Reflowering the Western Spiritual Paradigm

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, the Crucifixion being the arrow of violence,

suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life re-emerging in Revelation.
Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. Apocalypse is the [bridal] unveiling reunion.

Since the Renaissance, Western cultures have seen themselves as the central crucible of cultural liberation, scientific discovery, democratic emancipation and social progress. However, underlying the world view of much of Western culture is a Christian notion of an ordered universe manufactured by a fatherly creator God, in which worldly affairs are but a foretaste of an afterlife in heaven or hell, which despite the advances of modern science into every dimension of reality from the origin of the universe to the human genome, is still believed in by a significant proportion of people.

Either this is frankly a collective delusion, or it has some genuine basis in the unfolding nature of existential reality. There are of course potential evolutionary and biological explanations. Propensity for religious experience could be a serendipitous consequence of the close proximity between the amygdala and temporal lobes - parts of the brain evoking ecstatic emotional fulfillment and intense semantic significance. Conservative religion could also be a quirk of evolution of the brain to make us susceptible to beliefs which facilitate larger more dominant social groupings, through envisaging a moral deity looking over our affairs, which serves to reduce intra-social strife in favour of ascendance over other societies, something which is clearly evident in both Christian and Islamic history and cultural attitudes.

Our spiritual and religious roots underpinning this world view, contradict its Renaissance ideals in many ways. The Christian tradition, far from being the basis of democracy, or scientific discovery, sought throughout the dark ages to impose an often corrupt totalitarian conservatism on its population, through internal crusade, witch hunts and inquisition, even denying its followers access to the very religious texts it claimed were the divine word of God, such as the Bible itself. Christianity is not originally Western either, but comes from a mixing of cultural ideas stemming from more ancient cultures strewn across the Middle East, fused with some lingering beliefs dating back to old Europe. It entered the Western institutional mainstream only when Constantine converted to the Christian faith after blood-curdling and obsessive episodes of martyrdom under emperors such as Nero.

Nevertheless the Western cultural tradition holds on to a notion of enlightenment based on Christian notions of brotherly love, turning the other cheek, forgiveness of sin, charitable kindness to others and a belief that our actions in the world have a moral and spiritual dimension, in which they will eventually be held to account in the life hereafter. This despite the fact that its priesthood frequently hasn't adhered to these principles and Christian societies have frequently engaged in genocidal war and ruthless conquest of other cultures.

If we hold up a mirror akin to that of scientific discovery to the Western religious tradition, many of the central tenets of Christianity look to be contrived beliefs concocted by early church fathers to craft a neo-pagan religion in frank denial of its roots based on cobbling together early orthodox Christian teachings with existing popular 'pagan' beliefs turning Jesus from a Jewish prophet into a born-again only begotten Son of God and Mary from an incidental player into a replacement for Isis and Diana.

Many of the central beliefs look to be fantastic fantasies with no basis in natural reality, or social history. The Trinity of Father, Son and a gender-exorcised Holy Ghost is a polytheistic contrivance alien to the formless abstract Jewish God. The ideas of the physical resurrection and virgin birth are biologically ridiculous fantasies reflecting an attempt to weld early Jewish Christian practices with the popular cults of Isis, Mithra and other deities, from Diana to Adonis. Neither Christmas nor Easter are genuine dates because the former was chosen to coincide with the solstice festival of Mithra and the latter with the fertility festival of Ostaria or Ēostre, a kind of European Ishtar, for which the Easter egg still stands in memory of.

The idea of a 'loving' yet vengeful father God, who is prepared to sacrifice his 'only begotten son', so that our sins would be forgiven if we believe in him looks like a throwback to neolithic thinking. The Eucharist celebrating the gruesome sacrifice of eating his flesh and drinking his blood - the central soma and sangre of Christian communion - is likewise a cannibalistic rite disconnected from Jewish tradition. Is this neolithic sacrificial principle that "without shedding of blood there is no remission from sin" any part of a genuine creator deity's modus operandi, or is it a dark carry over from customs of human sacrifice? Isn't the sacrificial principle that Jesus has to die to save us from our sins something from the dark days of older jealous tribal totem deities and those seeking to placate natural fertility, where sacrifice is deemed to renew the harvest by returning blood and bone to the fields?

There are deep confusions here about what the nature of a creator God would be. Why would a God which created the whole universe and all of nature in the magical diversity we now know it to be then set up a narrow moral human paradigm and a system of diabolical punishment in the afterlife? We know from nature that all niches, from plant to animals which consume them, from herbivores to carnivores which devour them, and from hosts to diseases which parasitize and sometimes kill them, is an integral part of the climax diversity of life. Life thus transcends morality. Moral systems have meaning only in so far as they emerge as a natural part of social evolution of a species to permit social integration. Therefore any God which created life as we know it would defeat his own purpose by ending it all in a simplistic day of judgment over human moral issues.

There are also deep confusions about the nature of the heroic messiah, with Jesus becoming the only begotten Son of God, who then drips blood endlessly on every crucifix and every church statue, despite the fact that it is 2000 years since it was claimed he would return in power in the same generation as those standing before him.

How do we rationalize whether there is actually a core of genuine understanding in this tradition and separate the wheat of some genuine knowledge of our inner life and destiny, from closely held, but completely fallacious religious notions, which hold us back from discovering what conscious life is all about?

Jesus occupies a central place in Western belief, yet his life and sayings are somewhat contradictory, between apparently genuine source gnostic sayings such as those of the Gospel of Thomas "I am not your master but you have drunk from the bubbling stream I have measured out", to the synoptics, which have been later overlaid by the mythical narratives of the authors, claiming Peter acknowledging Jesus is the chosen messiah and ornamenting the history with manifestly fabled accounts, including the Bethlehem birth narrative.

None of this goes anywhere towards notions like the only begotten Son of God, assumption into heaven or bodily resurrection. Nor did Mary have a significant role in Jesus' mission, except perhaps at the beginning in Cana. Later Jesus was to ignore his mother and brothers when they sought him and in John his brother derided him, although later James and desposyni, or blood family of Jesus became the first Jewish Christian following. Mary in a patriarchal moral twist was only later elevated to semi-divine status by the Pauline church fathers to overturn Magdalen's sexually questionable position as Jesus' emissary and complicit partner - in his own words "everywhere my name is mentioned they shall also speak of you".

Jesus' mission also launched him into an ambiguous position, encompassing both the firebrand apocalyptic desert Nabi of John the Baptist and even Zealot viewpoints regarding the establishment, to indulgent fertility worship, from his anointing by a woman, through his mission being supported by the women 'out of their very substance', to the women of Galilee coming down to see him off, and the motifs of the true vine, the winebibber and turning water into wine, all of which echo Dionysian rites, as does his advent on the epiphany and the nature miracles, such as calming the storm and walking on water. This is why the Jewish mainstream see Jesus as a false messiah and why he is referred to as such in the Talmud.

Although some of these pagan notions may be later synoptic ornamentations, it is consistent with Jesus attempting to make a very innovative messianic cross-cultural synthesis of the prevailing beliefs in Israel and neighbouring Nabatea, which was at its cultural peak at the time, and goes a good distance to explaining why Christianity became so popular in the pagan world, although this was also partly a redrafting by people from Paul on, in terms of a miraculous semi-god in the traditions of Adonis, Ba'al, Dionysus, Melcarth and Mithra.

The traditional notion of the Jewish messiah is not a man-god but a human hero that brings about an epoch of long-term future goodness, associated with David, Solomon and Cyrus the Mede, who assisted the Jewish return, and later in such human figures as the rebel warlord Bar Cochba a century after Jesus and the apostate Shabbati Zevi in the middle ages. Traditionally a mashiach is 'anointed' by a high priest rather than a woman of dubious virtue. The Christian idea of an only begotten messianic Son of God is a complete breakaway from this tradition into fertility worship heroes.

Looking deeper into this situation, one can ask in terms of the cultural stream of consciousness and wider religious traditions, are there underlying patterns or archetypes, in the sense of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, which have driven the advent of not only Christianity but other heroic religious movements, and are these a valid expression of subterranean currents in evolving human life and consciousness?

Central to many aspects of Jesus' mission was the idea of apocalypse - that world history was hurtling towards a tumultuous falling-out, ending in an ultimate clash between good and evil in which the day of judgment would come about. Originally Satan had been merely a kind of tester and the after life in old Hebrew ideas was just the underworld, or Sheol. However, Zoroastrian notions of cosmic renovation by trial of fire in the conflict between the light of Ahura Mazda and the ignorance of Angra Mainyu became the model for later Jewish notions of the day of judgment and the division between those going to heaven and those purged in the fires of hell. Jewish prophets by the time of Zechariah had adopted this apocalyptic view in various forms, also shared by the Essenes and other desert ascetics.

It is this view of tumultuous apocalypse in a free fall to an Armageddon-like day of judgment, an unveiling in which all the covers will be thrown off reality, that haunts us down through history to this very day.

At the opposite end of the Biblical epoch we have two very quaint, absorbing mythical origin stories, the 'Elohistic sabbatical creation and the Yahwistic Eden story, between them giving us complementary views of our mythical beginnings in Genesis, in what may have originally been separate and conflicting Northern Israelite and Southern Judaic accounts.

Genesis forms a counterpoint to apocalypse. The Bible is a bow, suspended between Fall from Eden and the Tree of Life we see reemerging in Revelation and such works as the Book of Enoch. Both ends of the bow are verdant - immortality in paradise. At the centre is the Crucifixion, the arrow of violence, the war of dark and light. The apocalypse is, in its own word, the [bridal] unveiling.

The sabbatical creation is a very beautiful iconic account, but it has manifest contradictions which could come about only in a flat earth view, in which the sun, moon and stars are little more than earthly features on the firmament above. The plants get created, not only before the animals, which are made in steps from sea creatures to land, but also before the sun, moon and stars, clearly an astronomically impossible and naive earth-centric viewpoint. Nevertheless it is this charming brief mythical account which creationists and intelligent design proponents are prepared to place against all the predisposing evidence of nature, genetics and evolution showing a dangerous and slavish literary idolatry to the text, turning it from a charming mythical allegory into a fundamentalist confrontation with nature.

This situation deserves a moment's thought. Evolution is not just an alternative hypothesis to creation. The notion of creation is a two page mythical opening account written around 500 BC that was never intended to be a literal scientific description. The growth of scientific knowledge has taken place despite relentless opposition from the church from Galileo on down, one of whose turning points was the discovery of the ovum, which meant that children were not just the seed of men planted in their mother's wombs, rendering Jesus' virgin birth genetically impossible.

Each step of discovery of the natural universe has come through overthrowing preconceived notions by diligent searching to find patterns that completely transcend naive ideas, from the quantum theories of the forces of nature and the cosmological evolution of the universe, to the intricate mechanisms of molecular biology. Evolution has been confirmed in action in diverse phenomena, from disease resistance to cancer. Its imprint is clear in all the genetic evidence that has emerged from molecular sequencing including the human genome project and its offshoots. We now understand the evolutionary tree of life in intricate genetic detail, yet Christian advocates are still relentlessly trying to subvert the educational system, by demanding that creationist and intelligent design ideas be taught alongside evolution. Not only does this violate scientific integrity, but it runs against the command not to make graven images of Genesis 1.

Moreover, there is nothing we can find in the miasma of cosmological phenomena we now know the universe to contain, which in any way suggests it was externally created by a separate personality, or deity. The very idea of creation is a human concept to do with manufacture and the most elegant complex system in the universe, the human brain, is self-generated interactively in embryogenesis in a way which it is impossible to 'create' by external manufacture. Thus the jealous, father god looks increasingly like an outmoded cosmological concept, neither necessary, nor sufficient to explain the material universe, nor our subjective consciousness within it. Moreover it is a sexually imbalanced notion, possessing the all-to-human attributes of personality, sexual jealousy, vengefulness and forgiveness but only in masculine form, when the diversity of life is founded on female and male sexes interacting in complementation together.

The Eden account has a different resonance, declaring many of the jealous and vengeful aspects of Yahweh right at the outset and portraying the whole of human history as a fall from the grace of paradise in what is also a sexual falling out between woman and man, in which patriarchal obedience of wives to husbands, amid sexual undertones, through Eve's seduction of Adam, via the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil at the behest of the serpent, causing mortality, the travail and pain of childbirth, and living dust to dust by the sweat of the brow, cast out of the gates of paradise by a flaming sword.

This theme of falling out has deep cultural resonances, running right back to the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 BC and the transition to patriarchal culture we also see in Genesis in the transition from the ways of Laban to those of Jacob. It is a theme which one could easily understand in terms of a recurring creation myth retelling our falling out from integration with nature, as gatherer-hunters, to form patriarchal civilizations, amid the tumult of war and rumours of war. In a more general sense, it is an account of the human stream of consciousness, of future shock under rapid cultural change, heading inexorably towards a tumultuous and uncertain denouement.

There is another deep theme in the Fall from Eden towards apocalypse and that is in the discovery process of consciousness itself and the idea that all the covers will be thrown off reality, rather than through a naive innocent view of paradise, nor through a glass darkly in the intervening period, but in the end, face to face with reality, we will discover what existence is all about, very much as the explosion of the scientific world view has brought about in the last few centuries.

However apocalypse also comes with dire warnings of tumult of the war of civilization and belief system against civilization and belief system and of the Earth being shaken into a state of genocidal triage in the process, in which a third of all living things expire.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe they can shake off the entire natural order in a mythical rapture, in which the elect all float up into the heavens and reunite with God casting away the entire beauty and complexity of the natural realm as little more than a husk or mere detritus of a flawed realm, despite the fact that we now know the 'heavens' are the astronomical vacuum of outer space lethal to planetary life and not a simple firmament of God in which winged angels can fly effortlessly between the clouds. This brings out the worst in Christian fundamentalism taking no responsibility for caring for this 'transient' world or how far it is abused in the dominion of man over nature, while looking to a potential armageddon of 'the late planet Earth' in bringing about the advent of the kingdom of God.

Islam like Christianity has just such a distorted fantasy life. The prophet, despite his own remonstrations about Jesus' and Mary's deification, has become effectively deified as the 'last prophet' so that Bahai's, Ahmadis and others are persecuted and killed for believing in a more recent prophetic figure and others are summarily killed even for merely depicting the prophet's face. Yet Muslims also look to a final victory of Islam in the day of judgment and some would hasten to bring it on by military and political strategies. Shi'ites believe the Mahdi, a Muslim messianic figure of the second coming will appear and teach Jesus, while some Sunnis demur that there is no Mahdi but Jesus, confirming the continuity of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

While the Christian heaven is populated with sexless angelic winged beings, the Muslim paradise is crafted exclusively for the sexual pleasure of men, with 72 black eyed virgins made anew each morning to wait on a man's every whim, let alone their many wives from the earthly realm. This sexually imbalanced patriarchal view is a biologically untenable contradiction as are the winged angels of Christianity. The idolatrous devotion to the book by fundamentalists on both sides reduces any wisdom either religion might have to naught.

Rather than a rapture, what we are witnessing is a dangerous transition in which human impacts on the planet are becoming more and more damaging and the combination of sheer human population pressure, combined with reckless consumption of the Earth's non-renewable resources are precipitating climate change which could raise the oceans and make many areas inhospitable.

At the same time we are destroying natural habitats on a global basis so that we are coming to witness the sixth great extinction of the diversity of life, not at the hands of a supernova, a volcanic eruption or an asteroid or cometary impact but simply at the hands of humanity's unrestrained lack of long-term sustainable outlook.

It remains unclear whether humanity will have a soft landing and be able to make a satisfactory transition to a sustainable global culture or whether our lack of long-term foresight and short-term greed will lead to a hard landing with dire consequences for our future survival.

So one could say that the apocalyptic paradigm is a real warning to our existential condition and that the messianic heroic quest is a journey we all need to take to avoid the hard landing and bring about the sustainable epoch of planet earth for the future generations of humanity.

Could Christianity survive in any recognizable form in this situation? The Christian church was meant to be a steward to guard the Earth until the second coming, but what has actually happened is that the deification of Jesus has been used as a token to perpetuate the reign of the church and effectively prevent any transition to a new epoch, by making the church the permanent guardian of a pagan fallacy that sees this supposedly deified figure caught in an idolatrous trap, dripping with blood in churches throughout the world.

This means no real flesh and blood messiah male or female can hope to bring about a natural paradigm shift to the sustainable age without overthrowing this pagan fallacy, designed by the clergy to ensure the perpetual reign of Christianity, in contradiction to the throwing of the covers off reality in the apocalyptic awakening into the epoch of the tree of sustainable life.

If the Western spiritual tradition were redeemable, it would become a very different entity, celebrating the living presence in each and every one of its participants, in restoring and protecting the natural diversity of paradise on Earth for the future generations of humanity and of all life, while practicing the ethic of selfless love for all in bringing about the blessed condition of existence we all know is possible.

Rather than lamenting the blood of the savior, it is the life blood of the generations, celebrated in the the key rites of passage of birth, loving partnership and passing away and the passage of the seasons and their bounties, with the reflowering and sustenance of living diversity forming the natural cycle of celebration. Ironically this brings us back closer to the Jewish mother tradition in which spirituality is a vehicle for celebrating the ongoing life and life-blood of the people to go forth and multiply, to cherish the Earth and replenish it, rather than original sin, sexual guilt and hungering for a heaven which sloughs away our biological existence.

Its natural sacraments, rather than the empty cannibalistic vessels of soma and sangre encompass the diverse living visionary sacraments of the biosphere, from the sacred mushroom teonanactl, flesh of the gods, through San Pedro and peyote, to ayahuasca the vine of the soul.

It is also much more sexy, because conscious sentient life of the human species is sine qua non essentially sexual. While our individual incarnations are mortal, the sexual web of the generations of life is immortal. Rather than the patriarchal eternal sky god exhorting women to be faithful to men, the feminine 'goddess' aspect of spirituality again becomes ascendant and sacred, because it is the females who bear live young and nurture the next generation into life. Rather than rejecting sexuality as part of the flawed material realm of bestial lust, as Christians do, based on the fallacy of original sin, sex is the central mystery of immortality of the generations. So spirituality and sexuality come together as one, and in the place of the bonds of patriarchal marriage, we have astute choices of loving partnership in liberation between women and men.

This is why the Song of Songs made it way into the Bible even to become the holy of holies, the inner sanctum of the mystical communion with the divine, because it contains within it the secret coda of immortality in fertility.

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled:

for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,

and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing;

whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

The emphasis is on a fulfilling and beneficial incarnation in this lifetime, through good actions nurturing the world around us, leaving it wherever possible a better place than we came into while celebrating the best experiences of life, rather than looking to an imaginary afterlife for redemption without taking full responsibility for this life. The emphasis is also on the original evolutionary virtue within us, that makes us able to love and to be in love, and to compassionately care for others we are not even related to, rather than the disabling fallacy of original sin, which leaves us as broken beings, helpless without the imagined savior's intervention. This is a critical phase of our cosmic coming of age in planetary awareness, in taking responsibility for our own fate and our destiny in the universe.

On the Epiphany (left). Reciting the anointing with Jane (top right)
Celebrating the Millennium Eve dawn on Mt. Scopus (lower right).

To fulfill this transition in terms of a rite of passage to the new epoch, I journeyed to Jerusalem with Jane over the second Millennium to pronounce the epoch of the Tree of Life in sexual reunion at a 12 day workshop at the Academy of Jerusalem, with the warm support of liberal Jewish hosts, which included an all-night vigil with 100 or so people on Mt. Scopus on the night of Millennium Eve and a second rite of passage on the Epiphany (my birthday), from the ascension site on the Mt. of Olives, via Gethsemane, pronouncing the opening of the Gates of Mercy and sacred reunion in the Song of Songs at the Wailing Wall.

Apocalypsia Celebration Millennium Eve (YouTube)
Opening the Gates of Mercy on the Epiphany

Gaia Anointing
Video

The spirit of God is upon us
the spirit of Gaia is within us
because they hath anointed us
to sing good tidings unto the meek
they hath sent us to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and the opening of prison to them that are bound

to proclaim the acceptable year
to comfort all that mourn
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion
in Palestine, in in Sidon, Syria, Arabia and the world
to give unto them beauty for ashes
the oil of joy for mourning

the garments of love for the spirit of heaviness
that they might be called trees of compassion
the planting of the divine
that all might be glorified
in the abundance of wisdom

and we shall renew the old wastes
and we shall restore the former desolations
and we shall repair the waste cities
the desolations of many generations

they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation
and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments
and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels
for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud
and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth
so shall harmony and fulfillment spring forth
among all the nations

this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Is there a pattern connecting events which leads to the unfolding of an apocalyptic stream of consciousness? There is nothing in the scientific description of reality which confirms or denies the possibility of conscious experiences having a collective dimension in relation to fundamental changes in our planetary situation over time epochs.

One interpretation of the evolution of conscious life forms is that this is the sentient cosmological conscious of the universe coming to know itself through us knowing ourselves - that our individual conscious experiences are capable of entering into a rapport with a more oceanic conscious sensitivity. Many of the elements of Eastern mysticism point towards a state of contemplation, or samadhi, in which individual consciousness becomes one with archetypal, or cosmic consciousness.

A central aspect of the evolution of sentient beings may be to fully explore and experience such states, which may become a web of conscious experience reverberating throughout space-time connecting generations vastly separated in both space and time into one self-fulfilling experience of the universe compassionately knowing itself, even as if we are the 'mind of God' becoming complete in our own liberation. In this sense it is the biota of the universe which become the pinnacle of molecular complexity and conscious sensitivity, so it is in the consciousness of the biota, rather than the heavens that we should expect to find the mysterium tremendum of the 'godhead'.

The existential cosmos appears to be a complementation between the objective physical universe composed of quanta, atoms, molecules and their accumulation into biological and geological forms, and into astronomical bodies of planets, stars and galaxies, and the subjective stream of consciousness in all of us, which is subjective rather than objective, and thus complements all objective phenomena, and stands as the central Cartesian theatre of existence, without which we would never have access to experience the physical universe, despite appearing to be merely a manifestation of our fragile, excitable brains.

It is this conscious aspect of a complementary reality that has driven spiritual and religious paradigms and their quest for meaning in a conscious life which might continue to exist after physical death, as well as the phantasmagorias of heaven and hell, with all their delights and furies. It is the conscious dimension in which religions find their supernatural plane of existence and which makes people prepared to die for their religion as martyrs, and unfortunately in our age, to kill innocent victims in suicide bombings.

In the dance of Tantra, Shiva as the inert conscious aspect engages with the feminine Shakti spawning in the dance of maya of illusion all the material phenomena of existence. Likewise in the Tao of nature the feminine receptive yin complements the masculine creative yang.

Both subjective consciousness and the notion of intentional (free) will remain enigmatic in the objective scientific description of reality and it is through the agency of these two that our conscious experiences of intentional life and our accountability to fate unfold. The universe is neither random nor predestined. Future states remain indeterminate through quantum uncertainty and the unpredictability of chaotic processes. While, in the quantum world, all outcomes remain probability superpositions, in our conscious experience, Schrodinger's cat is either alive or dead. This suggests that subjective consciousness plays the role of collapsing the wave function of superimposed states of the universe, reducing the probability multiverses of quantum reality to the historical process of perceived reality we experience.

Consciousness thus looks like a cosmological phenomenon, in which we are evolving participants. If there is hand-shaking quantum entanglement between future and past, as quantum experiments like the Wheeler delayed choice experiment imply, it is even possible subjective consciousness may form an eternal web throughout space-time, extending even after the immortal web of life on Earth may have become extinguished, as the sun swells into a red giant, heralding the demise of our solar system. Whether or not humanity spreads beyond our solar system to spawn the galaxy, the consciousness we experience may thus take us right to the core of the cosmological condition.

Healing the Western spiritual tradition in a reflowering of nature could become the pivotal complement to the scientific revolution, in bringing about a sustainable paradigm enabling sentient consciousness to come of age in its discovery of the deepest nature of cosmic existence, but only if we can escape the bondage of our spiritual tradition to the long expired persona of Jesus and the frankly pagan fallacies of the Son of God caught forever dripping blood on the sacrificial cross and the neolithic notion of a father god who saves by killing his only begotten son, as if the good of redemption from sin can come only through weighing out a lethal dose of homicide.

But is this a realistic scenario? Can we really redeem an utterly flawed neolithic blood cult, in which we have dressed some of the more admirable virtues of selfless and brotherly love? Wouldn't it be better to just start afresh with a new beginning? That depends on whether the spiritual tradition can let go of its rigid stranglehold on our perceptions of reality and open to an evolutionary transformation of its own identity, in the nascent unfolding universe.

The Song of Songs and the Living Universe

The Song of Songs and the Living Universe

Chris King

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Collective Messiah and Beneficent Futures

In Eliyahu’s words above the Mount of Olives during our all-night celebration on Millennium Eve: “we are together the collective mashiach and our vision here tonight will spread peace in our hearts and peace on the city of peace below Jerusalem - and be a light for peace in the whole world, and in the whole universe”.

This vision of the collective messiah coincides closely with the description of the messianic dream manifest in children in Rabbi Adin Steinsalz’s ‘The Messiah Complex’ : “Therefore school children are all "my messiahs" [Chr 1 16:22], each one of them is within the category of a small messiah. And if he is not a messiah, whether in his present capacity or in his potential future, at any rate he belongs within the category of small messiah through the power of his will, the power of his dreams. From the inner Jewish world view it is possible to say, that each member of Israel has in him, in some way, a messianic spark.”

One of the most poignant and enjoyable aspects of my meeting with Yitzhaq in Jerusalem was the ability of people of different paths to sit around the table together and discuss their beliefs and traditions, as one shares a bottle of good wine, and one’s idiosyncratic cultural treasures, in a spirit of equitability, each learning insights from the others, in a way which brings mutual wisdom.

A particularly fertile aspect of the Jewish concept of the messiah is that it is a natural process inspiring living human beings to seek the long-term future goodness of humanity in a personal heroic vision quest. Again Rabbi Adin Steinsalz’s words: “A Messianic complex is not just the general wish - be it overt or covert - to redeem the world or to improve the conditions of the world, but it includes another component just as important. The messianic wish is not merely a general wish for improved conditions and for changes for the better, but the wish of that private person to become personally the redeemer of the world.”

It is a central tragedy of Christianity that this natural vision of redemption has been stolen from the living people by the pagan crafting of the heroic identity of Jesus as man-god Lord and savior, so that the spontaneous original virtue that resides in the messianic quest has been supplanted by an original sin which leaves humanity helpless except through the semi-divine intervention of the Lord in a Second Coming which Yeshua stated would occur in his own generation.

Part of the reason mainstream Judaism sees Yeshua as a false prophet and the Talmud Sanhedrin refers to ‘Balaam the Lame’ is that Yeshua’s pretensions to wild natural miracles and espousal by female patronage to his own sacrificial demise are more characteristic of the contemporary Dionysian fertility worship of Nabatea than of the Pharisaic traditions of Israel. And it is these very features, which also caused Christianity to sweep across the pagan world.

Apocalypse: Bridal Unveiling versus Patriarchal High Noon

In a deeper sense, both the notion of an apocalyptic unveiling and the messianic quest can be seen as a cultural imprint on the emerging human stream of consciousness, in which we have faced tumult and future shock in the process of coming from gatherer-hunter bands, through conflict of civilizations, to an awareness of the closing circle of planet Earth and the greater cosmological scheme in the scientific age.

Thus the founding myths of Genesis, to which Yitzhaq frequently refers, form an axis beginning with a falling out of relationship with nature and with the depth of communion with the ‘divine’ and a sexual falling out between woman and man in the patriarchal ascendance, leading down the corridors of history to the final unveiling in the age of apocalypse we all now face.

Apocalypse means ‘unveiling’ - something unmistakably associated with the veiling of women and with marriage. In Jewish tradition, unveiling has a deep connection with the struggle against matrilineal patterns we find in Laban’s kin. Jacob thinks he is marrying Rachel, but finds, after failing to unveil her, that he has been tricked into marrying Leah, leading to his seven year vigil, finally escaping the clutches of his matriarchal in laws to found the patriarchal tradition of Israel, albeit still punctuated by matriarchal inheritance of the Jewish line through the mother.

Hence in Jewish marriage ceremonies, the bride is unveiled for a period before the religious consummation, both to allow the power of her radiance to shine forth through Shekhinah - the feminine face of God - and also critically to make sure who she is to avoid Jacob’s plight. Muslim women wearing the Burqa take the warning - you are treading on ancient ground - the requirement to unveil for ID checks in public is older than both Islam and the modern age!

However, in the patriarchal tradition of monotheism, apocalypse is associated with tumult and discord in the culmination of the messianic age in which each path sees its ultimate destiny in becoming the sanctified of the supreme dominant faith of the true God ostensibly throughout the entire world. The apocalyptic way of the one God has thus led to some of the most serious strife facing the planet and a real risk that monotheism will bring about, not an era of long-term future goodness, but the hellish destruction of military, nuclear and ecological Armageddon upon us all.

Abrahamic Syntheses and Divine Contradictions

Part of the seeking to unify the mythical, and in a sense historical, peoples of Abraham is a striving for a unity of viewpoint between Israelites and Arabs and between Jewish and Islamic religions, each of which on their own are liable to an apocalyptic high noon of ultimate diabolical supremacy.

However one fundamental difficulty with the stress on Abraham is that it doesn’t carry over to the gentiles of Christianity, nor to the non-Semitic adherents of Islam, neither of whom trace their roots from Abraham except in so far as Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are variously perceived to originate from the covenant that Abraham made with El. However El is a significantly different entity from the God of Moses, or of Jesus, or of Muhammad, who may, from the intimations of Harran and Ur in the Bible, and many of the nomadic Benjaminite names around Sumerian Mari, be anything, from the ancient Moon god Sin, to El the old father god of Canaan.

James Tabor, in his summary ’Principles of Abrahamic Faith’ , describes the common relationship: “There is One Creator God, YHVH, the One Who will be, is and always was, beside whom there is no other. He is the Great, and Mighty, and the Awesome One – merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loyal love and faithfulness. To Him alone we offer our deepest love and highest devotion.”

He then proposes a fusion of the prophetic, Christian and Jewish ideas of the messianic culmination: “The Kingdom of God is the goal and meaning of history... In that Day YHVH Himself will dwell with humankind, the will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven, violence among men and beasts will cease, and the knowledge of YHVH will fill the world as the waters cover the sea. YHVH will be King over all the earth ... Human beings will be able, at long last, to reach their full potential as creatures made in the image and likeness of their Creator God. … ushered in by His prophetic Messiahs / Anointed Ones, as His chief human agents who prepare the way for His coming."

Here we can already begin to see the pathological signs of God’s nature emerging as a monarchial, implicitly male Lord, ruler and creator. But this is only the good side – the rosy future. Somewhere we have lost sight of the violent jealousy and retribution of YHVH the forsaken lover of the bride Israel, and the homicidal Father Abba who sacrifices his only begotten Son in a twisted tale of guilt and the war between light and dark, fit only for the blood rites of the pagan religions Christianity sought to annihilate as false teachings, echoed in Ester and other dark Old Testament passages used by Christians to justify the messiah who has to be killed for us all to live.

So what is the relationship between the messianic quest and the identity of the abstract nameless God of 99 names, acting in history and destiny, variously referred to as Abba, al-Llah or YHVH? Is God an essential element of the messianic quest, or is the quest for collective redemption a natural manifestation of the existential condition of biological mortality, and the struggle for full understanding and reconciliation, while God is a cultural construct, or even an evolutionary trait, whose purposes are more adapted to the emergence and control of large societies?

Deity and Cosmology

To understand the nature of God, we need to look a little more carefully at what we now know about how life, the universe and everything actually comes about. At every stage of cosmological discovery, revealed religion has come into collision with the emerging scientific discoveries of the universe in which we exist, from Galileo’s excommunication for discovering the Earth orbited the Sun, to the rejection of Darwin’s discovery of biological evolution as the basis for life’s complexity.

Rather than existing on a flat Earth, with the firmament of Heaven above, we find the universe appears to be self-generating through a paradoxical series of complements. The cosmological form of the universe as a whole is intimately connected to the diversification of the infinitesimal forces of nature. The mathematical form of this is ultimately challenging and confounds our intuitive ideas of space, time and classical causality. It is intimately pervaded by chaotic processes on huge energy scales, unconceived of by even the most hyperbolic Biblical author. All of these processes appear to be self-generating and there is no hint, or indication of any kind, of an external creator, or the need for external intervention in the process of cosmic emergence.

Rather than an ordered cosmos emerging by an act of God from the chaos of tohu vohu, existential reality presents as a series of symmetry-broken complements - wave and particle, body and mind, female and male, as well as chaos complementing order in the generation of complexity, in a manner much more closely mirroring the Tao of yin and yang, the Tantric origin of Shakti and Shiva retreating from intimate coitus, and the fertile overflowing of the Song of Songs, than the seven day act of Sabbatical Creation, full of manifest endearing contradictions, such as the Earthly plants coming into existence epochs before the Sun.

If we look around the universe, from the annihilating maelstroms of black holes, through the nuclear furnaces of stars and elusive shadows of dark matter to the freezing wastes of outer space for a place where God might exist, we are inexorably led back to the biota of living planets and to the conscious brain, which for all its fragility and mortal ephemerality, is the perennial interactive culmination of all the forces of nature in complete integration, from the quark through protons and neutrons to atomic nuclei, atoms and molecules, through proteins and nucleic acids and on to the fractal structures of organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organisms. Thus, in our search for God, we find ourselves back at ground zero, the very source of the messianic quest - our own selves.

Moreover the informational deluge of the genetic age following the human genome project has shown us irreversibly that life evolves, and does so based on extremely subtle and complex physical laws, which no attempt to finesse the bogey of creationism into ‘intelligent design’ can hope to model, let alone understand . This is a fundamental folly, coming from the application of human ideas of industrial design to God forging the entire universe in the same classical way we make bridges, automobiles, computers and watches, none of which are alive, or conscious, or capable of generating living systems. The very notion of creator God thus smacks of human projection of a very limited kind.

We now see the heavens we thought were up in the sky are a radiation-filled vacuum, and that most, if not all, of the cosmological ideas of religion are willfully imaginative human fantasies. This holds equally true for evolving ideas of the afterlife from the old Hebrew idea of Sheol, through the sexless Christian heaven with angels bearing feathered wings to fly in the airy skies, to the hyper-sexed Islamic heaven full of black-eyed virgin houris, created anew every morning for the carnal pleasure of men, let alone the diabolical intimations of hell fire used to make us cower into submission.

This means that if we are going to understand the mysteries of consciousness and the claimed spiritual dimension of the existential condition, let alone our cosmic origins, we may have to approach this quest with something more like the radical transformative spirit of skeptical inquiry of science and look for vastly more paradoxical, complex and subtle solutions, than the legislative feudal Lord riding the apocalypse on a white horse, the Shi’ite Mahdi trying to attract him to worship at Mecca, or the demiurge cosmocrator in the guise of an old man with white woolly hair.

Also hidden in the patriarchal divine fantasy is the repression of the intrinsic sexuality of the universe as evil, and the subjugation of the feminine aspect to God. In contrast to the ‘Elohistic account of the sabbatical creation, expressing God in the plural, with man and woman conceived in ‘their’ likeness, consistent with the congregation of the mighty of the Psalms, and with the presence of the Asherah and Heavenly Host in Hebrew worship, in the Eden genesis, which appears to be a Judaic account, we find YHVH wandering alone in the garden. He is so incensed by Eve’s deceiving Adam into eating what she thought was the fruit of life-giving wisdom, but was actually the fruit of dark and light division, that Eve was cursed and Adam was cursed and they were both thrown out of paradise by a flaming sword, to live as mortals under pain of childbirth, with woman now firmly under the rule of man, as man is under the vengeful thumb of God.

We can see this as a founding stream of consciousness description of falling from the arboreal gatherer-hunter wilderness into patriarchal urban empire and conflict, just as the unveiling is the final stage of this process of culture shock. Nevertheless this creation myth results in oppression, with man ruling over woman, as God rules over man, in the assertion of an inequitable regime of pure dominance, just as dark and light become warring opposites, fractured from the healing wholeness of the immortal Tree of Life - the very process which the Zohar declares caused the Shekhinah to retreat until her return in sparks or shards in the unveiling.

Moreover the feminine sacred was demoted and shattered - Hochmah of the Proverbs, who cried out that she was there with Him from everlasting, before his works of old, is relegated to mere practicality. Shekhinah retreats de-sexed of her power to become merely the feminine face of His presence on Earth. Asherah, symbolic of the immortality of the Tree of Life, is cast out of the Temple and burned with the bones of her priests and priestesses in the Vale of Kidron, in the shadow of Deuteronomy - that apocryphal text ‘discovered’ in the Temple, for whom the prophetess Huldah was maneuvered by a posse of men into acknowledging as ‘genuine’, thus making women to blame for their own plight, in such punishments as being stoned for adultery for not crying out when raped, or not possessing the tokens of virginity, thus cementing male reproductive rule outright and showing that the whole process is driven, not by divine law but by the incessant paternity uncertainty, not shared by women, that drove the transition to patriarchal marriage.

This is a violation of the central cosmological principle, of complementarity, which also lies at the source of the emergence of human culture. Human super-intelligence appears to have arisen through neither sex having the strategic upper hand in the reproductive prisoners’ dilemma, so that each has had to run a Red Queen race to succeed in courting the opposite sex, particularly in terms of bright men possessing intelligent and witty minds, good creative skills, melodious music, accurate targeting, and good domestic and fathering skills being selectively favoured by astute women in the highly polarized reproductive process human pregnancy, lactation and child rearing involves, in which women have to make massive and risky long-term investments in parenting, while the men are prone to sewing wilds oats and yet fear paternity uncertainty with jealousy and violence. As a result of strategic sexual paradox, genes for cultural intelligence have swept rapidly through the human population. To the extent that either sex gains a fully dominant position reproductively, as patriarchal marriage laws seek to enforce, this would act to inhibit the very essence of human culture and intelligence.

YHVH and the Mysterium Tremendum

The central claim of monotheism, despite its incessant factionalism and the endless spectre of religious war, conversion by the sword, and the genocide of jihad and crusade, is that, unlike the cyclical iconic fertility deities of pagan ‘false’ religions, the nameless, faceless, abstract God acting in history is the ‘true’ God of creation, not a mere stone idol, who, despite displaying the turbulent reactive emotions we associate with human personalities, including jealousy and retribution, fit only for a totem deity, is different because He is absolute, omniscient and omnipotent. However the proponents of iconic religions have always understood these to be metaphorical symbols of a transcendent entity, just as Christianity does today in its endless figures of Jesus and Mary.

It thus serves us well, in coming closer to understanding the nature of the numinous reality behind the mysterium tremendum, to recognize that the very best of the meditative tradition of inner vision has come, not from monotheism, but from the traditions of the implicitly iconic male and female Hindu deities. It’s is the rich interaction of these, from Brahmanic Indra, through ancient Dravidian Kali and Shiva, whose origins go back to the Indus valley planter cultures contemporary with the Sumerians, that the meditative depths of insight of the Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jain thinking came about.

It is here that we can begin to see a deeper avenue to understanding the mysterium and the whole religious spectre of the quest for the supernatural in the inner journey in meditative repose to the ultimate interior cosmic ‘self’ or ‘void’ of the Buddha mind, and with it the philosophy that mind is ‘finer’ than the gross accretions of matter and thus forms a complementary realm to the physical universe.

It is in the mythical allegories of Vishnu dreaming the history of the universe, with Brahman appearing in the lotus emerging from is navel, that we come to understand how the religious quest is a manifestation of inner consciousness as a dream-time, rather than a false physical heaven in the sky generated by a legislative personality who will love us only if we obey him, but curse us in his jealousy and condemn us to hell fire if we are unfaithful.

Furthermore the god acting in history is not new. If we go back from Abraham to the gods of our African Adam and the even older African Eve, we find for example in the ancient culture of the Bushmen, whose maternal mitochondrial genes form twin human Mariana trenches of some 100,000 years separation across the Kalahari (Behar et al.), both the shamanic vision quest and abstract creation deities, whose roles in relation to humans are refreshingly subtle and paradoxical, and also reflect heroic personalities with miraculous attributes.

Bushmen believe in the existence of two gods: ≠ Gao!na a greater god manifesting the creative force and //Gauwa, a lesser god invoking the malevolent forces of uncertainty and misfortune.

≠ Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself:

"I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger.
No one can command me.
I am a bad thing. I follow my own path."

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. ≠ Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life. But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain both the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves. Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and ≠ Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

However the Bushmen do not see these as good and evil in the manner of YHVH and Satan. When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and bad he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours. Still lamenting the Bushman's ignorance of absolute morality, he later asked the man, whom meanwhile he had discovered 'was in the habit of smoking wild hemp', what he thought was the most wonderful thing he had seen. The reply he was given was that no one thing was more wonderful than any other and that all the animals were the same.

We need to take a deep teaching from this evolutionary perspective on life, for the lessons of evolution are that disease and predators, just as plants and animals are integral to the diversity of life and a critical feature of the climax diversity that makes conscious life able to come into existence. Therefore our notions of absolute morality are flawed. While there may be a beneficent role for a greater collective consciousness expanding love and peace in the universe, we need to view this in a context founded on respecting the evolutionary diversity of life as both a natural and sacred process, with all its teeth and claws and the contradictions of sexual fidelity and betrayal.

Significantly, although the culture of Bushmen such as the !Kung-San is nominally patriarchal and male elders like to consider themselves definers of lawful arrangements, according to the accounts of Marjorie Shostak’s ‘Nisa’, women have retained a considerable degree of reproductive autonomy and relationship choice, comparable with modern society. A woman will return to her maternal family to help with at least her first birth and early child rearing and the first menstruation is celebrated as a joyful rite of immense feminine power, which can destroy a male hunter’s prowess if he inadvertently witnesses it.

Pivotal to the discovery of the immanent numinous is the profound difference between monotheistic prayer and contemplative meditation, which shares attributes of personal vigilance and autonomy with the older shamanic vision quest pervading world cultures. While Zen koans are paradoxes and the mantra Om Mane Padme Hum is a verbal recitation of a single concept designed to make the mind one-pointed and to stop the train of extraneous verbal thought, prayer is a formal verbal recitation to an unseen personality in the place of an actual vision quest. It is not a direct path to empowerment and self-transcendence, but passing off one’s own autonomy to an entreaty to a higher being.

While the Jewish tradition has had a continuing current of confirmation of the life force in its people, the Christian tradition has degraded our integrity because humans are perceived to be intrinsically fallible and can achieve redemption only by appealing to the Lord Jesus Christ because of the biologically false doctrine of original sin.

Again, while the Jewish tradition has had a continuing current of mysticism in the followers of the Zohar, the Christian mystics from Meister Eckhart to Marguerite Porete have been largely suppressed and even burned at the stake, and the Sufis, whose founding traditions run back to the time of Jesus, have been variously crucified or hermetically sealed, as merely the ‘inner garment’ in a society of dominant Islam which condemns all future prophets to death because Muhammad is considered the final prophet of the monolithic world age.

Many, or even most, religions, despite their treasured sacred texts, have thus acted as much as barriers to communication with the mysterium tremendum, as conduits to it, by placing obstructions in the way of the process of discovery, aided by the intervening roles of the priesthood. The prophets crying in the wilderness have more often than not been cursed and killed, despite being the visionary link between the people and the divine, formative and essential in the emergence and development of religious traditions, while the priesthood have enforced the orthodoxy, as often through torture, murder and incarceration as through insight and spiritual wisdom. And this is not just a problem of corruption of the upper echelon, but intrinsic to the very nature of the priesthood and the fascist nature of religious social control.

The God Spot in Evolution and Brain Science

So where does the nature of God stand in evolution and in the workings of the conscious brain?

Firstly there is a fundamental contradiction in the very notion of a moral creator deity. Although we know that life has evolved through mutation and selective advantage, because the evidence is clear, both from the fossil record, and from the genetic sequences of diverse species, even if we don’t presume this, no God who created life the way it is, with its climax diversity spanning both predator and prey, and parasite and host, designed it on the basis of the moral obedience of any species, however dominant, let alone a riveting focus on any particular one of the countless planets orbiting myriads of stars and galaxies in the universe as we know it. Even if God had a particular affection for planet Earth, or a deep desire to see conscious life become morally and ethically aware of its own existential predicament, devising the biota to survive adaptively by tooth and claw, is in complete contradiction to demanding the very opposite as a consummation - that the lion lie down with the lamb, as Isaiah fervently hoped and that all forms of dissention would cease to exist. No creator deity would intentionally give the power to make free choices, only to command his creations not to disobey him under pain of eternal damnation. All such ideas are a grotesque sadistic product of oppressive human patriarchal logic designed to perpetuate and control large dominant human societies through fear and oppression particularly of the female.

Secondly the dynamics which have been used to associate religiosity with evolution and the brain come in two opposing forms, reflecting the prophetic and orthodox currents above. Some twin studies have shown that religiosity has an up to 40% genetic basis, regardless of the cultural environment of the person concerned. However what this constitutes depends on the experimental measures used, from self-transcendence through to measures of religious conformity. These differing measures highlight two very different currents.

The brain scientist Ramachandran first highlighted an area which popularly became entitled the ‘God-spot’ on the boundary between the temporal lobes and limbic system centres such as the amygdala, which serendipitously lie alongside one another. The idea of this, gleaned partly from episodes of temporal lobe epilepsy, was that primary mystico-religious experience is often associated with a combination of peak emotional fulfillment and overwhelming significance - associated with mutual hyperactivity of each of these neighbouring areas. A natural conclusion could be that evolution has arrived at a human brain attuned to mystical insight. However, although this may be true to a certain extent, people endowed with such faculties have often been rejected, treated as lunatics, or even killed by the societies from which they came or at best given guarded, somewhat isolated existences, as shamans, healers, witches, prophets or other intermediaries with the unseen world, so it remains unclear such traits on their own are a selective advantage, although they might be genetically linked with other traits such as creative insight which might compensate.

A completely countervening evolutionary trend is the one toward religious conformity and the propensity for belief in a moral deity, with powers of punishment of transgressors, on the basis that such traits enable larger more dominant societies of believers to survive and prosper. Thus an evolutionary trend, in which people seek simple ordered belief systems enforcing a moral regime, may aid the survival of large societies, despite the fact that it reduces the autonomy and capacity for religious discovery of the individuals who possess this trait. This is consistent with the biological theory of morality as a means to reduce intra-social strife to enhance inter-social dominance. Many of the central elements of monotheistic worship fit closely with this idea. An invisible moral deity, who is omnipresent, and aware of our thoughts and desires, demands fidelity on a national or global scale is optimally suited to influence our actions in a way which will reduce our likelihood of exploiting at least other members of our own religious following, even if we consider it a divine duty to annihilate the infidels in the name of God‘s divine plan.

Research into a variety of religious practices, from Carmelite nuns, through Buddhist monks, to young university students in a variety of settings, supports a diversity of such components of religious belief spanning these two opposing currents.

This brings us back to the avenues of conscious exploration humanity has discovered access to embracing prophetic vision, meditative contemplation, the shamanic vision quest, the use of trance states induced by psychotropic and psychedelic plants and fungi, and the varied states of lucid to ‘precognitive’ dreaming and finally related deep conscious states, such as so-called near death experiences. Although many of these involve unworldly experiences, in which a huge variety of situations can occur, from sweeping visionary panoramas, to witnessing a deep connection to all life across space-time, they all appear to be accompanied by the activity of a conscious biological brain, so until we can fathom exactly how consciousness is generated it remains unclear whether such visionary experiences can transcend the biological reality in which we are embedded.

Before coming to any conclusions about God or His moral or ethical covenant with humanity, we need to explore the varieties of conscious experience without preconceptions, or predilections, in the same skeptical spirit of truth the scientific inquiry engages with the physical universe.

Shulamite Apocalypse: Free-will, Living Redemption and Sexual Destiny

The quest for the cosmic redemption of life is thus a fundamental attribute of the existential condition, which has much deeper roots than the Abrahamic epoch. Indeed it is a fundamental aspect of the way conscious beings find themselves in the mortal coil and thus have no option, as sexual beings, but to give their best to the ongoing future of their progeny and to life as a whole.

Just as Rabbi Adin Steinsalz speaks of the children of Israel, so children the world over find themselves facing a situation where their voyage of life is pitted against the vagaries of fate and its true redemption lies in making the vision quest of the mortal condition to help bring about a greater unveiling for the generations of life to come.

This existential quest is deeply embedded in the complementarity of body and soul we find at the root of the existential condition and is the one true panacea for all the travails of selfishness and exploitation, which of themselves can do no good for us because, no matter what fame and fortune, or temporal power we attain, we can’t take it with us when we go.

Whether there is a disembodied conscious afterlife or a deeper principle of conscious relativity which unites all conscious beings as one manifestation of the universe coming to discover itself in its own maha-samadhi apocalypse over space-time, doesn’t really make any difference, because it is what we do now as biological beings which will bring about the redemption of existence around us, or let it slide into oblivion.

In this respect, it is the tenuous thread of personal autonomy we call free will, which is our critical asset in being able to make any difference to the world around us. The core reason evolution has arrived at the conscious brain, is because it provides life’s best chance of anticipating threats to survival and giving us all a chance to live another day. So in regard to the notion of future destiny, which Rabbi Soloveichic in ‘Destiny, not causality, governs Israelite history’ , suggests is paramount, we need to understand destiny is neither fixed by causality, nor is a future preconceived by divine will, nor even set, like an apple in the eye, by the national psyche, but generated consciously through the paradox of free will expressed in each and every one of us, as sentient beings shaping history together. We thus have little choice but to take personal responsibility for the world situation in which we find ourselves, because it is the messianic quest which lies at the very core of our conscious being.

The messianic quest is thus real and leads naturally to our redemption, even though the many spectres of God acting in history could well be a cultural, or even an evolutionary aberration. Just as we can’t afford to take the baggage of spiritual materialism with us, neither can we afford to corrupt our intrinsic virtue to false assumption of divine providence. The future of the universe remains our personal responsibility as long as we continue to exist in the mortal coil.

This is also extremely pertinent for the future of Israel and Palestine, for the Middle East, for humanity as a whole and for the ecological future of planet Earth, because it may be that, only by descending into the abyss of tohu vohu and realizing the universal nature of the messianic quest common to all people, and the suppressed nature of the feminine, which in the prisoners’ dilemma of yin and yang, contains the keys to the long-term investment in future offspring that secures the stability of humanity from the boom and bust mortal risk-taking of patriarchal reproduction, will the world become a safe, sustainable place for life to flourish.

But the unveiling is also finally the end of the messianic era - even the messianic quest of world redemption has become tainted with the patriarchal imperative, as a predominantly male quest - so we are being drawn into the primal chaos of a sexual reflowering, in which the Song of Songs between woman and man again becomes a true Holy of Holies, and the Shulamite bride returns from the wilderness to reclaim her sovereignty, as co-conceiver of world futures, under the tree of all life, in a true marital unveiling beyond our wildest dreams.

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?
Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee.
What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.

References
Behar et al., The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2008), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.04.002
Fielder, Christine and King, Chris (2002-2010) Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence