Listening to Jesus Christ Superstar this morning. The Broadway Show album, versus the movie version that I’m more familiar with. Must say it was cool to hear Ian Gillian singing Jesus. Though for the most part I still enjoy the movie version the best.
There’s this one section when Judas is singing, after Jesus is captured and he calls out to God “you knew all along/ why’d you let me do it?” And in that moment I stopped and had this thought that stuck with me…
For all of our intellectual acrobatics about the existence (or not) or God or the nature of God etc…, in the end, when it counts, our “mind” (for lack of a better/easier word) just goes there. To this “something bigger exists”. Call it what you will. Everyone has a slightly different name for it.
But near our perceived death, or when in perceived danger, our thoughts go to this big idea of some larger than life divine consciousness. Or perhaps for some it’s more of a larger than life mass consciousness or super-consciousness. I’m sure the feeling of the idea is different for everyone.
But the point being, in that moment, the simple conclusion was “well there it is… After all our planning and claiming and asserting or denying, after all our pondering and contemplating, postulating and proposing, I bet a lot of people still end up right back at the same place they were in their youth, with this idea being foremost in their mind of the existence of this divine super power.
Then… you know, if that’s the case, then why bother with all the wondering doubting or denying? Why not just accept that that implant/engram/idea/program is there? It’s RIGHT there. Look for it. See it? It’s undeniably present at the very least in (what some might call) most people’s subconscious if not right in their present consciousness. (Some might say for them personally it’s “just below consciousness”…). Still there. Just not present all the time. But still there.
For me personally it just provided a freedom to stop playing with the idea of ITS existence so much and just ease into acceptance more often. Like easing into a hot but soothing healing bath.
Now yes, I admit that the next immediate thought was “okay sure that’s THERE for most of us, but that does NOT imply nor equate to the existence of THAT thing in any way. It just means we were programmed or indoctrinated to believe that from a very early age. Hard indoctrination. Not easy to overcome.”
(We could discuss this aspect of the subject a lot more of course. It’s deep. Like have you ever met anyone who was simply just not raised that way? Like they just were not raised to believe in any type of divinity or super-divine sentience at all in their childhood…? It’s really almost a supernatural kind of an experience right? Because it has the ability to create a sincere lack of shared reference points… Which of course can lead to a lack of understanding of viewpoints that another totally takes for granted as being undeniably “true”. But let’s keep moving…)
Then i watched “the mind” go to “you know, I bet very soon we will discover the neurological causes of this…. the mind (of almost everyone…) automatically going to the Divine in certain situations, like death or near death or close to death or in times or real struggle or intense elation. We probably just experience endorphins and/or neurotransmitters releasing more which trigger access to unchartered regions of the brain. High probability of being the case.
So…. What does that mean? Or at least imply?
Well for one thing, for me, after a few seconds it led to this: One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to believe that once we discover how something works “scientifically” –that once we discover that a once-past “something” considered so astounding or impossible seeming that it’s called “supernatural” now has a potential scientific explanation, that it somehow negates it’s potentiality as being something true or “real”.
Not enough time now to dig deeper. And I don’t want to leave you hanging. But you get it. If we ever discover the neurological correlations or causes of what we now label “prayer” or “talking to god” or “hearing the voice of God” or feeling “taken care of” or protected or “saved by God”, or even near death experiences…, this won’t negate the reality that it’s still happening. It’s real. We just now know some of the neurological mechanisms of the phenomenon. See?
Real quick, another great example is how for centuries we believed light to be composed of waves, as in “not material”. Then after tens of thousands of laboratory experiments later, scientists began seeing light “miraculously” turn into particles all of a sudden — as in “light” as we know it was no longer limited to JUST being composed of waves, and furthermore, “light” could then be said to be “matter”. Minds blown. Though no one knew how this was happening nor why. To make the matter even more stupifying (and one might say seemingly-supernatural) light seemed to be able to transform itself from waves into particles any time it wanted to, and then back again, with no necessary rhyme or reason. Scientists were and still are stymied by several aspects of this phenomenon. Through the years we have gathered more and more data about this strange anomaly in our understanding of the laws of physics. But we’re still 100% clear about how it works or what the larger implications might be to the world of modern physics. Though we have collected a lot of data and understand much more about the mechanism of this strange unexpected oddity. Even with all the data collected, even if we one day discover everything there is to know about it — how it works or why it does it at all, these scientific explanations will never dull the phenomenally crazy and exciting feelings we have about it. It is one of the most mind-blowing anomalies of modern physics, has broad, far-reaching implications in regards to how the universe might work, and is just generally uber cool. The science behind it, if anything, just helps us understand it a bit better. But the process itself, as impossible and contradictory as it is, still happens.
In the bigger picture, the larger point being, just because WE eventually discover (or some might say “create”) our own scientific explanation for some phenomenon does not make it any less astounding, NOR any less real.
More later of course. Bye for now.
– Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone
