SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION

     Political and religious revolutions begin with people trying to maintain their own ways of relating to reality by forcing everyone else to change theirs. These sorts of revolutions never work - not with everyone trying to change everyone else's head and no one trying to change their own at all.
     A spiritual revolution, however, is not at all like a political or religious one. A spiritual revolution begins at home, in each of our heads and hearts, with each of us changing our own consciousness so that we may fulfill our true nature and become ever closer to pure God Consciousness.

     However, the religious fundamentalists of all three of the major monotheistic faiths do keep trying. They feel they have to. They don't like the world as it has become. For them, it has become evil. They have come to feel that this modern secular world has gone too far in rejecting God and religion. They definitely disagree with Nietzche. For them, God is not dead. In fact, they have come to feel that they are maintaining the true faiths of the past against the Godless and evil modern secular world.
     They have staged their political or religious revolutions. The Islamic Shiite fundamentalists revolted and took Iran back from the brutal and corrupt, American backed Shah. The Jewish fundamentalists have forever changed the future of Israel, refusing to leave their settlements in the Palestinian lands taken in the Six-Day and the Yom Kippur wars. And in the United States, the fundamentalist evangelical preachers have become a powerful political force and have changed the face of American politics.
     Today, these fundamentalists are at war in much of our world. Our President is one of them - a right wing, Christian fundamentalist - waging his holy crusade against the Muslims; while the Muslim fundamentalists, the ones we Americans call terrorists, are trying to drive the infidels out of their holy lands. And of course, in Israel and Palestine, the Jews and the Muslims are killing each other daily.
     They are bringing the rest of us into it too. This time, it is not a war between nations. It has become a war within nations. Each nation has become two camps - one secular and democratic, one religious and autocratic. There is no common ground. Each camp projects their unconscious shadow upon the other. The secularists, stuck in their rational, left-brained minds, see the fundamentalists as deluded and deranged, while the fundamentalists, stuck in their ancient and unconscious ways of looking at reality, see the secularists as demonic and evil.

     These three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - all began as a result of authentic spiritual experiences that have greatly enriched mankind. However, by the time that science and democracy began to make inroads upon our spiritual beliefs, many of us had already ceased to believe in the literalness of our Torahs, our Bibles, and our Korans. Many of us had already stopped taking them seriously. They no longer seemed relevant to the world in which we found ourselves.
     Many of us became secular humanists. We became enamored with the knowledge and the wisdom inherent in our new science. We watched as it showed us the biological oneness of all life. We watched as it gave us a greater understanding of and more power over our physical reality. We watched as it showed us journeying on our Spaceship Earth upon an almost endless voyage of discovery through the universe. We watched as it showed us our potential to evolve much further spiritually than any of the authors of those old Books had ever envisioned for us.
     Many of us also felt that democracy expressed a spiritually higher and more conscious level of community than did the old autocratic, religious communities. We felt that our laws should be man-made, with everyone having a say, rather than laws based upon ancient, and often self-serving, interpretations of what God may have once said.
     Many of us, like Uncle Karl and his friends, were impatient for more than democracy. Many of us still are. It's never going to work if we don't all open our hearts and share completely. No one should have more or less than another. If we have more than others do, we will be afraid of them, afraid that they will take it from us. If we have less than others, we will be angry at them for not sharing with us. Inequality generates fear and anger, not love. A world based on inequality has never and will never work. We will never become one with our spiritual selves if we allow fear and anger to rule us, if we deny love.

     Although these three major religions have long understood and have tried to fulfill the human need for a communal spiritual life, the more extreme fundamentalists of today have turned their spiritual life into hate-filled collective psychoses. For example, many of the faithful Protestant fundamentalists in this country believe today, from taking their Bible literally, that the end is near. They believe that when the end of days begins, they will be wafted up into the sky in a rapture, where they will get to watch all the rest of us, all of us whom they have long hated for being different, die horrible and lingering deaths below.
     Is this anything like what Christ lived and taught? The extreme Jewish and the Muslim fundamentalists are no better. They are all angry and full of hate. They are all afraid really, afraid to change their heads and grow. It is true that there is a need in humankind for a common spiritual life. However, in spite of what these fundamentalists may think, it is not to be found in any of their one-sided and divisive religions.

     Whenever there is this radical a split in the collective consciousness, the energy generated becomes explosive and very dangerous. Today, there is an immediate need to find a transcendental solution, a way of being that includes both the rational, left-brained consciousness that has led to science and democracy, as well as the consciousness that will lead to a new and collective spiritual way of being. There is a great and immediate need for a spiritual way that will take each and every one of us upon the next great collective adventure.
     The spiritual revolution that began worldwide in the early 60's was a dimly understood but valiant attempt to begin this process of bridging the seemingly impassable abyss between science and Spirit. Many of us who were there in those days felt that we actually were beginning to find a spiritual way that would let all of us here on Planet Earth live in peace and harmony.
     We saw that both the Buddhists and the Taoists had evolved cultures much higher than any generated by the three monotheistic religions. When we examined their way, it became clear that they saw Spirit much differently than the monotheistics. They saw God, not as a being telling us how to be and what to do, but rather as a level of consciousness - called God Consciousness - one that was accessible to each and every one of us. Many of us, following their example, went for it.
     When I'm one with my God-consciousness, I know that science is not evil. It has given us so much. It is in fact a great boon for mankind, our one chance to go into space so that we may continue to exist as a species. We are too vulnerable here on this rock. We need to spread ourselves throughout the solar system. We also need to figure out how to travel faster than light so that we can really go looking around.
     The trouble isn't with science, not at all. It really isn't with religion either. Science and Religion are just two tools that awareness uses to further its ends. The trouble is rather with the quality of our awareness, especially our general lack of any at the collective level.

     A spiritual revolution begins with the desire and the intention to become more conscious - to become a more whole and less repressed being. Back when many of us rejected our religious consciousness and its way of being in the world for this modern world that our collective, rational mind has created for us, we actually rejected half of our very being. In order to become rational, left-brained beings, we became blind to the mythical, the magical, and the spiritual sides of ourselves. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, rejected half of their very being too, when they refused to leave the safe harbor of their faiths based upon ancient ways and follow the rest of us into the future.
     We all need to reclaim these lost territories. We all need to open ourselves to the truth of our repressed selves. To become whole and at peace with ourselves and with one another, we need to allow these repressed selves back into our lives. To do this, we have to trust ourselves. We have to trust that we can find our own way to God Consciousness and a spiritual life. More importantly, we have to trust that everyone else can do this too.
     I had a dream once. In the first part, I was watching a Holy Man receive his followers, one at a time for a short blessing. It was all very formal and ceremonial. It had a strong Tibetan Buddhist flavor. Then the scene changed, and I was in a kitchen, sitting at a big round table with others. We were all working on our heads, sometimes sharing ourselves, sometimes not. Some of us were meditating. I would get up every once in awhile to knead or punch down or shape into loaves the dough in my daddy bread-making ceremony. Then a voice told me that I was a kitchen table holy man. I liked that a lot better than the Holy Man act.
     A year later, after having this dream, I read an interview with Sister Virginia Barta, a then seventy-three year old, retired Franciscan Nun who lived in Dragoon, a little town outside of Tucson, Arizona. In the interview, Sister Virginia said that, although she was retired, she still had "a ministry." She called it "a ministry of presence." She went on to add, "many people from all over the country and Europe come for what I call kitchen table holy talk. When I'm not meditating, I may be cooking or just sitting at the table talking. Ultimately we get to the main questions of life." (From The Odyssey, A Journal of Inner Exploration, Summer, 1998.)
     If we all become kitchen table holy people, if we all focused upon raising our own consciousness and sharing with others, we would no longer need therapists, ministers, priests, spiritual teachers, or holy people. Not that we ever did. And, because we would all be focused upon this great and challenging endeavor, we would create together a feeling of unity, of spiritual community amongst us. We would create our new spiritual way, one that would be open to everyone, one that would be closed to no one. One of my heroes, Stephan Gaskin, once said that there was really only one spiritual community for all of us anyway, and its only membership requirement was a belly button.
     Having already traveled a ways down this new, kitchen table spiritual way that's coming, I can report that, once we have all started down this new way together, we'll all become telepathic with one another. As another of my heroes, Spider Robinson, tells us, the way to telepathy begins with being completely open with our heads and hearts, while caring for and trusting each other completely. Once we see how good it is to share ourselves in a loving way, we won't want to hide out inside our separate heads anymore.
     We won't change that much externally along the way either. We will still work and play and make music and babies together. But not too far along the way, although we will still remain the same ordinary folks we've always been, we will become much more conscious and very kind and generous and loving. See you all there.