In order to see the whole universe we have to get out of the universe. But this is impossible. We are already in the world. We are already standing on a certain point, and we see only part of the world each time. Our picture of the world is a kind of fantasy made of our memory in our brain. Each person has this limitation. That is why we have problems, troubles, fighting, arguments. The angles we see the world from are different and the supreme awareness is to see that we cannot see the whole world, to understand that we are deluded and limited. This means we have to let go of our viewpoints. Only when we are doing this are we free from the limitations of our individuality.

The Wholehearted Way
Eihei Dogen’s Bendowa

 

 

We should not allow ancient religious assumptions and beliefs to lead us into thinking we know or understand what happens in events or processes such as the biblical account of creation. God, of course, has always been understood to be a profound mystery, but the way in which God has been talked about has often involved fudging this point and proceeding as though we knew that God is really a personal being, one of enormous power who can create at will things that previously did not exist. Thinking of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) forces us to take the profundity of God’s mystery to a deeper level. For “creativity” is simply a name with which we identify this profound mystery of new realities coming into being; it is in no way an explanation of it.

In the beginning…Creativity
Gordon Kaufman

 

Religion always expresses itself through and across the social psychology of a people and time. For if a people and time are primitive, their religion will be primitive also.

Religion: Faith, Fact, or Fantasy
Ian Guthridge

 

In this new world, those Christians who most single-mindedly devote their time and energy to prayer (people known hitherto as ‘contemplatives’) begin to seem like ‘experts’ in an esoteric branch of knowledge. And, since they seem to have some difficulty in straightforwardly communicating quite what it is that they are on about, theirs appears to be a secret knowledge, a knowledge of extraordinary facts, obtained by people who enjoy unusual experiences. This new field of expertise deserves a name: let’s call it ‘la mystique’ (or, as Certeau’s translator nicely coins it, ‘mystics’ — to set alongside ‘ethics’ and ‘dogmatics’). And the experts who work in this field? We’ll call them ‘mystics.’

The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’
Nicholas Lash

 

Ours is a secular age not because God is absent from the world, but because we now have “a plurality of options” for understanding the purpose of our existence and creating meaning in our lives. Secularism is not about the elimination of religion, but about the proliferation of choices.

God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age
Galen Guengerich