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(picture taken with cheap Yashica fixed-focus camera) |
From my diary Tuesday 4 July 2023:
Today, as I was in the forest up the hill behind our house with our dog Hana, I thought of my relationship with nature – our natural environment – and God.
There was a time, in 1974-75, when I became convinced that humankind could only survive if we destroyed our present world civilization – in a nuclear war, for example – and returned to a Stone Age existence in nature to start a new history, hopefully without making the mistakes I thought had led us down our disastrous path.
I wanted to try to become one of the survivors of such a nuclear war, which I expected to take place around 1979 (no idea how I came up with that time frame). This is why I went to America, to try to survive in nature on my own – as a test. If I survived in the woods of British Columbia/Canada for at least a year, becoming completely attuned to nature, I wanted to travel south to Patagonia, which I thought would be spared most of the deadly fallout caused by a central nuclear war since the vast majority of likely targets were in the northern hemisphere.
Of course, I met the “Moonies” (then known as the Unification Church, founded by the Korean Sun Myung Moon) in New York on my way to Canada and decided to join them.
When I took a “vacation” from the Moonies eight months later in November 1975 and hitch-hiked to California (see: https://diamir.blogspot.com/2006/12/memory-of-california-thanksgiving-1975.html ), I wanted to try again to go to the woods in British Columbia. But I got stuck in Sacramento, where I tried unsuccessfully to hitch-hike north on Interstate Highway 5 for more than 2 days, sleeping among some bushes near the access ramp.
After some adventures over the next few days I gave up and returned to the Unification Church in Berkeley on Thanksgiving Day (among other things I had been robbed of almost all my possessions earlier that same day).
During the years I lived in Cyprus (1983-87 and 1990-91) I came closer to nature than ever before or since.
In the summer of 1984, about a year and a half after I moved to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, I started hiking in the Troodos Mountains, almost always alone. Walking through those mountains and later sleeping many nights outside under the stars (without a tent) was the most exhilarating activity I had ever experienced.
I thought I might finally meet God there, meaning the God I had learned about from the Bible, the Catholic teachings I absorbed in my youth, the very strict monotheistic concept of Islam I had encountered in the Middle East in 1972-73, and the idea of a long-suffering but loving Heavenly Parent promoted by the Moon church in its Divine Principle.
I never did meet that God, though I always tried to be open to Him/Her/It.
I now believe there is no such God in nature.
To me, the highest expression I can see of a God is in us humans – and it is nothing like the perfect, unchanging, all-knowing deity postulated by all of the monotheistic religions.
This God encompasses great beauty, goodness, love, empathy, magnanimity, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, and so on, but also their opposites, ugliness, evil, hatred, stupidity, selfishness, etc.
This God is evolving, changing, learning through us and with us, humans, at least in this tiny part of the universe, our Earth. I think this is the single most important insight I have found in my life, so far.
My first serious doubts about God -1994
https://diamir.blogspot.com/2020/05/father-figure-and-inner-voice.html
More information on my background
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Cyprus Troodos Mountains: Sunset above clouds on Madari ridge, May 1985 (picture taken with cheap Yashica fixed-focus camera) Diary, Sunday 19 February 2023: It's time to write about deeper things. … Who am I, really? Where do I stand? What do I believe? The world is a mess in so many ways. It's a mess mostly caused by the so-called “western” powers and their vassals and quislings in other countries. I have left the ideology of Sun Myung Moon behind but I cannot replace it with another. I don't want to adhere to any ideology. In a way I have one of my own, but it's not elaborate at all and could not actually be called an ideology. There is too much vagueness and too much uncertainty. There is just too much I simply don't know. It was comforting to have a ready-made ideology, to adhere to certain beliefs that somebody else had cooked up for me. It took me several years to free myself of that belief system. There was a big gap left when I finally ditched it. I have found very few ideas that could help me plug that gap. After all, I followed Moon's ideology for more than 20 years, and I cannot deny that it left a deep impression. Also, I am reminded of it often because my wife remains a committed believer and insists that I go through at least some of the motions to go along with her. Doing this doesn't hurt me, so I have no excuse to refuse. But I do feel just a little bit hypocritical. More important, however, is my strong desire to avoid friction, and even more so, confrontation over our different beliefs or ideas. We both believe in a God. But my idea of God is very different from hers. She believes in the traditional God, the creator of all and “heavenly parent” of us humans. To me, God is its own creation, and we humans are the best proof of its existence because we are at least in part what you could call the very mind of God. Without us and perhaps others like us in the cosmos, God would not have a fully developed mind that can explore the creation – which is basically God's body. Yes, I think we are the mind of God, or at least an important part of it. There are forms of consciousness at every level below us, and the cosmos as a whole is conscious. But we are the highest level we know in our tiny part of the universe, and thus we are part of the evolving mind of God. So, what can I do with this wild idea? Nothing, really. I can think about it, and I have done less of that than most who read these lines might imagine. I can write about it here. It doesn't serve me much in my life at all. Nonetheless it feels to me much more authentic than anything I learned from Moon and the Moonies, which I always regarded as somehow artificial. It was something I had decided to impose on myself, both because it seemed to make a degree of sense and it helped me to connect with other people. I never made any really close friends among my fellow Moonies, though. Of course, I didn't have any close friends before either, even though I was 24 years old when I first encountered the Moon movement in the USA. Maybe I am just too strange, too weird to be able to forge close friendships. …  View from
my former 'bedroom' under a juniper tree on Troodos summit, Cyprus.
Photo Oct. 2016
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