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Of A Spiritual Pantheist Published Spring 1998 in Pantheist Vision magazine I have been a Pantheist since I was a seven-year-old boy playing in the forest on an island in the middle of the river that ran through our farm. This island, with no one living on it, was covered by a rain forest and was a veritable jungle. Once I had crossed the river on my raft I was in a wonderland that belonged completely to me and I to it. Several small streams crossed the island and when I sat by one long enough and quietly enough, this quiet silent place would suddenly spring into life with all sorts of birds and animals. Once, in an hour, I actually saw a beaver cutting down a small tree, a deer drinking from the waterhole, a duck swimming with her babies, a fox peeking cautiously out from behind a clump of ferns, and a chorus of birds, with river otters for comic relief. I totally identified with the river, the forest and the animals on the island. Of course, at this tender age I didn't know that this spiritual feeling was what made me a Pantheist. It was not until I was in my twenties that I realized there was a name for it. And it was not until I typed in "pantheist" in an Internet search that I realized there were so many of us. As I expanded my search I began to be aware there are many different kinds of Pantheists. Some, to me, seemed to almost deny the theism part of Pantheism. Others seemed to be ecological theists, with a divine being who was separate from nature. Yet, despite differences, all had in common a reverential feeling about nature. Even friends who believed God had a white beard and sat on a heavenly throne sometimes had this feeling. When I asked one of these friends, "Where is God?" she instantly replied, "God is everywhere." Even as a youngster all religions seemed to me to be unnecessarily complicated. Yet almost everyone whom I loved and respected seemed to believe the Holy Bible to be the word of God. But in college I began studying philosophy and religion and quickly discovered that not everyone believed the Bible to be the "only" word of God. Indeed, there were other great religions which had no knowledge of the Bible and which had as many members as Christianity and whose Holy writings were even older than the Bible. But although some of these ancient teachings seemed more reasonable to me than others, none said exactly what I felt. The renaissance philosopher who came closest to my beliefs was Giordano Bruno. He believed that the universe is infinite, that god is the universal world-soul, and that all material things are manifestations of the infinite principle. Bruno, considered the forerunner of modern philosophy, had a profound influence on Spinoza and the monad theories of Leibniz. To Bruno and all great thinkers, philosophy is the search for unity. "Nor can this unity be apart from the things, it must contain in itself the universe which develops from it, it must be at once the all and the one. This universe is God, a universal substance." (Bruno) In Bruno’s early works the Unity is simply a living universe but not intelligent; in his later works the universe appears as the realization of the divine mind. Bruno, one of the greatest philosophers and thinkers of all time, was burned at the stake. The founder of Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes, once asked me about my beliefs. I hesitatingly pulled a scrap of paper (that I had carried since I was a teenager) out of my wallet. It read: "I am one with God; I am a creator; with my thoughts and emotions I can create beauty, but I am humbled by the knowledge I can create ugliness. I am humbled also by your presence for you are God." Holmes was silent for a moment and then he said, "That about sums it up, doesn’t it?" To Holmes, "Mind" was a synonym for God. He said, "mind is not one thing and the physical universe another." He believed, with Spinoza, that mind and matter are identical. There is nothing but mind, reality or spirit. Holmes wrote: "There is only one mind and we all use it, hence thought is creative." To all this I added a dash of John Burroughs and a cup of John Muir. This seems to me to be a satisfying mixture for this pantheist. |