This article below by famed female philosopher mythologist anthropologist Jean Houston, deals with the Problem of Evil indirectly as it ponders whether God exists or not; and deals with that ol’ Problem very directly, not to mention dramatically, at the very end of the article… <\/p>\n
And here also is a video of Jean Houston<\/a> talking to Deepak Chopra about the existence of Deity\/Consciousness\/God. Just like in the article below, in this video Jean also ends dramatically — this time with the remark, “I think suffering is Infinity playing with itself.” <\/p>\n +Katia<\/p>\n THE ‘FUTURE OF GOD’ DEBATE Here are a few of the points I made or intended to make at this remarkably 1. The world has been rearranged, the reset button of history has been hit. 2. There is a radical need for a new natural philosophy based on our new 3. In spite of the fact that there appears to be a decline in attendance in 4. The complexity of the present world is shattering expectations in every 5. As Martin Buber taught us, “I” attends to “Thou” much more than “I” 6. The issue of where this is all coming from has ancient roots. St. Francis My own take on this is that we are the players in a great game called I believe that to live in a state of both\/and is to become who and what we Now we know that many of the great spiritual traditions, Buddhist, Hindu, Finally, we are that crossroads between biology and cosmology. We are called There is a wonderful Sufi story of a man broken hearted by all the suffering And God said, “I did do something. I sent you.”<\/p>\n ————<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This article below by famed female philosopher mythologist anthropologist Jean Houston, deals with the Problem of Evil indirectly as it ponders whether God exists or not; and deals with that ol’ Problem very directly, not to mention dramatically, at the very end of the article… And here also is a video of Jean Houston talking … Continue reading The ‘Future of God’ Debate – and the Problem of Evil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,189,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness","category-existence-of-god","category-problem-of-evil"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDr. Jean Houston
\nMarch 15, 2010<\/p>\n
\nrousing debate between the atheists and skeptics — Michael Shermer and Sam
\nHarris on one side and Deepak Chopra and myself on the other. The debate was
\nmostly focused on the scientific aspects for the existence or non existence
\nof God. My role was to provide a somewhat different perspective.<\/p>\n
\nMany are called to take initiatives that before would have seemed unlikely,
\nif not downright impossible, including the rethinking of the reality of the
\nIntelligence that underlies the universe. My perspective joins that of the
\npoet Christopher Fry: “Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet
\nus everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men
\never took.” In this, we are present at the birth of an opportunity that
\nexceeds our imagination — the 13.7 billion year experiment that could
\nresult in our lives coming to end within the century.<\/p>\n
\nknowledge of the cosmos, the world, the cross-cultural mix of knowledge and
\nunderstanding, potential evolutionary directions, and our own emerging
\nrealities. We have been shackled for too long by philosophies, however
\nnoble, that have been limited by much narrower views of the world. And what
\nis worse, too many of us have been patterned and prepared in the alembic of
\nthese limited views, however out of date they may be, and we find ourselves
\nto have been marinated in the medieval soup of the mind. Today, many feel
\nthe need to release inadequate ideas of God so that we can all move forward.
\nTo become atheistic and skeptical at a time of so much opportunity is one
\nway to respond to our dilemma, but then we forget that religion and
\nspirituality are also about the quest for meaning, transcendence, seeing the
\ninterrelatedness between things, compassion, goodness, laughter, and the
\ngreat Pattern that connects all things with each other as well as ways to
\nlive kindly with the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human
\ncondition. Thus, faith will never go away and, in the words of Karen
\nArmstrong, ” To identify religion with its worst manifestations, claim that
\nthey represent the whole, and then demolish the straw dog thus set up does
\nnot seem a rational or useful way of conducting this important debate.”<\/p>\n
\ntraditional organized religions, the search for spiritual experience has
\nrarely been greater. In America alone, in the last 30 years, the number of
\nreligious groups has doubled. We take new names, sit zazen, become Sufis,
\nTaoists, neo-pagans, devotees of Kali and Vedanta. Buddhism in all its
\nvarieties is the fastest growing American faith. There is an eruption of
\nspiritual polyphony, that some might caustically see as “the Divine Deli” or
\n“cafeteria religion.” What this points to recalls the original Greek meaning
\nof enthusiasm: entheosiasmos, “being filled with the god.” As one Catholic
\nBrother told me, “These other traditions do not contradict my own. Rather,
\nthey open the wells of the Waters of Life. When I meditate with His Holiness
\n[the Dalai Lama], I feel as if the deep rivers of our respective traditions
\nare meeting and becoming a mighty flood of spirit and renewal.”<\/p>\n
\narena, most especially, in the geography of the soul. Lost as we all are, we
\ncan understand why some retreat into fundamentalisms that provide archaic
\ncertainties, holding houses of containment before the onrush of new
\nrealities. Others wander in a spiritual void, overwhelmed by the loss of all
\npattern, looking to material accomplishments to replace the loss of essence.
\nStill others flee into “replacement strategies”– psychotherapy, drugs, sex,
\ngrowth seminars, travel. In each case, mind and body are at the end of their
\ntether, swung out into vertigo over the abyss of Being. And yet the yearning
\nfor personal experience of the divine reality has never been greater.<\/p>\n
\nattends to itself. When you get beneath the surface crust of everyday
\nconsciousness, and past the sensory, psychological and even mythic and
\nsymbolic levels of the ecology of inner space, you discover the depths
\nbeyond depths, and, with it, peace, serenity joy — no separations, but also
\na transcendent grace and even high creativity. It is not just the mystics,
\nbut the high creatives (some of whom are scientists) who report that in the
\nthroes of creative experience, feel themselves aligned, guided, allied by a
\npower that is beyond or deep within themselves. This power is felt as
\nspiritual reality, a vision, an inward voice, an invisible life’s companion,
\nand became a formidable motivation for a quest for truth and discovery. One
\ncannot just reduce these experiences to brain secretions and happy neural
\nchemistries. There is more to us than that. We inhabit the Universe, but the
\nUniverse, with its vast domain of intelligence and inspiration also inhabits
\nus! In certain states of consciousness and explorations we tap into its
\nmyriad resources.<\/p>\n
\nin the 13th century defined the issue of consciousness, the brain and God
\nwhen he said “What we are looking for is Who is looking.” Meister Eckhart, a
\nlittle later, took it further when he said “The eye by which I see God is
\nthe same eye by which God sees me.” He got into a lot of trouble with the
\nPope over that one.<\/p>\n
\nParadox. And what is the paradox? It is that we are both Infinite and finite
\nbeings: As finite beings we are Godstuff incorporated in space and time; as
\nInfinite being, we are the Living Universe in an eternal yet spirited form
\nof itself. As this Infinite self expressing aspects of God, and as a form of
\nthe Living Universe, we find ourselves capable of creating and sustaining an
\nindividual finite self. That is you — the human being that is the microcosm
\nor, if you will, the fractal of the Infinite self. The human Selfing game
\nmay be what Infinity does for fun. Not realizing this, we live in a state of
\ngalloping ambiguity, caught in a limited time vehicle
\nand yearning for our greater self. Then when we make the rare excursion into
\nour Greater being, becoming our cosmic selves, we suddenly yearn like
\nDorothy in Oz to get back home to the farm in Kansas. Why is this? To
\ncontinue the metaphor, to live in Kansas however joyous and rewarding it is
\nto chronically confront our limitations of body, mind and the others.
\nWhereas to enter into infinite life is rather difficult to navigate and
\ntranscends all understanding.<\/p>\n
\nwere patterned to be. We cannot contract the infinite to fit into the
\nfinite, because if we do so we just end up with a fundamentalist God.
\nHowever, we can extend — through conscious work on ourselves — the
\ncapacity to expand and thus to enter into partnership with the infinite.
\nThen, and this may be the goal of the Paradox game, we do indeed discover
\nthat we are an infinity of selves creating and sustaining our individual
\nhuman self. Do you see the stupendous import of this statement? To me, it is
\na mind cracking, soul buffeting, life enlargening realization. Once
\nunderstood and internalized, it adds tremendous power to our freedom to be,
\nour enormous capacity to grow, evolve and recreate ourselves, and our
\nability to live simultaneously as finite and infinite beings. The Infinite
\nself has some part in directing the development and unfolding of the finite
\nself, and the finite self offering joy, entertainment and knowledge to the
\nInfinite self. This is the Paradox of partnership resolved. The game is to
\novercome the illusion of separation.<\/p>\n
\nTaoist, the Christian mystical tradition declare that the finite and the
\ninfinite are on a continuum with each other. Even recent scientific
\nspeculation is saying the same. Modern physics of the quantum variety as
\nDeepak Chopra so brilliantly illustrates, increasingly extends into the
\nparadoxical and mystical in is pursuit of a unified theory of the
\nfundamental forces of the living universe.<\/p>\n
\nto explore the mystery itself as an interface between engagement with
\nexternal realities and embrace of the inner journey. This brings us to a
\nplace of contemplative practice, and the vital synergy between inner and
\nouter realities necessary to transform self, institutions, paths of
\npossibility, as well as visionary endeavors. And in so doing, unleash the
\nhuman spirit of those who compose the institution or endeavor and of those
\nwho are served by this. It is an activity of extraordinary balance, a
\ntension in repose. It is about a zone in which paradox occurs. It is a space
\nwhere the sacred emerges and the local self disappears. It is a space of
\nexquisite silence and of extraordinary service. It is a space wherein there
\nis a fusing and blending of silence and service. In such a state one has
\naccess to the creative, world making place where one’s unique entelechy (the
\nessential self) meets the Entelechy of a potential new time, one that gives
\nthe details of an evolution in person and society.<\/p>\n
\nand sorrow he saw in the world. He sat by the roadside and began to beat the
\nearth. He looks up and yells at God. “Look at this mess. Look at all this
\npain. Look at all this killing and hatred. God, Oh God, why don’t you DO
\nsomething!?”<\/p>\n