Imagining Reality - Part 1

I was thinking about Santa Claus lately, wondering what role this concept could possibly have played in human psyches to have grown into a cliche in modern life, and by what route did it become a symbol for the unreliability of belief.

And then I remembered that I am breathing. The sun is shining. Life abounds on all sides. Food and water are plentiful. I am blessed and live in abundance.

Some agency has arranged a miraculous creation all around me and I can appreciate that fact. Human bodies have very specific requirements for viability, and those requirements are met exactly, right here every day. The more I think about the probabilities of this, the more astounding it seems.

It makes no difference if one prefers to think of our circumstances as the endpoint of a non-directed evolutionary process set in motion through purely physical processes, or if one prefers a personified deity, a personal God, or other kinds of religious ideation to explain it all. It has been arranged that we live and prosper.

And one way to wrap up the whole concept is to celebrate an image of someone who arrives in the middle of the darkest, coldest part of the year bringing gifts overflowing.

I wonder how many layers of meaning and truth were compressed into this one image through the millenia, in storytelling around winter fires.

So, how did belief become attached to this image, which, on some level, describes pure fact? And why is it now an almost dead symbol?

Are we still creating rich images of the mysteries of our lives? Or are we killing them all off, allowing them to be subverted into commercial props?

Are we the same species as the one which created the original archetype of Santa?

I think that we are. I think that we need and want these rich images that live just at the boundary between hard physical reality and the intangible realms of idea, spirit, mind. I think that they are essential nutrients in a system of meaning, truth, and clarity that re-balance our psyches, reminding us that our circumstances are largely beyond our control, reminding us to honor the unknown.

We are, in fact, in the same position as our distant ancestors: what we know is far, far outweighed by that which we do not know.

As far as we understand, humans living just beyond the limits of history had mythologies involving cycles and fertility. Modern day mythologies generally involve warrior cultures (c.g. Star Wars) fighting over methods of control (centralized vs. democratic) using differentiating technologies (mass produced vs. eclectic, non-uniform).

Circles have flattened into straight lines. Fertility has become its opposite: warfare. Now, which is more primitive, a culture making rich images of its truths, or a culture which glorifies its interest in destruction?

Maybe human history is actually running backwards. Wouldn't that be a shock? After all, it occurs to me that, in our curved universe, circles are natural while straight lines are theoretically impossible.

So, maybe we don't actually exist, but are precursers of ancient humanity, a sort of nightmare before dawn, figments of their imagination, theoretically impossible.

Possibly Irreconcileable Differences (?)

There is a split, rather a large gulf, separating some Friends in our Meeting from others. One would think that this split would revolve around some aspect of belief or belief content, but it does not.

As far as I can tell, this split between Friends originates from differences in the personal experience of internal 'voices,' for want of a better word.

My sense is that there is a big difference between Friends who seek deep interpersonal values and Friends who seek to discover the truth of their everyday existence.

Those second Friends might be described as perplexed about the contradictions of conscious life - being aware of one's self implies two entities, yet both are one - so that they wish to understand the facts of their existence. Or they may be walking a path to God, seeking Unity with the Divine. In any event, their search involves subtlety, personal humility, submission to forces larger than their consciousness, among other things.

The former Friends seem to be in the position that there can be little or no understanding of these things, so one should seek human contact and human goodness to the best of one's ability and leave off the rest. They may also be of the present condition that they do not have the luxury of earnest spiritual seeking at this time, and thus wish soley for comfort, solace, society. These Friends may be involved with morality, integrity on a social level, and communal sharing, among other things.

Almost everyone has had the experience of internal promptings which seem to push one in some direction or another, and, most certainly, almost everyone has had the experience of conscience.

There are some Friends who would describe this internal guidance as coming from something other than their consciously perceived self. These Friends sit with expectation, almost as if waiting for a lover, during Meeting For Worship, waiting for very subtle forces.

Other Friends state that they believe that the inner promptings and wisdom that they experience is either self-generated (or at least explanable that way) or given by God. There is thus no need for a more complicated explanation than the workings, possibly as yet not understood, of the material world, or the workings, unable to be understood, of God. These Friends sit in Meeting to become quiet, to lose the jangling complications of everyday life, to find peace for a bit of time.

[Of course, there are many other motivations and ideas about what people are doing during Worship. But I am trying here to articulate a problem that has been present in the Meeting for some time now. Please try to fit your ideas to my line of reasoning for a moment (only).]

This is all exceedingly ironic. The two ideas about what constitutes worship involves not whether God helps us (or is there), but instead is totally a difference in expectation. Friends who sit expectantly in Meeting may be looking for subconscious promptings to give them wisdom, may be attempting to take an evolutionary step forward in terms of extending human consciousness, may be waiting for the gift of God's messages to speak to their condition.

Those who seek peace, quiet, and human contact in Meeting For Worship want vocal ministry that is uplifting, enheartening, and possibly a bit entertaining, may wish to have their children present with them, may engage in inspirational reading or prayer or other forms of centering behavior. They may invoke God or not.

These two groups of Friends, while so similar in intention, are opposite poles from each other in practice, having divergent expectations of Meeting For Worship.

I am now quite sure that there will not be a way to overcome this kind of difference in expectation. For each, the entire point of Worship is invalidated by the other's point of view and behavior.

And yet, neither point of view is invalid. They are simply incompatible.

It may be damaging to all to try to force communal values in this case. I do not know. I only know that we have no vocabulary at present to use in attempting to understand each other, being separated by the common language of Quakerism, which rides serenely over the gulf of widely divergent expectation.

Horses and Carts, Chickens and Eggs

I may have been on Mars for the past few years, but it is only very recently that I have come across the fact of people calling themselves NonTheist Friends, with their siblings the Theist Friends. Apparently, there has been conflict in some Meetings over the issue of whether one believes in God or not while acting after the manner of a Quaker.

Oh my. I hope that I am not asked whether I am a theist or non-theist Quaker.

One of the brilliant innovations in George Fox’s inspiration was that doctrine is not truth, regardless of content. I believe that he even said “stay with the experience of the life within you, and this will free you from a dependence on words.” (from Rex Ambler’s Truth of the Heart)

Yes, I understand that Fox was steeped in the theist traditions and that the vocabulary and interest of the early Quakers was rooted in Jesus and the Scriptures. But none of them defined what they meant by God, while all of them rejected the notion of a creed or a formal declaration of the content of one's belief, as far as I know.

So my experience says to me that to be or not to be Non/Theist is a matter of taste, since we have no idea what the words actually mean anyway. Since they are a description of experience, the words come later, it seems to me. If at all.

I do not aim to be divisive here, nor to be flip. I am actively concerned by Quakers who change focus from experience to conceptual doctrine.

I am neither a theist nor a non-theist Quaker, nor am I agnostic, nor atheist. I do not reject the idea of divinity - though I am also pretty sure that I cannot accept many, if not most, of the commonly used descriptions of God.

All these are just words.

What's beyond the words? Talk to me about that.