The Oldest Religion

The oldest religion, as judged by the oldest sacred sites, centered around burial rites, was ancestor worship. I am certain it was noted and marveled at, that some who died came back to life*. And some who returned reported what today is called Near Death Experiences. This I believe seeded our most primitive faiths.

For this  oldest of religions, life and death were separated by thinner veils. The ancestors were still available to us for guidance and communion. It was only later that death became a kind of finality and we became concerned about whether or not there was an afterlife.

Death for many seemed senseless and thereafter life could even be described as a meaningless accident of Nature. It fell to a newer and more mythic religious temperament to invent all manner of phantasmagoria to sooth our growing insecurities about death and our place in the Cosmos.

The Spiritualism of the last two hundred years, corrupted by charlatans preying on the gullible only cast more doubt on this primitive faith that life can not be killed. And the theories of transmigration of the soul while theories still yet fuel the imaginations of psychics who offer us a false and second hand sense of knowing  which serves the ego more than understanding.

Yet for all we do not know and can not prove, the intuition of the heart speaks to me thus - that in the strange worlds of what the Physicists call the Quantum realms, we become "entangled" or connected in some similar way, with the life energy of others, regardless of spacial separation and even time, and this I suggest, very strongly established by the actions of love - in those bonds of bodies and genes as well as of hearts and dreams. And within this entanglement of soul connections the veil between words can seem thin indeed, and love here at the very least, as it says in the Song of Songs, proves strong as death.

*The most famous case of the apparent dead coming back to like was probably Jesus, to which the term "resurrection" was technically misapplied by Gospel writers.
Before embalming became  popular, grave robbers and others would open coffins and find the interred had tried to claw their way out of the grave after burial.

Our Emotional Universe

The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’

"I reject the myth of reality as external to the human mind, and I acknowledge consciousness as the source of the cosmos.  It is mind that we see reflected in matter.  Physical science is a metaphor with which the scientist, like the poet, creates and extends meaning and values in the quest for understanding and purpose." 
~University of Minnesota physicist Roger S. Jones (1982)

 “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”
~Physicist and astronomer, Arthur Stanley Eddington (1928)

 “Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter.  All there is, is mind and motion.”
 ~Anthropologist Armand Labbe (1991)

 

Have you ever heard someone say; "I need space." Perhaps we need this space because space IS mind, an open mind, clear and receptive to renewal and inspiration. This is actually an old idea popularized by the Buddhists who say all is Mind - intelligent mind, wisdom mind - and recommend contemplating space as a means to awakening to this, our formless reality. When I feel spacious, I am open to life, to the free flow of experience as it arises.

Have you ever heard someone speak about the "gravity" of a situation? At such times we feel heavy do we not? And it is not unlike the dense material objects to which we attribute the force of gravity which seeks to pull us down and compress us toward a compacted focal point.

When upsets come do we not perceive things in a slightly "warped" manner? We speak of space as being curved, warped by the presence of gravity driven mass. Have you noticed that the bodily location of our obscuring emotions seems not only dense and heavy but warped as well, twisting our musculature into tense and sometimes painful masses. even our eyes change shape and clarity of vision both physically and mentally is diminished. What if the contractions of consciousness crate the energetic density we call objects.

Have you ever experienced the light hearted state where seriousness is relaxed and the play of enjoyment seems the rule? is this not the opposite of the heaviness of gravity. Be become buoyant like a gas that has been released from the stuckness of solidity.

Have you known one with a "cold" heart, meaning they seem out of relationship with the warmth of life found in connected relationship. The cold of absolute zero is the cessation of movement, a separation from the vibrating exchange of energy plasma's from which are constructed most of what our senses perceive in the creative unfolding of the universe.

Many physicists have spoken of the universe as a mind rather than a lifeless matter that somehow creates consciousness. Perhaps it is as simple as Mind contracting, warping space, which binds our attention hypnotically, habitually in the experience of density and its limitations. Perhaps the so called physical laws we have learned are simply mental habits - addictions really - to particular pet views, constructs built up over Billions of years of evolution.

Considering the minds power under hypnosis to demonstrate the ability of our physiology to respond to an imagined flame with a blister or stop the flow of blood in a wound, just perhaps our reality indeed is only Mind convinced it is material, substantial, and bound by laws of a Universe which somehow appeared from nowhere.