1) Thank you Nick but I'm not a scholar and would never claim to be. I'm a perpetual and insatiable student (of all things), and the stacks of books on this subject alone piled around my bedroom to which I haven't yet gotten are appalling to see. What we are and what's going on has preoccupied me since I felt my brain turn on laying in the grass, looking at the stars and contemplating what I'd been told about god and infinity on a summer night in NJ when I was about 8. After that no one could recruit me for a game of "war" or get me into a fistfight without jumping me. I knew it was a waste of time. I was like a less bleak version of the little Alvy Singer in "Annie Hall" who won't do his homework because he found out the universe will all end someday, so what's the point? By the time my father fell over dead when I was 15, (I outlived him 2 weeks ago), I'd come to the conclusion that the only point, the only justification for all of this was love. Yes, I was a hippy.
My high school and college years were so filled with music that I failed to devote any time at all to the hard sciences, which I'll never be able to catch up with. I laid the ground for philosophy and art, but not for chemistry and physics. I'm no perfesser, like our friend BH.
2) I'm going to suggest the idea of a threshold of need. Its different for everyone, and what comes in response to that need is unique to the individual. Look at AA. I've been in bands (and relationships) with people in AA, and people who should be in AA. A physical addiction is really hard to beat. AA, in my understanding, succeeds by giving a philosophical, social and spiritual structure to someone who's need is right out there, who's threshold of need is pretty low - they're not going to be able to do much until they attend to it. That stuff is easy for me because my body completely rejects alcohol and most drugs, the good ones and the pharmaceutical ones too.
My need is for answers. That's a fairly high threshold because for the most part I can get along physically without them. Keep myself numb with a bit of TV and distracted by work, and I'm semi-good.
As it turns out though, I'm pretty good (or god is pretty good if you want to go that way) at very subtly engineering myself into situations that drive me to the brink of desperation if something doesn't come along and push me into a new level of awareness and understanding. Some might say its god, some might say its just neurosis, some might say its my higher self, many might say it many other things. I'm not going to venture an opinion here, but I do have the experience I have, and it informs what's really going on. Works for me. By the time I had cancer and 11 months later a heart attack, I had already wedged myself into untenable situations that weren't going to resolve without massive restructuring of myself internally. I've had great help with all this. So cancer was major surgery, much pain, and a huge hit to my finances from which I may never recover (that's America!) , but - it was also a breeze. I found it kind of fun to really engage in truly life-and-death issues, and not just everyday trivia. So what had come in answer to my internal need for resolving external situations I had created was perfect, perfectly timed and paved the road for sailing through more apparent crises. Call it god, call it coincidence - whatever works for you. By the time I woke up in the hospital from a heart attack, my daughter got to see me burst out laughing when informed that I'd had one. What next, you know?
How seriously will we take all this? I'll be damned if I'll ever understand how my mother could go into and out of Auschwitz and be taken on what they now call the death march as a teenager, and still sing everyday when I was little, but I think I owe it to her to sing as well.
My parents were raised orthodox but life brought them more deeply into the world than their parents had been (until they themselves were gassed and incinerated). Its maybe easy to to stay fixed in place, rigid in orthodoxy, until life conspires to expose you to a wide world. They raised me within judaism, but with openness to what life itself is, which can't be constrained by a single point of observation. Yeshua his own self, walking in Judea, railed against orthodoxy and rigidity.
"A Course In Miracles" arrived in answer to a need. One of the ideas it offers is that everything we see is a reflection of our own internal selves. We create how we see. This goes a long way towards explaining the dialog we're having here. Einstein tends to support this idea, btw. Oh, how I love him:
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
As to what's really going on, is it god or just my own consciousness, I'm not sure there's a difference. "The Kingdom of God is Within," the man said, and one of his followers said "If you bring forth what is inside you it will save you."
DS
