hallo...I think I'm glued to my chair today, pardon me.

I retrieved this from a blog on myspace and thought it worth putting up here, as a demonstration of a sort of non-dualistic viewpoint, or state of consciousness.
in this post, the author has combined Christianity, psychology, and politics into a sort of rote...it is a type of oneness thesis and I enjoyed it. it is I think, a sign of our changing society of which I've been noticing many.
alysia
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this question starts off the dialogue:

If the point of the Christian faith is for people to be whole, what does that mean? Can people be whole and still be against gays and lesbians? Can people be whole while distancing themselves from poverty and the poor?

Dear B,

Your questions get to the heart of my understanding of the Christian gospels. When I use the word "whole," I am trying to put substance into the fourth gospel's definition of Jesus' purpose, "I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly." My thinking is informed by the struggle to survive that I believe is implanted in every living thing but that comes into self-consciousness and choice only in human beings. Plants turn to the sunlight, conscious animals respond to a threat to their survival with the instinct of fight or flight, but self-conscious creatures install survival as their highest value and thus become overtly self-centered. If survival is my primary goal, I judge every person and every deed by the effect that person or deed has on my ability to survive, so I engage in the constant act of enhancing my survival ability by diminishing that of others. The self-centered nature of human life was in early Christian history understood as the product of "the fall" from our original perfection and was called "original sin." So long as my primary agenda is survival, I cannot be whole. I am not free. I am not able to live for others, to love beyond my boundaries or to discover the freedom just to be. So, in order to become human, in order to become whole, human life must transcend its survival mentality. Wholeness is thus a synonym for being fully human, which I define as transcending survival in the cause of being.

With that definition I find it impossible to combine wholeness with any other human emotion that is "against," to use your word, the "being" of another. I regard "being" to be a description of the "givens" of a person's life, such as race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. The whole person cannot be against the being of homosexual beings, but the whole person can oppose any behavior pattern of either homosexual persons or heterosexual persons that diminishes the life of another, which seems to me to include any forced sexual act, all promiscuity, pimping, prostitution, any act of child abuse, etc. I see no evidence that suggests that the proclivity to diminish another through sexual behavior is any more prevalent in homosexual persons than it is in heterosexual people. This is an act of personal decision making.

When you move to the issue of distancing yourself from poverty and the poor, personal decision making is joined with corporate action of both the state and larger communities. I do not see how an individual can make work on poverty successful without the action of the state other than as a witness in the public arena raising consciousness and by the act of simplifying your own personal lifestyle. A better leveling of the society between the rich and the poor can be accomplished by taxation politics, by which I mean graduated income taxes, inheritance taxes and, to a much lesser degree, taxes on consumption, though that is the most regressive tax of all. Yet a government that taxes too heavily destroys initiative and the entrepreneurial talent that builds wealth for all. So a balance must be found. In recent years, our society has widened the gap between wealth and poverty to dangerous proportions. We have expanded the percentage of the tax on the income of the poor and the middle class while lowering the percentage of tax on the income paid by the wealthy. We have expanded the multiple between the CEO's salary and a worker's salary by some 5000% in the last 20 years. This gap widened during the eight years of President Clinton and galloped out of all boundaries during the eight years of President George Bush.

An aroused populace is one way to address this issue. Self interest also requires that the economic and political system of a nation must serve the vested interest of all the people if it wants to survive. I do not believe that any nation or even the stability of the world will survive if half of its people are starving when the other half are dieting. So on this issue, personal and corporate action must coalesce.

Thank you for your question.
– JS

glad u got something out of it Lucy. I liked the way he starts out with religion and ties it into the whole of society, with the survival thing.

I've been studying the 7 chakras..the first 3 or lower chakras have to do with the ego, which has to do with personal power, sex, and survival instincts.
the fourth chakra is the heart. once the heart becomes open and active, the issues are not longer just about surviving..or competing.

love, alysia