Thoughts for Interfaith Week

Thoughts for Interfaith Week

It’s Interfaith Week and we are called to contemplate oneness and unity.

To have a sense of oneness and unity is a wonderful ideal but difficult, for it’s inevitable that we live in a world of duality: good and bad, right and wrong, them and us, enemies and friends, like and dislike.  Yet that is only the world of our own perceptions.  “Everything is perception,” says Noam Chomsky, “and we don’t know what perception is.”  But we do know what they do.  Our perceptions colour all that we encounter in the world.  They are the lenses of the mind, sometimes enabling us to perceive in sharp focus, though usually with some level of distortion.

Perception begins in the body.  There is no colour in our environment.  Colour is what our brains do with the light when its frequencies are altered as it is reflected from objects.  Even the edges of objects are defined for us by a function in the part of the brain which gives us vision.  We perceive of reality what we need to in order to navigate our way in a world of duality.

That’s fine at the physical level, but perception at the level of the mind can become so distorted by memories of previous experiences, the influences of family and culture, and our own inherited predispositions, that we may have but a tenuous hold on reality and for some, little or no hold at all.

This is the byproduct of our dysfunctional ego, and the dysfunctional ego in the human species is the source of every evil in the world.

So far in the history of humankind all attempts to curb the power of the dysfunctional ego have, in large degree, failed.  The current wars in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen and elsewhere, along with the daily reporting of murder, extortion and cruelty, demonstrate this all too clearly.  Our religions have had, perhaps, the greatest influence on the mitigation of evil and yet even they are contaminated by the divisive ego, internally and in our interreligious relationships.

Our beliefs can influence what we do, but it is what we do that is most important.  Beliefs can distort our perceptions, so we need to know what belief means.  Too often it means ‘believing about’ certain religious concepts.  For such beliefs people have been willing to kill and be killed, to torture, maim and shun others.  Beliefs can therefore arise just as readily from the ego and its misperceptions as they can from genuine religious or spiritual experiences.

One phenomenon, common throughout the world, that gives me hope is this: that most people are doing good things to most other people most of the time – religious or not.  Evil is an anomaly.  “Serenity and peace is the norm of the earth,” as Lau Tzu put it.

“There is a place in the soul which has never been wounded,” declared John O’Donoghue.  This place is beyond beliefs and perceptions.  It is the very source of life itself.  It is love.  The reason that most people do good is because the enabling principle of the entire universe is love.  That love, of which everything is an aspect, is as much us as we are of it, as most of the mystics of all religions have said through the centuries.  Love is that which enables every quantum particle of every atom of every molecule of every cell in our bodies.  Constantly our bodies seek wholeness and health, even when, or especially when illness strikes us.  The ego also seeks wholeness but so often in the wrong things.  What changes all that is letting go, even of our perceptions and beliefs.  This means stilling the mind and the body and trusting the source of love and wholeness, which lies at the very heart of each one of us, to do its work in us silently and beyond words.  As that influence enables our ego to come to rest, our actions will spontaneously arise from the source that enables all things in life – ‘God ‘.

Brian Holley is a member of Herefordshire Interfaith Group and CANA (Christians Awakening to New Awareness).  He describes himself as a ‘spiritual tramp and a religious has been.’