RELIGION IN THE REAL WORLD AND NEW WORLD

When we examine all the traditional religions of the 21st century; whether it be Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam, we find, without exception, Protestant divisions within each of these traditional religious denominations. Thank God they don’t kill each other like the Sunni and the Shiites and the Kurdish Muslims of Iraq. Things can get a bit noisy now and then between the various subgroups in each of the traditional religious denominations.

Potentially: I’m not saying this has to be. I’m not saying this should be. I’m not even saying this is good to be. Potentially we can have a different religion for each person in our global village.
Of course there are going to be commonalities. There are also going to be individualities. Our focus will be both on the commonalities and the individualities, and on the relationship between the commonalities and the individualities.

Personal Religion and Interfaith is where religion meets the individual and group psychotherapy movement in the modern world. The conditions for the optimal facilitation, exploration and actualization of personal religions and interfaith are the same conditions that make for effective individual and group psychotherapy. These are the conditions: (1) unconditional positive regard for the person; (2) a non-judgmental attitude toward the exercise of free speech; (3) if necessary, a privacy or confidentiality agreement; (4) an increased tolerance for the contradictory, the repetitive and the novel or unexpected.

The psychotherapy movement in the modern world was started by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the early part of the 20th Century. Freud found that a form of free speech, called “Free Association” could have healing potential under the conditions of psychotherapy.

The person is encouraged to speak freely any thoughts that randomly come to mind; without any censorship or evaluation. You can record your free associations and your dreams. Then study it.

Later in America, it was discovered that a form of free speech, similar to Free Association, called “Brainstorming” could be used in industry to create innovative products which were marketable. Brainstorming could also be used in Think Tanks to create innovative solutions to social problems.

Brainstorming, like Free Association, was related to mental processes between fantasy and the dream state. Sometimes these mental processes are called Preconscious Mental Processes; between the conscious and the unconscious.

We need to learn and to teach people how to use these venues of free speech and related mental processes in a positive, constructive, productive and creative way. This learning and teaching is particularly relevant for the prevention of teenage drug abuse, an international epidemic.

I want to speak briefly about the natural capacity of the human brain and mind to organize experiences. I feel this is important functionally in our modern world because we are being bombarded by information explosion, and by mass media control of our religiousness. Through meditation, and insightful revelations we can organize our experiences and make them more meaningful from within to without.

I think a good way to introduce you to this capacity of the human brain and mind to synthesize experiences is by doing a simple experiment.

I want everyone to imagine a triangle and a circle in their mind’s eye. Now you tell me which sound is the triangle and which sound is the circle: Malooma/Tekeetee.
Most people hear the circle as Malooma and the triangle as Tekeetee. Most people see the sound Malooma as the circle. This is the result of the natural synaesthetic organizational capacity of the human brain and mind.

When you log on to the real world new world.com website, go to a section called, “Public Psalms of A Personal Religion”, Psalms 11 and 12.

In Psalm 11 I raise the question: “Can you see infinity in a grain of sand?” Psalm 12 kind of answers this question: “The dot expanding became the circle. The circle contracting becomes the dot”.

The image of a dot within a circle occurred to me many years before I wrote Psalms 11 and 12. I awoke from a dream with this mandalic image of a dot within a circle.

I realized that my brain and mind were working naturally during sleep, unconsciously; to produce a unified integrated solution to an existential concern I had at that time.
In my life there was an important person. We were sitting on chairs close together; as close as my left hand is to my right hand. There was nothing in his hands. He took the fingers of his right hand and pointed them into mid air. In a millisecond there appeared a human figure in mid air. The human figure was about 6 feet tall.

The human figure seemed to be made of a semi-soft grayish white clay like substance. It reflected light. The emergence of the human figure looked like a grayish white toothpaste coming out of a toothpaste tube; except there was nothing in his hand. The material for the creation of the human figure came out of his fingers in a millisecond. It would seem to me that an accomplished artist would require at least five minutes to draw a human figure with this kind of artistic complexity and detail on a sheet of paper. He was able to produce this human figure with nothing in his hand, merely by pointing his fingers into mid air in a millisecond.

There was another important person in my life. We were sitting on chairs within a conversational distance. He was able to hear what would happen before it happened. He commented on it. He took sides, and he made plans with me on the basis of something that had not yet taken place.

What is the synaesthetics of these behaviors? What is the incidence of these behaviors? What is the neuroscience of these behaviors? What is the psychobiology, the psycho-chemistry, the psychophysics of these behaviors?

We do not know. We do not have adequate technologies for the study of these behaviors.
If and when they are discovered, I believe it will also reveal something more about personal religion and interfaith. We need to learn and to teach people how to use their special abilities and talents in a therapeutic way to help and heal themselves and to help and heal others, with less emphasis on show business.

In human life there is the possibility that the technologies and the findings of the physical sciences could come together with the social sciences and humanities and religion and medicine and law. This coming together will be necessary for the creation of interdisciplinary and interfaith teams of specialists to deal with bio-ethical issues in our new world; issues dealing with human cloning, the appropriation of human transplant organs, the control of human population birth rate and medically assisted human suicidal dying. These are already important issues in our real world.

In human life there is the possibility that positive human needs, interests, abilities, talents, visions, and dreams could come together with human energies and human activities of all kinds.
Look what the telephone, the television, the computer, the electronic banking system, and the airplane have done to our real world. When taken together, they have transformed our real world into a new world.

New worlds will continue to be born in the real world.