AUTHORITY FIGURES II

This blog will be titled, “Authority Figures II” I can't really cover the subject in one blog and even with two blogs I can only introduce a few ideas. [Read Wednesday's blog “Authority Figures I”]

Why do so many have the propensity to worship authority figures? Much of it must be natural. We share a lot with herd animals. We love the company of others. We enjoy sharing the same ideas. We gain a feeling of closeness with those that we agree with. There is so much we cannot know for ourselves we must depend on others.

Don't we have the right to expect our leaders and other authority figures to tell us the truth? I don't know if “right” is the right word. It is clear that we have been misguided for millenniums. I believe there will be a time when we can expect leaders to be truthful; it is not yet.

How did we become so vulnerable to manipulation? We have to go way back to see how it began. When we first began to inhabit bodies, what we now think of as fear was only a defense to protect the body. If we saw something that could injure the body we had an appropriate built in response.

Somewhere a long the line, probably in our hunter and gatherer stage, fear became more generalized and begin to include defense of emotional and mental states. Safety in a more generalized sense became important.

Who was it who began using fear as a control mechanism? In small ways it could have started in any group or family. It could have started with good intentions, warnings given to children and others so they would be cautious.

However it is likely that some leader or would be leader began using fear of others or a situation to get the folks of a like mind to take a certain action. It could have been a member of the tribe who had explored an area no-one had been to, he or she may have decided to fabricate a story of some dangerous beings over the next ridge and he or she had the answer for how to deal with them. This scenario can be spun in many different ways. It is easy to imagine how one could gain power over others and use that power for greater personal status.

Still to get folks to go to war and kill millions of others takes more than fear of bodily injury.

Enter religion. Imagine these early people free to form their own idea of creation. Imagine each individual in their search to understand their being develop their own ideas of their origin. Each would have their own idea of nature and the energy that formed it. Of course, they would share their ideas as they sat around the campfire and a consensus would evolve. However, there would be no pressure to accept the consensus. What we would call religion was their curiosity about life, all of life. People sense they are more than bodies. By observing Nature they know there is an energy much more powerful than their individual existence.

Then along comes some people from the outside; perhaps they come at a vulnerable time, a volcano is exploding or game is scarce, something is making the folks a little concerned about their well being. These new people claim they have this universal energy all figured out. This universal energy is their God and they know how to appeal to Him for anything. They show the folks how to perform certain rituals and how to think in certain ways. When the volcano subsides or the game returns, most the people are pretty certain it was cause and effect.

At first the folks only know the positive side of this new god. There is an ugly side, it seems that this new god wants them to live in a certain way and if they don't, their continued existence is jeopardized.

Now these new people, who came into the tribe, claim that there is a very dangerous group of people living just over the next ravine and their God insist that they be killed to protect the tribe.

Haven't we been going through some version of this craziness for as long as our history has recorded our species? We don't want to do it any longer. We don't need an authority figure to teach us what this Universal Energy is. We can explore it for ourselves. It is good to come together and share our ideas about what god might be. It is not good to adopt somebody else's idea unless it really feels right. Agreement is not necessary or even desirable. We will learn best with a divergence of ideas.

I have developed my own idea [but certainly not original]. I see God as “All that Is” and the Universal Energy as Unconditional Love. We are inseparable from God or “All that Is”.

In a sense it means we know nothing, but I am comfortable knowing nothing if it is all Love. We can spend our time exploring our being. It will be a marvelous adventure. WOW! The Universe is big.

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Love and Peace, Gregg