BEING SPIRIT

We (humankind) are tripartite Beings. We are a Physical Being that interacts with the three-dimensional world around us, limited in our interactions by our five senses, six if you include our linear sense of time. In a computer analogy, the Physical Being would be our “User Interface,” or UI.
We are Beings of the Mind. Our minds rule our senses and our interactions with the perceived world around us. Our minds do the thinking and remembering for us. I like to think of the Mind as the Operating System to carry on the computer analogy.
Then the third and highest part of our being is our “Spirit.” The spirit is the “Me,” or “I” that owns and operates my Body and my Mind. The “I am” which I will discuss in more depth later.
So I am an “Awareness” that I call “Me,” and I operate my Mind and Body as I see fit, sometimes with great success and sometimes with less than spectacular results.
As Spirits, we have long noted that there seems to be a balance in the world-at-large of what we perceive as good and evil. We see that we maintain a balance of good thoughts and deeds with bad thoughts and deeds. We like good so much that we tend to award and promote ‘good behavior.’ At the same time, we are so attracted to doing bad things in order to see if we can get away with them, or to find an easy path to ‘success’ that we also promote and pass down ‘bad behavior.’ To simplify, the twin concepts of Good and Evil have been passed down from generation to generation in various forms throughout the history of Mankind in order to maintain a balance.
Maybe it all started with something like this: At some indefinable point in pre-history long, long ago and probably in a community cave somewhere in Northern Africa, Mankind first became aware of his capacities for committing both good and evil thoughts and acts. He sat down one night with some of his friends around a fire in their nice, warm cave and began to discuss these things that he had become aware of within himself and found out that his friends were having these experiences as well. They discussed what it all meant and how it all might have come about, so one of them decided he should ‘write this shit’ down before they forgot it and thus both Writing and Philosophy were born.
As time went by, Mankind got frustrated with not being able to explain satisfactorily to himself, his friends, or his wife exactly what this all meant. At the same time, he had spent so much of his time thinking all of this over that he was running out of food and the other basic necessities of life, like firewood and leather for his wife to make clothes to the point that she was really getting bitchy at him over it.
He came up with a new idea! He called all of his friends over and told them that after much thought, deliberation and soul-searching, he had come up with a solution to the whole ‘good and evil’ question. His friends were beside themselves wondering what his solution might be, his wife was standing nearby with her arms folded, listening skeptically, as wives do. He told them that the solution was that there was a 'Greater Being!'  Greater than all of them! He explained that this 'Being' had created them and had ordained that they should be both good and evil in order for them to grow both Spiritually and Philosophically and have a Balance in their lives. His friends were amazed at such a thought! They wanted to know who this Being was?! Where this Being was?! How had they not all seen this Being before?! Of course his wife, walking off to the back of the cave in disgust, said, “Puuh-leeaase!!” . He told his friends that he would have to get back to them about this radical new idea and so, satisfied for the moment, they all went off to sleep with their families, except him, he went to sleep on the rock-shelf near the opening of the cave because his wife was severely pissed at him by this point. A week or so later, he and his friends went out hunting at about an hour before dawn. They were asking him if he’d come up with any ideas as to who this God-fellow was. Just at that moment the sun came up over the horizon. In a fit of inspiration that would plague us all forever-after, he pointed at the sun and said, “There! There is our 'Greater Being' who created us all!... He's telling me that He will only communicate to the rest of you through me.” Quickly, he added the part that he had been thinking of to cure his own problems at home, “In exchange for my service in interacting with 'God' on your behalf, you will only have to pay me a tithe of 10% of all of your earnings!” Amazingly enough, they all agreed to this! He was very proud of himself! He had answered the 'God Question' and gotten food and clothing for his family at no cost to himself. Thus did Religion come into being. His wife was also very proud because now she had prestige among the other wives who created envy in order to express their feelings toward her elevated status. This also engendered gossip, as a by-product.
For a long time Mankind was happy with the Sun as Supreme Being. But later, as Mankind’s friends asked more questions and their children came along, he invented Theology and the Philosophical study of Divinity to further muddy the waters and ensure his job-security.
On a separate note, one of his friends came up with the associated idea of Governance of their cave and thus was Religion’s handmaiden, Politics, created when he convinced the rest of the cave-dwellers to ‘elect’ him as Chief. Of course he had to induct a system of ‘taxes’ so that he could devote all of his time to efficiently running the cave society. OK, back to my original thought…
Through the Millennia, afterwards, Mankind worshiped many different 'Gods,' in as many different ways, always searching for that indefinable “Supreme Being” that was our “Father,” “Creator” and generally all around Good Guy.
Today, we have continuing arguments over just who or what this 'Supreme Being is,' whether It’s the Christian God (modeled on the Sun), the Muslim God (modeled on the Moon), the Hindu Gods (modeled on both of the above along with various critters), the God or Gods of countless other religions, past and present, or whether He/She/It even exists at all. Atheists love to point out that you can’t define God empirically so It must not exist. Deists counter that God cannot be defined by scientific methods so It does exist but conveniently outside the realm of Human Science or Logic and the arguments go on and on, ad nauseam.
I am fairly certain that, as of this writing, there has never been any Scientific way to define exactly what it is that separates Humanity from the rest of the Mammalian population, but something does. We call it the “Human Spirit.” Can the Human Spirit really be measured using scientific method? It’s the part of us all that defines who we are, the “I am” in each of us. The part that makes us continue on despite great odds against us. The part of us that continually seeks answers, that quests for Enlightenment.
According to the Bible, Moses once asked God what His name was. God replied, “I AM THAT I AM.” We like to shorten that to “The Great I AM,” or just “I AM.” Now, a lot of people today like to think that since our ancestors did not have McDonald's, Starbucks, Malls, Massive Inflation, Big Government, traffic jams, or most of the other amenities that we take for granted every day, that somehow they were stupid, backwards, ignorant and smelly. I submit to you that, fundamentally, Mankind has not changed in thousands of years. In fact, we are no smarter or less superstitious than the cave men that I started this out with. Moses, regardless of where you stand on the issue of religion, was a great thinker and philosopher of his time. Pretty impressive for a goat-herd and purported one-time Prince of Egypt. So, back to “I AM.” Let’s look at that for a moment. What was he trying to say to us? How does “I AM” make sense in any rational way? Here’s what I think. We are all, as individuals, lesser “I am.” But! We tend to shorten the name Moses passed down, “I AM” rather than “I AM THAT I AM.” What I think he was saying is that we are ever-growing, ever seeking. We are best defined as “I am that I may be.” Moses was saying that in his view, 'God' is grown… Spiritually. That It has no need to seek, to explain, that It not only has the answers to all of life’s mysteries, but that It is the answer. Knowing God is knowing all that is. “I AM THAT I AM,” indeed. Moses was expressing the fundamental growth of the Human Spirit and the goal we should reach for. He set a 'God' as the example and benchmark.
The Ancients knew and understood that we are Spiritual Beings, that we are constantly seeking answers. That we have a need, as humans, to strive to understand both our Physical World and the Spiritual World of our minds and only in that way can we grow and mature. “No pain, no gain” as the saying goes.
Religions might have come into being in order to give us a 'Perfect Spirit Model' to reach for, to measure our own imperfect spirits against. Intentional or not, it worked on so many levels and it still does, to a great but lessening extent. In function, it unites groups of people into 'Societies,' and having different religions guarantees that we will have the contention (pain) that we need in order to develop to our full potential as a Species. It will continue to work until we realize that there is only one race, the Human Race, that we are all in this together and that we don’t have to be able to label, define, or understand everything and it is really OK if someone else disagrees with our point of view. Once we reach that point, Humankind will begin the next phase of evolutionary development.
Humanity separates itself along National, Religious, Social and Ethnic boundaries which are ALL artificial and demeaning to us as a sentient species. But then, Humanity is a fairly young sentient species and all playpens need walls.
Imagine the potential that Humanity has available once we realize all of this and put our “childhood” behind us. In the meantime, we will continue to have division and strife along Ethnic, Religious and Political Boundaries until we can grow past this stage of our development.
So, does a separate God really exist? The truth is, I don’t really know, no one does. I have no idea and can’t have any idea short of a ‘Divine Revelation.’ Neither can anyone else, with the possible exception of Televangelists or the Muslim Extremist Mullahs. At least they all tell us that they know that God exists and that It conveniently exists according to their particular model. Personally, I'm completely certain that if It does exist that It is not a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, Buddhist or any other restrictively modeled religion. I strongly suspect that 'God' wouldn't be Religious at all! I sincerely doubt that God would attend Jewish Synagogue, B’Nai Brith, or Pentecostal tent meetings or that It particularly recommends one of these over any other.
To my mind, God would be about Spiritual Growth, about learning to understand and accept who and what we all are and that we are all here in this life together and that this is the only chance we get at it. If there is a Heaven, it is beyond and after this life. What we get there is beyond what we do or believe here. I'm not saying that all of the above philosophies are completely wrong and a waste of time. They are all methods originally designed to help us understand and grow Spiritually in the same way that children grow physically.
One time, when I was a Mental-Health Counselor, a woman came to me very upset and crying because her Baptist Pastor had told her that since she had been raised Pentecost and had “spoken in Tongues,” there was absolutely no place for her in Heaven. He actually told her that she was damned for the way that she was raised. I was shocked and dismayed, although I really should not have been. She wanted to know what I thought, did I think that she was damned to an, in his words, “Eternity in Hell's Everlasting Pit of Fire” simply because of the way she was raised?
I called her Pastor and invited him to come meet us for coffee or whatever he wanted, my treat. When he arrived and got settled, I asked him to verify that what she said that he had told her was true and correct. When he said that yes it was, I asked him to show me in the Bible where it said that, or to at least give me a chapter. When he wasn't able to do that, I asked him when it was that God had told him in particular what was ‘acceptable’ and what was not and why would God in all of His infinite Wisdom, assign this particular knowledge to him. I pointed out that I thought that if people were worshiping God in a manner that they sincerely believed was the Truthful and Right way to do it, then who was He, or I, to judge that they were wrong? Wouldn't God judge me? He had no answer to that and ended up apologizing to the woman in question. He learned a lesson. The lesson he learned was the same one Jesus taught when he said, “Judge not lest ye be Judged.” Indeed who hasn't got a beam in his or her eye to distort the truth when
they are attempting to judge the mote in another persons eye? So, 'What Would Jesus Do?' In the final analysis, he would probably barf all over his divine sandals and take his road-show to wherever he had originally come from. ©Fred C. Pierce 12/1/2010