Music Selections

[Joe Mahmood]

NELLY FURTADO - SAY IT RIGHT

 

[Joe Mahmood]

BRIAN FALLON - FORGET ME NOT

 

[Joe Mahmood]

THE RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS - FACE DOWN

 

[Joe Mahmood]

TRUST COMPANY - DOWNFALL

 

[Joe Mahmood]

THE PRETTY RECKLESS - TAKE ME DOWN

 

[Joe Mahmood]

Thanks for listening. Goodnight and have a fantastic weekend...

KODALINE - IN THE END

 

[Joe Mahmood]

FAOUZIA - YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW ME




"Sincerity is the way to heaven."

~ Mencius

 

[Joe Mahmood]

JOHN MARTIN - ANYWHERE FOR YOU

 

[Joe Mahmood]

SHAYNE WARD - NO PROMISES



Which one comes first...
God or Man?
The Spiritual realm/Multiverse or The Universe?
The Chicken or the egg?
The soul/consciousness or the physical body?

The mankind search...

9th June 2021

Everything in the cosmos is either conscious or unconscious. Or, to be more precise about our terms, an object is either participating in the domain of mind or it isn't. Choosing which is which, however, isn't as easy as it appears. Why do we say that brain is conscious? The brain is made up of ordinary atoms and molecules. Its calcium is the same as the calcium in the White Cliffs of Dover; its iron is the same as the iron in a two-penny nail. As thinkers, nails and the White Cliffs of Dover aren't famous, but we all accept that the human brain has a privilege place in the universe, meaning that its atoms are somehow unique compared with the same atoms in "dead" matter.

When a molecule of glucose passed through the blood-brain barrier (a cellular gatekeeper that determines which molecules are allowed to pass from the bloodstream into the brain), the glucose doesn't change physically. Yet somehow it contributes to the processes we call thinking, feeling, and perceiving. How can the simple sugar regularly used to nourish hospital patients through an IV tube learn how to think? That question goes to the heart of the mystery. If all objects in the universe are either part of consciousness or are not, the conscious ones learned how to think, and yet no one has ever explained how this occurred.

Really, the whole notion of atoms learning to think is totally irrational. The exact moment when atoms acquired consciousness will never be located. Linking mind and matter has been labeled "the hard problem" and has become the focus of intense debate. Out of the 118 elements found, only 6 make up 97 per cent of the human body: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. If anyone hopes to mix and match these atoms in such a hugely complex way that they suddenly start to think, this would seem like a naive goal. But in essence that's the only explanation offered for how the human brain became the organ of consciousness.

With billions of base pairs contributing to the double helix of human DNA, complexity becomes bewildering enough to serve as a plausible cover for ignorance. Telling which objects are conscious and which are not is very tricky. Calling the entire cosmos conscious is just as plausible as calling it unconscious. The argument can't be settled simply on physical grounds.

The mystery boils down to a clear-cut choice: is the universe made of matter that learned to think, or is the universe made of mind that created matter? We can call this the divide between "matter first" and "mind first." Although "matter first" is the default position of science, the quantum century seriously undermined it.

One popular view tries to rescue the "matter first" position by cleverly turning everything into information. We are surrounded by information on all sides. If you receive an e-mail announcing a sale on smartphones, a piece of new information has come your way. Yet the photons that strike your retina as you read the computer screen also carry information, which gets transformed into faint electrical impulses in the brain that are another kind of information. Nothing is exempt. At the bottom, anything a person can say, think, or do can be computerized in the form of digital code using only 1s and 0s.

A model can be developed where the observer is a bundle of information looking out upon a universe that is an even bigger bundle of information. Suddenly, mind and matter find common ground. Some cosmologists consider this a viable alternative to a conscious universe. All it takes, we are told, is to define consciousness purely as information. An articulate proponent of this view is physicist Max Tegmark of MIT. He begins his argument by dividing consciousness into two problems, one easy, the other hard.

Excerpts extracted from YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE - Discovering Your Cosmic Self And Why It Matters, by Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Menas C. Kafatos, PH.D.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/
https://www.menaskafatos.com/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

Goodnight...

KELLY CLARKSON - I DARE YOU

https://youtu.be/FfWomPGz0IU


The Future of Religion:
An Interview with Ninian Smart

By Scott London

In 1968, Time magazine asked "Is God Dead?" It was a provocative and poignant headline at the time. But now, some decades later, the newsweeklies are pondering the opposite question: What do we make of the extraordinary interest in spirituality and religion today? "Millions of Americans are embarking on a search for the sacred in their lives," writes Newsweek magazine, while U.S. News and World Report notes, with apparent surprise, that "the United States appears to be more religious today than it was at its founding."

The signs of a spiritual resurgence are everywhere. Titles like Talking to Heaven and Conversations with God top the bestseller lists. The latest offerings from Hollywood explore spiritual subjects like Tibetan Buddhism, life after death, and the limits of faith. Physicists debate the spiritual significance of quantum mechanics. The medical establishment wonders what to make of the startling discovery that prayer affects healing.

One of the most intriguing aspects the new religious scene in America is the pervasive mingling and mixing of different faiths and traditions. Never before in history have so many religious values and rituals coexisted within a single society. Much has been written about the cross-pollination of race, ethnicity and cultural values, but what happens when religions meet? Will the syncretism of the global village lead to some sort of universal religion, as some predict, or will it produce a vibrant mosaic of many different faiths?

Ninian Smart pondered these questions for the better part of five decades. As one of the world's foremost scholars of religion, and the author of some 30 books, he was widely regarded — until his death in January 2001 — as an elder statesmen in the world of religious studies.

Born in Scotland, he taught at the Universities of London, Birmingham, and Wales for many years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1960s. He continued to teach there till the end of his life, dividing his time between England, Italy, and the United States.

I met Smart in Santa Barbara in April 1999 to explore one of his favorite subjects: the future of religion. A short, round man with a big smile and a delightful sense of humor, Smart's approach to the subject was at once playful and scholarly. Our conversation began with the quip that the study of comparative religion can make one "comparatively religious." I asked him if he had found that to be true.

Ninian Smart: Exploring the world's various religions can certainly change your outlook and may push aside some of the narrower views that are found in every religious tradition. But on the other hand it may deepen your religious experience. It depends on what sort of person you are.

Scott London: You belong to the Episcopal Church but have come into contact with and learned from many of the world's great religions.

Smart: Yes. I came in on this in a very unusual way. I was drafted into the British Army at the end of World War II and was put into the so-called Intelligence Corps. The first thing I did was spend a year and a half learning Chinese. That completely took me out of my original world view. We studied Confucian texts and so on. Then, the army being what it was, I was sent to Sri Lanka (or Ceylon, as it was then called). The dominant religion there is Buddhism. We were training local soldiers there. We decided that it was ridiculous to have a Christian chaplain for a unit that was predominantly Buddhist and some Hindu. So we invited the monk who was in charge of the neighboring temple to become our chaplain. I think we were the only unit in the British Army that had a Buddhist chaplain. I was eighteen when I went into the military so I became acquainted with other religious views at a very early age.

London: How would you describe your own faith today?

Smart: I often say that I'm a Buddhist-Episcopalian. I say that partly to annoy people. [Laughs]

London: How so?

Smart: I like to annoy people who think that a religion can contain the whole truth. No religion, it seems to me, contains the whole truth. I think it's mad to think that there is nothing to learn from other traditions and civilizations. If you accept that other religions have something to offer and you learn from them, that is what you become: a Buddhist-Episcopalian or a Hindu-Muslim or whatever.

London: How does Buddhism complement your Christian beliefs?

Smart: I think the Buddhist ethic is clearer and more systematic in some ways. The Buddhist notion is that our chief problems are greed, hatred and delusion. Well, delusion is not much mentioned in the Christian tradition. In the West, we have underplayed the idea that our moral and spiritual troubles have to do with a lack of clarity or insight because original sin has dominated so much of our thinking. We tend to think that our troubles are caused by insufficient will power. There are merits in thinking that, of course, but I think you can learn something too from Buddhism. In that respect, Buddhism is complementary to Christianity — it adds to it.

London: Perhaps this is one reason why Buddhism is being embraced by so many Americans today.

Smart: I think the attractiveness of Buddhism is that it doesn't involve a belief in God. That appeals to a lot of people — intellectuals and well-educated people in particular. It is also a very practical religion that offers techniques such as meditation. Also, there is the more peripheral fact that Buddhism has a very good spokesman — the Dalai Lama — who has had a lot of impact, and quite rightly so.

London: You wrote a book a few years ago where you spoke of Buddhism and Christianity as "rivals and allies."

Smart: Yes. In a sense, they are incompatible because there is no God in Buddhism — particularly in Theravada Buddhism. But they are also allies because their values and practices are compatible and they can work together — indeed, they would benefit greatly from doing so. That is what I meant by "rivals and allies."

But the fact of the matter is that Buddhism has changed a lot. In Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism, for example, you do get something like God or Christ. In fact, when St. Francis of Xavier arrived in Japan, he wrote back to the Vatican and made a joke. "It is unfortunate," he said, "that the Lutherans were here before me." By this he meant that Pure Land Buddhism was so much like Lutheranism.

London: Pure Land Buddhism?

Smart: Yes, it is a form of Buddhism in which if you call on the name of the Buddha Amida in faith (or Anitaba in the Indian context), you will be reborn in the Pure Land — it is like heaven. One of their saints said, "If a good person can be saved, how much more can a bad person be saved?" Luther could have written that. So there are forms of Buddhism which are very much like Christianity.

London: The Dalai Lama has been very outspoken about the need for mutual understanding between religions. Do you see any signs of progress on that front?

Smart: Certainly the understandings have advanced tremendously in the last fifty years, even if it is primarily through religious education and interfaith dialogues and things of that sort.

London: Some critics feel that interfaith dialogues tend to be rather wishy-washy — mostly polite conversation.

Smart: That's partly true. I don't go for dialogues greatly (though, in fact, tomorrow I'm going to Rome to participate in one). People say that it's mere conversation but, first of all, what's wrong with conversation? What would people otherwise be doing? They could be fighting each other. Secondly, who is going to decide what is wishy-washy? Suppose I would say, "I don't believe in hell," and somebody turns around and says that I'm a wishy-washy character because I don't believe in hell. Am I supposed to believe in hell to escape the disaster of being wishy-washy? What if two denominations, or two groups of people, decide they are going to do some work building houses in Tijuana to help the poor — is that wishy-washy?

London: There is a striking passage in your book Choosing a Faith where you describe the great number of West African Yorubas in Los Angeles today; the number of Sikhs in Birmingham, England; the Mormons in the Fiji Islands; the Tibetan Buddhists in Scotland; the Hindus in South Africa; and the Confucians in Berkeley, California. How will all these different traditions manage to coexist in the future?

Smart: Not just in the future — they are coexisting now. They are getting on together, despite the clashes and bitter warfare that we notice in places like Bosnia and Sri Lanka. This has come about partly through peaceful migration. For example, many doctors from Asia migrate to Britain or the United States to practice medicine. But a lot of it is also a result of unpeaceful migration. World War II left behind 300,000 Poles in Britain. There are Palestinians all over the Middle East. One could go on and on. The net result is that we have never had such a mingled population as we do now. There is not a big city in the world (except perhaps in Japan and one or two other places) where there are not sizeable numbers of whoever you care to mention. The second largest Greek city today is Melbourne, Australia. The largest Polynesian city is Auckland, New Zealand. And so on.

London: What will be the fate of religion in this new global village?

Smart: Well, one result of all these migrations is the emergence of new forms of religion. For example, some Hindus are building temples in Malibu now. They may have been educated in the West and know very little about Hinduism. So they have to invent it from scratch because they want their children to be Hindus. And this is happening not just for Hindus, but for Muslims, Confucians, and so on all over America and Europe. That's a hopeful sign.

One of the effects of religions getting together is that they borrow from one another. For example, I remember going into a town in the south of Sri Lanka and one of the first buildings I saw was the YMBA — the Young Man's Buddhist Association. It was a young men's organization modelled on the YMCA. They were borrowing a Christian organizational item. Another example is the growing number of Catholics who are practicing Yoga and meditation techniques borrowed from Buddhism and Hinduism. So there are these borrowings which I think fertilize the religions.

London: Syncretism, the word usually invoked to describe this kind of cross-pollination, tends to have very negative connotations.

Smart: Yes, this can be disturbing to people. They have often been taught, "You have to have solid faith and must be sure of your religion," and so on. They fear that they might be threatened by these new developments and mergings. So you get a backlash against it.

I believe that if you wanted to, you could work out a few equations. What happens when Religion A meets Religion B? Well, A becomes a little B-ified, and B becomes a little A-ified. Then people in A don't like the B-ification, so they become AA types. And the same goes for B. So there is always that dynamic going on when religions meet. Now, for the first time in history, all religions are meeting. So they are bound to interact in some alarming ways.

London: Are you concerned about the growth of fundamentalism?

Smart: It depends what sort you mean. I don't regard fundamentalism in the United States or in Europe as a terrible threat, partly because it is a self-curing disease. The younger generation drifts away, so fundamentalists always have to recruit to keep up with themselves.

London: You mean children never believe as strongly as their parents?

Smart: Yes, they become more liberal partly as a reaction to their parents and partly through education. Education tends to make people a bit softer.

London: What you're saying suggests that there is a kind of evolution that takes place over generations toward more and more liberal beliefs.

Smart: Yes, I believe that. But it's difficult to show because attendance in the liberal churches is declining today. But I think that is so, yes.

London: Many attribute these waning attendance figures to the growth of the self-help movement and the quest among a growing number of Americans for spiritual meaning outside of established religions.

Smart: Yes. A lot of it involves a new individualism, in a sense. People now have their own particular religion — a denomination of one. I suppose it's a part of the new age phenomenon, but it's much wider than that. On the whole, I would say that is healthy. But I think it was always there, secretly.

London: Secretly?

Smart: What I mean is this: My wife is from Italy and I know her relatives very well. A great uncle of hers died fifteen or twenty years ago. Near to the time of his death I remember asking him about life after death. He said, "I'm not concerned with that." I said, "What do you mean you are not concerned with it?" He said, "Well, there is talk of heaven and purgatory and all that and it doesn't bother me." I said, "That's rather unusual. You are a good Catholic and go to mass every Sunday, and yet you don't seem to think that bit of teaching is important." He said, "Yes, I think it's a good bit of teaching for young people. Priests should go on preaching that. But for me, well, I'm at a certain stage of life where I don't need that anymore."

You see, even in the old traditions, which appear to be very unchanging, you meet people who have come to their own very private conclusions — though they haven't always stated them in public. I think that today these things have become more public and probably more widespread. That is one great feature of the present state in America. And you will find the same thing, somewhat, in Europe too.

London: Do you think the spread of democracy around the world today is having an affect on how and what people believe?

Smart: Yes, I think so, partly because it removes the pressures to believe in any particular way. People have access to other ideas and ways of doing things that they never had before. And they have new freedoms. The Pope has many merits, but perhaps he doesn't fully understand this aspect of democracy. To put it a little crudely, these days nobody is afraid of excommunication. If they decide they don't want to be Catholic anymore and want to become Episcopalians or Hindus, they just do it. The churches no longer have the disciplinary powers to keep their followers in check. That means that they have to accept much more feeding up from below than they had to in the past. So, in a certain sense, the Pope is elected by those who believe in him. I've often admired the way many Catholics who have left the priesthood, for example, have nevertheless remained sincere Catholics. They voted with their feet.

I think there is a certain inevitability about these trends. For example, the government of Iran has been trying to ban satellite dishes because the leaders worry that Western ideas will come in and corrupt Islam. Well, whether they corrupt Islam or not, satellite dishes are going to win out in the long run. One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they were unable to insulate their people, as they had done in the past, from fax machines, television, radio and all that. So people inevitably get new ideas.

London: What do you make of the rise of evangelical movements around the world in recent years, particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Smart: Well, the evangelicals have a long record in Eastern Europe. I remember visiting Romania some years ago with a BBC team. We were making a film about Romanian Orthodoxy. When we asked people, "why do you go to liturgy?" they said, "so we will not fall for the tricks of the Baptists." [Laughs] So they felt you had to go to liturgy to make sure your faith was alright, otherwise you might succumb to the evangelicals because it was so attractive.

With the new freedom of religion, such as it is, Russia is being penetrated not only by evangelicals but also new religious movements. I have some friends who are Moonies, for example, and they report on their successes in the former Soviet Union. I think there are two or three factors that help explain this. One is that the Russian church was corrupt. Two, these movements are new. And three, people in Russia have not had any religion — they have been under the Soviet ideology and probably not believed anything that one would recognize as religious. But now they are getting all sorts of choices.

London: In that respect, then, one could look upon the former Soviet world as a great experiment. The people now have the freedom to choose any faith they please.

Smart: Yes, but remember that a Russian faced with this is still a Russian, so he is more likely to be sympathetic to Orthodox Christianity.

London: Let's say it were possible to approach the question of faith from a completely fresh standpoint and, after examining the merits and shortcomings of the various religions, to actually choose a faith. What do you think a new global citizen might choose?

Smart: It depends on certain value judgments that people make. I mean, if you were going to be attracted to a mystical faith which involved the contemplative life, Buddhism would be quite reasonable. But then, not everybody is a budding mystic. In fact, it's pretty certain that very few people are. So another kind of religion, one that was perhaps more pragmatic and service-oriented, might appeal to those others. So I think you have to take your values into account.

London: Do you subscribe to the idea, expressed by some scholars of religion — most notably Huston Smith — that there is a core wisdom at the heart of the world's great religions?

Smart: No, I don't, because I don't think it can be shown or specified. I believe strongly that the mysticism of all the religions is just about the same. But that is not the only core. Anyway, why should they have a core? Wouldn't it be more interesting if they didn't? Or if they had several cores?

London: Perhaps we're evolving toward a time when there will be a single world religion composed of different tenets of the various world faiths. What's your view?

Smart: I don't think religions will merge into a great global faith. But I do believe we're moving toward a global ideology that has a place for religion and recognizes the contributions of the different traditions. Hopefully, it will have an overarching view as to how we can work together for the promotion of human values and spirituality. I would like to see an agreement that recognizes that we live on the same planet and that some interests, such as human rights, must be universal and that all religions must be respected.

Tolerance has been a very important feature of Christianity from its very roots, despite all the other things that have gone on since. And that, I think, must be the global perspective. Tolerance implies more than saying, "Well, let the Muslims go on with what they are doing." It also means trying to learn something from them and adding that to your own tradition. That is the attitude I think needs to inform the global citizen of the future.

http://scott.london/interviews/smart.html

 

[Joe Mahmood]

"When you realise that you are here to learn, develop and gain wisdom; and there is something bigger than this life and beyond this life, this is the end. But, this is not the end. This is the road to The End."

~ Joe Mahmood, 29th June 2020, Singapore.

MATT REDMAN - NEVER ONCE



SPACE & PHYSICS

Where Are the Anti-People? [Excerpt]​

Physicist Dave Goldberg breaks down the mysteries of the cosmos in his new book The Universe in the Rearview Mirror. In an excerpt, Goldberg explores the matter-antimatter divide
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dave-goldberg-universe-rearview-mirror/
Could there be a cluster of antimatter stars orbiting our galaxy?
By Paul Sutter published February 08, 2021

Antimatter shed by anti-stars could even be detectable here on Earth.
https://www.space.com/cluster-antimatter-stars-orbiting-milky-way

 

[Joe Mahmood]

HAEVN - WHERE THE HEART IS

https://youtu.be/f3MtxYzX1II


In 1993, Bali. A Spirit said these to me through someone who was close and dear to me.

"...if you follow me to my world, its as though I've murdered you. Please forgive me."

"I will know where you are and I love you so much..."

****************************************************************

17th February 2021

Religion of the Heart

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB

In our innermost heart we can tap a source of power strong enough to counteract the forces that threaten this good green earth. And we need every bit of energy we can get to put it to work for the goals for which we stand here.

I’d like to invite you to give some thought to a particular problem. Why are our responses to the ethical problems of the present time so singularly ineffective and anemic? I’ve asked myself many times, why is this so? I think of one reason, at least, and I’d like to suggest that to you tonight.

Our ethical approaches are uprooted from their religious roots. They are cut off from their religious sources. A great task before us is, therefore, to reroot our ethics in religion.

What do I mean by that? I’m not talking about the religions, but about Religion. This Religion which underlies all the different religions — from which all the different religions spring — is the religion of the heart. But we must clarify what we mean by “heart.” Rightly understood, the heart stands for the whole human person, for the innermost center of our being, for our totality, not for any part of our selves. I am appealing here, and will be appealing all along, to your experience. Only if what I am saying is true in your experience, is it true for you. It might be true for me, but if it isn’t true in your experience, then it is irrelevant to you. Please, keep checking what I offer you against your own experience. I suppose that we all share the experience of moments on which Religion hinges. I speak of experience, not of teachings we have learned in church, at school, or at home. Religion hinges on experience.

Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging.

The Religious key experience varies greatly from person to person. Yet, there is something that is always there: a sense of overwhelming belonging. Now, this is shorthand for something that needs to be developed and explored and explained. But I hope it will serve as a pointer towards the roots of your own innermost personal religiousness. Does your religiousness not somehow hinge on an experience that you have had? And was it not in some way or other the experience of belonging, an overwhelming sense of belonging? And I am not specifying it any further. For some profoundly religious persons, the term “God” has no meaning. Why push them to use that term? Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging. Now, some of us feel comfortable, more or less, in calling that ultimate reality to which we belong God. Others have exactly the same experience, but do not feel comfortable calling it God. Personally, I’m never quite sure whether I do or do not feel comfortable with the term God. I think rather not, because it is too easily misunderstood. But I do belong to a tradition that gives the name God to that reality, and so speaking out of this tradition, I can conveniently also call it God.

Now, what do we do with that experience? What do we do with that innermost religious experience of our heart, that awareness of ultimate belonging? Regardless of whether you belong to this or that religious tradition or whether you belong to none of them, you always do three things with that experience; you cannot help it. You do something with your emotions. Because the experience is of the heart, that is of the whole person, certainly the intellect, the will, and the emotions are involved in it. They can’t help doing something with that experience. The intellect interprets it. You cannot help that, even if you say, “In my personal religion that deepest religious experience cannot be interpreted.” That is an interpretation. By denying that it can be interpreted, you are interpreting it in a negative sense. That would be quite valid and sufficient, but most people and all religious traditions go further. And so we get doctrine. We must prevent it from becoming dogmatic. That is a different matter. But we do have doctrine, dogma, in the widest sense. We do have intellectual interpretation of our primal religious experience.

The second thing we do with it is to accept, in some form, our belonging. Our will does that. But, our intellect often imposes limits. We experience limitless belonging. But then we don’t allow ourselves to act upon it. We act, for instance, as if we belonged only to those who hold the same dogmas we hold. Implicitly, religious belonging is a limitless belonging. It is not even restricted to humans. It is open to animals, to plants, to this planet, to the whole universe. It is completely open, implicitly. This is now where ethics enter the picture. Our will does something with our experience of ultimate belonging, and that is where morality has its roots. If we belong, we must draw out the consequences. And so ethics is part of religion. An important one, but still only a relatively small one. We must remind ourselves of that because most of the religious traditions with which we are familiar here in the West are over-ethical, are moralistic. Morals sometimes seem to have swallowed up their religious matrix. Then, all that you hear in sermons is dos and don’ts. But nobody is particularly attracted to dos and don’ts. We may take them in stride, but only if we have reasons. And religious reasons are the only ones strong enough. If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you are willing to accept your ethics as the moral implications of your religious experience of belonging.

Don’t think only of the rituals of the great religious traditions. Even in your own, personal religion you may have rituals about which you never told anybody. You’ve never shared them. They are your own. But they are genuine rituals.

There is a third aspect. Our emotions also do something with the experience of ultimate belonging. They celebrate it. We celebrate that experience in various ways, and that leads to ritual. Don’t think only of the rituals of the great religious traditions. Even in your own, personal religion you may have rituals about which you never told anybody. You’ve never shared them. They are your own. But they are genuine rituals. And if, as children, we refrained religiously from stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, that had, quite possibly, something to do with our primordial religious experience. It may have been part of our ritual. Adults have sometimes complicated rituals, hardly distinguishable from miniature psychotic episodes. We all need rituals. Unless they are given to us by a religious tradition, we have to make them up for ourselves.

Thus, the primordial religious experience of ultimate belonging will find its expression in doctrine, in morals, and in ritual. We have to prevent dogma from becoming dogmatic. We have to prevent morals from becoming moralistic. And we have to prevent ritual from becoming ritualistic. How do we do that?

In healthy religion, morals, dogma, and ritual remain rooted in authority of the heart. And remember, the heart stands for the whole person. In doctrine the intellect deals with the religious experience. That is important, but there is more to us than our intellect. The heart alone encompasses the wholeness of our religious response. If you put doctrine always under the judgment of your heart, you will prevent your religion from becoming dogmatic in a negative sense. If you always refer your ethical convictions back to the heart, you will prevent your religion from becoming moralistic. If you refer your rituals constantly back to your heart and to its primordial experience of ultimate belonging, you will prevent your religion from becoming ritualistic. It always has to be the whole person that stands behind the religious response, not only your intellect, not only your will, not only your emotions.

The moment I accept responsibility for recognizing authority in my own heart, my religion comes of age.

The basic question is, “Where does your ultimate religious authority reside?” And if your answer is, for example, “In the Bible,” then you have to ask yourself, “And who tells me that the Bible has authority for me?” For other people the ultimate authority resides in the Koran or in other sacred scriptures. Who gives the Bible authority over me? Is it not my own heart that freely (and authoritatively) recognizes authority and so validates it? If we continue questioning, we come to the insight that our ultimate religious authority resides within each one of us. I say it resides there. I’m not saying that each one of us is the ultimate religious authority. That would be nonsense. But my ultimate religious authority is also “within,” or else I could never recognize it “out there.” The heart “recognizes” authority in a threefold sense of the word. The intellect recognizes authority in the sense of identifying it as such. The will recognizes authority in the sense of acknowledging its claims. The emotions recognize authority in the sense of appreciating that it deserves to be honored. Only when intellect, will, and emotions, each play their part, is the recognition of authority wholehearted. The moment I accept responsibility for recognizing authority in my own heart, my religion comes of age. At that moment I pass from irresponsible religion to responsible religion. This passage has far-reaching consequences.

Now, I would like to point out some of these consequences in connection with two terms which in our Western tradition have been important for ethics: love and obedience.

The biblical concept of love makes sense in light of our ultimate belonging. In our basic religious experience, we become aware that we belong to all. And we say, “yes,” to that belonging. Love in the biblical sense means that “yes,” including all its consequences. Unless we take love in that sense, we get entangled in contradictions. Think, for instance, of the command to love your neighbor. In the sense in which we normally speak of love, it implies at least preferential desire, if not passionate attraction. But can you really love your neighbor with preferential desire, let alone with passionate attraction: We’re talking about the neighbor that lives next door to you. It is impossible. Besides, can anybody command you to have preferential desire? Is attraction subject to any commands? It makes no sense whatsoever. But, that somebody says: You have experienced ultimate belonging; now say “yes” to that experience and draw the consequences — that makes perfectly good sense.

The Bible does not say: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That means, love your neighbor as (being) yourself.

The Bible does not say: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It says: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That means, love your neighbor as (being) yourself. In your true self you are one with your neighbor. And at the moment of your primordial religious experience, you know that this is true. Nobody has to tell you. And so the commandment simply means, “Say yes to that experience and act accordingly.” But if you think that you have to “love your neighbor like you love yourself,” then you have to first imagine that you are somebody else. Then you have to love that somebody else who is really yourself, as you would love somebody else. And finally you have to try to love somebody else who is really somebody else the way you would love yourself if you were somebody else. It is an impossible act of mental acrobatics. In contrast, there is nothing more natural than the insight that your neighbor is yourself. You have experienced it; now act accordingly. It is in this sense that we can reroot ethics in religion.

I’d like to give you one other example: obedience. Obedience is often understood as doing what somebody else tells you to do. Well, there is some reason for that. Obedience is often learned by doing, for a time and under very special circumstances, willingly, freely, what somebody else tells you to do. This is obedience as method. But that method has a goal: obedience as virtue. And that is obedience in the full sense. Obedience as virtue in Jewish tradition, in Christian tradition, in other great religious traditions in the world, means far more than doing what somebody else tells you to do. It means, ultimately, listening with the heart. It is an intensive form of listening, the most intensive form of listening. The opposite of obedience is irresponsibility. One who acts irresponsibly is not listening thoroughly and is, therefore, not giving the appropriate response.

An ethics that is not rooted in the religion of the heart will not think of obedience as wholehearted, responsible listening. Obedience will simply be equated with conformity to external commands. But our heart tells us that external conformity can be irresponsible at times. We are all too apt to conform to external pressure even though our heart tells us to stand up against it. Given an unjust command, non-conformity becomes the expression of a higher obedience. Civil disobedience is a case in point. Here, “disobedience” is true obedience, rooted in the heart.

We all have an inordinate tendency to yield to the demands of external authority, even in flagrant violation of our own hearts’ better judgment. I remind you of the experiments …that proved conclusively that over 60 percent of an average population will torture another human being with electric shocks until the victim lies unconscious, and for no other reason but the instructions by an authority figure…

Our society has a blind spot with regard to obedience. We think that human beings find it extremely hard to submit to external authority. The opposite is true. We all have an inordinate tendency to yield to the demands of external authority, even in flagrant violation of our own hearts’ better judgment. I remind you of the experiments by Stanley Milgram at Yale University, tests that were repeated also in Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Milgram proved conclusively that over 60 percent of an average population will torture another human being with electric shocks until the victim lies unconscious, and for no other reason but the instructions by an authority figure — in this case a psychologist, the authority in our age — who quietly insists: “The experiment requires that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.” Our society is convinced that submission to authority is something that comes very hard to human beings. And we act accordingly. We train children from earliest youth on, to be submissive to authority, as if this were something one has to hammer into beings. We have a blind spot there, as I said. The fact is we are so prone to be submissive to authority, that all our efforts should go into teaching children to stand on their own feet against authority if necessary. Only if we bend backwards, may we hope to overcome our congenital bent to conform to external authority. The only valid gesture for authority under these circumstances is to constantly give back authority to the grassroots. The prime task for all who wield authority is to give back authority to those who are under it.

Because obedience as virtue is a listening with the heart, training in obedience is not training in conformity. Its highest goal is not to produce puppets, but prophets. For a long time religious traditions have known that the highest obedience is the obedience of the prophet. The prophet is one who learns so thoroughly to listen that he or she hears what to say, how to speak out, within the community, but against the trend of the community. It is necessary to speak out from within because if you speak out from the outside, you are not a prophet, you’re just an outside critic. You must be part of that community, but you must also speak out. Either of the two alone would be relatively easy. It would be easy to stay in, if you could shut up. Yet, the two have to come together: to stay in and to speak out. Where these two come together, they form the cross of the prophet. The staying in forms the vertical beam, as it were, and the speaking out forms the horizontal one.

In our innermost heart we can tap a source of power strong enough to counteract the forces that threaten this good green earth. And we need every bit of energy we can get to put it to work for the goals for which we stand here. What we can achieve is not the question. The great question is whether we will have the wisdom and courage to take the proper stance. The sincere effort to do so will give us the assurance, each one of us, that we have done what we can do. That is more important than thinking about survival. If we are too much concerned with survival, we are apt to get into the same groove in which those are who for the sake of survival, endanger the survival of us all. If instead we focus in our discussion on the rerooting of ethics in religion and of religion in our primal religiousness, it may help us clarify our stance in the face of the great peril we are confronting.

Originally published as “Religion of the Heart/Nuclear Stalemate” in NICM Journal (Vol. 8, #1, pp. 27-33). 1983.

https://gratefulness.org/resource/religion-of-the-heart/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

BRIAN AND JENN JOHNSON - YOU'RE GONNA BE OKAY




"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things"

~ William Wordsworth

"One ship drives east and another drives west
by the self-same gale that blows.
'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,
that determines the way she goes."

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

[Joe Mahmood]

Two inmates looking through a window from behind bars.
One saw the mud. Another saw the stars.

ROBBIE WILLIAMS - BETTER MAN

 

[Joe Mahmood]

PLUMB - BEAUTIFULLY BROKEN

 

[Joe Mahmood]

AMANDA FONDELL - ALL THIS WAY



ALL THIS WAY SONG LYRICS

We made it through storms, made it through rain
It's been a long way and now I'm here
Trying to get back what you gave me
you don't need to save me, you broke my fears

So baby hold on
now that we come so far
just listen to your heart

You don't have to save me
just need you to follow
Cause we made it all this way
I won't ever give up
of something that's so strong
Yeah, we made it all this way

Like the moon causes the tide
Give me wings so I can fly
You'll already saved me
I need you to follow

Cause we made it all this way
We made it this far gotta hold on
It's a part of this road and we make it through
I open my eyes and it feels right
I just need to know I'm here with you, oh

So baby hold on
now that we come so far
just listen to your heart

You don't have to save me
just need you to follow
Cause we made it all this way
I won't ever give up
of something that's so strong
Yeah, we made it all this way

Like the moon causes the tide
Give me wings so I can fly
You'll already saved me
Just need you to follow
Cause we made it all this way

Sa, Sa, Sa ,Sa, Sa save the day

You don't have to save me
just need you to follow
Cause we made it all this way

I won't ever give up
of something that's so strong
Yeah, we made it all this way

Like the moon causes the tide
You Give me wings so I can fly
You'll already saved me
Just need you to follow
Cause we made it all this way

Sa, Sa, Sa, Sa, Sa, Save the day

 

[Joe Mahmood]

RACHEL PLATTEN - STAND BY YOU




STAND BY YOU SONG LYRICS

Hands, put your empty hands in mine
And scars, show me all the scars you hide
And hey, if your wings are broken
Please take mine so yours can open too
'Cause I'm gonna stand by you
Oh, tears make kaleidoscopes in your eyes
And hurt, I know you're hurting, but so am I
And love, if your wings are broken
Borrow mine so yours can open too
'Cause I'm gonna stand by you

Even if we're breaking down, we can find a way to break through
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you

Yeah, you're all I never knew I needed
And the heart, sometimes it's unclear why it's beating
And love, if your wings are broken
We can brave through those emotions too
'Cause I'm gonna stand by you
Oh, truth, I guess truth is what you believe in
And faith, I think faith is helping to reason
No, no, no, love, if your wings are broken
Borrow mine so yours can open too
'Cause I'm gonna stand by you

Even if we're breaking down, we can find a way to break through
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you

I'll be your eyes when yours can't shine
I'll be your arms, I'll be your steady satellite
And when you can't rise, well, I'll cry with you on hands and knees
'Cause I
(I'm gonna stand by you)

Even if we're breaking down, we can find a way to break through (come on)
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'm gonna stand by you
Even if we can't find heaven, I'll walk through hell with you
Love, you're not alone, 'cause I'm gonna stand by you
Love, you're not alone
No, I'm gonna stand by you
(Even if we can't find heaven, heaven, heaven)
I'm gonna stand by you

 

[Joe Mahmood]

CALUM SCOTT - YOU ARE THE REASON

https://youtu.be/ShZ978fBl6Y


The “Streetlight Effect”: A Metaphor for Knowledge and Ignorance

POSTED ON MONDAY, MAR 21, 2016 12:50AM BY YOHAN JOHN

by Yohan J. John


There is a story that I think anyone interested in human knowledge ought to know. It comes in many forms. Here is one version, incarnated as a joke: 'A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”'

A parable featuring the Seljuk Sufi mystic Nasrudin Hodja may be the earliest form of the story: 'Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. “What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked. “My key,” said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?” “In my own house.” “Then why are you looking here?” “There is more light here than inside my own house.”' The Indologist Wendy Doniger quotes this parable in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, as a way to prepare the reader for the disappointing realization that the “available light” on Hinduism — the hymns, the histories, the archaeological remains — tends to illuminate the perspectives of dominant groups, relegating to the shadows the viewpoints of women, lower castes, and other marginalized groups.

Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is. Responses to this problem vary. The mystic is most likely trying to remind the listener of how limited human knowledge is, and how often we look for solutions in precisely the wrong places. The humanities professor Doniger uses the problem as a justification for reading between the lines: using the available light to speculate about what may lie in the darkness. And the cognitive scientist Chomsky seems to be using the problem to justify why scientists answer questions that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the questions they originally set out to answer.

I'm a scientist, a history buff, and also a bit of a mystic, so I tend to combine all three perspectives on the “available light” problem, also known as the “streetlight effect“. The mystic (and the teller of jokes) is right to ridicule our tendency to look for something in the wrong place, however well lit that place happens to be. It's absurd to force a problem into some intellectual framework simply because this framework happens to be convenient. But does this mean we should abandon problems that have no good framework? That seems to be what Chomsky is saying. Don't waste your time fumbling in the dark: answer the questions you can answer with the resources you have. The rest is just hand-waving. This hard-nosed approach is popular among a certain sort of scientist and engineer, but it leaves most people quite dissatisfied. 'What's wrong with a bit of hand-waving?', Doniger seems to be asking. In the case of history, we know something must have been going on. Why not use our imaginative faculties to shine light in the dark places?

Combining these three attitudes towards “available light” is easier said than done. Given a particular problem that seems to be lurking on the boundaries between light and dark, do we resign ourselves to wide-eyed wonder? Scorn humanity's hubris? Move into the light? Or try to trace shapes in the dark? I think the key is to know where you are, and also what time it is.

I like to call vision the 'master metaphor'. To understand is to see clearly. And to see we need illumination. Ignorance is darkness. The metaphor of seeing as understanding works very well with other famous metaphors, so I'd like to indulge in a metaphor mash-up. Humans require light to see what they are doing. The hours of daylight are synonymous with work, even though many of us work under artificial lighting. If light is the key to understanding, then sunlight is the Big Idea: the intellectual framework that allows us to see everything. The sunlight lets us delineate object and shadow, true and false, good and bad. Sunlight is what determines what the “true” color of an object is. Sunlight is objectivity. Sunlight is metanarrative. Sunlight is ideology.

Nighttime by contrast, is synonymous with play, mischief, music, fun, and sex. Anything other than work. Under the light of the moon and the stars, the sharp daylit boundaries become blurred. Color is drained from the world. Shades of grey abound. In candlelight, the shadows dance. Nighttime is a time of escape from the strictures of the day. Madness can come when the free-form night invades the structured day. Pink Floyd's Roger Waters conjures this image up in 'Eclipse', the litany that concludes The Dark Side of the Moon:

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
everyone you meet
All that you slight
everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.*

Under the sun, everything is in tune. True and false are clearly separated. At night we allow light and shadow to dance with each other. A perfect metaphor for the play of nighttime is the campfire. We gather around it, hypnotized by the flames. We cook, we eat, we sing songs. Humans are the only creatures who cook their food with fire. Fire is a central metaphor for human illumination. We use it like no other animal does. We beat back the darkness. Seated around a fire, people can see each others' faces and hear their voices. All around them, the darkness looms. And what do people typically do in such situations? Tell stories. What are stories? Shadow-puppetry. Speculations about life and death. Fantasies about what lies on the other side of that hill. Or ocean. Or galaxy. Imagination is the light that can lead us beyond the campfire.

It is tempting to think of our stories and myths as lies we tell ourselves to comfort and entertain. From this serious-minded perspective, the word “truth” should simply not apply to fiction. Truth comes from the non-fiction prose of daylight, and not the poetry of moon, star and fire. Against this boring scientism, the dreamers and poets periodically revolt. “All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'.” A poem can feature “imaginary gardens with real toads in them“. If sunlight is objectivity, metanarrative and ideology, then moonlight is subjectivity, fairy tale, and ritual.

There is an alchemy in the blurring of light and shade that happens at night. The available light of day makes it seem as if the horizons of possibility are fixed. The science of day is Thomas Kuhn's “normal science“: conservative, incremental, firmly anchored in a paradigm. The science of night is Kuhn's revolutionary science: progressive, saltatory, unmoored. It is no surprise that major scientific breakthroughs can happen in dreams. August Kekulé came up with the idea for the benzene ring after he dreamed of an ouroboros — a snake eating its own tail.

A totalitarian worldview is one that considers available light as the only light there is. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that this worldview often leads to nighttime curfews and restrictions on parties.) From this way of thinking we get austere monotheism, boilerplate Marxism, free market fundamentalism, and the various inanities of evolutionary psychology and selfish-gene biology. The opposing worldview isn't really a worldview at all. It wallows in murk and revels in fragmentary vision. It manifests in various forms of obscurantism: self-ironizing humanities-speak, incoherent conspiracy theories, New Age frippery, and superficial religious syncretism. But the two ways of seeing can each serve a purpose. The desire for a single overarching “source of illumination” is what gives us our most intricate “theories of everything”, as well as our conceptions of universal human rights. A suspicion of the Great Light Bulb in the Sky is what informs much art and music, and also countercultural resistance.

In attempting to fold so many ideas into one compound metaphor, I may be somewhat guilty of a totalizing worldview myself. But I can't resist adding more samples to my metaphor mash-up. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a popular essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, the title of which was inspired by a fragment of ancient Greek poetry: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”. According to Berlin, you can divide thinkers into two groups: hedgehogs who view the world through a single lens (such as Plato, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) and foxes who view the world through many lenses (such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin). Berlin's hedgehogs operate in the stark light of a singular idea, whereas his foxes prowl nimbly in the shadows.

Let us now return to the campfire. The mystic is the one singing the songs with quirky lyrics. She tells tall tales about her experiences wandering in the darkness. The historian looks back and forth between darkness and light, trying to imagine what happened during the day. The “normal” scientist relaxes, recharging for the real work, which only happens in daylight. The “revolutionary” scientist dreams up new schemes for how to make the normal scientist's job a little easier.

And this is why it's important to have a sense of place and time. All the people at the campsite need to gather wood for the night's fire, and food to cook. There is a time for blur and dither, and a time for sharp boundaries. The universe has conspired to make it somewhat easy for humans to decide when to do what. During the day, our literal and metaphorical lights are brightest. At night, our lights are more varied and dynamic.

Technology adds a whole new dimension to nighttime. Thanks to the artifice of lightbulbs, we conjure up an imitation of the day at night. Apparently this has real consequences for the quality of our sleep, and therefore for the quality of our waking hours too. Technology gives us the power to let night and day bleed into each other. Perhaps Pink Floyd only capture one half of the modern malaise. Eclipses disrupt the workday, and light pollution distorts the dreamtime. Perhaps this is why the tech brigade (the canaries in the coalmine of modernity) make workplaces that look like amusement parks, while at the same time using numbers to quantify everything from baseball to burritos.

Maybe this era of whimsical work and programmed play is just a transitional phase. “Available light” is always in a state of flux. During the twilight hours the two kinds of light meet each other. It makes sense that these periods are associated with magic. Magic is nothing if not transformation. Humanity may be in a civilizational twilight period, but we can't tell yet if technological magic is leading us towards a bright new day, or towards a psychotic all-night rave.

Let's hope our sources of illumination provide us with enough light to navigate through what is shaping up to be a dark and confusing century.

https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quark...t-a-metaphor-for-knowledge-and-ignorance.html

 

[Joe Mahmood]

OWL CITY - FIREFLIES

 

[Joe Mahmood]

AMY GRANT - I WILL REMEMBER YOU