Another Transitions column from our local New Age Guru, Ross Freake at the Kelowna Daily Courier. Ross writes every two to three weeks on spirituality. Every once and a while I challenge what he has to say. (See Pantheism Panned: New Age Spirituality cannot deal with the Problem of Radical Evil & It's Easter time and I am Passionate about the Resurrection!)   Here is the introduction to this column which he launched last year.

This column will seek directions, a road map or a sky chart, from the people who have already traveled the path and advise the rest of us on how to avoid the potholes and where to turn when we come to four-way stops. You will meet people who have made a somersault into the unknown, and occasionally, people who have made the ultimate transition and left the now-here and headed back to nowhere.

This week Ross asks the question – What do you believe? His advice is that we “start figuring out who we are and where we are going” by examining what we believe in because “beliefs shape who we are”. Ross then points his readers in the direction of Neoplatonism  to help answer this question.  That is entirely the wrong direction to go.

Ross is right to challenge people on their belief systems. It is important that we examine ourselves, for Socrates once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” So let's examine the belief that platonic dualism is the answer to life’s questions. Ross says, “we make it so by thinking it so” If we can order our inner consciousness and tune into a larger idea, “we can be anything we want, have anything we want.”

What nonsense!  Ross counsels us to a radical denial of the real world of space, time and matter, disconnecting us from that which is outside so we can get in touch with that which is inside. This belief system denies our very material existence. It is a false hope. One may be able to hide in silence from the hustle and bustle of daily life but one can’t run from the real world. Denying reality is a cop out. In the dualists world, all we have to love is ourselves. That is a recipe for boredom.

Engaging reality with faith, hope and love is the way to answer life’s questions. Only when we acknowledge there is a real world other than ourselves and only when we give ourselves away to the other do we find true fulfillment. As Martin Buber states in his famous essay, “I and Thou ”, it is in saying “Thou” to God that I can at last say “I” and it is in saying “I-Thou” that other “thou’s” become real.[1] This is the essence of love, acknowledging the reality, the beauty and the significance of the other.

So God is for our material existence, for our otherness. He created the world and said it was good! God is a person, who loves, hopes and believes in us enough to enter this world as a human being and engage it to the point of suffering and dying for the sins of the world. God’s self giving love is seen in the Incarnation. In Jesus, God gave himself away to that which is other than himself. That is why the Bible tells us that God is love.

The bodily resurrection of Jesus into a new material reality beyond evil, sin and death is the vindication of God’s love and the affirmation of the goodness of the other. This is the Christian hope. Faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead for the sake of his world is the pathway to life not platonic dualism that denies the reality of the other. Face it, platonic dualism is boring. My advice to the dualists is to get real, get loving others, and get a life!

Tags: Socrates, Platonism, dualism, Martin Buber, incarnation