in a higher reality and the drive to explain Nature in terms of laws and processes that operate seemingly independent of God. Time, space, and gravity don't seem to need God at all, yet without God the universe seems random and meaningless. Einstein expressed this dichotomy in a famous saying: "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

I'd like to retrace Einstein's lifelong spiritual path because what he was searching for -- and never quite found -- was secular spirituality, and in many ways that is our best hope today. Instead of falling back on traditional religion, which has been shattered by science and the horrors of the twentieth century, or erasing spirituality in favor of stark materialism, secular spirituality looks at the whole of life in a different way. God and reason are allowed not simply to co-exist but to fulfill a single vision. This vision is rooted in consciousness. Either we think like God or he thinks like us. If neither is true, there cannot be a connection between us. Einstein's ultimate goal, he said, was to understand God's mind, and to do that, the human mind must be explained first. After all, our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality, and if that filter is distorted and misunderstood, there's no possibility of grasping God's mind.

Einstein's spiritual ambition was enormous but largely private. However, thanks to his world fame as the most intelligent person alive (true or not), people flocked to hear what he had to say on every great issue, scientific, religious, even political (hence his involvement in Zionism and the development of the atomic bomb). In the next few installments of this post we'll see how he came to terms with a God that was unknown to the Judeo-Christian tradition but was still alive and real. By following a great man's thought processes, we might find a way to escape the deadlock between faith and science ourselves.

(to be continued)

Labels: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, God, Mother Theresa, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, Walter Isaacson

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Wednesday, July 04, 2007

What's the most dangerous idea in religion?

By JOHN BLAKE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/30/07

Religion is one of the most potent forces in human affairs. It has inspired some of history's most sublime moments, but also some of its most barbaric.

The Inquisition, the bombings of abortion clinics, suicide bombings in Iraq – all have their roots in some form of religious ideology.

With that in mind, five leading religious thinkers from varying faiths were asked the same question: What is the most dangerous idea in religion today? Their comments were edited for brevity and clarity.

Violence in the name of God

— Richard Land
"I would agree with Pope John Paul II who said that there is a sacred sanctuary of the soul for each man and woman. No other human being has the right to coercively interfere with that sacred sanctuary of the soul. The most dangerous idea in religion is the idea that violent, coercive force is permissible in the name of God — any God.

"You see this with radical Islam. Notice that I said radical Islam, not Islam.

"More people will die if this idea spreads. It will help poison the well of debate and discussion about issues that people disagree on. It's corrosive to public discourse to say if you disagree with me, I'm going to kill you. It erodes freedom of speech, assembly and worship."

Richard Land is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He was selected by Time Magazine in 2005 as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

Follow our rules or else

— Wayne Dyer
"Carl Jung [the author and psychiatrist] had a line. The paraphrase is this: The No. 1 problem with organized religion is that the purpose of organized religion is to prevent people from having a direct experience of God. Religion is organized around the principle that religion will provide the direct experience of God for you as long as you become a member, follow our rules and contribute to us financially.

"The most important thing a human being can recognize is that they are already connected to God and to maintain that connection is not something you can turn over to another person or organization. One of the truths of the physical world is that you must be like what you came from. If you have an apple pie and you ask what the apple pie is like, it's like [the apple] where it came from."

Wayne Dyer is one of the most popular self-help speakers in the nation. He's the best-selling author of 29 books and has been featured frequently on Public Broadcasting Service specials.
My religion is right

— Rabbi Harold Kushner
"There's a sense that in order for me to be right, everyone who disagrees with me is wrong. It makes religious interfaith cooperation more difficult. If I believe that, I have to believe that other people's religions are worthless, invalid.

"You have to understand that religion is not about getting information about God. Religion is about community. The primary purpose is not to get us to heaven but to put us in touch with other people. I can have fierce loyalty to my family without denigrating other people's family. I can have fierce loyalty to my own religion without denigrating other people's religion. In the same way, my neighbor can say, 'My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world.' I can take that as a statement of love, not fact."

Rabbi Harold Kushner is one of the most famous Jewish thinkers in the nation. He is best-known for his best-selling book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" (Anchor, $21).
Converting others to your religion

— Dr. Abdullahi cq Ahmed An-Na'im
"I wouldn't believe in a religion if I didn't believe it to be better than other religions. The notion of superiority and exclusivity is inherent to religious beliefs. It can be dangerous and not be dangerous.

"The whole idea of missionary work is a very loaded and dangerous idea because it's often presented as simply presenting beliefs for someone to accept or reject. It's always embedded in power. Those who have the ability to proselytize to others are more powerful than others. They have the resources to establish schools, hospitals. Missionary work is not neutral. It is embedded in power. You don't find Muslims coming to proselytize in the United States. But you find Americans going to all sorts of Muslim countries."

Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University.

A tribal view of God

— Deepak Chopra
"The most dangerous idea is my God is the only true God and my religion is the only true religion. It leads to quarrels, divisiveness, terrorism, prejudice, racism and bloodshed. We see it in the world right now

"All religious ideas are programmed into our consciousness at a very early age. We hold them to be true. It's very difficult to step out of that condition even in the face of good intellectual reasoning because of emotional bondage to our condition. We bristle with emotions when our beliefs are threatened.

"We are at a very critical stage in our evolution. We're beginning to become aware. We know a lot about nature. We have a pretty good idea about the beginning of the universe. We understand to a great extent the law of physics, chemistry and biology. And yet for the vast majority of us, – though we have cell phones and can make nuclear bombs, – our psychological and spiritual evolution is frozen to a level that is very tribal."

Deepak Chopra is chairman and co-founder of the Chopra Center for Well Being in Carlsbad, Calif. He is a best-selling author and popular lecturer best-known for integrating Western medicine with the natural healing traditions of the East.

Labels: Abdullahi cq Ahmed An-Naim, community, Deepak Chopra, God, ideology, missionary, Rabbi Harold Kushner, religion, Richard Land, tribal, violence, Wayne Dyer