What is the most important information I learned in my years of reading?

Thursday afternoon, during a physical therapy session for some aches and pains, the therapist asked what I did during the day. Being introverted, I responded with a short answer: “Read”. “Read what?” he asked. Slightly longer response: “Oh, about spirituality, religion, consciousness.” Probing further: “How long have you been reading about those subjects?” Answer: “Thirty-plus years.” Further: “What’s the most important information you learned?”

Lying on a table, consciously breathing in and out while doing exercises, wasn’t the best time to contemplate the most important information I had learned in thirty years of reading and taking notes. I rambled something about The Tibetan Book of the Dead and what a Hindu woman had told Morgan Freeman in a video titled The Story of God. In essence she said she viewed truth as the trunk of a tree and all the different religions as branches.

Driving home I wondered how I would have answered the question had I been asked when I wasn’t doing physical therapy and the purpose hadn’t been to distract me from the exercises.

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong

“The Spiral Staircase” is an autobiographical account of Karen Armstrong’s journey from seven years in a convent, to her adjustment to the outside world, to her becoming a bestselling author beginning with the book “A History of God.”

At age seventeen Armstrong entered a convent where she hoped to find religious ecstasy, transcendence and God. Instead, in her words, she found the following:

“Now it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life and death, and that instead of being transfigured, as I had hoped, I had got the worst of all worlds. Instead of being full of courage, fearless, active, and protective of others, like the initiate of a tribal rite of passage, I was scared stiff. Unable to love or to accept love, I had become less than human. I had wanted to be transformed and enriched; instead I was diminished. Instead of becoming strong, I was simply hard. The coldness and frequent unkindness, designed to toughen us up, had left me feeling merely impaired, like a piece of tough steak. The training was designed to make us transcend ourselves, and go beyond the egotism and selfishness that hold us back from God. But now I seemed stuck inside myself, unable either to escape or to reach out to others. An initiation prepares you for life in the community; I had left the community that I was supposed to serve and was inhabiting a world that I had been trained, at a profound level, to reject.”

After leaving the convent she immersed herself in scholarly work and eventually taught in a private girls’ school. She writes, “If traditional religious disciplines had failed to enlighten me, perhaps I would find in literature what had eluded me in the convent chapel. And this raised all kinds of questions about the nature of religion. If an unbeliever could experience the same kind of ecstasy as a Christian mystic, it seemed that transcendence was just something that human beings experienced and that there was nothing supernatural about it.”

Pondering Oneness, Religion and the Golden Rule

My reading has taken an interesting turn recently. I read Walter Russell’s two volume set “The Meaning of the Divine Iliad”. Following that I read Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov’s book “Angels and other Mysteries of Life”. Beside me, partially read, are Grete Hausler’s book “Here is the Truth about Bruno Groning” and Brian Hodgkinson’s “The Essence of Vedanta”.

I keep asking myself, What is it? What is at the Heart of religions? What is missing? Why isn’t humanity able to understand the fundamental aspect of all religions—the belief that we are all one as expressed in the Golden Rule in one form or another whether it’s Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

It’s so clearly stated in the Vedanta. There is only the Self. Advaita Vedanta states that “everything, conscious or otherwise, is regarded as one. All is one.”

Mahayana Buddhism “considers all physical forms to be void of intrinsic self (a teaching called shunyata, which means “emptiness”). The ideal in Mahayana is to enable all beings to be enlightened together, not only out of a sense of compassion, but because we are not really separate, autonomous beings.”

The website Chabad.org writes about Judaism: “We are not a religion. We are a soul. A single soul radiating into many bodies, each ray shining forth on its unique mission, each body receiving the light according to its capacity, each embodiment playing its crucial role. Together we compose a symphony with no redundant parts, no instrument more vital than another. And our path back towards that original source of light is through every other ray that extends from it.”

In Matthew 22:35-40 it is written that Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And Abu Dawud writes about Islam, “Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you; and reject for others what you would reject for yourselves.”

It all seems rather basic to me and yet with millions and millions of followers of these religions, humanity continues to harm itself. Krishnamurti asks, “Can Humanity Change?” and Jacob Needleman writes, “Why Can’t We Be Good?” Maybe it all comes down to the concept of transformation. There are levels of being from magical to mystical to rational to transformational. Eventually humanity may reach a level where love overcomes hate.

The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart by Joseph Chilton Pearce

For a period of four years my wife and I lived in Virginia. Joseph Chilton Pearce was our neighbor, and I had the rare privilege of sitting in his living room and listening to his wisdom. There are quotations in his books “Bond of Power” and “Evolution’s End” that have stayed with me for years and I will post them in a future entry. I also had the opportunity of reading “The Biology of Transcendence” in manuscript form, and Joe actually included me in his acknowledgments: a gesture which I treasure. Below is a quotation from “The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit.

P 8 Both our current religions, scientific and ecclesiastic, may well be offended at my contention here that they are destructive to life and civilization, that they are not nurturing but are, in fact, devolutionary. Yet recognition of this devolutionary effect is necessary if we are to clear the decks and open ourselves again to the evolutionary force of love and altruism that seems to lie behind our life and cosmos.