We are all living in pretty hateful times. It’s pretty negative “out there” even for a jungle. I could easily add here that the current climate seems to be charged with evil intentions, but lets face it, most people have always been interested in their piece of the world far more than they could ever be in world peace. This point in history is no exception.
So what is going to save us from ourselves? Is love really all we need? I have doubts in the powers of romantic love, because that just seems to screw people up. But it is interesting to consider the options nevertheless…
The ancient Hebrews did not have separate figures to represent numbers, so they used letters of their alphabet. As Donald Michael Kraig explains in Modern Magick: “It was believed that if two words had the same numerical total, they had a significant relationship to one another, and in some cases could be considered synonyms. As an example, aheva=13 and echod=13. Therefore aheva (love) and echod (one) are the same. Since in Judaism there is only one God, according to this system, God is Love.”
The Hebrew language is attested from the 10th Century BCE, and later developed into Mishnaic Hebrew (200CE), the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud (meaning instruction, learning) the central text of mainstream Judaism. If folks realised then that there is a connection between one and all, and this connection was benevolent, how did we go so very wrong?
Somewhere along the lines, man started to create God in his own image (because lets face it, it is far easier and more profitable to do this than it is to actually take the time to comprehend God and your relationship to it). Through centuries of misinterpretation, misdirection, and absolute misuse of power, man-made religions conquered the world; and the world suffered greatly.
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their book the Laughing Jesus said:
“We have inherited a distorted form of Christianity created by the Roman Church in the fourth century, which focuses exclusively on Jesus the ‘man of sorrows.” The images that have dominated our culture are of a man being tortured to death.
“Original Christians were inspired men and women who imagined a world that would no longer be divided up into citizens or slaves, men or women, Gentiles or Jews. But inadvertently this band of non-conformists gave birth to a totalitarian regime that would rule Europe with an iron fist for over a thousand years. The result was not Heaven on Earth, but the Holy Roman Empire.”
But is the Empire crumbling? Does religion have a future? Not according to a recent study.
In May 2001, researchers (using census data from nine countries) reported a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. They analysed a century’s worth of statistics from Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland, and came to the conclusion (using a mathematical approach that has been used to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part) that religion has a strong chance of becoming extinct in these countries. Hope springs eternal…
Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona said: “Social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, as social groups have a social status or utility. For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."
"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%."
Even if it is on the decline, can we really still use religion as our poor excuse for not getting along with one another, or is it time we started facing certain fundamental realities about ourselves? Are we capable of loving another without condition? There is certainly a difference in connotation between loving another and being in love with another, I think it is best summed up by this quote: "Once you have loved someone, you'd do anything in the world for them: except love them again." (Anon.)
Being in love (rather than loving) is a conditional act, as it always depends on you fulfilling your need for another to love you exactly the way you love them; it must be reciprocated, and has little to do with being selfless.
When was the last time you expected a friend to be faithful? You simply assume they are faithful, or you would not be their friend. Why is it not so with lovers? I believe it is because there comes a point in every relationship when fear of losing the one becomes equal to the love you have for them (subconsciously, at least). In other words, our need for our partners (and the daily familiarity and security they offer) outgrows/out balances our desire for them to be free. There is no way anyone would put up with a friend who had these traits without complaint.
Parents have this paradigm with their children just as much as spouses do with each other. Jealousy, anger, bitterness and resentment all come from this paradigm; how much you compromise is defined by how easy it is for you to live in this paradigm. Relationships fail when this paradigm cannot be sustained anymore.
The human condition is co-dependant and yet I do not believe it needs to be this way. If, as the ancient Hebrew’s proposed, one and love equates the same thing, then you are by default love, and there is no need to fall in with anyone else. Love, by all means, but stand up while you do so.
I used to refer to myself as a born again atheist until I realised that it was not God that was letting me down, but my version and perception of God (or how that clashed with other peoples perceptions). We are all capable of extraordinary strengths and we all have within us phenomenal capacity to do, be or grow in anyway we choose. There is something of the divine in all of us; if you don’t go within, you go without.
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