No, God isn’t dead but is hidden on the far side of a screen, a curtain, of continuous electronic noise. These days the presence of the sacred, of divinity is almost entirely absent from our lives and our culture. We are increasingly living, especially in the “west”, in an overwhelmingly secular time, more than ever before in human history. We are enwrapped in technology, subsumed within the cyber-sphere we now inhabit, and simultaneously losing touch with many of the most important and profound parts of our human heritage. Technology itself has become a kind of “new god.” The cyber-sciences now order, control, shape, and define much of the world we live in. We dwell amidst a strange blend of cyber-utopianism and cyber-dystopianism with the weirdness and dangers of this brave new world becoming more evident every day.
Awareness of “divinity” within ourselves and the world around us has, however, never been at a lower ebb. Increasingly we are coming to believe that God, long at the center of human existence, is not only gone but irrelevant. We have lost connection with our true wellsprings as human beings and as a culture. We inhabit a society consumed by genuinely important issues and a flood of trivial ones. The quest to connect with the underlying ground, the essence, of our own existence is, however, being ever more abandoned as we live enveloped in the sea of electronic babble that now surrounds us. We are pushed and manipulated toward docile conformity. What could be a time of bold exploration, even a new renaissance has instead become one of accepting staying meekly and protectively within the herd. The New Invisible College aims to restore and reinvigorate crucial comprehensions of who and what we really are.
We have arrived at a juncture where we need to remind ourselves that it hasn’t always been like this. Our separation from the sacred, and awareness of its centrality to human life on earth, is a relatively recent development. For as far back as you can go in human history, the question of the ultimate inner nature of human beings, and of the universe itself occupied a central place in our existence. What religion has to say about such truths has, of course, varied greatly. The true teachings of religion and how to live in accord with them have certainly been controversial and often disputed, Such disagreements did not alter, however, that such questions were seen as at the core of human existence.
In many cultures, nothing was more important than the relationship of human beings and the creation we inhabit to a holy, timeless, ineffable but pervasive underlying force and intelligence within all creation. Now, however, hypnotized by our electronic toys and flashing screens, it has become all too easy to turn our backs on the quest to understand what we really are and contact the seeds of divinity that still dwell within us. If we don’t make this connection within ourselves, we also become unable to pass this understanding down to our children and future generations.
Blinded by too much noise, bling, and dazzle we are increasingly unable to make contact with the holy place inside us where God still lives. Rather than prying these doors open and swinging them wide, we are allowing them to stay sealed and shut, losing the knowledge these inner portals are even still there. We are turning our backs on the challenge of comprehending and the joy of experiencing what is really down inside us.
Copyright 2021 Will Gold
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