Freedom and God by Dr. Larry Morris Delivered July 1995 at INTA Congress in Portland, Oregon
"Oh, Lord, I want to be free, Want to be free / Rainbow round My shoulder, wings on my feet." Old Spiritual
"Without the high hope of adventure religion degenerates into the mere appendage of a comfortable life." Alfred North Whitehead
"We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.... Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one." Four Quartets T. S. Eliot
The desire of man being infinite the possession is infinite and himself infinite. He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes are we are, that we may be as He is. William Blake
I would like to explore what at first seems to be a paradox or even a contradiction between two of the basic principles of New Thought: Freedom and God. The I.N.T.A. Declaration of Principles states that "the universe is the body of God, spiritual in essence, governed by God through laws which are spiritual in reality even when material in appearance." So God is all in all or, as Alan Anderson puts it, all in all "and then some." This is the basic premise of New Thought: God is the One Presence, everywhere present, in and through all things. So we in New Thought believe in the One Presence that is God. Or do we? For we have another New Thought principle (also in the I.N.T.A. Declaration of Principles) which states that we "affirm the freedom of each person in matters of belief." This is an interesting and even revolutionary principle for any religious body to adopt. For religion -- certainly any orthodox religion -- is based on a series of creeds and dogmas to which its adherents must ascribe. To have a religion which asserts freedom of belief as one of its basic tenets seems almost a contradiction in terms. Can we have a religion without dogma or creed and, if so, in what sense is it still a religion? I think that the solution to this issue lies in the Latin root term for religion, which is 'religio.' Religio can either mean "to tie down," "hold back" or "keep in place" or it can mean to "return to the source." I think that the first definition of religion expresses how most religions do in fact function in our world. For most of the world, traditional religion functions as a stabilizing force; it tells people what to believe about God and about life and how to structure their perception of reality. It says, in essence, believe such and such and you'll be saved because we the priests or ministers or rabbis or swamis say it's so, or because the Bible or the Koran or the Bagavad-Gita or the Dhamapada says it's so. This kind of religion holds people in place. It gives a sense of meaning to life: it affirms values and it gives individuals a clear orientation. People who ascribe to an orthodox religious system, like, for instance, Islam, know who they are, they know who God is and they know where they belong and what they are to do in their life -- because the religion spells this out for them in great detail. All that they have to do is follow the system of rules and regulations provided by the religious structure and they can be happy and content. This construct of a clear and unambiguous religious structure can have great appeal to people living in a complex and rapidly changing modern world, as is evidenced by the rise and impact of religious fundamentalism in our own country. Even young people today may be swayed by the appeal of fundamentalism, as it offers a clear and unmistakable set of values to live by. So if we take this doctrinaire system as religion, what is New Thought? For that, I think that we need to look to the other definition of 'religio': to return to the source. Perhaps New Thought is really a way of spirituality rather than a religious system. We affirm freedom as one of our basic tenets because, without freedom, how can one discover anything? If the goal of New Thought is to return to the source, to discover our basic oneness with God (to know it, not just to believe in it), then how can we possibly come into this realization without freedom: the freedom to inquire, to question, to experiment, to learn, to grow and to unfold? If we have a closed mind based on our acceptance of a dogmatic religious structure, how could we ever grow spiritually at all?
J. Krishnamurti once said, "Truth is a trackless path." There is no system or methodology that can bring us to oneness with God. Oneness with God comes through freedom, not through some structure, for the structure itself would get in the way or, at best, be an intermediary or filter through which we encounter God. In the Yoga tradition, Nirvikalpa Samadhi (which is the state of ultimate union with God) means "beyond mental construct." So any construct we try to place on God limits our oneness with God. If God is all in all, then we can only come to know God as all through perfect freedom, including the freedom from a belief system itself. As we know from modern science, the observer affects the observed. The more bogged down and conditioned we are by belief systems, the more our perception of God's presence in our life may be limited and hampered. I'm not saying that we can't adopt a series of affirmations (like the I.N.T.A. Statements) as a working hypothesis to give us some framework for our spiritual exploration, but there may well come a point where even these affirmations and even our methods of spiritual treatment and affirmation and denial and positive thinking will give way to a direct experience of union with God -- an experience "from the alone to the Alone." What's interesting (and even paradoxical) about New Thought is that, unlike many other religions, we affirm that we are already one with God; this oneness is not something that we will achieve somehow, some day. But is this a belief or is it a fact? Nietzsche said, "God is dead and man has killed Him," meaning that most people don't live as if God were a living fact in their hearts from moment to moment. In New Thought, there is probably room for both senses of 'religio' concerning this issue. We may begin with the belief or at least the hope in our Oneness with God and then, through our freedom to grow, unfold, examine and explore, we may come to know our oneness with God. Joel Goldsmith said that it took him twenty years of almost continuous study and meditation before he realized his oneness with God. Many of us would probably feel that twenty years is just a beginning. But, in New Thought, this journey to God must begin and end in perfect, personal freedom. Freedom is not a misprint or a mistake in our tenet of principles. We are free to discover and realize that we are one already with God. And then, to live from that oneness. Even though there are some fundamentalists in New Thought who think of our teachings as prescriptive rules and regulations and who take every word of the New Thought founders as if they were etched in concrete, perhaps these fundamentalists have forgotten that the founders themselves from Quimby on were spiritual iconoclasts, mavericks and pioneers who all affirmed freedom as the very cornerstone of their individual spiritual quests. You might say that, by definition, New Thought appeals to the adventuresome, risk-taking, innovative kind of person, not someone who settles for the status quo. It's interesting that Quimby and Emma Curtis Hopkins had no interest in founding any spiritual organizations. Nona Brooks reluctantly founded a loose-knit federation of Divine Science churches. According to Robert Bitzer, Ernest Holmes was deeply opposed to a church-structured organization. Charles Filmore, when asked by the
ministers he had ordained to found an organization of Unity ministers, replied, "Now you are free; why bind yourselves?" And Joel Goldsmith was against religious organizations because he felt that such organizations would have to use unillumined teachers and ministers to fill in the gaps. This predisposition toward individual freedom is at once a great strength and a weakness for New Thought as a movement. Since ours is a religion of freedom, not of fear or guilt, people are free to come and go in our New Thought churches and centers without feeling guilty or fearful. And people feel free to splinter off and form new centers and churches from existing ones. So, in consequence, there has been a lack of centralization within the movement as a whole. As someone put it, New Thought is like a general who gets on his horse and rides off in every direction. But most of us are drawn to New Thought precisely because we are interested not in conformity to a centralizing structure, but because we seek the freedom to explore our individual spiritual unfoldment in a free and unfettered way. We never call our people in New Thought followers, because each of us is his or her own leader being guided by the Spirit within to our right place in the scheme of things. We are spiritual independents. Yet, the freedom of which we are speaking is not just existential freedom. For in our deepest states of meditation, treatment or prayer, we discover a freedom that connects us totally to a cosmic something, call it God, or One Presence, or the Oneness of All Life. So, in New Thought, we realize that utter freedom is utter connectedness and that the greatest freedom comes as we surrender to God. In fact, in New Thought the highest perception is that freedom and surrender are not separate or different but are one and the same thing. And we also come to realize that we do not choose God, but that it was God, all along, who chose us. As the St. Athanasius creed states: "It is not by the taking of the Godhood into man but by the taking of the manhood into God." In New Thought, because the universe is the body of God, and because we are free to return to the source, we meet our ultimate freedom at the point of total surrender in which we realize our oneness with God. Since there is no separation between us and God, freedom comes with the conscious fusion and expression of our oneness. The paradox is: not I but God lives through me, but I live also - Teilhard's Omega Point. In its total affirmation of individual religious freedom, New Thought is the most revolutionary of religions. And we have probably only touched the tip of the iceberg as far as what the full meaning of this revolution implies. As T. S. Eliot says, "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion...."