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5. CREATION, EVOLUTION AND CO-CREATION: THE CONSCIOUS NATURE OF GOD AND HUMANSby Dick Rauscher
Over the last few months I have received several e-mails asking if I could explain in greater detail my concept of God. First, let me say that all concepts of God are just that; concepts. As the Rabbi’s warn, to know God is to be God. No one can speak about God with ultimate authority; not even the sacred texts of the worlds various religions. All of us have mental concepts or maps that explain or make sense of reality. Our maps are called beliefs, opinions, certainties, expectations, fears, and assumptions. We all have a mental map we call God. Some understand God as Yahweh, others refer to the Goddess, and some call God the Great Spirit. Regardless of how you understand God, your map is no more correct or accurate than anyone else’s map; it’s just different. All maps of God are valid if they help us create ultimate meaning for our lives. The important point to remember about our maps and beliefs is that they tend to be fixed, inflexible, and static; especially our sacred beliefs about God. Our maps are very difficult to change because our ego is absolutely convinced that its own personal map is the correct view or understanding of reality. As a result we often find ourselves passionately defending the maps and beliefs we learned in childhood from adults we trusted. We don’t often remember how or where we learned a particular belief in childhood because we simply assumed that the adults in our lives knew what they were talking about. We just accepted their wisdom. Over time I have come to believe that my childhood Sunday school maps depicting God as a theistic, anthropomorphic person sitting up there in heaven, answering prayer requests from faithful worshipers, is a dangerous and outmoded map. It makes God all powerful and his followers helpless and unable to do anything without God’s help. The primary virtue for those using this common theistic map is that of obedience. It is a map of God that essentially encourages followers to avoid ultimate responsibility for their own choices and actions. Children are expected to be obedient. This map of God no longer makes sense for me. Today I understand God to be, the name of the ceaseless, unending, ongoing, restless, creative flow of pure conscious energy in the universe that uses change to create; an intelligent conscious organizing and reorganizing energy that runs through the whole of creation; an energy we call evolution.(1) God is this conscious, intelligent, creating spirit energy that has been present from the beginning of creation and manifests in the world of form as evolution. God uses change to create form. Change is the evolutionary imperative embedded in creation. There is no permanence in this universe. Everything is in the process of changing. Creation requires change; and that includes the maps we use and the beliefs we hold to be accurate. God uses evolution to create form. The creating spirit energy I refer to as God has three essential characteristics; it supports and enhances life, it supports and enhances increased complexity, and it supports and enhances consciousness.(2) Only this intelligent, ceaseless, flow of conscious organizing and reorganizing energy I call God has the ability to reverse entropy; to be negentropic.(3) All other energies in the universe are entropic. Beatrice Bruteau(4) calls this unending, creative God energy agape love. She contends that agape love, the unconditional energy that exists and flows through all creation without a “because”, is the only energy capable of reversing entropy! Agape love is the essential creating “spirit” of God embedded in all of creation; the “ essential nature” or “ground” of the universe. Why do I prefer to use this concept of God? Why do I think this way of describing God is important and helpful as we move into the 21st Century? My answer is simple; there is no form without consciousness, and there is no consciousness that does not create form. When humans became reflexively consciousness through the process of evolution, we were, at that moment, born in the image of God. We began to share the gift of pure consciousness with God, and because we are capable of manifesting agape love as our essential nature,(5) we became Co-Creators with God. At that moment, we could begin to participate with God in the creation of form, and at that moment, we became ultimately responsible for the forms that we create. If we continue to think of God as a theistic Santa Claus sitting in heaven and “running” the universe, then we don’t have to take conscious responsibility for the forms that we are creating on this planet. I deeply believe we no longer have the luxury of that primitive map; a Santa Claus God it is a very dangerous illusion. We create love and compassion, but the painful reality is that we also create pain, suffering, war, hatred, judgment, injustice, and evil. Satan is another dangerous theistic belief. The ability to create pain and suffering does not reside in Satan, it resides in our own hearts! It is we who create pain and suffering in the world, not Satan. We must stop blaming Satan for everything that is “evil” and stop waiting for Santa Claus God to grant all of our wishes. I believe it is imperative for the survival of consciousness on this planet that we become more conscious and more responsible for the forms we are creating as a species. As conscious beings, we really only have two choices. We will either manifest the unconscious primitive ego energies of fear, greed, power, and success,(6) or we will manifest the creative agape love energy of our conscious essential self. Consciously or unconsciously, we will be creating form. The only question is will we be supporting and enhancing life, increasing evolutionary complexity, and enabling the evolution of consciousness; or will we be destroying life, using simplistic black and white thinking, and demanding unquestioning obedience to outmoded beliefs and maps of reality. The evolutionary thrust toward higher complexity that eventually evolved into life and then pure consciousness on our planet, was a biological evolutionary process that took several billion years. There may be additional biological growth resulting from natural processes or human genetic manipulation of the DNA, but it is clear that the future evolution of our species will be growth in consciousness; a growth that is already increasing geometrically. When reflexive consciousness appeared, the future evolution of the human species moved from biology to consciousness. As conscious beings, we are now totally responsible for the growth of our own consciousness; for the future evolution of our species. We will become what we think about. We no longer have the luxury of continuing to create out of the unconscious entropic energies of the primitive ego. We must learn how to empty our ego so as to manifest the conscious, “no because” agape love energy of our essential self that loves life, complexity, and conscious growth.(7) We must learn to create agape love, because that is who we are; conscious children of God, created in God’s image. We must learn to intentionally support human evolution through the spiritual transformation of our human consciousness; a consciousness that is reaching for the stars with one hand, and creating pain, suffering and powerful entropic weapons designed to destroy consciousness with the other hand. Like it or not, we must mature quickly as a species. We are rapidly running out of time. The growth of human consciousness in science and technology is exploding. We can no longer envision ourselves as separate ego selves, separate nations, and separate ethnic tribes; the otherness and judgment of us vs. them. We must learn to see ourselves as a conscious species. A human family. Just as a wave is part of the ocean, we all share in the Unity of God. We must learn the skills of cooperation and learn to build peaceful global communities. As Co-Creators, we are all the creative “heart” of this planet. This is a reality we can no longer ignore simply because we do not want to change our old maps. As Co-Creators, we will create what we think about and we will continue creating form; consciously, or unconsciously. The question is “for how long?”
1) Taken in part from Epistemology,
Fourth Order Consciousness, and the Subject-Object Relationship,
Robert
Kegan, What is Enlightenment:
Spirituality for the 21st Century, Fall/Winter Issue, 2002 (back) | |
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