Unity

I have been working hard to maintain some kind of balance. I have been calling myself a rationalist and a mystic, a skeptic and a believer. I have held fast to the idea that the religious imagination is irrational, but that one can have a spiritual attention that does not need to be governed by any rational faculty to still be a valuable part of our lives.

I have argued, often vehemently, that things like Intelligent Design do more to damage the religious life than the scientific one. The need by some to square spiritual beliefs with scientific truths is faulty and damages our ability to integrate mythological stories, rituals, and religious experiences We turn mythology into history and it stops being eternal. We live for our immortality rather than be as immortal in the mortal realms of our experience. By this I mean, fail to see all life as holy, as part of an eternal unity, focusing rather on the hope of eternity.

But then I read David Bohm, and I understand how rational and spiritual modes of thought can be intergrated. It doesn't have to do with proofs or making those truths of the natural world we understand through science have religious meaning, and it certainly doesn't have to do with taking our religious stories and showing how they are literally true in the same way. It has to do with recognition of unity, of a greater universal principal through which our lives are activated and all things arise. Here is David Bohm: