LSP8: It's the Roots, Not the Fruits, That Matter

The key to finding your reconnection to God is to understand how your brain-soul nexus actually works. 

I'm not a big believer in the idea that you can get closer to God by following a lot of fixed rules or rituals. On the other hand, I know that getting closer to God isn't a free-for-all where you can take any path you want and expect to get where you want to go. In fact, despite all the talk from spiritual teachers (including myself) about journeys and pathways, what matters most is not where your feet and hands go, but whether you can grow eyes and ears on your feet and hands.

This is another way of saying that the brain-soul nexus is a strange yet beautiful synthesis of Heart and Mind, Body and Talent, eyes that can hear, ears that can see, and pathways that travel long distances without your ever leaving home.

In this way of understanding your relationship with God, the metaphor of a garden is easiest to understand.You take seeds of knowledge and truth, you plant them this way and that in the little patch of Creation that belongs to you and you alone (your 3D body and brain), and you make choices about which plants to nourish and which plants to discard from your own garden. Eventually, your choices grow from tentative saplings into sturdy trees that control the environment of your garden. This is the years-long process we call "growing up."

The trees you grow in your inner garden depend on your fixed assumptions about life. Everybody has their own set of fixed assumptions. We aren't always consciously aware that we have these fixed assumptions. But we all have them. Our human brains couldn't function otherwise. 

   In your inner garden, you have more control than you realize over the kind of tree you're growing. But as in any beautiful garden, it takes time and hard work and commitment to keep your garden healthy. Don't listen to any spiritual teachers who promise instant fixes. A pine tree worth remembering doesn't grow from a pine cone overnight. Photo credit JAT.

 

From your sets of fixed assumptions grow related thoughts, beliefs, and actions. So these sets look a lot like a tree. The roots of the tree are your fixed starting assumptions, the beliefs you simply won't budge on. The trunk and all the branches grow outward from the unchanging roots. Mostly what you see when you look at the tree are the upward-reaching branches with their bounty of leaves and blossoms and fruits. But without the roots, there would be no branches, no fruits. The root is what matters. To know what kind of tree you're growing, you have to look at the roots.

The metaphor of the tree doesn't apply just to individuals. It also applies to major belief systems, major ideologies. Every religion and every spiritual tradition on Planet Earth is like a tree. Each religion has its own particular set of roots--the core beliefs it won't budge on. From each set of roots, a distinctive tree grows. The tree grown from Pauline Christian roots is not the same as the tree grown from Mahayana Buddhist roots or the tree grown from Native Canadian Algonkian beliefs. These are different trees. They're NOT, as so many people would like to believe today, different branches of the same tree. They are different trees. They're different because they have vastly different roots, vastly differently starting assumptions.

Albert Einstein really hit the nail on the head when he said, "It is the theory which decides what we can observe." This is such an important statement--such an important truth--that it's on my short list of fixed starting assumptions, the beliefs I won't budge on. Einstein's brilliant observation is one of the roots of the tree I'm trying to describe here.

I see in most of the world's religions some lovely leaves and branches (for example, customs related to community healing and life passages) but in trying to reverse-engineer the process of reconnecting to God, I've looked only at the roots of major religious traditions. What I've seen is that major theories about God have been holding people back in their attempts to know God. It's the theories which have decided what they can observe.

All major world religions start with the assumption that your brain and soul are NOT intimately intertwined with each other in a GOOD way. So people spend their whole lives trying to escape from either their "bad" bodies or their "bad" souls or both.

This is exhausting and frustrating and leads to intense disillusionment, and it's no wonder that many people simply give up on the idea of a loving God.   

The honest truth is that if you insist on trying to find God by climbing trees that are covered in the horrible thorns of distrust in God, you're going to get stabbed and cut and covered in painful scars.

Would it surprise you to know that you have the seeds for a strong and vital connection with God--the seeds for a tree of completeness and wellness--right inside your own biology?

It's there because God is a lot smarter than you've been led to believe.


Addendum September 5, 2018: On August 29, 2018, the Pew Research Center (an American think-tank that carries out public polling and analysis on a wide variety of contemporary topics, including religion) published a new analysis that examines religious beliefs and behaviours. The Religious Typology: A New Way to Categorize Americans by Religion finds seven major religious categories from highly religious to non-religious. What distinguishes the seven groups from each other is their root beliefs--their fixed starting assumptions about God, sacred texts, and the afterlife, as well as morality and spiritual practices. The Pew analysis also reveals the links between these root beliefs and such cultural and social choices as political affiliation. For the record, I would place myself in Pew's "Diversely Devout" category.


For Further Reflection:

Once upon a time, a man and woman lived in a wondrous state of completeness and wellness in a garden created on Planet Earth by God. They knew God, and God knew them. The man and the woman were humble before God, because they knew they were children of God, not incarnations of Source itself. But at the same time, the man and the woman were loved by God and trusted by God. In fact, they were loved by God and trusted by God so much that God asked them to help in the great task of caring for all the life that grew and flourished in the garden.

Something about the way in which God had shaped the bodies of the man and the woman gave these children of God a unique skill, a skill not fully granted to any other creature on Planet Earth. It allowed them to see the fruits of two very special trees that grew in the middle of the garden. One was a tree that bore the fruit of life. The other was a tree that grew the fruit of moral knowledge. Each tree had the potential to show the man and the woman one half of God's face, but only half.

After a time, the man and the woman began to notice the fruit of the tree of moral knowledge was easier to pick and easier to eat than the fruit of the tree of life. The tree of knowledge took less time to cultivate. Its fruit came more often and hung lower to the ground. It showed them many hidden things about how to use and manipulate the tools of Creation. With such knowledge and such tools, they didn't need to bother with the slow-flowering tree of life, which gave them useless things, such as tears and love and music. The man and the woman, drunk on fermented knowledge, felt powerful, like gods themselves.

In their impatience, lured by the promise of godhood through knowledge alone, the man and the woman failed to see that, beneath the garden soil, the two trees were intimately joined together through a network of roots and symbiotic spores and energy flowing back and forth along quiet, enduring pathways that wove together all of Creation. The two trees depended on each other, and, in turn, all the other trees of the garden depended on these two for help in staying strong and true no matter the winds that came their way. In this way, even the smallest of trees, anchored by the blessing of life and the blessing of moral knowledge, was able to give shelter to the creatures of earth and air and water.

The man and the woman, certain they had used their unique skill correctly, and unwilling to accept that a network of roots and symbiotic spores could be more important to the health of the garden than their own clever hands and feet, lost their ability to feel the sense of completeness and wellness that had once sustained them. Then they lost their ability to see the garden, though it still existed everywhere around them. And finally they lost their ability to see the face of God.

The unique skill of all human beings remained with them, though, and no one could escape from its double-edged truth as both blessing and curse.

Free will, it is called.

Its story lies at the root of everything we call religion and spirituality.