New Pray er Book
Spirituality without Religion
prayer in its most ancient and elemental sense consists simply in speaking to things rather than merely about things
in india there is a greeting in which the palms are placed together and you bow to the other person the position of the palms together praying the god that is in you recognizes the god in the other
this is your safe place a cathedral a retreat i am open i am awake you can appear
i might call you by different names the other consciousness invisible mystery mind divine presence the transcendent geist the unkown id and i will fail
i say goodbye to anthropocentric thinking consciousness did not appear in the world with the emergence of humans and their brains as if the universe existed without consciousness before humans existed
my mind is not mine but yours a power in which i am carnally immersed my mind is not located inside me i am situated bodily inside you
there are uncountable algorithms at work in the physical world writhing and reaching pulling matter and energy into their schemes acting out of what almost seems to be an unquenchable playfulness sometimes out of all this static and confusion you assemble yourself and take form before my very eyes
eyes are proof for the existence of the sun legs are proof for the existence of firm ground wings are proof for the existence of air brains are proof for the existence of a consciousness independent from material concerns
you are the wind moving between binding all beings i live immersed in you in intelligence enveloped and informed by a creativity i cannot fathom
learning and intelligence problem solving decision making all of that exists outside of the sphere of human consciousness these are performances which can exist without a specific place and supraindividual they existed before human brains and are not their products our brains merely supply us with these strategies they make them available to us
you see through me you smell through me you taste through me you touch through me you hear through me i am your interface
we thought ourselves alone on earth but we are an insignificant minority on a planet thickly populated by the invisible living beings we call microbes
i forgot about you but you did not forget about me my solitary sense of inwardness my interior mindscape is born of the forgetting of a much more ancient history the ancestral sense of the surrounding cosmos as the voluminous inside of your body
i am mortal grass is mortal i am grass
spirit and matter two sides of the same bare existence material presence like a stone or a coffe mug is not passive and inert existing is activity to exist is a very active thing to be doing
as the refrigirators‘ hum is to me so i am to the houses as they are to the trees
light and mirror in an empty room light stays invisible it only shines when it meets a surface which can reflect light as bright as a mirror may glow it never creates the light by itself which it emanates
plants head in the direction of the sun
intelligence i assume is a strictly centralized phenomenon mistaking my distinctively human form of intelligence for intelligence itself
the evolution was able to create our brains and consciousness because the real existence of another consciousness gave it the opportunity to create an organ in our heads which has the ability to link the material with the immaterial dimension
i am a place you pass through i do not always recognize your visit i am sorry my hospitality will improve
figs need the fig wasps to become pollinated and fig wasps need the figs to reproduce and to feed on
my admiration for nature and all of it‘s proceedings stems from the hidden assumption that nature was able to create all of this without having a brain or consciousness
the purpose of my mind to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into you not because i love you not out of any intention to worship you ultimately i may have no choice in this matter i have the impression that you may be seeking me out
my greatest hope for the future rests not in the triumph of any single set of beliefs but in the acknowledgment of a felt mystery that underlies all our doctrines
The End