 131. Quantum Physics (Living Light) |
The New Reformation
The time has come for a new and worldwide reformation of human culture. The impact of this cultural conversion of mankind will be comparable to that made by Copernicus in the natural sciences and Luther in the domain of religion. But this new reformation will be universal. It will include all of mankind and every aspect of human culture. It will include all aspects and all traditions of religion, all the sciences, the communications media, economics, and politics. And it will transform the intimate and relational conditions of all people.
This new reformation will continue the cultural gesture begun in the time of Copernicus and Luther. That is, it will extend the cultural and scientific tendency of Man to acknowledge and also surrender to what is beyond and more primary than Man, and beyond and more primary than the Earth. This new cultural gesture will base itself on full recognition of the more radical and modern discoveries in science and cosmology, such as those proposed by Einstein and his theories of “relativity.” And it will also base itself on full recognition of the more radical and modern realizations in the area of human religion and spirituality.
This new cultural reformation will step beyond the old and childish mentality, wherein Man is surrounded by the Parent Deity and the Parental Universe. And this reformation will also pass beyond the adolescent conceptual rigidity of scientific materialism, so that mankind may not only acknowledge the Paradoxical Condition of Nature, but also participate and surrender within that Paradox. Only in that case may we continue to grow and evolve as Man, and ultimately transcend Man and the Earth.
All of this means that we must now begin to escape beyond the conventional Man-versus-Object mentality in religion and science. We must realize and presume God to be greater than an Object to us—greater than the Sun or the Creative Other. And we must see Earth and Sun and our own local Universe within an Infinite Paradox of space-time, which arises, and floats, and changes, and passes away within the Paradox and Living Radiance that is the true Divine, the Mystery or Condition in which all present conditions are arising.
Conventional and traditional science objectifies Nature as the “It” of observable processes. Just so, conventional and traditional religion objectifies God as the Eternal “Other” that creates the World and Man. Thus, both traditions, in their conventional mode, create objective and independent Idols, which Truth belies. In Truth, God and Man and Nature are Coincident, and thus Identical as the Paradox and Process of the totality of Existence. And only when God and Man and Nature are thus conceived to be perfectly reconciled, as a Unity, can we observe and experience and surrender to the Divine Paradox of the Process in which we exist.
Science must abandon the conventional conception of the “It” of Nature, and religion must abandon the archaic conception of the “Other” that is believed to be God. We must all acknowledge and point to and surrender to the Single Paradoxical Reality and Process. Both science and religion must abandon the strategy of separation from Nature and God. We must all acknowledge our inherent Unity with the Paradoxical Reality and Process, and, therefore, we must all surrender into the Living Reality, which never begins or ends, and which sustains all that exists, and which is ultimately beyond all knowledge (and thus is Transcendental). And we must establish the unanimous and universal validity of the cultural disposition of human self-transcendence, or heartfelt and intuitive surrender into the universal, All-Pervading Current of Radiant Life-Energy, within which all worlds and beings are arising, floating, changing, and then apparently passing out of sight or knowing (but never passing out of the eternal realm of Existence itself). Only on such as basis can we live in personal and social pleasure, creativity, peace, harmony, and immortality. And only from such a point of view can we also rightly establish religion, practice science, and create communities that are human, intelligent, and sustained by continuous submission to the Truth, Process, and Paradox of the Living Reality.
The Reality in which we “live and move and have our being” is not actually or merely Other than all beings and things. The “Otherness” of God and Nature is an archaic conception shared by both conventional religion and conventional science. In the case of both conventional religion and conventional science, Man, and thus every individual, is, by virtue of a false conceptual understanding of the process of “knowing”, established in the mode of the independent observer, the experiencer, the believer, so that his very being is separated from ecstatic participation in the Reality that is both Nature and God.
