The Road to Enlightenment

In my last post I talked about people recognizing that we are all one in the eyes of God. There are three ways in which we can become enlightened and learn to love one another. The three ways are not based on complicated thoughts, but are very complicated to achieve. The three ways are this: (1) as persons we must accept our relationship with God as being real and eternal; (2) as persons we must acknowledge that every single human being shares this relationship with God; and (3) all of us must agree to respect one another and to allow each of us to live in the world in peace. In church we say, "Peace be with you." In life we must say the same thing. None of the above is easily accomplished. How can anyone love someone who has destroyed a fellow human being, particularly a child? I believe that if we can create a world of love and mutual respect that crime and other aberrations of our nature will fall away and die out. Is this pie in the sky thinking? Perhaps, but it is certainly worth our trying to achieve it. Even in failure, we can make this world a much better place to live.

2012

I'm not going to be one of those folks that are predicting the end of the world in December of 2012. There are enough people doing that already, and they have the subject well covered. I don't agree with them however; 2012 has already happened; the world as we know it ended in August of 1945 when two atomic bombs were dropped in Japan. I was alive and a young father of two children in 1962 when the United States and the Soviet Union were extremely close to war with Hydrogen Bombs. That was a 2012 enough for me in my lifetime. However, the proponents of 2012 are on to something. The world needs changing, and we are the ones who need to do the work. We need to all change the way that we look at the world and each other. I had an epiphany the other day, a small one but one that I think important. I have often wondered how our bodies which are short lived and corruptible can contain the essence of something we call a "soul." It came to me that we don't contain an individual soul, but rather we all share in the single soul that we call God. In short, we are all one no matter what shape, capacity, outlook, and understanding of the world that we have. All living matter. If you kill your neighbor you are killing two people. Yourself and your neighbor. Your neighbor is the exact same person in the presence of God as are you. Currently, we are divided by culture, religion, political affiliation, and history. In the eyes of God these things mean nothing. We can all have these differences without killing each other and attempting to outlaw the other persons ideas. I'm not just talking to the United States in which I live. The entire human race is equally guilty of this separation, and it is killing us all. All we need is just one freak of nature, Hitler comes to mind, who will commence using the nuclear weapons on his neighbor. When that happens we will wish that 2012 had undone us all as predicted. It will be tame by comparison. Gnosticism is taking many forms these days, and Noetic Science is one of them. All of these ideas that stress our commonality and our similarity and our need to be one people constitute the only road that we can follow to what Churchill called the "Broad Sunlit Uplands," where we all want to reside. When you find yourself hating or even disliking your neighbor, and by the word "neighbor" I mean the entire human race, it is time for you to take a deep breath and suck in your stomach, and learn to love one another. This is what Christ preached when he gave us the Golden Rule. He told the man who came to him in the middle of the night that there are only two rules. The first is to acknowledge God as the center of our universe, and the second is to love one another as we love ourselves. Is this a formula to get us out of the 2012's that we face. I think it is, how about you?

Agree to Disagree

The Gnostic looks at agreement as an impossible achievement. At no point in the history of human beings (homo sapiens sapiens), which stretches some 200,000 thousand years, has there ever been total agreement on anything. Indeed, there are many people alive today who think the world is only a few thousand years old; not counting those who believe that the world is flat. The story of the Tower of Babel from the Bible is illustrative. The contention is that God wants us this way for some reason. To the Gnostic there is only one possible solution to this lack of agreement. That solution involves adding tolerance to our laws. This addition occurred when the Golden Rule was propagated by Jesus as one of two laws that we all have to follow. The first law is to accept that God is One and there is no other God. The second law is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. If this is not tolerance I fail to see what else it might be. In short, we need to stop demonizing each other because we disagree. As stated above, disagreement is the order of things and it is doubtful that full agreement will ever occur, at least during the conceivable future. A good start is to accept that all views, whether religious, political, economic, personal, or patriotic, need to be held in a tolerant manner so that others who disagree with us need not fear being punished for so doing. If we can achieve that perhaps someday we will all acknowledge the same truth. This is the Gnostic Way. When that truth is finally discovered it will go by the name of God.