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Connection
with God and Humanity
By Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD
www.lesliereynoldsbenns.com
A benefit for practicing confession, defined
as the ferreting out and releasing previously
unconscious or unexamined psychic clutter, we can
then realize our connectedness to the universe.
We human beings are all connected to each
other by virtue of our shared humanity. As
Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently,
In a real sense, all life is inter-related.
All men are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly affects all
indirectly.
And we are all connected with God, or whatever you
call him, her or it, as well as with all creation.
God's spirit resides in us and is, as many religions
articulate, the very breath we breathed at our
birth.
This concept of oneness is central to most world
religions. Christianity uses the image of the
life-giving vine and its branches to illustrate the
nature of this cosmic connection, where Christ is
the vine and we are the branches. All
attributes of Christ are available to flow to the
branches. All attributes are available,
regardless of our levels of consciousness. All
attributes of whatever you call deity are available.
In Tao-ism, the Tao is similar to the
Christian God in that it is also omnipresent and all
powerful. Except that the Tao represents the
way, or the path, to oneness and is similar to the
Buddhist word "dharma."
Buddhism, rather than advocating looking outside
ourselves for God, begins with the assumption of our
oneness, which can only be found by letting go of
expectations as well as the need to chase after the
next experience we believe will produce lasting
satisfaction. Oneness is only attainable by being
present in the moment with whatever is going on.
But to get to that oneness, we must also let go of
our attachment to the past, let go of the clutter we
have collected in the process of living, similar to
Jesus' saying, "Do not worry about tomorrow for
tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has
enough trouble of it's own." (Mt. 6, NIV)
In most Native American religions there is no
separation of the natural world from the world of
the supernatural. This unity is thought to be beyond
the comprehension of mankind and can only be shared
in through the practice of rituals.
At the heart of Hindu theology is the paradox of
unity and diversity. Hinduism has a large
number of individual divinities - 330 million by one
estimate. In it, wisdom tends to be found in
manyness. (The Hindi Sikhs are the exception
believing in a single God.) However underlying
everything that exists, is the eternal, unchanging,
spiritual essence that is called Brahman, in which
all is unified. So ultimately, in this
extraordinarily polytheistic religion God is one.
Just as beneath the incredible variety of human
beings, humanity is ultimately one. God is
many and God is one.
Islam has at its hub the oneness of Allah. He
holds complete control of the universe even to the
most subtle movements of a leaf. "He
knows everything-- past, present and future. When
there was nothing, He was present. When there will
be nothing, He will be present." (Umais Ahmad, www.suite101.com)
One essential difference between Islam and
Christianity is that while Islam accepts the words
of all the prophets of the Bible's Old and New
Testament, it doesn't accept Jesus as the Son of
God, nor believe that he was crucified, but that he
was taken directly into heaven. Islam, like
Christianity, that is, the Christianity reflected in
the words of Christ in the New Testament, is open to
distortions, or in this vernacular, clutter.
This clutter can lead mankind to separateness and
away from connectedness.
If we are clutter-free as the result of looking
inside and releasing previously hidden or unexamined
material in our psyche and take a moment to be still
with nothing going on, we do come to realize our
connection with all humanity on an ongoing basis
rather than a momentary insight. We can
see that there is no essential difference between us
and our fellow human beings. We are
irrefutably a part of God.
Excerpted from Confession is Good for More
than the soul http://www.confessionisgood.com
www.confessionisgood.com
Dr Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD, author,
most recently of Confession is Good for More
than the Soul. Speaker, trainer, workshop leader,
community activist and wedding officiator.
Sign up for a FR*E*E
4-part mini e-course - CREATING YOUR OWN REALITY
- at http://www.lesliereynoldsbenns.com
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