|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Written and Published
by Dick Rauscher,
M.Div., Fellow AAPC
Forward to a friend
|
THE
STONYHILL NEWSLETTER
|
ISSUE #7
OCTOBER 24, 2007
|
|
| |
|
| |
1) Reflections on Authentic Spiritual Growth
and The Evolution of Our Beliefs
Since our happiness and authentic spiritual growth are both directly
dependent on growth in self-awareness, we will continue our examination
on the subject of "beliefs" in this issue of the Stonyhill Newsletter.
Last week we looked at the "bent nickel" beliefs of our primitive ego.
We explored some of the suffering and unhappiness that come from our
bent nickel beliefs when we use them and psychotically distort the
reality of "what is".
This week we will look at the concretized "unexamined beliefs" of our
primitive ego.
Nothing is fixed and static. Everything in the created universe is
subject to change. Everything in creation is in a process of becoming.
This is true for everything except our unexamined beliefs. They resist
change simply because they are never examined. We do not take the time
to think about them. They simply represent the "truths" we use to live
our life.
Despite the fact that "every" belief is relative and subjective, our
unexamined beliefs are the beliefs that we hold to be "absolutely" true.
We seldom remember where they originally came from; all we know is that
they have been around for a long time. They represent the rigid bedrock
beliefs that define who we are as a person; our beliefs about reality,
our prejudices, our values, our biases, our ethics, our phobias, and our
principles.
If others ask us "why" we hold these beliefs, we often find ourselves at
a loss for words. "Just because it's true" is a common emotional
response. We have trouble defending our beliefs because we have never
really thought about them or examined them. Never the less, we will
passionately, and angrily defend these personal beliefs when others dare
to challenge them. Our primitive ego does not like to be told that it is
wrong.
Beliefs are not necessarily fact. Beliefs are just mental constructs
that we "emotionally" believe to be true. Just because we "believe" or
"think" something to be true does not make it so.
There are no beliefs where this is more evident than when we are talking
about our spiritual or faith beliefs. For example, many of us believe in
a theistic God; a white, elderly bearded male "being" that lives "up" in
heaven, listens to and answers our prayers, keeps tabs on us, judges our
behaviors, and sends us to hell for disobedience. He sacrificed his only
son so that we could be forgiven our sinful nature. He rewards obedience
with eternal life in heaven. When we sin, it is the work of the Devil.
Whether we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or simply non-religious, many
of us would not have a significant problem with the majority of the
above statements. They are simply the common unexamined faith beliefs of
our culture. They are so interwoven into our day to day culture they
have become "flat world belief's. Everyone assumes them to be true. We
take them on "faith".
Regardless of how easily a culture's faith beliefs come to be accepted
as "truths", it is important to remind ourselves that faith is never an
absolute certainty; an absolute provable truth. If it were, then it
could not be called a faith. We take things on faith when they "can not"
be absolutely proved. It is only when we attempt to concretize our faith
beliefs and hold them as "absolute truth" that we begin to create
problems for both ourselves and those around us.
When we stop to take a closer look, we will find that our belief in a
theistic God as described above, is actually the root-source of most of
the violence and prejudice we experience in the world today. Theism was
the creation of our early ancestor's primitive egos seeking safety in a
dangerous and mysterious world. If they understood exactly what their
tribal God wanted and expected from them, then they could know with
certainty that they were under His or Her care. We know from Abraham
Maslow's hierarchy of needs that safety is a very basic and primal human
need.
Religious uncertainty and doubt would have created an intolerable
anxiety for our superstitious early ancestors who experienced natural
events as unexplainable mystery. Their tribal "faith" beliefs would have
quickly become "absolute truths". Of course, it inevitably led to tribal
conflict and violence to determine whose God was more powerful. The
collective primitive egos of each tribe would have split the world into
the judgmental categories of us versus them. Theism has been one of the
primary root-causes of war, conflict, and violence for thousands of
years.
Lets imagine that we "believed" God to be immanent or an integral part
of all creation like many Native Americans believe, then there would be
no dualistic categories of sacred versus profane; our God versus your
God. There would be a oneness or unity in which all creation would be
experienced as sacred. God and faith would no longer be based on
religious "beliefs"; God would be intuitively "experienced". The God
experience would be a mystical happening, not a set of religious
"beliefs". The concept of my God versus your God would no longer have
any meaning.
Whether we understand God to be Universal Intelligence, the
Consciousness of the Universe, the Ground of all Being, or the
Initiating Evolutionary Spirit that infuses all of Creation, the bottom
line is God would still be God. Only our beliefs "about" God would have
changed.
What if we believed God to be immanent in all of creation; that all of
creation was sacred. Would our relationship to the Earth and our current
exploitation of the Earth's natural resources change? Would our
religious wars that have killed so many millions of people end? Would we
be better able to see the sacred in every human being? Would the
religious conflict and violence that we are experiencing in the world
today end? In time, I believe they would. The cultural beliefs, stories,
and memes that we teach our children have great power to shape our
world.
Nothing in creation is fixed or static. Living systems are both evolving
and changing, or they are in the process of dying. In his book, The
Stages Of Faith, James W. Fowler tells us that this is true in our faith
beliefs. We should expect to have different understandings of our
"faith" as we mature and grow through adolescence, early adulthood,
middle adulthood and late adulthood. The faith of our childhood should
not be the faith we hold at the end of our life.
Everything in Creation is in a process of evolving and "becoming". This
includes our "unexamined beliefs".
Authentic spiritual growth is growth is self-awareness.
We are capable of shinning the light of unconditional love and
compassion into the world only when the authentic or essential self that
resides at the core of our consciousness, that sacred part of each of us
that is created in God's image, is able to transform and mature the
unexamined beliefs of our primitive ego.
We will take a closer look at conditional love and our essential self in
the next issue of the newsletter.
(Readers can go to www.stonyhill.com for in-depth articles and past
Newsletter discussions on the subject of our inner-child's primitive
ego, happiness, and authentic spiritual growth.)
2) PERSONAL THOUGHTS
Like most, I began my spiritual journey firmly grounded in the religious
beliefs of my childhood. It took forty years, but I finally accepted
that I was meant to make spiritual growth my life vocation. I entered
seminary and was eventually ordained an Elder in the United Methodist
Church. I chose a ministry of Pastoral Psychotherapy and Pastoral
Counseling in part because I was embarrassed to call myself a Minister
or Pastor. I did not want to be identified with the conservative,
literal Fundamental Christians that were increasingly becoming the
public face of Christianity.
Along with my training as a Psychotherapist I began to read and study
the ways of Native American spirituality, Buddhism, and other Eastern
spiritual practices. I read Thich Nhat Hahn, Anthony DeMello, and other
contemporary spiritual teachers, including Jesus Seminar biblical
scholars such as Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Karen
Armstrong, Robert Miller, and Bishop Shelby Spong.
Over time, I grew to better understand the source of my embarrassment
with Christianity. I saw increasingly clearly that Christianity, as
commonly taught and practiced by the Christian Church, was stuck in the
ethics, values, and primitive beliefs of a culture that had disappeared
into the misty annals of history. Christianity had stopped growing,
evolving, and "becoming" more than three to five thousand years ago.
I was embarrassed to be identified with those who said that the Bible
should be read literally not metaphorically, that Jesus was not fully
human, that homosexuals were perverted sub-humans, that evolution was
not real, and that women were not equal to men. I could not relate to
these ideas, I could not teach or preach them, and I could not worship
the God that they represented. They simply did not make any sense to me.
I considered these antiquated ideas and concepts to represent ignorance,
and I did not want to be seen as ignorant. My life and ministry was
devoted to helping people heal the wounds of their lives and learn to
live more fully in the moment with reality, not teaching them the
primitive beliefs of a long dead culture and insisting that these
primitive superstitious beliefs represented literal truth in the 21st
century.
The power of belief in the consciousness of the human species is what
shapes our reality. Unconscious beliefs and unexamined beliefs are
powerful shapers of the human realities we create because we do not see
them. We never examine them. They operate outside of our awareness. We
believe them because we assume they represent "truth". They represent
truth because we believe them. The primitive ego is easily caught in
circular logic.
Today, I believe that unconditional love and the compassion of authentic
spiritual growth are directly linked to growth in self-awareness; not to
religious or faith "beliefs". I believe that understanding and examining
the beliefs that shape our personal lives, our culture, and our global
community is the most important work we can undertake. The Primitive Ego
Theory of Human Social and Spiritual Development that I often refer to
in this Newsletter was created by me over the last thirty years as a
developmental and spiritual growth model or tool to facilitate and
support the growth of our self-awareness; as individuals and as a
species.
I believe that we no longer have the luxury of functioning out of our
unconscious and unexamined beliefs. They are too dangerous to the global
community that we are becoming. A compassionate global culture will
evolve only as we grow in self-awareness as a species. I believe that
authentic spiritual growth or growth in self-awareness is the ultimate
commitment and responsibility of every individual; that the survival of
our species may well depend on how well we meet this challenge.
3) SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
What are the fixed, unexamined beliefs that your primitive ego is
convinced represent "truth"? What do you believe about members of the
opposite sex? What do you believe about people of color? The elderly?
Poor people? Mexicans who want to work in our country? Same sex
marriages? What evokes emotion and anger in you? What are the
unconscious unexamined beliefs behind those emotions? Remember, because
you believe something to be true, does not make it so.
Authentic spiritual growth and the ability to sustainably manifest
unconditional love and compassion come only from growth in
self-awareness. Sitting with our emotions can be a powerful source of
self-awareness and insight into our unexamined beliefs. As Carl Jung
reminds us, "everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an
understanding of ourselves".
Over time we will come to understand that our beliefs are only illusions
created in our mind; certainties created by our primitive ego that needs
to "know".
True wisdom comes only from the emptiness of "not knowing".
StonyHill Institute
4) GOALS OF THE STONYHILL NEWSLETTER
We live in a world filled with conflict and violence. Almost everyone
agrees that something has to change. There is an urgent need to develop
a more compassionate global spirituality.
At Stonyhill, we believe it makes no sense to profess the values and
morality of peace and compassion while continuing to manifest the
primitive ego's paradigm of vertical power called survival of the
fittest; a paradigm of power, control, and violence.
We must learn how the unconscious judgments of the primitive ego bring
the seeds of conflict, and a sense of "otherness" into the world. If our
personal goal is to do no harm to others or the world, then our thinking
must consciously evolve and become more conscious or self-aware.
We will become what we think about and authentic spiritual growth is
achieved only when we grow in self-awareness.
Traditional mainline religions are based on primitive pre-modern and
violent tribal metaphors written during a time when our human
consciousness was still very primitive. Until our mainline religions
remove the violence contained in their scriptures and come to understand
that most of the wisdom in their scriptures is metaphoric and should not
be interpreted literally, they will be unable to offer the moral and
ethical framework needed to create effective global solutions to the
challenges facing us in the 21st century.
We will evolve as humans only as we become more self-aware and
intentionally increase our ability to love unconditionally. A
compassionate global spirituality is no longer just an interesting
philosophic idea; the future of the human species may very well depend
upon our ability to create it. The danger that we could destroy
ourselves as a species has never been greater. The creation of a
compassionate global community is the most important goal of human
consciousness in the 21st century.
The Stonyhill Newsletter explores the insights and spiritual practices
required to achieve the authentic spiritual growth that comes from deep
self-awareness, understanding the primitive ego that resides in each of
us, and the intentional evolution of our species consciousness.
The Stonyhill newsletter is written each month for counselors,
therapists, clergy, and individuals interested in authentic spiritual
growth, intentional growth in our human consciousness, and the formation
of a compassionate, non-violent global community that openly embraces
radical inclusiveness and diversity.
Namaste
Dick Rauscher
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
The Stonyhill Newsletter is written and published by Dick Rauscher,
M.Div., Fellow AAPC. For past issues of the Stonyhill newsletter and
other in depth articles on authentic spiritual growth and the Primitive
Ego Theory of Human Development written by Dick Rauscher go to
www.stonyhill.com
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2007
There are many article on spiritual growth, the middlepath and the
primitive ego on the Stonyhill web site at www.stonyhill.com. If you
would like to read an in-depth article on The Primitive Ego Theory of
Human Development and the relationship between authentic spiritual
growth and the growth in self-awareness that comes as we better
understand the primitive ego that dwells inside each of us, you can go
to article #26 on the web site or just click on this link:
http://www.stonyhill.com/articles.htm - awakening
Visit the STONYHILL INSTITUTE website at
http://www.stonyhill.com/articles.htm for additional articles on the
integration of spirituality and psychotherapy.
Please feel free to forward this newsletter on to others who might be
interested. Your privacy is important to us. We will NEVER sell or share
our mailing list with anyone.
Click here to send this newsletter to a friend.
If you are not already a member of this list
click here to subscribe.
To unsubscribe click the link at the bottom of this newsletter.
If you want to leave comments or thoughts about the reflection in this
week?s newsletter you can go to our blog site.
|
|
| |
You
can contact us at:
Dick Rauscher
167 Rainbow Drive #6729
Livingston, TX 77399
585-781-4000
dick_rauscher@stonyhill.com
www.stonyhill.com
|
| |
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2007
STONYHILL INSTITUTE OF SPIRITUALITY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
This email was sent in compliance with the CAN-Spam Act. If you want to
be removed from our mailing list, please go to the bottom of this
newsletter and click the unsubscribe link.
|
|
|