knowledge, belief, and reality

[ArmsMerchant]

Some people confuse knowledge with belief--witness the children's song "Jesus loves me, this I now--for the Bible tells me so." This is not knowledge--certainty due to personal observation and/or intuition--but belief--accepting something unproven as true on the basis of bowing to authority, or peer pressure. This is so pervasive in the West that the Judeo-Christian mythos is largely accepted as truth by people--regardless of whether or not they are church-goers-- who have no conception of the numerous inconsistencies--not to say absurdities--in the Bible.

This mindset is a sort of hangover from the passing Age of Pisces, the keynote of which is "I believe." This age is dying, but dying hard--the current jihad being the most obvious death throe, along with the general worldwide climate of fear. Even a cursory examination of the three Abrahamic religions will show that they are largely founded on fear and denial.

What then of reality? First, we need to clarify just which reality we speak of. Our personal reality is self-created. (For more info on this and how it works, see "the law of attraction" thread in SotD.)

So-called subjective reality consists of "a chaos of quantum soup, and we ingest this soup through our five senses". This is from Chopra, who goes on to say that our senses then transfrom massless energy into sound and vibration, form and solidity, texture and color, fragrance and taste. The way we INTERPRET that energy soup structures our reality and creates our perceptual experience. Most of the time we do this unconsciously as a result of social conditioning , also known as the "hypnosis of social conditioning." When we live under this hypnosis, we believe the superstition of materialism. (See, AF--I SAID I'd get around to addressing this issue sometime.) The superstition of materilism relies on sensory experience as the crucial test of reality.

At the level of concensual reality, however, the superstition of materialism prevails.("Reality is a collective hunch"--Lily Tomlin) We depend solely on our senses for information, despite the fact that we can only perceive a miniscule portion--perhaps one billionth--of all the data that is available. Thus, for many years, we thought the world was flat because it looks flat, and thought the earth was the center of the solar system, and thought the world stood still. Today, we know better.

At the level of personal reality, we can choose. As one evolves and transcends the superstition of materialism, one perceives that we are, in fact, All One. The implications of this are enormous. For when one posits that we are All One, then no one is any better or any worse than anyone else. Hence, there is no reason to hate, fear, blame or envy any other person. This, however, does NOT mean we are identical--we are each of us a discrete individuation of the divine unity, the sum total of which constitutes God.

Thus we create our own reality, and this gives us, literally, godlike power. We need only to own it and use it. Realizing this, it is only a small step towards realizing that we are all ultimately responsible for our lives. There are no victims, no villains--just billions of people, many if not most of whom are largely motivated by hatred and fear, trying to find their way as best they can.

All of us are on the same path, however, and all of us will in time reach the same destination. The great danger for those who are farther along on the path than others is to fall into the error that this somehow makes them special, superior, and thus they turn away from the greatest truth--we are All One.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius, however, stresses knowledge--more specifically, gnosis. That is, personal experience with ,and knowledge of divinity, without the need for priests or gurus. ALong with this comes a more clear, reasonable, and unlimited conception of God.

The god of the Piscean Age was a discrete divinity somehow set apart from his/her/it/their/whatever creation. The god of the Aquarian Age--as posited by numerous thinkers and writers including the Course in Miracles people, Neale Donald Walsch, Wayne Dwyer, Deepak Chopra, Muslim Sufis, Christian mystics, and Jewish cabballists--is the unifying spirit of the universe, a vast collective body of information and intelligence which animates and unites us all.

Thus--ironically--the theists of the Age of Aquarius are on much the same page as the atheists of the Age of Pisces--both reject the petty, cruel and mean-spirited deity as portrayed in the Bible.