Ok, it didn’t take long to figure this one out — why my page (and others) appear to have gone whacky. If you are looking at this site and find that the blog is “exploded” with items in wrong places or if you scroll down the right hand column and see RELATED ARTICLES with noting below it, BUT you see a number of related pages at the bottom of the page, you’re using Internet Exploder Explorer.

Rather than conform to standards common on the Net, Microsoft (and I know this is tough to imagine) has been changing their browser in hopes of nudging the coding market their way. It isn’t working. I looked at my various sites through Firefox, which I love, and even the new Google Chrome, which I like a lot except the opening page design but is jaw dropping in its speed. The results? In everything except IE, the sites look perfectly wonderful.

I know IE ships with Windows which is why it has a huge audience share, although on my own site it’s a distant 2nd at best. I know we all have a comfort zone on our computer, but I really would encourage you to try Firefox or, if you want another type of view, Google Chrome. I’d suggest Firefox because, frankly, I’m not so sure what’s behind Google sometimes in terms of privacy, but I base that on a few of the features and some of their other actions and could be mildly incorrect.

Anyway, be brave. Try Firefox and browse more quickly and safely. It’s a snap to install. Even for me.

Blessings,

Brian

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Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543 just before he died, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution. His heliocentric model, with the sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of modern science that is now often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.

Wikipedia

What I would like to suggest is that it is time, in Christianity, for a kind of Copernican Revolution that, curiously enough, brings us closer to the spirituality of Jesus.

We live in a world of competing religious ideas or, perhaps put more at the heart of it, apparently differing views. I would say that they are perhaps different like the same sentence spoken in French, English, Japanese and any of the other languages. They are speaking of something with words that are filtered through cultural bias and slant. What is at the base of many of these religious approaches? That is the question we must ask and answer truthfully and directly.

We cannot expect God in any real way to favor a particular religion and a specific place and time, as religion by and large tends to be geographical when you look at the numbers of devotees or followers. It makes no sense, as the later Christians said, that tens of millions born before Jesus plus those who have never heard his name, much less adding in those who otherwise did not profess their identity as a Christian, were going to spend eternity in Hell.

How do we deal with the fact that God speaks differing languages to others? As an example of the vast compassion and love of God who, thankfully, is not bound by our own prejudices, limitations, love of being exclusive, and more.

However, there is one additional factor, one that is what the metaphor fora Copernican Revolution calls for and one alluded to in my opening line.

A true revolution, the kind that Jesus termed the Kingdom of Heaven which was both within and around us if we had but eyes to see and hears to hear, flies in the face of established Christian thought as it veered away from Jesus’ spirit and teaching.  Jesus has been the center of things in the Church and in Christianity, when, in reality (or Reality) just as the earth was supplanted by the sun as the center of the Universe (from our point of view, of course), at the center of our universe must be God, not the dogmatic attempt to tie Jesus in and make him a kind of disguise for God, a notion he protested with his very soul .   “Why do you call me good? There is none good but the Father?” among other comments and actions.

How would Christianity be if God was at the center of your Universe? How would you feel about others, perhaps a Vedantist/Hindu, who also has God (as he or she can feel and know) in the center of his life as all else moves around it in celestial orbit? Would you see a different language of God and a follower of that to be akin to you, a fellow seeker whose journey is to be encouraged and supported, not denigrated and belittled as less than your own “right” way?

Since I was a child, meaning as early on as I can remember, my prayers were straight to God, my sense of Presence that appeared in my later years was felt to be that as opposed to a Jesus or a Buddha or a Krishna. I also, later, found myself awed not by God favoring my team, as it were, (white, United States of America, my particular Church), but, rather, the startling universal compassion  which Jesus spoke of constantly and said was right here and right now available to us.

So, perhaps it is not time. Perhaps it does not speak to you.  All that is fine.  But for myself, anyway, the power of a Christian’s Copernican Revolution is Jesus’ desired revolution in the vision and Presence in this world.

May you find Peace,
Brian

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What Pluck does is to read a blog and pull from it keywords. It then goes to search in some 4,000,000 articles from such sources as great blog writers (who have to be approved and show their skill), encyclopedias, videos and more and pulls back to me the most interesting articles that usually (very usually!) might be of interest to you as a visitor. Some will be factual, some opinion just as some will be ones you agree with and some you may disagree with. All are worth discovering and investigating and they change, bringing in new information and ponderings. Keep in mind that if you come across an article that criticizes or challenges the way you think, meet it with gratitude. Having to think about our beliefs and experience makes us clarify our thinking and moves us along the path, even though we may disagree with the article!

Does it work well? When I set it up and got things working, the articles it pulled up included things on Christian meditation, meditation breathing techniques, angels, early Christianity and even encyclopedia entries on certain mystics and on terms.

I hope you find it be of interest! It’ll be growing to include comments and, I hope, a more enhanced sense of community amongst visitors to this and other sites with similar topics.

Blessing,

Brian

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One other problem that lies within Christianity is something I’ve mentioned before — the change of the spirituality OF Jesus to the spirituality ABOUT Jesus. In that radical shift, one has to glean from the various sources what are closest to the words of Jesus and to the remarkable character of Jesus that peers out at us, often from behind constructs designed to support the Church’s existence and power, not to support and enhance the individual’s movement toward recognizing and celebrating the immediate Presence of the Kingdom of Heaven both within us and in this world right now.

The latter is what Jesus taught — not the importance of a religion which, according to some of his harshest words, are like sepulchers — well tended on the outside but, inside, full of dead mens bones. One of the groups identifiable in the New Testament story responsible for Jesus’ death was the religious right of it’s time, those who insisted on clinging to the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. Those who would set up lofty goals by which people were to be judged as  religious or not and those who identified such goals as future-oriented, to be found in the created image of Jesus that awarded the growing orthodox Church absolute power in such things as penance, morals, and the right to kill or tortureor damn  those who did not toe the line. Frequently those were the ones — often identified as mystics such as Meister Eckhart and the list goes on and on — to whom each one of us is grateful for preserving as best she or he could the inner message of Jesus beneath the self-serving self-perpetuating veneer given to Christianity by its leaders.

The discovery in 1945 of the Gospel of Thomas intact (although at first it was misrepresented at a heretical gnostic gospel, which it plainly isn’t) took us back as if in a time machine to a period which I had grown up believing showed the unified block of believers with a lunatic fringe trying to take the train off the tracks. Instead, we had a wide range of communities dedicated to Jesus’ teachings and the interpretations. Today, the lunatic fringe is driving the train of their own design.

What you know to be true — what you feel in your heart that resonates with Jesus’ words when they are not being forced into his mouth to justify the cornerstone of this or that particular community — as in Peter in some traditions and James (the brother of Jesus) in another and Paul in a third — you are drawing close to Jesus’s heart of compassion as well as passion, of vision as well as insight, of encouragement instead of damnation.

All of the last three may very well be nothing except the briefest of summaries of what I’ve learned in over 55 years of living, of reading, of questioning, of experiencing and, even if they are “true” at best I can say that I believe they are true for me and that I am still growing, still deepening my searches. I think it doesn’t matter to God in the long run which branch of Christianity or which other Tribal identity you have when it comes to Religion. What matters is that the church, just like each one of us, should be there to encourage and to facilitate and to bless those who pass by on the path toward God, giving a temporary respite if needed and an embrace, words of support and joy at a prodigal son or daughter that one has had the pleasure, the uplifting and sweet pleasure, of knowing along the way.

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These two things are related and if you keep them in mind as a kind of compass to get your bearings you’ll go a long way toward unraveling the problems I’ve alluded to.

First, much of Christianity is based on people’s perceptions of the Universe as held at the time of Christianity’s formative years. Without going into too much detail, the situation is this — much of what followed in Christian Theology assumed the world was a Mechanistic Universe — a machine. God sat at the controls because, well, He build the machine. If one pressed these buttons — the right belief, the correct creed, the winning view of Jesus — then after a great deal of grinding and whirring, out would come the ticket to Heaven.  As an aside, most of this took place in a kind of three-tiered universe that consisted of Heaven above, Hell below, and this veil of tears stuck in the middle.

But the Universe was not universally thought of as being something that could be delivered from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. The idea that you had to buy into the concept of the Universe as a Machine also limited God to a certain time and place with God’s role being the foreman of the plant. Such a view was, to put it mildly a rather peculiar bent in the greater Eastern world.

The Universe, said others with a bit more experience in such things, is not mechanical but, rather, organic. The Universe is alive and intertwining, not dead and segmented, and that which is alive is the very Consciousness I spoke of in my last blog entry. By that I mean that God is a living process — verb, not noun — but I do not mean to even suggest that it is an impersonal process as in a machine, for that takes us back to the mechanistic view of things. Ultimate Consciousness is a process at the depths of which we can find the qualities associated with God — Compassion, Love, Intelligence and Divine Presence.

Think about it — unlike the passionate history of mystics both in and out of Christianity, nobody commits their love, their adoration and their fascination t0 a mere machine. There are relatively few hymns written to a machine or an impersonal, cold and orderly process. Throughout history and culture, participation in the process of Consciousness, however, is something altogether different. That is because our hearts are made to vibrate at the same frequency, as it were, with God, and in those moments of being struck by the absolute beauty of a sunset, the Presence of God in early morning hours before the world’s layer of activity and distraction are piled on, the look of your loved one, the glance at a child’s play and countless other opportunities that you yourself recognize as being “in the flow” or having direct access to the spiritual touchstone for your soul.

But, again, when one looks at Christianity’s history (and much of it as an organized religion is not pretty) ask yourself — is this seeing God as mechanistic or organic? What implications does it have to see it one or the other? Which one matches your own experiences?

At the beginning, I said there were two things, mechanistic vs. organic being the first.  I’ll get to the other in my next entry as I wasn’t expecting to prattle on this long!

Blessings,

Brian

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