The Need for a New Vision

I write about an ulti­mate or all-consuming con­cern or pas­sion that takes over one’s life and leads to total, com­plete sur­ren­der of one’s entire being act­ing in accord with the object of faith. Faith is devoid of belief in and of itself. It is much deeper and prob­a­bly an innate char­ac­ter of human­ity. How can we live with­out faith in some­thing? be it our­selves, the state, cap­i­tal­ism, reli­gion, dogma, creed, tra­di­tion, or whatever?

As for myself, my con­sum­ing pas­sion is the God-dess, Radha-Krishna, Yugal Kishor. I often say, “I don’t believe in God-dess, I expe­ri­enced God-dess.” The thing is this. I had many expe­ri­ences of the divine. I touched holi­ness. I had dreams and visions. These things kept me going along with my ongo­ing exper­inces of the divine in every­day life. How­ever, fran­klly, none of these expe­ri­ences are com­pletely defin­i­tive and con­vinc­ing. I expe­ri­enced var­i­ous aspects of God-dess and they are all real. When one is deal­ing with the Absolute, the Ground of All Being, God-dess, in faith, what is really being asked is total sur­ren­der and absorp­tion in God-dess’s ser­vice for eternity.

Now, if I’m going to spend eter­nity some­where, doing some­thing, serv­ing some­body, it had all bet­ter really be cool and totally bliss­ful and engag­ing for me so that I’m really lov­ing it. I have been totally charmed and cap­ti­vated by the beau­ti­ful Radha Krishna leela. How­ever, the Indian sto­ries also chafe my West­ern psy­che and I think I don’t really want to live like that for eter­nity. So, since I have faith in God-dess and not just faith in cer­tain sto­ries about God-dess, my faith is not dis­turbed if I ques­tion those sto­ries and try to imag­ine them in a way that is more rel­e­vant for myself and per­haps some oth­ers. Faith is health­ier when it is dynamic and not sta­tic. To be dynamic doubt needs to be encour­aged and a ques­tion­ing enquir­ing spirit engaged in fur­ther ellu­ci­da­tion of the unl­lim­ited glo­ries of God-dess.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 08:46 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.