OZODI OSUJI’S WORLDVIEW
The religious philosophy (theology) underlying my essays is Modified Gnosticism (strictly speaking, Modified Gnostic Christianity). I say modified because it is not strictly Gnostic.
Traditional Gnosticism posits that we are in truth spirit and for some reasons (usually rebellion against God) we came to manifest on earth. Some aspects of Gnosticism say that the angel Lucifer was filled with pride and did not want to obey God and wanted God to obey him. He declared war on God and those angels obedient to God fought with him and chased him out of heaven and he descended to earth to form his kingdom (that is the opposite of God’s kingdom). Another version of Gnosticism says that the spirit that disobeyed God and founded our earth is called Demiurge. (This is the probable origin of the Christian concept of the fall of man, the descent into darkness and the original sin…usually represented in the metaphoric story of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating a forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden, living in the world of abundance, and been chased out of it, living in the world of scarcity.)
In our time, an American clinical psychologist, a professor at Columbia University, New York, Helen Schucman, postulated another version of Gnosticism. In her version the agent that rebelled against God is us. As she sees it, the son of God (who is all of us) did not want to obey God. God created him and he resented that fact and want to create God, create himself, and since that wish is not possible of gratification, for once created one cannot create ones self or ones creator, the son of God, as it were, went to sleep and in his sleep dream a world in which he is his self creator and creator of the universe.
The son of God’s fictional self creation is shown by his replacing his real self, the self God created him as, with a self concept that he himself invented. The self concept is always that he is separated from God and all other people and is born in body and lives in body and dies. He willfully forgets his real self, the self that God created him as, the unified self (unified with God and all creation), a self that is eternal, permanent and changeless.
On earth we have substitute and replacement selves, separated selves that live in bodies and die. Helen Schucman in her A course in miracles says that we invented this replacement self out of our wish to create ourselves and not accept that God created us. As she sees it, our earthly self, the ego and its world, is an illusion and in fact does not exist. Her whole theology lies in showing people what to do to overcome the awareness of the earthly self and become aware of the unified spiritual self.
In line with Gnosticism in general she sees the earth as darkness and sees heaven as light. As Gnosticism sees it, our real home is in the place of light and our present home is a place of darkness, is a place we must leave and return to heaven. Thus, to Gnosticism and Helen Schucman the earth is a place of darkness that we ought to leave and return to our real home, a place of light, aka heaven.
Given its perception that the earth is not our real home, Gnosticism, therefore, does not teach folks how to adapt to the exigencies of this material world but wants them to see the material world of space, time and matter as not good and leave it. Gnosticism wants to transcend this world and return to our home of light. To adapt to the exigencies of our world is considered a child’s game.
Gnosticism asks folks to stop listening to the voice of their wish for separation, the ego’s voice, and, instead, listen to the voice for God, the Holy Spirit. When the children of God seemed to separate from him, A course in miracles said that God could not communicate with them as he normally did in unified spirit, so he created another God, the Holy Spirit, and lodged him in the mind of his separated sons. That is, the transcendent God created an immanent God and the immanent God entered the temporal world. Now, there seem three Gods (called Holy Trinity): God the father, God the son (us) and God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is placed in our right minds and from there he corrects what our left minds, the ego, does; he teaches us to love and forgive one another for what is done on earth is as in a dream and not real hence to be forgiven. The Holy Spirit teaches us to see the sons of God as God created and sees us as: unified, holy, innocent, sinless and guiltless for we have not separated from our father and from each other.
The voice for God teaches us to overlook the world and what is done in it, to see earthly events as dream events, as not real. The Holy Spirit perceiving the world as a dream asks us to forgive it and in doing so become aware that our true self is the joined self, the world of light.
Jesus was a man who forgave all his brothers what they did to him and in doing so forgave what he did to them. He was crucified and did not feel like those who killed him did anything bad to him for he did not identify with his ego and body. Before he died he asked God to forgive those who killed him because they know not what they are doing; in their ignorance they believed that the son of God (all of us) is ego and body and could be killed hence they believed that they could kill him (a representative son of God), but, in fact, the son of God is immortal and cannot be killed.
Jesus overlooked what other human beings did to him and in so doing resurrected to the awareness of his real self, the Christ self, an immortal self.
Each of us is told to do what Jesus did: to forgive those who wronged us and in doing so overcome the world and awaken to our true self, the Christ self.
The Christ is the son of God who knows that he is still as his father created him, joined with him and all his brothers and sisters. Christ knows only love for the state of God that is, union, is love.
On earth love is manifested in forgiveness for those who wronged us. In the only prayer that he taught his followers, Jesus asked them to pray thus: our father, who is in heaven…forgiving us because we have first forgiven those who wronged us. Further, he asked us to forgive the adulterous woman for we are all adulterers, sinners; he asked us to first forgive those who wronged us before we go pray to God, and he walked his talk by forgiving those who crucified him. There is no doubt whatsoever that Jesus taught a gospel of forgiveness; he said: when one of your cheeks is slapped, present the other one to be slapped, too; you should pray for your enemies etc. God hears all our prayers; in fact, he knows all that we desire and has already granted them to us but to receive them we must first forgive one another, for forgiveness is the meaning of love; we must forgive each other to meet the condition for returning to heaven(heaven is love).
For our present purposes, Gnostic religions tend to see the world as a place to be left, now, not tomorrow. Jesus, if one cares to read the four gospels correctly, saw this world as a place to be left. He gave his disciples the impression that the world is ending in their life times and that they ought to prepare to leave it. Simply stated, the original Jesus was a Gnostic person who saw this world as not his real home and saw his real home as heaven. Jesus wanted to leave this world and wanted his followers along with him to leave this world. Gnosticism wants its followers to leave this world.
Upon the death of Jesus Christ, two interpretations of his teaching emerged, the Gnostic one (as is shown in the Gospel of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Judas, and Peter etc) and the one now in the Christian doctrine. Those who wanted to live in this world and improve it versus those who wanted to transcend this world right now. The former warred with the later and won.
The Catholic Church emerged as the part of Christianity that wanted to live in this world and improve human beings, improve their egos and bodies and gradually prepare them for return to heaven.
In effect, the part of Christianity that distorted the teaching of Jesus prevailed. Jesus wanted folk to leave this world right away but the Church teaches people to be in the world but live a moral existence as a condition for gaining entrance into heaven.
The extant Christian Church accepted the material world and wants to make the most of it rather than jettisoning it and returning to heaven.
My theology is in line with the Church. That is to say that whereas I accept that our real home is the place of union, unified spirit state, aka heaven, I still want to be in this world and study it through science and improve it through technology. I want us to live in this world and not be in a hurry to transcend it. I do not want to forgive the world, overcome it and ignore it and return to heaven. I accept the realities of this world of space, time and matter and deal with them on their own terms.
Nevertheless, I recognize that the realities of this world are the realities of an illusion, are things of dreams. I accept that the world of separation is a world of dreams. However, I want to have a pleasant dream and when I have had enough of it then I do what Gnostics ask us to do: forgive the world and awaken in unified state (where we always are, for ideas leave not their source; we are always in God while dreaming that we are separated from him and from each other).
The essays in this book, therefore, teach a Modified Gnostic philosophy, aka modified Gnostic Christianity; they teach that the essential teaching of Gnosticism is correct, that our true self and true home is unified spirit and heaven, but that in as much as we left that self and home and manifest in a false self and false home that we must first understand that false self and false home on their own terms (by studying physics, chemistry, biology and earth science) and devising a technology to effectively adapt to this world. When we have made the most of this world then we, like happy children, get tired of our game of separation and give the game up and awaken in God, we end the journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere. We stop living in darkness and return to living in light (which is unified state).
I accept that we came from a different world and ought to return to it but I am not in a great hurry to return to that world, as A course in miracles urges its followers to do. I am not motivated to negate this world and to escape from the world as A course in miracles urges us to do. I am motivated to understand the dream self, the ego, and the dream world, the material world of space, time and matter, and eventually to transcend them.
Our material world will be here for as long as the sun has enough energy left to power it, which scientists estimate to be about five billion years. In five billion years the sun would have burned off its hydrogen and helium and turned into a supernova and thereafter engulf its closest planets and then explode into smithereens. Before exploding the expanded sun would be so hot that it would dry all the waters on planet earth and end life on earth.
The relevant point is that our earth has the capacity to support biological life forms for another five billion years. In as much as biological life forms, us, can be on planet earth for another five billion years we might as well study the material universe via science and through that knowledge adapt effectively to the earth.
Just imagine what we learned about the universe in the short period of time when human beings embraced science (the scientific methodological approach to phenomena). We have learned about the nature of the elements, and atoms. We know that there are 94 naturally occurring elements (hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen etc) and we have invented another16 in laboratories.
We know that each atom is composed of three parts: electrons and a nucleus containing protons and neutrons. We have learned that the nucleus (protons and neutrons) can be further split into quarks and that eventually quarks are units of light (gamma rays).
Now we use the electron in elements to do all kinds of work, including electricity, and electronic gizmos etc. We have used neutron bombardment to split the nucleus of atoms (fission of the nucleus of uranium) and released energy to do work with, electricity, and, unfortunately, to also kill people (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we have fused the nuclei of hydrogen to explode hydrogen bombs and, eventually, will figure out a way to use the released energy from nuclear fusion to provide electricity for mankind. And we have done all this within the short space of time since we embarked on learning about science!
Imagine the world that we would have if we allowed science to triumph and we truly understood the nature of the world. We would be able to travel at the speed of light (which Einstein estimated to be 186, 000 miles per second). We would trace this world to its big bang origin 13.7 billion years ago (when all things were compressed into a ball smaller than an atom, which became supper hot and exploded and in nanoseconds produced photons, light, which transmuted to particles (electrons, neutrons an protons) and which unified to form the first element, (hydrogen).
For millions of years only hydrogen clouds existed in the universe then those clouds of hydrogen gas (matter has three forms: gas, liquid and solid) separated into galaxies and galaxies separated into stars and planets.
Inside the core of star, as Fred Hoyle told us, nuclear synthesis takes place: two atoms of hydrogen (a hydrogen atom is composed of a nucleus with one proton and an electron circling it) combined to form helium (which is composed of a nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons and an outer two electrons circling it) and the three known isotopes of hydrogen (an isotope has different numbers of neutrons whereas the number of the element’s protons remain the same…regular hydrogen has one proton and no neutron but an isotope of hydrogen has one, two or three neutrons).
We now know that in the outer parts of stars, the less hot part of them, other elements are formed (such as carbon, oxygen, lithium, neon) and that the heavier elements (such as iron, gold, diamond etc) are formed when stars die, shatter themselves in novas.
On earth, elements of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur (and some trace elements, such as magnesium, sodium, potassium, phosphor etc) combine to form biological life forms (the earth is the only planet so far known to have biological life forms).
My point is this: if in only four hundred years of science (from Copernicus to Galileo to Newton to Charles Darwin, Harvey, Dalton, Boyle, Pasteur, Maxwell, Max Plank, Bozeman, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, Fleming, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Broglie, Pauli, Dirac, Hubble, Chadwick, Fermi, Crick Watson, Wheeler, Gel Mann and others we are beginning to have a glimpse into how the material universe works and manipulate that knowledge to improve the human condition just imagine what would happen in thousands of years when our understanding of science has grown exponentially. This world would approximate what religion calls heaven!
We have understood the four forces of nature: gravitation (ala Newton and Einstein’s general relativity), electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces (some are trying to unify all four into one force, Einstein tried and failed and those impressed by Super Strings hypothesis, believe that they are on the curve of unifying them); we have made serious headways in understanding the nature of motion and mechanics in general, heat, light, sound, electricity; in chemistry we have understood the nature of molecules and compounds (how they form via ionic or covalent combinations of the electrons of the combining elements); we have impressive understanding of organic chemistry (how carbon joins hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen etc to form the basis of biological life forms); in biology we have understood evolution and biochemistry; we are beginning to understand the nature of the earth, the crust, upper and lower mantle, upper and lower core and what constitutes them (such as molten iron and nickel in the core of it); we are beginning to understand the atmosphere and the gases that compose its various levels. Simply stated, we are learning a whole lot about the universe and no doubt will learn more if science is not scuttled by misguided metaphysics that wants to rise above matter and return to the world of meta-science in a hurry. God gave us brains and minds and we might as well utilize them to understand our world, albeit a dream world.
I am saying that I am not in a hurry, as Gnosticism and its version in A course in miracles is, to get out of this world; I want to be in this world, understand it, improve it and optimize living in it (ego and body) and then leave it.
I accept the thesis that we have another self and home, one made of unified selves, and a place of light, a place we left to temporarily live on earth, a place of separated state, the opposite of God (which is union) etc. In effect, I accept A course in miracles’ thesis regarding our natural home and the need for us to return to it except that I do not particularly want to return to that world right away. It is here that I see the need to modify A course in miracles and Gnosticism in general.
This is my point of departure from Gnosticism. I do what makes sense to me; I cannot be dishonest; I must have intellectual integrity and live only what makes sense to my intellect; to do otherwise is to be a phony, hence to be a living dead person.
If what makes sense to me makes sense to you then accept it but if not you can always do what Gnosticism asks you to do, forgive this world and overcome it and return to unified spirit state. (Or if you are an atheist you eschew all these talk on theism and concern your self with materialism, aka material monism, as opposed to idealism and idealistic monism and its solipsism exhibited in A course in miracles.)
By the way, I know that unified spirit state, aka heaven, is real, and is not some imaginary place that religionists hatch to give us the illusion that there is a better world awaiting us when we physically die. Sigmund Freud was wrong in seeing religion as an illusion that deceives folks into thinking that there is a better world than our present world. Richard Dawkins is wrong in seeing God as a delusion, a belief in what does not exist as existent. God exists; in fact, God is the only thing that exists permanently. Our world is ephemeral, changeable and transitory. However, you must first understand what God is.
God is the union of all things. All things can only be unified in spirit, not in matter. God is not material, is spirit. In God there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; we are all unified as one self (share one spirit self); in God we are in each other.
It is not my goal to explicate the nature of God for no matter how I tried you cannot understand him. The only way to know that God exists is to experience him. To experience him one must approximate his nature.
God is love. To know God one must love him, and since he is all his creation, love all his creation. Love all and know that God is real.
Any one who does not love all God’s children and love their father cannot pass through the gate of heaven into heaven. As long as there is one son of God that you hate, that you bear grievances against for the wrong he did to you, as long as you are full of desire for vengeance and revenge you cannot be near God; the hateful person must be outside heaven, outside peace and happiness (outside spiritual abundance).
In the meantime, I focus my attention to the world of the here and now and study the physical sciences for they enable me to understand this world and make the most of it.
If what I do interests you, then come aboard what I call Modified Christian Gnosticism, but if not, go find what makes sense to you, for, as Joseph Campbell noted, each of us must follow his bliss. In our father’s mansion are many rooms; go occupy one room; find your niche; I have found mine.
Whatever you do, please consider the thesis that our true nature is love and live from your loving self; love you and love all people; in doing so the least that you would receive is peace and happiness. You must agree that peace and happiness, the gifts of God, are not gifts to sneer at! Good luck.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
February 6, 2009
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
* Dr Osuji is writing an 800-1000 pages book on Basic Science (physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science); a book that he hopes would make its reader science literate. The book should be available sometime this year.
