The Christ-Buddha-Atman-Al-Insān al-Kāmil-Messiah-Zhenren-Tirthankara "suffers with," or has com-passion on, all other beings, because it sees in others a reflection of its Self. Others become a mirror of its Self. What you do to others, you do to Me. It looks out on the world, and all it sees is its true Self—everywhere it looks—in the [...]
What's in store for ThyMindOMan.com? Where have we been, and where are we going? The Gift is being invited into my life and yours, as are some great new offerings.
We operate from two identities simultaneously during our life, but one of those identities is greater, and is the one that we should strive to know, and be One with.
A friend asked me what my take was on the problem of evil, or theodicy, so I thought I'd write about it here.
David Bentley Hart (b. 1965) is described as "an American polymath whose work encompasses a wide range of subjects and genres. A prolific essayist, he has written on topics as diverse as art, literature, religion, philosophy, film, baseball, and politics. He is also a writer of fiction." Religiously speaking, he is a "convert from high-church Anglicanism [...]
It's taken more time to write about this reconstruction, because it is perhaps a more sensitive subject, and more complex, than any I have written before about Mormonism or Christianity, yes, even more so than Jesus or Joseph Smith (which might be an indication that something is off-kilter). The Salt Lake City based Latter-day Saints take the Book of Mormon very seriously as a holy text, as scripture revealed by God, similar to the Bible, and perhaps even more important than the Bible. The Book of Mormon is one thing that makes them unique, their own testament of the divinity of "Jesus Christ," which they believe is also evidence of the unique prophethood of Joseph Smith and the divinity of the church he organized as God's "true church." But I think the truth may be much more nuanced.
Thinking of God as a male human(s) out in the universe somewhere seems to be a primitive, magical, supernatural, and archaic conception of the Divine, literalizing the pronouns of "He" and "Him," and in the Christian tradition of "Father" and "Son." I've written about this specifically at least once before, but it's worth discussing more.
This short documentary Being 97 by Andrew Hasse is moving and poignant. The ageing philosopher Herbert Fingarette (1921-2018) contemplates the meaning of life and death after having written several books about it during his academic career. He asks, "what is the point of it all?" He feels he failed at solving it.
Humans want to know what's real, what's reality, what's true. We have explored the outside world and our inner worlds for millennia, and we seem to still not be sure what is absolutely real. I think the issue might be that what is really real is not something that can be seen or communicated through language at our dualistic level of perception. We have to transcend duality experientially and consciously in order to know the "really real," sometimes called the Nondual, the One, the Real, the Absolute, or God. Perhaps only at that level of consciousness may we come to truly know what is ultimately Real and True.
We often think of ourselves as one being, one human, a single individual that was born, who lives their life, and dies. But is that the case? Or is there more to it?