TruthBook Religious News Blog

Book Review
Global Shift : How A New Worldview Is Transforming Humanity by Edmund Bourne.
December 16, 2008 by Admin

The purpose of this book is to describe a fundamental shift in humanity’s way of viewing the world. Such a shift has been developing over the past three decades and will continue to evolve through much of the twenty-first century. The shift accompanies a profound rite of passage that the earth and its people are going through now and in the future.

In order to best understand the future and what one needs to do to change, you must first examine present problems and how they came to be. Therefore, the first part of the book looks at the adverse effects of the dominant worldview, and how it has compromised our collective ability to move forward. The primary problem is that the current worldview promotes a separatism that has been encoded into many of our social and economic institutions. It has led individuals and groups to prioritize their needs over the good of the whole, to exploit others and the natural environment, and to disassociate their own well-being from that of the world around them.

However, there are scientific advances and philosophical developments that have contributed to a broader understanding of who we are and what we are capable of becoming. The book also illustrates how paradigm shifts are showing up in a variety of institutional settings, and then goes on to describe personal transformational practices that readers can implement in their daily lives. There are practical and realistic ways to live a life that is consistent with enlightened values and core beliefs, such as compassion and sustainability, and that can perpetuate our potential for an evolved consciousness and way of life.

The book concludes with several more practical chapters. Given the broad changes in the way we perceive the world, what actions and personal practices are consistent with this new vision? In short, how does each of us implement the new paradigm in the way we lead our daily lives? In “Transformative Practices: Aligning the Inner Self with a Conscious Universe,” Bourne describes practices such as voluntary simplicity, caring for one’s body, nonviolent communication, forgiveness, mindfulness, inclusive (global) thinking, and letting go that can foster personal healing, as well as bring our lives into alignment with the needs of the planet and a conscious universe. And in the chapter, “Healing the Planet,” he describes specific actions the reader can take to help the environment and other global issues.

Labels: compassion, Edmund Bourne, Global Shift, separatism, worldview

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Faith and Values: Your World Is Colored by Who Your God Is

By Sally Santana
Saturday, September 13, 2008

Last month, Pastor Rick Warren got Barack Obama and John McCain to sit down with him and answer some questions on faith because "we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics because faith is just a world view and everybody has some kind of world view and it's important to know what they are."

You can have a world view about God, too.

In 2006, some findings from The Baylor Religion Survey were released. Long story short, it produced four views, or filters, of God. In 2008, many of us are familiar with them. They are called Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical and Distant (see www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-09-11-religion-survey_x.htm) Writer Cathy Lynn Grossman says, "These Four Gods tell more about people's social, moral and political views and personal piety than the familiar categories of Protestant/Catholic/Jew or even red state/blue state."

The kind of God you're trained to believe in doesn't have to be the kind of God you end up with.

What kind of God do you believe in, and how does that color your world?

Labels: Authoritarian, Baylor Religion Survey, Benevolent, Critical, Distant, God, Sally Santana, worldview

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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