COMMON GROUND

It is with great interest that I have read the blogs and responses to Mykyls' writings. I wasn't there for the original conversation that prompted the intense emotions that seemed to grow out of that conversation and it's perhaps good that I wasn't present.

I had been brought up in the church (protestant) and raised my children in the church also, believing that was the "right" thing to do. We learn to be parents from the parents who raised us. I can't say I wish I hadn't raised my children in the church because I know they picked up a few pieces of guidelines for behavior, belief systems, values and morals from what they learned there. At the very least, they learned enough to have something to compare to what they believed on their own. They also saw and heard things that formed different levels of attachment, or lack thereof, from people in churches we attended and from me. (Yes, my friends, I too am human and left my share of deep scars on my children).

As my children grew up, so did I and after they left home I began to really think for myself about what I experienced, saw and heard from the church, its members and leaders. I began to remember what it was like to attend church with my mother and it wasn't a pleasant source of memories. I began to withdraw from the sanctified walls and standing on the outside what I saw was a facade, a false facade, that guards its secrets beneath a robe of religiosity. I walked away from that church and away from organized religion 15 years ago and have grown more spiritually since I made that decision than I had any time since my childhood and through my young adulthood, even though I was very active in many church organized events.

My partner and I attend a discussion forum called Common Ground, founded by two men who have a dedication to world peace and who try to help people understand the fundamental beliefs of all religions. They believe that if we could understand other religious or spiritual perspectives we'd find a commonality that would surely lead to global peace. When you look at the history of war in the world, you will invariably find religious differences somewhere at the core.

When I have written about "going within" or finding your path, what I am largely trying to say is that there is a commonality amongst all mankind....a "knowing" that's unexplainable except as it relates to some sort of belief system by which we live our lives. From my perspective there is no right or wrong, good or bad, sinners or saints. There is only the is-ness of our existence. Those who would destroy the world trade towers, bomb a harbor full of military ships filled with sea men, strap bombs to themselves and step into a subway at rush hour only to kill themselves and as many others as possible seem evil to civilized mankind. How can those kinds of destructive measures be reviled when what they've been taught from a very young age is that if you die for a religious cause, you will be immediately be sitting at the right hand of God? It's all they know and for those of you who are in the process of recovery from religious teachings that bent and shaped your young life are in the same boat. We've been taught to "honor" our mothers and fathers, even though some of us have known unspeakable abuse, neglect, and dishonoring from those we are suppose to honor. During the days of the Crusades, women were burned at the stake for healing with herbs and ceremony not condoned by the church. Countries were attacked and villages wiped out because they wouldn't bow to the Catholic God. Religious fanatics stole land and murdered thousands who refused to be converted to whatever belief system ruled the day. The United States became what we are as a nation via the initial invasion, rape, murder and annihilation of a people dedicated to the preservation of mother nature who killed animals only as needed, using every part of the animal as possible for food, clothing and tools, or cleared only as much land as they needed to grow crops that would feed their people. When they moved on they left the place they had used in better condition than when they initially settled. Now we rape the land, kill for sport, use whatever space, land, air in any way we please and when it becomes too polluted and depleted we leave land fills (dumps), broken concrete and blacktop, empty buildings that decay while housing rats and the retched refuse of our population that somehow are unacceptable as part of the human race. The rich become richer and the poor become poorer and each are disgusted with the other. All this in the name of civilization. All this out of pride of being better than others in our own nation and certainly better than undeveloped countries, who of course would benefit from "civilization" but are too backwards to know any better. We are a nation united, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Hmmmmm. And we are civilized to boot. I somehow don't feel very proud of being an American.

Our commonality lies at the deepest level of ourselves, not as Americans, but as homo-sapiens in a world full of other homo-sapiens, all from a common source with so much promise and with the same depth of self should any choose to go there. I have found a path that makes all this understandable and do-able. I've listened to lectures at Common Ground, heard tapes from some of the most spiritual (not religious) people of our time, gone to countless lectures/discussions in which has been expressed concern that religion, as an institution, has failed us and given that the enormous, heart-warming strong desire for a spirituality that will have meaning and direction and acceptance of everyone rather than a chosen, proven few. There is a refreshing movement from religion to spirituality that just might save us from ourselves in spite of ourselves. I find my path in the Tao Te Ching. I am also a pagan (you might look that up in a good dictionary - Concord Concise is a good one). Others find it in Buddhism or Zen or any number of possibilities, to find the way to the inner self where the questions to all answers can be found and the circle of life continues. Go into your search with acceptance and love for all, including yourself and go in peace my friends. Nemaste