• We must encourage each other to stay in the e.s and the q.s of all these equobenities.

• The impoverished mode of each leads only to various kinds of death.

• The T. position is incredibly hard to attain but it is not impossible. For each of these equobenities it is more than possible, it is necessary. There has never been such a challenge

Here is the first equobenity spelled out:

Context: a changing, communicating world but still open to being violent, sometimes prone to being violent

Equobenity:

T.

to understand the legitimate needs of both sides

    to value both sides equally, though in different ways

  to be clear which one you are working for right now

to accept as natural that sometimes you work for both sides at once

       is to help insure a good future for both self and others

there are as may opinions and suggestions

as there are people, all legitimate

extra lines must be left to hear these voice

the etc. insures no one is left out

g.

depression or guilt that you can't understand

since all your actions were to be of help

•    •    •

How did the great, early religions get started?

The short answer is: unanswered questions. Many say, "Unanswerable questions."

Unanswered, or unanswerable, questions all individuals are familiar with: Why am I here? Why are we all here? How did we get here? What is the meaning of our lives? What is life? Why is life?

For many, unanswered questions are an answer in themselves, a mystery within which they live peacefully.

For others, unanswered question create a vacuum and there is no peace until the vacuum is filled, the questions answered  - or at least on their way to being answered.

Human history is wonderful with its religious answers --so many beliefs so fully expressed and practiced. So many people with so much evidence for their own belief. Why is it that none of the evidence can be duplicated by science, that an individual's, or a group's evidence will not stand up in court? And does this matter? How much does it matter?

The Chinese, isolated by choice from the rest of the world, created their belief system differently from the Indians, whose climate and early history were also uniquely their own. India offered a kind of complementarity to her peoples' questing soul: Buddhism, greatly concerned with the individual's quest for harmony and compassion versus the colorful, intimate Hindu religion, all about the many gods and their dramatic roles in human life.

Christianity and Islam have their roots in Judaism but history determined that  Christianity set its deepest roots in the urban and sophisticated Roman culture while half a century later, the Bedouin desert culture of the Arabs gave birth to Islam.

To this over-simplification perhaps another could be added. The Indian continent and the rich storehouse of the Middle East appear to have shared an equobenity:

Context: people's need to have an active practice in their religion at the same time as needing an introverted, meditative, silent, or solitary practice.

Equobenity:

•    •    •

But for many, especially today, the vacuum remains. The understanding of the central mystery of all, "Why?", is no more helpful than the three blind men who describe an elephant. One is riding it. One is being trampled by it. The third is trying to tie it up with a small rope. None of the three describe an actual elephant. Does any religion purport to answer the question "Why?"

Treated to such an ongoing Feast of diversity among people, many of us are content to be happy without conclusive answers. Others, of course, require answers and many extraordinary, scientifically provable answers are constantly being discovered. A few people are still willing to merely kill, the power to annihilate presumably proving their uniquely true understanding.

Are there any people without a capacity for awe, without the respect for the existence of profound mystery? To gather together in this acknowledgment seems to be a permanent need. It existed at the beginning and continues today.

•    •    •

What happens when change comes, when what made sense long ago now seems inadequate for how much we have learned, how much we keep on learning, how much we still need to learn? Are we are still willing to search? Are we willing to find, perhaps, not just one answer, but many numbers of answers?

Laurence van der Post in "Lost World of the Kalahari" describes being taken to the mountain where Creation took place. He is warned that the God of Creation has become weak because so few Kalahari believe in him anymore. After a long trek through the desert, the caravan arrives. The following morning Van der Post is brought to the steps that lead to the top of the mountain.

Footprints of many animals are embedded in the steps but they are all footprints of animals coming down. There are no footprints of animals going up. They have been created, now they must go out and live their lives in the world. Van der Post is led by his guide up the steps of the mountain to the Pool of Creation. He leans over to look down into the clear water and is immediately hurled back. He nearly falls. His Kalahari guide tells him that in the old days the god would have been so angry at this human intrusion that van der Post would have fallen and probably been killed.

the power of an ancient holy place is not able to make a different response. Its response to modern curiosity is the same as it has always been: fierce. But now it is greatly weakened. It is not able to be different,. It is not able to react more aptly in a different time. (Interesting question: does this kind of ancient power have a choice at all?)

•    •    •

Most of us do what survival has always required we do: we adapt. We don't throw babies out with bath waters and we don't think we have been stupid. We haven't been stupid. There have been many older times with many different needs and expectations. We fine-tune. We always fine-tune. Fine-tuning is how history happens, how change takes place whether in our own kitchen or in our nation. We add a little here, subtract a little there, always respecting the essential mystery of it all, of creation, of the whole unfathomable "Why?”

But oh the possibilities of friction! How they have multiplied in our present world. A widowed grandmother in Monrovia, Kansas orders her favorite cheese from Bangladesh and young people meet their life-mates half a world away but a whole world away in terms of language and custom, expectations and possibilities. Think of the complexities, the possibilities for misunderstanding.

•    •    •

The word "religion" makes itself out of the word for "ligament". It's as if our eons-long search through the veil of mystery has been a search for a powerful Something or Someone to tie us close, to reassure us that our ligaments tie us to our bones, to reassure us that it's safe to walk.

And it's of special interest that there is the "re" before the "ligion". "Re" means "again", as in "relive", "redo", "renounce". "Re" seems to tell us that we believe we were, once, tied tight to the reassuring and empowering god and we wish to get back to that perfection and security, to that love of the One who created us and sent us down the steps and into the world.

If we have ethics we will survive. We can keep all our religions but we must all share ethics. And when you look closely at religions you can't fail to see ethics curled up in all their centers. If you carried all the systems of ethics in all the religions outdoors, if you hung them all up in the sun and wind, you'd find they were all pretty much alike.

•    •    •

We do have one dangerous tendency: to throw the baby out with the bath water. If as a group, we turn against another group, we tend to condemn it wholesale.

We don't do this in our private lives. We pick and choose what to keep, what to change. Why can't groups become as good at picking and choosing as we are for our own persons? Religions are made of persons; some are good people, some are bad. If the bad seem to be in the ascendant why does it feel necessary to condemn the whole religion? It doesn't make any sense.

Context: war as a reason for rethinking your beliefs about God

"He wanted to believe that someone could be watching in pity and horror, someone who could change things if he chose. He wanted to believe that men were not in charge. But at the center of his sternum he felt a cold certainty that told him otherwise. He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he'd prayed in Konar and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building's inhabitants. The world was their place now. They would use it in their fashion, live or die by their own actions. He touched Klara's hand and she opened her eyes."

"The Invisible Bridge" by Julie Orringer (Vintage Books; A Division of Random House, Inc. New York; 2011; page 549)

Context: War, its terrors, injustice and hardships, over none of which an individual,

a "foot soldier" has any control at all. H/is remaining choices involve h/is interior understanding and what attitude h/e chooses, what attitude h/e struggles to choose, or what attitude h/e struggles to shake off.

Equobenity:

T.

in the presence of some situations

disillusionment represents a profound acceptance of what is real

if, at the same time, in different moments

you can teach yourself again and again words that still carry

their own reality

you will survive both your only reality

and the reality words like love cannot lose         

The impoverished mode of e. is to rest permanently in disillusion. From such soil flowers despair and cynicism. Once the horrific situation is over the possibility for love may be lost.

The impoverished mode of q., never letting yourself feel disillusioned, never letting yourself experience the crushing reality of collective crime, e., may make you happier in that moment. But after the horrific situation is passing away you may find yourself estranged in some important ways from those who have been to the depths of disillusion and returned with the power of love intact..

•    •    •

Richard P. Feynman won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work with the theory of quantum electrodynamics. The following is quoted from a series of lectures he gave at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1963.

He does not want us to argue about why we agree if we do agree.

"I therefore consider the Encyclical of Pope John XXIII, which I have read, to be one of the most remarkable occurrences of our time and a great step to the future. I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality, of the duties and responsibilities of mankind, people to other people, than is in this encyclical. I do not agree with some of the machinery which supports some of the ideas, that they spring from God, perhaps, I don't personally believe, or that some of these ideas are the natural consequence of ideas of earlier popes, in a natural and perfectly sensible way. I don't agree, and I will not ridicule it, and I won't argue it. I agree with the responsibilities and with the duties that the Pope represents as the responsibilities and duties of people. And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing."

"The Meaning Of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist" by Richard P Feynman (Perseus Books 1998, page 122)

Context: A humane, modern physicist who has lived in the thick of historic events e.g. the beginnings of the quantum and nuclear eras, doesn't care from where good ideas come from, just whether they are good and will help to save us.

Equobenity:                          

•    •    •

In terms of friction, religious tolerance and intolerance, in terms of good, evil, survival and safety, there has been one long historic period when one religion dominated but treated two rival religions as equals. For nearly eight hundred years the Muslim religion ruled Spain and in the high culture of its capital, Cordoba, Christians and Jews were treated by the Moslems as equals. For Western Europe this was the period called The Dark Ages. But in Spain all lights were on.

From 750 to 1492 a half a million people lived in Cordoba, the center of the Western Ummayid Caliphate. Cordoba had 113,000 homes and 21 suburbs, 70 libraries, numerous bookshops and palaces, 700 mosques and 300 public baths. To give this last figure perspective: "When the University of Oxford [founded in 1264] still looked upon bathing as a heathen custom, generations of Cordovan scientists had been enjoying baths in luxurious establishments." (Hitti)

Lights from the bordering houses illuminated miles of paved streets. And again to give perspective, "700 years after this time, there was not so much as one public lamp in London and in Paris; centuries subsequently, whoever stepped over his threshold on a rainy day stepped up to his ankles in mud." (Draper)

"Whenever the rulers of Leon, Navarre, or Barcelona needed a surgeon, an architect, a master singer, or a dressmaker, it was to Cordoba that they applied " (Hitti) There were 13,000 weavers of silk and wool; from Spain Morocco learned the art of tanning and embossing leather. In Spain, the Muslims invented paper, printing, glass and the water wheel; their gardeners learned how to use fertilizer and how to graft. From Valencia they exported citrus and rice, and from three Spanish provinces they exported 20,000 pounds of gold every year beginning in 750.

Except for the harp and the zither which were used in the Orient still earlier, all the musical instruments of the Middle Ages were of Muslim origin, including the lute [Arab 'ud], the bow for the violin and the viol. The rhyming of poetry, as well as the complexities of poetic meters, also came from Muslim Spain.

Cordoba was a city of education. Caliph Hakam II, opened 27 free schools for the poor and for both women and men. The University of Cordoba, the sole great center of learning in Europe, had 4000 students as early as 775. By 1000 the Caliph's personal library contained 400,000 volumes. (Ibn Khaldun)

Such a remarkable spread of literacy among an entire population, and for men and women alike stimulated, among other things, widespread interest in Arabic poetry. This interest gave birth to the popular songs of Jazal and Muwashshah, the precursors of the songs of love and chivalry of medieval Europe.

Of Arabic poetry in general, Hitti says, "Wherever and whenever the Arabic language was used there the passion for poetical composition was intense. Verses countless in number passed from mouth to mouth and were admired by high and low, not so much perhaps for their contents as for their music and exquisite dictions. This sheer joy in the beauty and euphony of words, a characteristic of Arabic-speaking people, first manifested itself on Spanish soil. The first Ummayyad sovereign was a poet and so were several of his successors."

The year 1000 AD: the year the spiritual center of Judaism moved from Mesopotamia to Spain, the year that Arabs and Jews became court physicians in Germany, the year that the Indian mathematician, Sridhara, recognized the importance of the zero, the year the Chinese perfected the invention of gunpowder although, until 1151, it was only used for firecrackers and turning prayer wheels.

Summary as extracted from twenty-eight books including:

• "History of the Arabs" by Philip K. Hitti (St. Martin's Press, Macmillan, 1967, ninth edition)

• "The Muquddimah: An Introduction To History" by Ibn Khaldun and translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal (Bollingen Series XLIII, Pantheon Books 1958)

• "A History of the Jews in Christian Spain" by Yitzak Baer (Volume I "From the Age of Reconquest to the Fourteenth Century" [The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1961])

• "History of the Moslems of Spain" by Dozy

• "A history of the Intellectual Development of Europe" by John Draper

All this has happened. Such tolerance, such enlightenment can happen again.

Context: response to universal and existential need and danger. Both need and danger are due to climate change, nuclear threat, religious friction, failure to shout out to the challenge, "Here we come!"

Equobenity: our prophetic choice of attitude:

  T.

with determination in e.

and respect for q.

for a continual alternation between the two

we will come to the new place

we are diverse, we must be heard

leave extra spaces

never omit the etc.