Ed's spirituality, And yours. Options

[Godiva]

I know I'm a nOOb, but this issue is one of the reasons I remain at least somewhat interested in Live's music and visionary nature... and I was wondering what the general attitude of posters on this board is regarding such matters.

I don't know a whole lot about what Ed subscribes to, I am more of an atheist-leaning agnostic. However, I find Ed's outlook on life refreshing... if one is to be a theist, then his kind of theism is the kind I can relate to and the kind I think can actually do some good in the world.

What about you guys? Have Live's songs connected with your spirit? Influenced your belief? What are your tendencies in things of a metaphysical nature?

I left Christianity in my early years of college. I found Live's older music extremely helpful to me during that time in my life (even though no one was playing those songs on the radio anymore).

[FishOutaWater]

I have spent a fairly decent amount of time studying many of the worlds religions and have seen through my own studies of Hinduism and vedic teachings, Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Juddaism, and “mystical” traditions of Christianity and other modern, academic studies of Christianity and the meaning of Jesus’s life and message (see the bookshelves of your local bookstore for the works of Borg, Eisenman, Crosson, Vermes, Pagels etc. and the Gospel of Thomas, the Dead Sea scrolls and other ancient discovered texts) that all of them have many, many things in common when you strip away the window dressing (i.e. traditions and labels for the beliefs). And what I have personally realized is that all world religions seem to be just different rivers leading to the same ocean.

With respect to main-line, establishment Christianity, you have to do some studying to realize that the beliefs and dogmas and traditions, and the story of belief and salvation and heaven and hell, may not be the only (or correct) understanding of what Jesus was all about, and maybe the idea that “belief in” Jesus is the only path to “salvation” may not be a correct understanding of what Jesus talked about. If you study the political, social, economic and religious context of Jesus’s time, and you study the timing and context of when the 4 gospels (and other gospels and writings) were written, edited, translated and retold, and look at what Jesus’s parables and teachings such as the Lord’s prayer and the sermon on the mount and the golden rule, etc. were all about, I think you can arrive at an understanding of Jesus’s message that was not all about him and his death and resurrection, but rather about loving others as yourself, being compassionate, being non-judgmental and not discriminating, seeking social justice and spiritual transformation, not placing the religious “law” above love and compassion, and not being attached to riches, or status.

I believe that there IS a unifying theory among all of those religions that make them all the same. That principle is that attachment to external things that bring us pleasure and aversion to external things that give us pain and clinging and mental formations and duality and judging and separation are all the antithesis of the light of the creator. Our ego mind creates attachment to people, places, things, feelings and experiences that make us feel positive, and aversion to those things that we perceive as negative, and it uses that external object referral to create a separate self sense. This endless cycle of attachment and aversion to things that we crave, creates personal and inter-personal suffering. No matter what you obtain, you are still not happy if you derive happiness from obtaining those things. Different spiritual paths call this the ego, the vessel, the satan, samsara or other terms.

But the transformational path to liberation, salvation, awakening, the “kingdom of God” etc. is the recognition of and unhooking from this ego mind, and the apprehension of, and awakening to, the big universal consciousness that has no birth or death (call that God or light or spirit or consciousness or salvation or the buddha mind or whatever) through prayer, meditation practice and a practice of compassion, wisdom and altruism. This light of the creator is right here and right now. This concept really is common among all of those traditions.


From the factual, scientific perspective, have you ever just sat and pondered the fact that everything, including ourselves, is LITERALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY all just one big flow of the same force of energy that just appears to us as matter and form. That makes us all One. That gives a whole new meaning to “you are my brother”, “do unto others as you would have done unto you” and “you are the world” and “we are all one”. Where do we go when we die? Back into the cosmic energy source. In fact, the eastern mystics would say that we are not born and we do not die. Those are illusions.

Perhaps the best metaphor for me about our true nature of reality under the theory of modern physics and the concept that we are all one, is this metaphor that I have heard many times. We can look at a wave in the ocean and identify it as a wave. And the wave identifies itself as a wave, separate from the ocean. But the wave is water just as the ocean, and it is the ocean, one in the same. The wave can crash onto the beach and “die” into the sand, but where does it go? It doesn’t go anywhere. It returns to the ocean. But it never left the ocean because it was, all along, not separate from the ocean, but one with the ocean. There is no separate wave from the ocean. Similarly, we now know that everything in the universe is one big pool of pulsating energy. The same ONE form of energy and the same source of energy exists as the sole component of all things. This is what modern scientists understand about our universe. That is the ocean in the metaphor. And we are waves. Expressions of the universe that are waves of the energy. And we see ourselves as separate waves. Separate from everything else. But we are one with the ocean. We arise from it and return to it and we are the same as it, all along. We may lose the form of a wave (when we die), but it is then that we realize that we were the ocean all along.

What if we took away all of that which is created in our minds as Krishnamurti and Buddhism and Hinduism and Kabbalah and all forms of spirituality suggest that we do? What if we are no longer controlled by our ego mind. What would we be left with? Those spiritual traditions say that we would be left with pure, unadulterated consciousness. A sense of oneness with all things. No beliefs that I am right and he is wrong. No prejudice. No anger. No war. No judgment. No rushing. No attachment. No fear. No division. I am the same as you. I can love you just as I can love myself or my son or my daughter. No religion. No belief that something happened 2,000 years ago as a sacrifice for original sin committed by Adam, so God can forgive those who form a belief in their minds that it happened, and everyone else who doesn’t believe that will be punished by a God who sits in judgment. No God who wants a jihad of death and destruction against infidels. From this oneness, un-negotiated and un-contaminated by thought and conditioning, a person could have only one response to the world... compassion and love.

And I think that this could be the oneness and love that Ed has written about from MJ all the way up to and including SFBM.

And when I listen to SFBM, I personally hear many references to this love and state of presence and consciousness and awakeing in songs like Love Shines, Get Ready, Wings, All I Need and You Are Not Alone.

[LiveOne]

Wow - great post, Fish. I hear exactly what you are saying...