Devotion to Essence: Refusal to Accept Idols and Beliefs as Truth
As a life-long, awe-struck student of Jesus Christ, I take his teaching very seriously and am committed to getting his message as he intended it, not as it has been represented by Rome, the State, the Church and countless good-hearted people everywhere who have sought to understand him.
No words can contain the scope of his message and I have failed enough times in my attempts to do so to know this, so I won’t bore you with my opinions. I would rather point to what he pointed to: our origin, our unity, our profoundly precious love/intimacy with God.
Ok . . . I’ll share my opinion: If God is infinite, then only God exists; there could be no time or place where God is not. That means that everything is made from God and could not exist by itself: the wave could not exist without the ocean.
If the wave could not exist without the ocean that would mean that we are not subject to Original Sin but instead to Original Purity: the purity and reality of Existence itself. Original Sin is an idea that comes later within time and space, and appears as just another idea within the Original Purity and obvious reality of Existence. Original Purity and dynamic unity with God is, I believe, the Original Gospel even though this flies in the face of orthodox dogma about separation from God being our born condition.
The Original Gospel is the always existing complete and perfectly obvious reality of Existence and our inherent, dynamic unity with it, like waves in an ocean or whirlpools in a river. Not refugees lost at sea or orphans born in sin, we are the waves and whirlpools in the oceanic wonder and glory of the Real God: already existing as Light, Love, Awareness, Truth, Beauty and Freedom.
The Limitless Nature of Love
Love is not constrained or limited by anything; it’s Brilliance illuminates the universe. God is alive as all things, freely, without restraint. All organisms, galaxies, every human being who ever lived, every microbe and bacteria, every memory, feeling and experience, literally everything, is the Radiance emanating from the Presence of Life, the Consciousness alive as the writer and reader of this sentence, the Awareness that is at the Heart of every experience, the only I there is, the One, the Only One who Exists.
Our idols of, and beliefs about God are fine but unnecessary since God is already present. Should we eat the menu or the meal? Must we live in a map? Or, can we live in the Territory? We already ARE the Territory, so let’s use the maps when needed to navigate the Territory, not try to replace it with the map.
Religions are maps that become caricatures of, and substitutes for the Territory. The Territory is Awareness, “our” Awareness. I use quotation marks here because no one “owns” Awareness. Awareness is the Ocean. Awareness is Free. Awareness is Life, Life is God, God is Existence. We are the waves on this Ocean.
Awareness cannot be owned, bought, sold or contained in any way. Words cannot describe it because they arise within it and come from it, after the fact of Existence. All words, ideas, beliefs, perspectives, points of view, philosophies, conclusions, doctrines, equations, formulas, cosmologies, religions, sciences and explanations are all downstream from the Eternal Presence of Infinite Existence. They are swallowed up in the Infinite Spaciousness as the Great Wonder: the Blinding Presence of the Beloved Person of Love, the Truth of every heart, the One and Only Being of All.
Separation from God is not Possible
This is why Christ stood up against the Pharisees and religious scholars of his day to condemn blood sacrifice and ridicule it as if it is something that God wants. Are we to think God wants substitutes or vicarious rituals of self-sacrifice but not self-sacrifice itself?
No. What happened is that more than 300 years after Jesus’ birth Rome and the Council of Nicaea wrote and published the first authorized Bible. They chose to edit Christ’s revolutionary message according to cultural and human interpretation of their day while also excluding writings they deemed heretical. Their publication began the subsequent, downward spiral of Christ’s intention of full liberation for ALL humanity. Jesus was portrayed as unique and special, not like the rest of us miserable bastards born in sin.
Few realized this change. Instead of helping people drink from the River of Grace that Jesus freely exposed for all, the Church and State dammed the River, built walls to block access to it, charged for Grace through obedience to doctrine, and acted as the administrators of it. This is the equivalent of selling water by the river.
They make up the truth, and we believe.
In the meantime, Reality exists freely beyond and before all of their, and our, ideas about it; all of our fear-based control strategies and power-freak shows; all of our puny contexts and loveless agendas. We whistle past the graveyard ignoring the Elephant standing on our foot.
The Cosmic Joke
This graveyard is the erroneous understanding of oneself as the collection of viewpoints and beliefs. The Elephant standing on our foot is the Awareness that underlies all viewpoints and beliefs. When I understand myself to be the Awareness OF this collection that I call me, my freedom is restored in the same way the sky is always present and free even when obscured by clouds.
Awareness is stable and certain. Though what we are aware of, like a mirage, may be a total illusion, the Awareness of it is not an illusion. Even as my body and mind have changed enormously since childhood my Awareness then and my Awareness now has not changed; I am the same I in both cases. At the most fundamental level what does not change in me (Awareness) must be what I am.
Everyone can say with confidence: I am aware. Our Awareness of what changes is the one and only thing in the universe that itself never changes, and when looking from it we see how all phenomena and points of view become equal. Every point of view, and each of us, are the waves in the Ocean of Awareness equal to the Ocean in essence yet not as the whole Ocean itself.
We are limited only by the containers we bring to the Ocean of Awareness, like Original Sin.
Eternal Living Awareness, Love Itself as Jesus knew it, is unlimited. It is stable, unchanging, infinitely wise and compassionate: the best possible place from which to live as a Human Being. Its fountain of Grace is truly overwhelming.
what I Love about this , is that whether you are a life long student of Christ
or a 66 year Jesus dodger , We can both find ourselves
on the same page of the Human book !
thanks Bob , keep Faith and Trust …..
Thank you Mark. Yes, there is no division in the Essence we share. That’s the Good News. No one owns it. No one can even name it.
all language and names are loaded and limiting ,
but as nature abhors a vacuum , intellect
has to label it , for it to even exist !
what we really are , has no need .
What a pleasure it is to read this wise essay. It radiates a clarity that cuts through layers of illusion, unveiling the immediacy of the divine presence beyond doctrine, beyond representation. The writing does not argue for belief but for direct experience—an awareness that is always already present, too vast to be owned, too immediate to be mediated.
The essay makes me think of this kindred spirit: I see Cinque’s essay through the lens of Jean Baudrillard–as a radical unveiling of hyperreality’s abyss. Baudrillard diagnosed modernity as a space where reality is no longer experienced directly but endlessly simulated—where religious institutions, cultural doctrines, and belief systems act as maps mistaken for the Territory, replacing the real with the spectacle of the real. In this sense, Cinque’s critique of institutionalized religion aligns and merges with Baudrillard’s insight. When the River of Grace is dammed and doctrine becomes a commodity, we are no longer drinking from the source but consuming a simulation of it. Yet, where Baudrillard saw only the endless play of signs leading to an empty void, this essay turns the abyss inside out, revealing that beyond the illusion, there is still something—Presence. Not a representation of God, not a system of belief, but the living Radiance itself, undivided, infinite.
And here we might turn to Joseph Campbell’s Mask of Eternity chapter in Power of Myth. Campbell understood that myth and religion are, at best, masks—ubiquitous in navigating the human condition but never to be mistaken for the infinite Reality behind them. He reminds us that the mask is not the face, just as the menu is not the meal. If we must use religion, let it be as a map, not a prison; let it be a lens, not a wall.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly…” (1 Corinthians 13:12). This passage suggests that our vision of the divine is always refracted, obscured by symbols, by myths, by words that fail to capture what is beyond words. Yet Bob Cinque’s essay insists that we not mistake the mirror for the reality it reflects. Let us know the mask for what it is, but also recognize the boundless, eternal behind it. The essay, in this way, is an invitation—not to discard all symbols, but to see them for what they are: at their best, only shimmering veils before the Infinite. With this perspective we can navigate each other’s perspective with more grace and love each other better. After all 1 Corinthians 13, home of the glass darkly, is the love chapter! Onward with more Bob. Stephen Knudsen
Not intending any disrespect for what you wrote however, mythologies have potent purpose and I would even say that man is a myth machine. Not claiming any credit for developing these ideas. They are Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Bernie Taylor’s influence upon me. Even if we claim not to believe any of them, I propose that we have guiding principles, mythologies built with them, whether we acknowledge them or not. But if one took the time to do that, what it is that really motivates our actions, it could improve and clarify what to do next. With respect to Jesus and the mythology that has been created about him, I should discuss with whoever has interest, in a separate forum / thread.
Yes, this is the dilemma. Given that God is everywhere and everything and I am included in everything, so what? How does that inform my every day experience? What does it mean to me personally? As both a physical and non-physical being, how shall I live?
Of the author I would ask, how has the realization changed his life?
funny , Bob 2 , I asked a Buddhist master those same questions
and all he said was ….. before enlightenment , fetch water ,
chop wood ….. after enlightenment , fetch water , chop wood .
what the heck ? I might just as well ask myself those damn questions !
I will suggest a path toward a practial approach for grounding spiritual truths:
We were created to participate in the ongoing creation of the universe. That is to say, we have the capacity to come up with scientific discoveries and technological innovations that lead to replenishing depleted natural resources. (“Be fruitful and multiply and REPLENISH the Earth…”)
Cultivating love to others (the true purpose of religion) goes hand-in-hand with organizing society toward ongoing scientific and technological progress. Right now, the big hurdle for the human race is to develop nuclear fusion.
Perhaps you can imagine the possibility that Jesus spoke at length about imperfections in the Bible, and I recorded his message here:
https://theplanetsspeak.substack.com/p/jesus-christ-speaks
I will suggest that the true purpose of religion is to cultivate our potential to let divine love shine through us and into the community and world around us.
I will further suggest that, to the extent we achieve this, we have little to fear regarding the need for “salvation.”