The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Belief V

 

 In the days of Jesus and before, religion was not used to interpret all experiences through the veil of beliefs in dogmatism, but was something that was intended to help people understand how all experiences, however different and unique, were always equally part of a shared human drama. The "living word," in this sense, was the lives of every single person, each of whom constituted a unique and holy gospel of experiences in the universal book of life itself. Cultural theorist Norman Denizen called this idea the universal singular.  

The Universal Singular

 The universal singular is a term that captures the paradoxical idea that each of us is both unique and universal, and that our lives represent both a singular and a universal experience. Like light, this means we are both a particle and the whole wave. We are not mere drops in the ocean, as Alan Watts said, but the ocean itself experiencing consciousness as droplets.  Like a particle or a drop of water, our experiences are singular, because there are things that are unique to our own biology and psychology, as well as our backgrounds, upbringing, choices, and personalities. At the same time, each of us also represents a wave or the whole ocean because there is “something universal about our cultures and, indeed, the human experience.” 

This duality is the bread of life itself, which each of us equally shares in just by being alive. For it allows us to listen to the experiences of others, no matter how vastly different they may be from our own, even if they lived on the other side of the planet and hundreds of thousands of years ago, and nevertheless see, and even identify with, the universal moments in their stories.  It is also what allows us to do the same thing with fictional characters from plays to novels and film.  Fairy tales, sacred stories, poems, myths and legends, all convey such universal singular truths, and often in ways which make it impossible to distinguish one genre of storytelling from another. 

Yet the “universal truth” such stories convey are never in the forms of  the names or the details of the characters themselves in any given story, which is to worship a cult of personality or a mere brand label, but always in the experience of overcoming obstacles and overwhelming odds, slogging through hell and back while slaying your demons and dragons along the way. Such ideas are mere metaphors for the struggles in life that are as universal to the human experience as feeling the sun on our face and raindrops on our tongue.  That struggle is the true cross of the human condition which each of us carries from the cradle to the grave.  Before being demoted to the rank of fairy-tale and replaced with religions that were more obsessed with the characters they portrayed than any of the lessons they taught or lived by, this had always been the function of mythos.  

Through the rhetorical alchemy of St. Augustine and others, however, one version of mythos was claimed to be divine and all others condemned as counterfeit. This was like five blind men having radically different ideas about what an elephant looks like, and then one suddenly declaring that their perspective is the result of divine revelation and is therefore infallible. Doing so allowed that brand of mythos to be commodified as "the fruit of the vine" that would "make you like God, knowing right from wrong" - exactly as the serpent promised Adam & Eve it would. 

And ever since, that one brand of mythos has been masquerading as the one and only "true" divine logos. The miracle of this transformation of mythical truth into scientific truth, which is reflected in the consecrating of bread and wine into divine flesh and blood at every Catholic mass, is how it took the mutual need for both and began conflating one for the other, even though they are not only different, but at times even mutually exclusive. This was seen in understandings about everything from the age of the universe to debates about whether the earth was the center of the universe or not, to which gods were worshiped and by what names they were called. 

 Since mythos invites our creativity to "come and play," allowing each of us to exercise our unique perspectives to create a story about who we are and the Eden we are born into, logos - which many Christians now call "God" - was often as subjective in our understanding of it as mythos. Even in the fields of science where objectivity is regarded as the greatest thing, often people’s views of evidence are highly correlated to their vested interests because when assessing emotionally relevant data our brains automatically include our wants and dreams! Negative as this sounds, the distortion of reality can be a positive mechanism because it keeps us going against the stream. It is also what makes it possible to overcome the effects of our biases, ironically enough, by viewing things from various points of views.

And the divine spark that allowed for such a transformation was  the very thing that religion condemns as a sin, for which Christ himself was condemned as a heretic for exercising, even though it is the only thing about us that can be said to be made in the image and likeness of an infinite intelligence that created everything - our infinite capacity for creativity. And what crucified that capacity as a heretic was a priestly class that had claimed their understanding of the nature of the elephant we call God was divine and therefore infallible. And their evidence for such claims came from oral traditions that were thousands of years old, having been transformed into the amber of the written word, and nailed to the cross of a page, which they kept prisoner like Dorothy in the Emerald Palace in their temple, in the tomb of a holy tome.