Science, Indigenous Wisdom, and Jesus -Chapter 3, Part 1

Introduction and Transforming Evil – By Connecting the Good

Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!

NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!

You are in Chapter 3, Part 1,  Introduction and Transforming Evil – By Connecting the Good

Here are all Chapter 3 posts:

• Chapter 3, Part 1 —  Introduction and Transforming Evil – By Connecting the Good

• Chapter 3, Part 2 — The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom

• Chapter 3, Part 3 — Facing My Shadow and Listening to the Voice of the Heart of Love

Are you trying to figure out Where This is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.

Find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!

Previously, at the end of Chapter 2, Part 3:

Even though I didn’t have the words to describe it at the time, I knew it intuitively: 
Unless we solve the “silo problem,” we won’t be able to solve any of the
other problems and issues we care about. 

I was beginning to glean a model for a new Symbiotic Network context that reflected the interconnectedness of the mycelium we spoke of earlier – because, after all, society’s most vexing problems are interconnected at every scale.

And so, the first phase of my formation was complete: experience with the Luminous Web, connecting that with Nature’s Web, connecting to and integrating the Transcendent Ground of Being within myself, and the emerging formulation of the Symbiotic Network.

It was almost time for me to test my inner insights in outer reality. And … there were more experiences needed that would reveal a traditional pathway to reconcile the mental, physical, and spiritual — and an indigenous but Christian “medicine woman,” Dona Catalina, in Mexico, would be the catalyst.

Chapter 3: Science, Indigenous Wisdom, and Jesus, Part 1

I know the title is provocative — that was my intention.

It may be hard to compute how science, indigenous wisdom, and Jesus can go together. How can I — who was raised a secular Jew, trained as a scientist (biologist), a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, lived and apprenticed with an indigenous Aztec Medicine Woman, and now have a deepening relationship with Jesus — at some point begin to call myself a Jesus-Follower?

You might think I’m confused —
Welcome to the Post-Modern reality of what Charles Taylor called the Secular Age!

I realize how much suspicion is out there, living in a world where everyone we meet seems to have an overt or covert agenda — selling religion, politics, or some kind of product. That’s why I want to be direct with you about how my own experiences around science, indigenous wisdom, and Jesus all contributed to the understanding I share with you in this book.

I hope my work will inspire you to deepen your own experience of the Transcendent, whether you are coming from a traditionally religious, spiritual, but not religious, agnostic, or secular worldview.

To me, it’s more about sharing the truth as best as I am able — Transcendent principles are more important and enduring than any man-made beliefs, including mine.

Spirituality, the core of Religion, is about humanity’s primal, fundamental need to transcend, a drive to be part of something much larger than us, to find meaning, and to understand WTF is going on here on Earth!

In my own search for Truth, it’s about alignment and honoring the Transcendent Order, for me, through Jesus, the Logos itself.

It’s beyond the worship of anything in the world — whether it be my tribe, my nation, the United Nations, or religion, science, business interests, identity-based political movements, political parties, or the biggest worship of all — the invisible secular religion of materialism/consumerism within a Culture of Separation itself.

I see spirituality as the complete embodiment of Cosmic Love that flows from the Transcendent in the form of Virtues that we universally recognize as being essential for individual and human society flourishing. We all know them — kindness, gratitude, sharing, forgiveness, charity, trust, faith, service, patience, and the myriad of other ways we express love and goodness in the world.

It’s less about what you identify with or your beliefs and more about your actions, what you do — walking your talk. It’s demonstrating what you think, believe, and value in the real world. These words come easily to me now, but they were all things I had to learn from experience over many years.

So, getting back to the story! I was finishing my master’s degree in biology at San Diego State University in the early to mid-1980s.

At the same time, as the poetry was coming through in natural settings, I found myself in a series of serendipitous adventures in community with some remarkable individuals, all of which allowed me to start translating the Ground of Being into the field of doing.

It all began when I moved into a low-income, African American, and Hispanic neighborhood in San Diego with an ex-Vietnam veteran. He was a very intense man who had gone to Vietnam as a super-patriotic volunteer only to come back a soul-wounded and disillusioned warrior.

He looked and spoke like an Old Testament prophet with blazing blue eyes. He was a Christian with a personal and social mission — to overcome his pain from being a top sniper in the jungles of Vietnam by ending ALL war.

He called himself a “witness” for Jesus Christ and a conscious “advocate” who expressed his faith as an anti-war activist. That was my first experience with a Christian who took such a stand. He and I both got involved in the worldwide anti-nuclear weapons “freeze” movement of the early 1980s.

That’s when I first learned about the work of Mahatma Gandhi, who used nonviolent direct action (inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount), and the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who was influenced by Jesus and Gandhi. It was here that I began to connect Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a Sarvodaya society, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter, with Dr. King’s vision of what he called the Beloved Community.

Transforming Evil – By Connecting the Good

It didn’t take long for me to become disillusioned with the peace movement’s strategy. I found that many participants were just angry peace activists for peace — all the talk about being nonviolent, following Gandhi and Dr. King was more of a tactic.

My experience in the “peace” movement raised deeper questions for me that laid bare the disconnect between well-intentioned political and social movements and the inner spiritual life.

How can we overcome the violence and brutality of the world if we try to dominate others while harboring bitterness and anger?

How can we overcome the madness if we’re always fighting against what we don’t like yet, not demonstrating what we are for — in real life — with our families and neighbors and in our communities?

The peace movement wasn’t about making a deep down, radical change of mind and heart, the metanoia I had already experienced. A peace movement, or any other “social/political movement,” operating inside the Culture of Separation never actually gets to the bottom line, root cause — the separation itself.

Consequently, Dr. King’s fundamental message gets ignored: If we don’t have what he called a “Revolution of Values” in society, we’ll be having peace demonstrations for the next thousand years because we haven’t built the foundation for peace — which starts in each of our hearts. Mother Theresa said the same thing. While she wouldn’t attend an anti-war demonstration, if you invited her to a demonstration of peace, you could count her in.

The peace movement didn’t tackle the deeper issue facing humanity of how we confront or resist evil, thinking of it as something only outside of ourselves rather than acknowledging its presence in our own hearts. As the cartoon character Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Former Czech President Vaclav Havel said something similar: “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Political activism traditionally has been focused “out there,” a strategy that leads to blame and anger and keeps us in the destructive and dysfunctional dominate-or-be-dominated or the villain-victim dance.

Our collective disconnection from the Transcendent/Logos tends to warp humanity’s well-intentioned desire for compassion, justice, or peace. Looking at history and even today’s political movements, if you are fighting on the battlefield of the Culture of Separation, what invariably happens is that those who’ve been dominated and oppressed clamor for “their turn” … to dominate and oppress others.

My experience with the peace movement deepened my understanding of the Ancient Blueprint — even though I didn’t have those words to describe it at the time. Now, it’s true that some elements of the peace movement had a religious foundation, for example, the Liberation Theology movement in the Roman Catholic Church. And … as far as I know, these efforts were focused on external political conditions, not internal “conditioning” — even Liberation Theology was still fighting on the battlefield of the Culture of Separation.

It was still more about fighting against the war machine or against economic injustice than cultivating the Virtues that demonstrate peace.

And there is the unacknowledged contradiction within the peace movement (and all social and political movements that are fighting against something) — well-intentioned as they are, these activists are on the battlefield perpetuating the Culture of Separation and very likely don’t know it — or don’t care.

Gandhi intrinsically understood the Ancient Blueprint that linked the Transcendent with the immanent — the fundamental importance of coming from Love while transforming society. He found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount his translation of the Ancient Blueprint, what he called the “Eternal Law of Love,” which applied to the Indian struggle for independence from the British Empire.  As Mahatma Gandhi said:

“Whether humanity will consciously follow the Law of Love, I do not know.
But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the Law of Love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough.” YET!

One inspiration for Gandhi’s strategy of non-violent resistance, a method to challenge the evil of the British Empire he got from Jesus, was summed up by St. Paul, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with Good.” 

I don’t believe this means not doing anything in the face of evil; rather, it gives us a universal prescription for how to transform evil in the world effectively.

Essentially, if you truly want to uproot evil and the darkness that exists in our world, then you have to create the Good.

I would extend and expand on this idea — if we also seek to change structures, that is, through social movements, then we also need to Connect the Good. We do this by creating a critical mass of positive spiritual consciousness that “flows” into new nodes of intersection — building our social network infrastructure to propagate Love in a tangible way.

At a time when darkness seems to be overwhelming Good, I recognized that each of us has a role to play — to shine a light, to release Cosmic Love through us, as a power to overcome the darkness in our own lives and the world. As we build our individual capacity to shine a light, we become more able to create “networks of love” to overcome the darkness and negativity that seem to be overwhelming the good.

This path of courage lit a fire in my heart. It’s probably why I was attracted to my next real-life experiment in community.

My veteran friend and I began a demonstration project — a Christ-based, intentional community — in a rundown part of the “ghetto,” an ethnically diverse part of San Diego. We found a property to rent and gathered a small group of folks to fix up a building with the best intentions of serving the neighborhood and community.

We did street-level actions to get to know our neighbors and beautify the neighborhood, and we held regular community meetings about realizing Dr. King’s Beloved Community. That only lasted a few years because we had to move out of the property, and by that time, some of the folks moved on to other interests.

Through my encounters, first with Nature, then with human nature, I kept my childlike curiosity, one of the requisites for being a scientist.

I wondered why it was that well-intentioned people, bent on world peace or other “changing the world” causes, had such a hard time creating peace in their own lives.

The next part of my journey, right after I finished my master’s degree in biology, was doubling down on my own spiritual development, moving again to another part of San Diego.

This time, I rented a room in a private home that became a retreat center for a Tibetan monk who had been sent by the Dalai Lama to establish a meditation center in San Diego. I stayed there for about a year, learning and practicing different forms of meditation, primarily meditating on breath (concentration) and mindfulness.

In my training, I learned methods to concentrate the different psychological “energies” within, and this enabled me to build a warrior’s heart and mind instead of just coping with — or avoiding — life’s challenges. It was a supplemental spiritual boot camp for me, in alignment with the transformation of my mind and heart through my experiences of the Transcendent over the past decade.

While studying with the monk, I also started journaling.

Every night, I would write down my dream experiences. I was fortunate to be in a dream group with a well-known Jungian psychologist who shared a method developed by Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Carl Jung’s students. It was called Active Alchemical Imagination. Being able to process and understand my dreams became a powerful tool to begin to understand my “outside” world through “inside” insights.

June 1987 Journal Entry

I often woke up in the middle of the night to record these, and sometimes, I would end up with two or three pages of dream content. The combination of disrupted sleep and spending so much time in the dream world likely put me in a more open state of consciousness, receptive to new ideas and experiences.

I’m glad I recorded those experiences, as well as the poems that came to me so that I can now share more accurately how this process eventually led me to a radical new way of building community.

In 1987, at the age of 28, I had a waking vision where I was able to bring together the different parts of my personality into a coherent form.

Here is how I recorded it at the time:

I was flying like a bird and then landed on a flat plain. I walk on the path that has transformed ahead of me, with diamonds on each side. I ran into a variety of characters.

I saw an oasis with trees and a natural pool. I see a reflection of myself that turns into the face of an old man with long hair and a beard smiling up at me. He has a golden crown with rubies and emeralds, with eyes twinkling brightly as the stars at night. He walks with me on the path.

Then I meet a whole cast of other characters: a queen who invites me on a journey, but I decline; a 15-foot monster who represents Fear who comes with me on the path; another man who is Anger, who also joins me on the journey; then the queen returns and rejoins me.

I have conversations with each of them, finding out what they want from me, and they agree to unite and walk with me and serve a higher purpose. Onward. More characters, now a big crowd — all the characters within me now traveled down the same path.

We came to a mountain, all of us heading up to the top, while we saw a light, a dot at first, then a cross of light that illuminated our path. There was a tremendous flash of light, and all of my friends were gone now, with a melting heat, like a crucible of light, uniting all of us together.

All of a sudden, I heard a voice coming from nowhere and everywhere. It said, “Your friends are not gone. They're all still inside you. These are your emotions, thoughts, images, and desires that pull you around and around — this way and that way, keeping you from becoming awakened to the truth inside and around you. You have only just begun.”

He told me that in order to become what he asked, he said — “Open yourself and become clear and transparent. You will experience me in all that exists — from tiny atoms to the grand galaxies, from all life to human beings, to those right next to you. My pattern is written down inside of you — encoded inside your heart.”

If every day you cultivate this relationship with all life, you will develop compassion, loving-kindness, and kinship with all that lives. No more will you be divided because you see the spark of me in all things and in yourself. You will find me everywhere.
Unite the Cosmos in Love.” 

I walk now down the mountain, free from fear, anger, greed, and envy — but instead filled with strength, calm, compassion, joy within joy, and clarity to heal and repair the world.

Looking back on this experience, I have a better understanding of what transpired.

When you connect the light of the Transcendent, what was once a disorganized, chaotic “committee” of voices pulling in all directions without a sense of purpose or focus can be unified under the light of a higher-order Reality.

Meanwhile, my experiences meditating with the Tibetan monk gave some structure to my “out of this world” experiences that had begun when I was twelve. I recognized there seemed to be systematic practices to evoke those experiences and use them to grow.

I had a sense my experiences were preparing me for something, but for what?

What they were preparing me for — at least in the short run — was a deeper understanding of applying the Transcendent in action, which came in a completely surprising way. 

---

NEXT POST: Stay Tuned!

Chapter 3, Part 2: The Ancient Blueprint I Found in Indigenous Wisdom

PREVIOUS POST

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NEXT POST