THE NEXT AWAKENING

BALBOA PRESS

Contents

Preface......................................................................xi1. The Portal................................................................12. Are We There Yet?.........................................................133. The First Awakening.......................................................274. Let Us Build a Church.....................................................335. Hiding the Keys...........................................................416. What Are the Keys?........................................................477. Oh Yeah, One More Key.....................................................578. Religion Had a Good Run...................................................779. The Next Jesus............................................................8710. Science and the Next Awakening...........................................10311. Darwinism: The Religion that Dare Not Speak its Name.....................10712. The Big Bang - In the Beginning was the Logos............................11913. The Hard Problem - Consciousness.........................................12514. Awakening – The Final Picture......................................135Bibliography.................................................................145

Chapter One

I came to earth for the experience.

In a formless, timeless realm, I was quickened for birth, pulled into a portal, and carried at the speed of light to my terrestrial place and time. It is mine to live and to be as I was to be. Bundled in me were my talents; done up tightly, bearing no mark. God saw my fear and only smiled.

For over fifty years now, my face has been a well-placed observatory for the saga of certain mundane events that are widely known but seldom noted. It is the earthly and earthy story of people of the common soil who were raised by it to move in widening circles of men, but for a lifetime are drawn back to its rough, uneven fields. Their course is a rendering and a harvest. Strength is given to the lifting and turning of earth, and it becomes their constitution.

The particulars of my placement would have caused the less curious mind to assume it had been assigned to an unremitting dullness. Hours flowed into slow-moving days on hills under the sun. The world extended to the end of a rutted lane, where it joined a road going to somewhere beyond. Always short of somewhere and isolated, there was nothing to see and nothing to learn. Yet some insisting, non-corpus instinct maintained that people were important. They were a puzzle of action, sign, and meaning, and if I wanted to live gainfully, I would have to look to them for answers.

I came to trust what I was told. My parents and my older siblings shouldered their natural role as mentors in dutiful fashion, though at times it fell to them unaware. I took what they said to me directly and the manners they acted out before me as a firm ground. I relied on their experience of having coped with the world longer, coupled that reliance with my lack of confidence, and negotiated the path of a good follower. In the unfolding plot of this rustic play, I focused my search for the sense of a purposeful, lucid, and deliberate life mission. I hoped it would look good on me.

I came to experience a great deal of church. To most, the common encounter is an occasional or somewhat regular church activity or service attended. For me it was more. It was the central outlet of my family when not occupied by the compulsory ones – working, schooling, and uncovering new ways to feel inferior. If the doors of the little church house were open, attendance was a matter of duty. We would be there.

A narrow road of graded creek gravel curved this way and that for about five miles from our house on one end of the ridge, circling past the knob farms and unpainted barns, to the church on the other end. I came to know its dusty curves well at an early age. It was a dry ridge of land. How dry? There was not one above ground stream of water, the nearest seller of beer and wine was thirty miles away, and drinking coffee was a sin.

I can't remember with certainty how many of the six boys and four girls were stacked into that old Chevy along with Mom and Dad. The older boys may have been driving separately before the latest of the girls came to join us. The Sunday morning contents of the vehicle could be calculated with more care, but the description is sufficient here to say it was elbow to cheek.

There are two things I remember most about those trips. One was the hum of the V8 in the two toned blue and white Chevy, which I did my best to vocally mimic for hours on end as I rolled or pushed anything that was round across the yard, pretending I was driving a car. The other was the occasion when Mom would notice my ears were dirty, then spit on a white handkerchief and ream them out. Eventually this served to focus my habits, somewhat on hygiene, but more on keeping my ears hidden. With my ears, this was no mean feat.

I came to learn how I was supposed to live inside the confines of that little church. Explanations were vague but certain. Some gaps were filled in by my parents and my grandmother on the occasions when I stepped out of line. My older brothers filled in a few gaps of their own, as they went to high school in the town ten miles away and learned things that were not taught on the ridge. Wearing cologne seemed primarily important.

I touched down right in the middle of the colony, being fifth of ten kids. Some people are born to be silent observers; others have it thrust upon them. If I had known the way it all would go, I might have done some things differently. But since I don't know how the different way would go, it might be as well as it is.

I still visit the little church. It gives comfort, in a way, to see its unchanging presence against the backdrop of new and bigger things. It is an uncommon place where we can know the playing field so well. Walking through its doors, childhood memories greet me with the familiar smell of the varnish on the oak pews. Some places are still held by the same faces from my childhood days there, but more deeply lined by the winds of time. It seems I can yet sense the spent energy of pondering every stage of growing up while sitting bored stiff in the same pews. Were these people a product of my consciousness? Were they conscious and contemplating me? How does it feel to be them instead of me? If they are contemplating me, which perception is the correct one – what I'm thinking of myself or what they are thinking of me? That was one way to kill an hour or two.

Occasionally I came upon new, more practical questions, like the ones asked during discussion in Sunday school. I preferred to sit in with the adult class when I could, as sometimes a willing teacher for the kids could not be found. The most interesting participant to me was an older guy we called Brother Frank.

Frank asked questions I have puzzled over to this day. One in particular was when he spoke up and implored of the teacher, "If you had a bicycle upstairs and wanted to bring it downstairs, what would you say?" It still bothers me. What did it mean? What is the answer, if there is one? Why would the bicycle be upstairs? Why would the person bringing it down need to say something?

These were the coordinates...