Religion and Our Evolutionary Journey

"The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon"

The Great Flaring Forth

Welcome to a  New Year, welcome to 2013 - as we continue the great evolutionary journey of the Cosmos and Human Family.  A great exciting and unfolding Journey of mystery engaging with and relating to the Mystery at the heart of creation..

This is a journey that began almost 14 Billion years ago  with what Cosmologists call the Big Bang or the Great Flaring Forth. From this initial event the great unfolding of our Cosmic Journey began. We do not know what caused this Big Bang or Flaring Forth, its origins are shrouded in mystery.  However, thanks to the efforts of our scientists, cosmologists and mystics we are beginning to  both learn and understand a lot more about the origins of this great evolutionary journey.

Mother Earth

About 5 Billion years ago the star we call ' The Sun' came into being and around it evolved our planetary system and from that event our  wonderful Blue Planet was born.

Over the ensuing billions of years, life was created and began to evolve into the wonderful and intricate diversity that inhabits our marvellous  planet. This is planet that sustains and nourishes a wide diversity of life, including our human species. Truly Earth is our Mother!.

Now, as previously stated, the origins of all this is still a mystery. However, for those of us who believe in the Spirit, we attribute  the origins of all this to  a Mystery or Source  and this we often call God.   Now it is important to both recognise and acknowledge that this  Mystery or Source  has been present throughout the 14 billion years of known evolution. In the Christian Tradition this is clearly stated in the opening verses of John's Gospel ( see John 1 : 1-5 )

Slowly over the billions of years creation evolved and several million years ago the ancestors of our present human family first walked the earth. Our species Homo Sapiens Sapiens  came about around 250,000 years ago and the ancestors of the majority of us arose on the continent we call Africa.  From there, we began our great human journey. This was a journey that has taken us from Africa to all corners of our Planet and, in the last century to the Moon.

This brings me to the quote above . This is a shortened version of a famous  Buddhist story about a nun who asks the Master to explain to her about truth. The Master replies ....

Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?"

For me, this has an important meaning, a bit like ' Don' t mistake the violin for the music'  Because  very often modern humanity  and particularly Religions can fall prey to this mistake. Let us return to our Evolutionary Journey and particularly to the journey of our species.  First of all the overall Journey.

If the  Mystery or Source  is at the heart of all this creative evolution, then it existed prior to the Big Bang ( See John 1: 1-5)  and has continued to be present throughout time. Consequently, God ( the Mystery or Source) has been present with humanity for millions of years and also for the past 250,000 years of our species. Let us look a bit more closely at this period.

We know that the formal Religions or Faith Traditions  have only been around for about the past 5000 years. These have mainly arisen out of the Patriarchal Societies that sprung up in the past 8 to 10 thousand years. Yet Spirituality and the sense of the Sacred Presence has been around for very much longer. We have evidence that goes back about 70,000 years - 14 times as long as the Faith Traditions. We can surmise that Spirituality probably is an inherent attribute of our human species. Hence, this  which support the concepts of the inherent attraction  of the Mystery and the ever present ' Presence' of Mystery with our human family. The ancient mystics remind us of this with the quote ' I let you find me so that you might seek me'  . This  speaks of a God or Source to whom human beings are inherently attracted to and by. It supposes that there is an inherent mutual attraction between the Mystery and us, as seekers who are mystified. In the Hindu Tradition, the oldest of the formal Faith Traditions, there are many references to this in-built attraction to and search for the Mystery ( or as Hindu's call it the  Absolute Reality ). One of the most famous are these lines from the Hindu Upanishads

   Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place,

when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.

Maitri Upanishad

So for the vast majority of time, our species have had a sense of the Mystery, a sense of the Divine. Spirituality is almost certainly as old an our human family. Therefore, the formal Religions or Faith Traditions are, to but it in the vernacular 'new kids on the block'   Now, this is not meant to imply that Religion has no place, it is merely to place it in both a context and in perspective. Long before the 'birth' of Religion there existed a sense of the sacred and the inherited Universal Wisdom of the ancient aboriginal peoples of the world. Long before we has Scriptures and before we had written languages, we had the oral traditions handed down for over a hundred thousand years. So our species were relating to and with this sense of the sacred before Scriptures existed.  What religion does is to formalise a set of beliefs about and experiences of the Mystery is a specific cultural setting and context. Thus we have a wide variety of religions , each with a view of the Sacred. In essence, religions are ' fingers that point at the moon' , or as Gandhi once remarked ' Religions are different paths up the mountain'

Our knowledge of the Mystery is 'limited'. Our Scriptures, traditions and the experiences of the Mystics, Saints and Sages , of all the Traditions, all help to expand our knowledge of the Mystery. However, they can merely 'point the finger' at the Source or Mystery  of All Life. They are not that Source. Each one of us needs to journey in faith. We each have to set out on our own journey  which ultimately returns us to the Source. Religion can be a great aid and support in this eNdeavour but , if we are not careful, it can also be a hindrance. History is littered with numerous examples of religions clinging to old outmoded theology and thus hindering the Spiritual Pilgrim on the Journey. Like each one of us, Religion and its leaders and followers, need to develop humility .  Humility is a great teacher, it reminds us of how little we really know , how small we are, not only in this vast Cosmos but in relation to the Immense Mystery that lies at the heart of all  creation.  To truly play their part in both guiding and supporting this spiritual journey our religions , along with their adherents, need to reflect on the old saying ' the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon'