People get ready
There's a train a-coming
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don't need no ticket
You just thank the Lord
People get ready
For the train to Jordan
Picking up passengers
From coast to coast
A Homecoming Story
A young child may desire more freedom, but what she lacks in freedom, she makes up for in family connections. Eventually, she comes of age, leaves home, and gains more freedom. She’s still connected to family, but that connection does not interfere with her new found freedom. Desiring even more freedom, she goes off to university, earns her PhD, and obtains employment and a compensating salary befitting her educational accomplishments. In other words, she has earned her freedom, but in the process, she has left family connections behind, or, perhaps a better way to say this is she left behind the stifling aspect of freedom-denying family connections. This liberated lady, soon thereafter, weds, has children, and begins anew this process which sustains life and her family linage. But, more importantly, freedom, at every turn, requires a break with the past. Sociologically speaking, these significant breaks with the past are called “rites of passage.” But, for the purpose of this homecoming journey (this blog), freedom generated “rites of passage” both define and produce new dimensions of freedom – a change in kind, not degree, of freedom.
We are born into a world of knowledge and knowing, and knowledge expands as a consequence of time, but the real throttle of this knowing process--the actualization of what is unique in human freedom, lies in our capacity to actualize our own non-being. Simply put, every time we ask a question we actualize in the question our own non-being. Whether we like it or not our knowledge expands, but when we ask a question we accelerate this expansion. Our passive experience of time does not produce a great deal of knowledge, but because we bring the logical relationships implicit in freedom’s structure to bear on an event, we are free to create judgments (and the values which follow from those judgments) concerning the significance and probable cause of an event. These judgments are determined valid across a continuum that ranges from sensation divorced from theory, at one end, to sensation reinforced by the most advanced and respected scientific theory available. There are no guarantees that the answers we propose in response to our questions will match up with corresponding events, yet scientists have a pretty good track record when it comes to the discovery and confirmation of these answers. In experience that is not accountable to scientific confirmation, however, we determine, via our judgments and emotions, appropriate behavior. It is at this level of preferred behavior, this level of "willed consciousness participation" (as it is called by Owen Barfield), that we encounter our potential for the highest order of expressed freedom—our ethical and moral judgments.
In our ability to step outside of our “mental space” (break with our past) and ask questions, we acquire the capacity to overcome the obstacles that restrict our freedom. When this ability was first acquired there was not much that separated humans from other animals, but after 300,000 years of actualizing freedom’s latent potential, we, the species Homo sapiens, are enjoying a wealth of freedom(s). The history of civilization records, albeit partially, the actualization of this “coming of age process.” To put this in the perspective of our little miss above—think of all the hard work and sacrifice that she put into her struggle to obtain her PhD; her task accomplished, she was rewarded with emotional, psychological, and financial freedom. Winning freedom is never easy. It begins with an obstacle and, with hard work and some luck, it ends with more freedom. There is one certainty that is inescapable, however; freedom is the rock--and we are all Sisyphus; and we remain as such until the end of the journey, the journey home.
Homecoming Train—All Aboard
As was pointed out in the “about section” of this blog, the retelling of my own homecoming journey is also about a more universal journey, a journey through the “stranger in each and everyone of us,” a journey back to the source of what it means to be a human being. During the three years I spent on the road from ’69 to ’73, I had no clue that I was on board this Homecoming train, but, in Hawaii, the clues started piling up. It wasn’t until the 1980’s, however, that I discovered that I was not alone on this train; and, like it or not, aware or not, all the rest of us are on board this train too!
Listed below are some of the more important “drop off--pick up” stations this train passes through on its way to its final destination. Let the words-- “The Pains of”-- precede each train stop; for instance, the first stop, “Love”, becomes “The Pains of Love” (The Pains of--the Buddha’s first noble truth).
1. Love—All aboard.
2. Void—All aboard.
3. Prejudice/ignorance—All aboard.
4. Percept Is A Product—All aboard.
5. Death/the inevitable—All aboard.
6. Knowledge—All aboard.
7. Science/method/structure/freedom—All aboard.
8. Religion/the journey inward—All aboard.
9. We’re not in Kansas anymore/the rediscovery of our lost identity—All aboard.
10. Human meaning/freedom—All aboard.
11. The Voice of Contingency/the voice that binds self to society, others, and God All aboard.
Two excellent observers peered into the abyss; both saw and described God differently. Hopefully, over time, this blog will make clear why the two observers below are describing the one and only God.
“The mind and the world are opposites, and vision arises where they meet. When the mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside. When the world and the mind are both transparent, this is true vision. And such understanding is true understanding.” Bodhidharma
“That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you–in the fullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life.”
Martin Buber
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