Doubt and Reassurance Volume I

Doubt and Reassurance Volume I

(Also available in soft-cover print editions)

Dr. Don Ray

Don Ray's work published by Quantum Embrace Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 Don Ray

All rights reserved.

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About the order of the Contents:

For some of us, well, at least for me, Doubts are ill-behaved guests, unwilling to politely remain in their assigned rooms. A rabble of Doubts of heart and mind; faith and intellect; self and society meander about, egging each other on.

This renders the following attempt at a Table of Contents a somewhat contrived and arbitrary structure for corralling doubts into specific holding pens for the convenience of the reader.

But it seems proper literary etiquette to provide at least some minimal illusion of organization to material that like life and our doubts was actually generated in a wonderfully chaotic randomness.

Table of contents

Doubt and Reassurance

Part I Why?………….Why what?………….Why everything!

No reason to dillydally in facing our doubts. Lets jump in to the biggies, why suffering, why death, why life?

Part II: The Reassuring Universe

It’s big, cold, violent, and doomed. Now what could be reassuring about this?!

Part III: Religions, faith, sects, cults, creeds, denominations, institutions, mythology, shamans, preachers, priests, anyone with holiness in their title, and those guys with the perfect hair asking for our money.

If you don’t have some doubts about these, you probably didn’t pick up (or down-load) this book.

Part IV: The Joy of Cat-box Cleaning

Time to return to earth and deal with real life doubts.

PART 1

(back to table of contents)

Welcome to Why…..Why What?…..Why Everything!

Mystery of Darkness or Bright Mystery of Light

The mystery Ben eloquently called it on Sunday, this life, the Source of that life, and our relationship with it all. Ultimately, when we finally lie exhausted from our intellectual, philosophical, and theological exercises, it all does indeed come back to mystery.

It is not given us to fully solve or understand the mystery. But I believe we are empowered by virtue of our freewill consciousness to choose whether to see the mystery as dark and impenetrable, or bright and welcoming. Is it mystery because it is hidden, or is it mystery because there is no bound to its dimensions, and each step of discovery leads to ever brightening light? Is it mystery because it is inexplicable, or because none can explain it to us, leaving us each invited to discover it for ourselves as individuals?

Is the mystery cause for despair or celebration? We are fully free to choose our answers to those questions, that freedom itself being part of the Mystery. We may freely choose whether to let our heart and soul experience that which our mind cannot grasp.

Perhaps the great imprisonment wrought by modern science has been the decree that if we cannot analyze and measure something, it does not exist; this capricious and arbitrary decree leaves us in spiritual solitary confinement, all interaction, experience, and awareness limited to what can be slipped in through the bars of our physical senses and intellect. Yet even with senses satiated with experience and intellect saturated with knowledge, we still hunger. The mystery has returned.

With invocation of mathematical symbols, rigorous logic, evolutionary pragmatism, and scientific inquisitions we seek to dispel the mystery. We need but faster processing speeds and greater bandwidth, and of course expanded budgets, to conquer this impudent mystery.

Indeed, we are free to do so, to turn our back on mystery.

Or, with the same invocation of math, science, logic, and evolution, we can turn toward the mystery, not conquering, but exploring, children at play in bright woods and meadows without bound.

Such a subtle difference in attitude toward mystery would at first glance seem inconsequential. But in our acknowledgement of mystery we open ourselves to experiencing that which we cannot understand or explain or categorize or quantify. (Three seagulls fly over as I write! Seagulls here?! Now that is a mystery!)

The Mystery inexorably returns, however steadfastly we deny it. Dark and impenetrable, it lurks behind our conscious awareness. Or bright and promising, it welcomes us when we turn toward it and walk into the warm embrace of relationship with the incomprehensible.

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Doubt is possible only if one is thinking, if one is open, if one is wondering, questioning, and searching……

……and doubt is only possible if one is aware of something, something that prompts the wondering, the questioning, and the searching in the first place……

…….and that awareness is itself reason for Reassurance.

What Matter?

What source?…

those subtle sounds and callings,

those whisperings to the soul.

What certainty, that sense of rightness

on path through woods in pre-dawn light.

What matter, the meager scribbles and

sketches of our lives,

left strewn along our path

that others only briefly cross.

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What of the nature of this world and our nature necessitates doubt, leaving us each looking, but each seeing something different?….and might the answer to that question itself provide reassurance?

Sunrise Blindness

As I watch the sunrise each morning, at least if the sky is not blanketed with thick clouds as it was this morning, I celebrate the colors, the rays, the growing brightness on the horizon, that first flash of brilliant orange diamond as a tiny fraction of the solar disk first penetrates some geographic slot on the distant horizon.

But then I must look away.

We cannot look directly at the sun.

As we consider the diverse spectrum of religions that have come and gone through the ages, as we consider the limitations of our intellect to grasp the concepts of even our religions already simplified down for digestion by the masses, I think we see something akin to the sunrise and its aftermath.

We are not yet ready to look directly at the Source.

Of course our religions and beliefs differ, just as each sunrise and sunset differs.

If we all could look directly at the sun without obscuring and distorting atmosphere, we would of course see the same thing. But that is not possible. So we can only look toward the sun, before sunrise and after sunset. We see its light, but light refracted, reflected, and diffused, light reaching us indirectly.

Today I saw the sunrise as a slowly brightening but still dim blanket of gray.

Someone this morning saw their sunrise as a brilliant cascade of pink and orange across the entire sky.

So also in our different lives, cultures, histories, and experiences, we see different patterns of enlightenment and understanding when we look for the Source.

We, sharing 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, are not ready to directly see the Source.

The disparities among our experiences of the sunrise from different points on the globe in no way imply the sun does not exist.

The disparities in our perception of the Source in no way imply it does not exist.

Though we cannot yet look directly at the Source and Sustainer, let us at least look at the beauty of the refracted, reflected, diffused light of Source and Sustainer. Let us recognize that our view of sunrise and our view of Creation/Creator will differ from that of the other person in different place and different life. But let us acknowledge that we are all looking toward the Light, from our particular vantage points, through our particular distorting and overcast atmosphere of circumstances.

And as we grow to begin to feel the first warming rays of Source directly revealed in our lives, let us do our imperfect best to pass on that Love, that someone else may through us experience sunrise Light, indirect and distorted, but still beautiful in its promise of coming day of vision clear.

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Blinding Glare of Ignorance

How little we know.

I just read John chapter 14. What do these words of Yeshu (Jesus) mean?! I don’t know.

I listen to the announcer on the Christian radio station quote Bible verses, and then expound on what a power the verses contain. How would that announcer answer if asked to explain those verses?

In such situations don’t many of us simply recite credos and dogma and what we learned in Sunday School?…and we recite it all from rote, not really knowing the meaning of what we say. Or is that just me who does not understand, and all the other people quoting Bible verses understand them in profound and personal depth?

I just read an article on quantum loop gravity. Cool stuff! But those boys and girls inventing it don’t understand its meaning any more than most of us in the pews understand John 14.

In recent weeks (October 2008) the worldwide economy has collapsed in a messy heap, leaving the experts in disarray and conflict regarding what should have been done and what should be done. Sounds to me like the money gurus understand economics about as well as