|
Obviously, as we look at the world around us, it is easy to see that such a universal spirituality to take hold among the majority of the world's populace is a long time coming. It may not happen for tens of thousands of years. But as spiritual growth progresses on this planet, more and more people will realize their place within this true spiritual reality. I believe traditional faiths and man-made spiritual organizations such as we know now will, in the long run, fade. It's not that spirituality will go away, rather, it will become central to every aspect of life. All organizations will have an aspect of spirituality. As self-mastery and personal self-government become more commonplace, personal faith and personal relationships with God will be the norm. We can see some of it happening around us now, albeit very slowly and sporadically. When we have a gathering of people who are in that consciousness, a rare event, the energy is extremely uplifting. But since such consciousness will not be universal for quite a while, for the present we will just have to create our own groups in order to enjoy universal spirituality and cosmic consciousness with those of like mind and soul. And this will pave the way for the world to follow.
Currently, in our personal lives, we see a progression of values from the material to the spiritual. However slow it might seem at times, more and more people are realizing that material gain means nothing without the spiritual values of personal relationships. Materialism is still strong but as more people begin to have the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing, and then go beyond to affluency, they will begin to increasingly focus on their inner needs. Historically, it was the creation of leisure time through technological advancements that resulted in cultural developments. When people no longer needed to spend so much time growing food and making a living, they had more time to work on the arts, sciences and humanities. This trend will continue all over the world and more and more people will have time to spend on self-development. Values will evolve over time from the material to the spiritual. From the temporal to the eternal. We will slowly begin to identify less with our material bodies and more with our souls. Could all this be an indication that we are transforming into something else, a material embryo slowly gelling into spiritual solidity?
If this is so, to where are we going? What is our ultimate goal?
Again, I look to nature to see if there is a fractal example. And I see the flower. It sprouts from a seed and grows and grows, until it blooms beautifully, and from which many seeds are created, falling to the ground until the cycle repeats. This pattern can be found in each of our lives, and I think, can also be applied on a much larger scale to our spiritual existence. Human life is but a seed, we are in the stage of sprouting into spiritual reality. Once we do so, we continue to grow and grow until we reach the pinnacle of spiritual evolution, to reach "the right hand of God," so to speak, to be Godlike, and yet not God, and then to go back out to the near infinite universe and become creator offspring in our own right, creators of our own seeds. Like a field of flowers, this will happen not only to individuals but to all evolutionary creatures. Entire civilizations of God's creatures are headed for transcendent transformational experiences in the goal of time, space and spirit. Of course, fractal analogies can only go so far, and as we are but embryos, projecting our futures any further would be like a baby pondering what happens after high school. But as we see the small, we see the large. As we see the part, we see the whole.
Traditional Concepts of Eternal Life
There are truths in both the Eastern and Western concepts of origin and destiny, but also some things that seem incongruent and illogical based on my experiences of reality. The Western concepts have us start in this life and progress toward becoming higher spiritual beings in the next life, if we are good, to reach heaven, or hell if we are evil. What we do in heaven and in eternity is not described in detail, in hell I guess we just suffer. The Eastern concepts lean toward reincarnation, some posit that our souls have always been around and after countless lives of being born and reborn is finally released from this cycle to reach nirvana, to escape from the sufferings of life, to dissolve and become one with everything, which would mean to actually become nothing.
The concept of a hell where the evil exist in eternal damnation makes no sense to me. What purpose does torturing beings for eternity who never asked to be born serve in the cosmic scheme of things? Is there an example of this in nature? Do bad flowers live in a botanical hell? Isn't it more merciful to merely end the existence of all those who do not wish to participate in the divine plan?
On the other hand, heaven seems like a good conceptual destination except it would seem pointless and even worse than hell unless we had a purpose for being there, information that is unavailable in those scriptures.
The idea of living countless lives after lives from the beginning of time for the purpose of becoming nothing also seems senseless. And if our souls were around for an infinite time in the past, why does it take so many lives to reach nirvana? Wouldn't an infinity of time in the past be enough to reach nirvana many times over? And if our souls were not around for an infinite time in the past, when and how was it created?
The Eastern and Western concepts of origin and destiny, however, can make more sense if we distinguish the difference in meaning of spirit and soul. The spirit is the essence of the Creator, the soul is the essence of our self. The spirit has been around for an infinite past, the soul is created here and now. The soul evolves and is transformed into higher levels of being through habitation of life vehicles and then fuses and becomes one with the spirit, but where was it created? Why not in this life? If we do not have past memories, this life is probably our first. And when we die, why does our souls have to come back to this planet to live more lives? The universe is immense, why is it conceptually necessary to come back here to Earth? It isn't. But because astronomy and the discovery of interstellar space is a relatively recent development, the sages in the past had only this planet to refer to within their conceptual frame
|
|
