This is the teaching of the Holy Grail.
The 12th Century didn't only profoundly see through the meaningless hypocrisies of institutionalized religion and realize that authentic humanity is grounded only in our spontaneous hearts, but they further and incredibly realized that being true to yourself is "nature itself" raised to its highest form, as opposed to absurd conflicts with the "supernatural" or "metaphysical" (the babble of intellectualizing theologians and philosophers).
Alas, this vision has been mostly lost to fanatical religious cults such as Baptist Big Bang Armageddonites and George W. Bush, whose limitless hatred of nature is matched only by rapacious Texas energy corporations.
It must be taken in that these people HATE NATURE and see "it" only as a planet sized money cow.
But God without nature is a meaningless abstraction. Indeed, "God" is a metaphor at best for a mystery beyond concepts and institutions. In other words, nature.
This is all of a piece with the terrifying truth (to most of the human race) that ultimate realness is where we already are. This, as they say, is "It" my friends, unless you'd rather masturbate away your lives in 65 I.Q religious games.
But birth and death have NOTHING to do with catechisms, pamphlets, and fear of life sermonetts. They have to do with the spontaneous raw ongoing ness of immediacy which is itself reality process. Indeed, it is exactly this "untheoretical" raw ongoing ness which is the land of souls, not libraries jammed with dead abstractions.
Indeed, the thinking about point of view IS the pseudo identity of human beings, but that "about which" it thinks is nature, nature, and nothing but nature.
The 12th Century knew this. They knew, for example, that love is a creation of spontaneous nature. An ancient Chinese word for nature is TZU JAN, which means (very roughly) that which is so of itself. And so nowing is the of itself soing of that which is so of itself.
In a sentence: nowing is realitying is selfing. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.
Our country is now controlled by people who are hypnotized with religious/nationalistic games. They are literally insane (i.e., TOTALLY out of touch with reality).
But this is the evil foam, merely, on an ocean of bottomless mystery, and this mystery is the reality in which we live and move and have our being. It also doesn't answer to the foam.
So we should keep the faith that from the depths of nature will still come our salvation. Also, that these depths are also ultimately "our" depths.
So much sorrow. So much despair. So much loss. But keeping the life and death mystery faith will save us in the end. It always has. It always will.
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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)
