Oct 11, 2015

Ponderings

It was very good

 

God saw all that had been made, and it was very good…. Genesis 1:31

 

To say that everything is holy certainly seems counter-intuitive. We can think that almost nothing is holy, especially when we look at the world around us with so much fear, killing, and so many terrible things that are happening around us. This post will look at the world around us and see if there is some way we can arrive at the conclusion that, indeed, everything is holy, that indeed, it is very good.

 

We can see that certain things can be considered holy because of their beauty and innocence. Things like a young child, a beautiful sunset, certain books we have deemed holy; all of these we nod our head that, yes, they are holy. We even occasionally say that someone we have heard about, or even may know, is holy. But to consider everything as holy, well — that is certainly stretching it, isn’t it?

 

Perhaps not. The book of Genesis, especially in both Creation stories, God creates the universe (“Let there be light”) and in particular, our earth and all that is on there: “And it was very good….” I think that if God states that it is “very good” we would be safe to say that it is holy. So we can claim, using the allegoric language expressed in the bible, at least at that level all is holy.

 

As God sees it

 

What does God see? In order to understand in some small way how God sees it, we have to step back and try to catch a glimpse of what God’s viewpoint is. God is the creator of all that is, that is the All in All, the very act of creation, and nothing is not “a thought of God”. We really can not comprehend the extent of what God is, but in some small ways we can glimpse the magnitude of what God may be, from that term that God is the All in All.

 

God is The Creator

 

Creation is not a “once done and over event”, but is a continuous fluid act that has never had a beginning and will never have an ending. Creation is the very nature of God, as expressed in the allegoric story of Genesis. Creation flows out of “who God is”, not just something God did once and then forgot. God has no use of Time, God just IS. The Creator, Now and Forever, Past and Present.

 

We understand God is eternal, including that mind-boggling thought that God had no beginning, always was and always will be. The thought of ‘always will be’ is easy to accept, but we have no idea of what the term ‘always was’ means, as our mind can not fathom that thought. But let us say it was long before the big-bang of 13.7 billion years ago, before time had any meaning. But just taking it from the creation of light that formed the big-bang, humanity is not even the last day if we took that 13.7 billion years into the thought of a single day. As 2 Peter 3.8 expresses it: “…A thousand years are like a day.’ Then about 6-8 billion years ago a giant star exploded, and somewhere about 4-5 billion years ago the remains had condensed into a star with a group of planets. Our earth is 4.54 billion years old, give or take a few million years. Time passed, life formed about 3.8 billion years ago, and continued events until about 2 million years ago the first traces of a humanoid appears, and modern man follows at about 250 thousand years ago. Fully functional modern man began moving about 50,000 years ago, replacing the earlier Neanderthals who had lived in and around Europe and elsewhere. Then it was much further along, only about 5-10 thousand years ago that written methods began to emerge, and progress accelerated. The key was communication, especially beyond the verbal histories that existed previously.

 

Let’s face it. Life was brutal in those early times. Many large animals abounded. We do not know how communities grew or existed, but we have evidence of brutal wars between groups of humans, lack of compassion, no reverence for life, etc.

 

God Waited

 

And all this time God waited, as our infantile behavior played out. We were but babies in the tapestry of life.

 

But God sent messengers even then. We have evidence of what appears to be statues of worship dating over 30,000 years ago. Other evidence appears when groups began cultivating crops, requiring the building of at least semi-permanent dwellings.

 

And still God waited.

 

Some seers arose in what is now India, and began putting thoughts together concerning life and beyond, and some amazing writings appeared, like the Upanishads. Thus God spoke at the level that could be understood at the time, and some absolutely astounding things were written.

 

And still God waited, giving inputs to minds that were open to hear.

 

God is waiting still

 

Then some 2000 years ago, Jesus appeared and taught his message. Probably much more was actually said, but only a few words were recalled many years later and placed in writings, even with the help of a suggested ‘Q’ source that was a listing of the sayings by Jesus believed compiled over the 10 years following Jesus’s death.

 

Good sayings, but how did people at the time of these writings live? Well, seemingly better than in times past, but still brutal by any standards today. Even as short a time ago as the as the crusades, starting in 1095 and lasting over 200 years, we western ‘Christians’, led by the official church of that time, beheaded and killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, thousands of Jews, and stole everything in sight, all in the name of God.

 

And still God waited, for God could see that we ‘toddlers’, from the viewpoint of the universe, were slowly making progress, as many good things were written by the sages, mystics, and other God-centered people that could now communicate, that showed remarkable progress in some isolated thinking.

 

And God is waiting still.

 

And Yes, God still sees it all as good. And holy.

 

God is still waiting

 

Yes, we are progressing, as we see more and more that our actions effect one another to a greater and greater degree. We are slowly moving towards a stance where we see all humans as one as God sees us, as Jesus sees us, as do all mystics see humanity. Thus the patience of God justifies the view, that from the overall viewpoint of even these past 50,000 years, we are beginning to grow up and become what we were meant to be as adults.

 

Yes, from the viewpoint of God, all is good, and therefore everything is holy.

 

The question remains: will we mature before we destroy ourselves before that point, and have to repeat the past several thousand years again before being able to become what we started out to become. Many archeologists believe that the builders of the Egyptian pyramids era was built not by slaves but by a race employing advanced techniques that we still do not understand.

 

And they just disappeared.

 

But we are not infinite in age

 

Ok, so God considers all this as part of the growing up process. What’s a thousand years more or less when you have infinity to judge by. But we humans are short sighted: we only have a point on that time span, usually less than 100 years, and life sure does not seem good, or holy, as we are immersed into the minutia of life, and it can be pretty ugly down here. How can we see that all of life is holy? Or even good? And how can we see that everything serves a good purpose? These are some of life’s most challenging questions, especially when we are mired in the middle of the mess that so often spells out our life.

 

Perspective, baby, Perspective

 

I spent about 40 posts recently talking about a methodology of changing your perspective into something new. (They are under the Abundance title pages.) It is very difficult to change our perspective about life that we have spent all of our life working around – our perspective is the pillar of our life; that is how we have trained ourselves into seeing all of life, and to think we can change that perspective over night is usually a dream. It can happen of course, but it always requires a traumatic event for that moment to occur. If we are lucky, we will have one. Painful for sure, but the result gives us a whole new outlook on the value of life itself, and the results will be pure joy for the rest of our life.

 

Most of us have to deal with everyday life, where we have not had a seriously traumatic event, but just a sense that there must be something more and life can not be as bad as it seems to be, with God totally out of sight.

 

We will continue to look at this problem in the future, and see what develops. I can assure you, it is possible to see that “All is Good”, once we learn to see just an inkling of the way God sees the universe, with all its fiery events, novae, wars, earthquakes, murders, and all other traumatic events.

 

Meditation

 

My Eternal Guidance, you have shown me the wisdom of the stars and the guidance of the universe. I am in gratitude for all that you have allowed me to witness in my life, to see the blessed events that have coursed through my life and in those around me. I have witnessed Your Creation countless times, and am aware of the infinite blessings you have bestowed on humanity, despite our youthful ignorance. I am grateful for all the love you have given me, for even when I have not responded, I have been aware of that Love filling all voids around me. Your loving grace has filled my whole being even when my behavior has not “earned” it, and I was blessed to see that throughout my life.

 

I am grateful for seeing life from many sides, and having been given opportunity after opportunity to move further into the awareness of Your Love. I am moved to tears when I see the blessings you have bestowed on me, and I look forward to continued blessings until You call me back into Your spiritual bliss.