Ancient Lithuanians were among the last "pagan" holdouts in Europe. Maybe that explains a lot about me. If you absolutely had to label them, my beliefs are probably best described as an eclectic mix of philosophical Taoism, Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, yoga, ecofeminism, universism, and pantheism, with random own beliefs thrown in for good measure. Future life experience may well alter the details of this worldview, and I'm very much open to this, because I'd hate to be mired in any dogma, even one of my own making. For now, I've come to believe that the material universe is a physical manifestation of a great spiritual force or forces that is/are realized in an infinite number of ways, some conceivable by the human mind, others not. (It's also my theory that we cannot intellectually comprehend the infinite because the brain itself has inherent limitations.)
Nonetheless, I enjoy learning about different spiritual views, philosophies, and sciences. I tend to think that while none holds a monopoly on truth, perhaps each in some way is able to get a handle on a small part of it. This is why squabbles between religious groups or rifts between religion, science, and philosophy strike me as rather petty. We can debate semantics and details, but in the end, aren't we all talking about the same thing, whether we call it Tao, Brahman, Akasha, Wakan Tanka, God, Natural Law, or plain old Truth? Mohammed Neguib has made the analogy of a candle inside a multicolored lantern: "Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there." One person's dogma is another's heresy. No absolute right, no absolute wrong. Just different ways of looking at it. I'm a big believer in religious tolerance (and tolerance in general, for that matter). There's more than one way up the mountain, after all. This is not a unique idea on my part... but perhaps no individual or group is meant to understand the entire Truth simply bcause we're all part of the one great Reality. How can one small tile know what the entire mosaic looks like?
Of course, that's where my own tolerance gets tested. I get HIGHLY annoyed with those who assert that theirs is the only way to be "saved," the one way to the ultimate truth. Anyone who claims to know the "One True Path" is either a fanatic or a scam artist. Thankfully not all Christians believe this, but my biggest turn off at Campus Crusade back in the day was the idea that only people who accept Jesus as their personal savior could get into heaven. By that logic, at least two thirds of humanity today are destined for purgatory; far more if you ask the really conservative. And speaking of exclusivity, neither can I accept the notion that humans are "higher" than nonhumans, and therefore only Homo sapiens are capable of entering the Kingdom of God, or achieving Enlightenment, or whatever state to which we are supposed to aspire. Because we have gargantuan cerebrums we're better off than creatures with four or eight legs, even though they can run faster or spin webs? It's anthropocentric ideas like this that give people lame excuses to annhialate the rest of creation. (Ties in with Ishmael and Dominion, perhaps a rant for another day...)
Then there's the matter of words. Many people are getting away from this, but there are still those who cling to an obsession with prophetic books and sutras. Don't get me wrong; Zoroaster, Moses, Krishna, Jesus, Muhammed, Guru Nanak, Gautama Buddha, Baha'u'llah and others were probably great thinkers and teachers. But taking ancient texts as literal and absolute dogma? For one thing, most weren't written down until decades if not centuries after the fact, and surely revisions were made along the way to further politic agendas of the time. (How many gospels, for example, never made it into the "official" version of the Christian Bible?) Shakespeare's quip that the devil can cite scripture for his purpose isn't empty speculation. As for divine inspiration, it's indicative of human cultural patriarchy that the prophets we hear about are almost invariably men. Plus, how many trillions of species have graced our planet without need of soothsayers? Are humans really so screwed up that we must have prophets to act as a bridge between Heaven and Earth? I highly doubt that, because indigenous cultures never saw the need for "salvation." It wasn't until destructive cultures started messing things up than anyone got the idea that Earth was screwed up, and that's only because they were screwing with it!
And that's another thing. Heaven versus Earth. Soul versus Body. When did they become antonymous? Like Shirin in The Story of B, I could not bear a God who was really so disengaged from life on Earth (or anywhere else in the physical universe, for that matter). This is why I more readily accept a pantheistic view than the idea that the spiritual is completely separate from and/or incompatible with the physical. The idea that this world is an "illusion," well, obviously I can't confirm or deny that with any semblance of authority. But I wonder if the illusion is that we keep making distinction of spiritual versus physical, nature versus human, and all those other dichotomies. For me, a spiritual experience can be had in a meditation hall with incense burning just as easily as walking through the woods with an empty mind. Why should soul transcend the Earth completely? There's no way you or I can fully know Supreme Reality, but we can sense how it manifests itself in the here and now. That does seem to be a theme in many belief systems, that Enlightenment by any name is essentially realizing the unity of all things. Maybe we're all onto something there.
"The wiser you are, the more you believe in equality, because the difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to all that is unknown." Albert Einstein
