35 | The Final Episode: Divine, Human, Cosmic, Entangled, Consciousness

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

The 35th, and final Episode. Turns out this project has been my companion for almost a year of life. 

Looking back, there are so many things I wish I could improve or re-do, and there are things in earlier Episodes that I would say differently based on things I came to see in new ways in later sessions. At the same time, that reflects exactly what I had set out to do: make something that was not mapped out prior to starting. 

I wanted to make the map as I went along. The result is a kind of public chronicle of a more personal process of discovery.

Which means that these Episodes are not a final “magnum opus”. There is still more to explore, and future discoveries will almost certainly change my current ways of seeing things. 

So, in this final Episode I want to do several things:

 

Overview of Episode 35

I will share about the frameworks out of which I operate, especially relative to the religions of the world, since I have drawn so heavily upon them during the course of the podcast. There are two frameworks: the way I see religions as works of art and creative expressions of human spirituality, and then a framework I call “mutualism”. 

After that, I want to share some examples of how I see things drawing from the religious heritages we have primarily looked at during these weeks. 

Then, I will summarize the current state of my own conclusions after 34 Episodes in this CBTB Journey; my answers to the question I asked near the beginning, “where and when did I begin”?

And finally, I want to share what is next.

That is a lot, so I’d better get to it.
 

Two Frameworks in My Approach to Religions: Art and Mutualism

My two frameworks for how I see religion and the religions can be labeled as “art” and “mutualism”. I will take mutualism first.
 

Mutualism

If you’ve been following along you know I frequently refer to different religious heritages and sacred texts. Moses, the Gita, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and Muhammad have been frequent visitors. Here is a little background behind why those in particular have been important to me.

In my late teens I had a profound spiritual experience, which was shaped by the heritage of my childhood, Christianity. As a teenager I was introduced to the mystical poetry of John of the Cross which shaped how I began to interpret the Christian life, and also sacred texts. 

I attained a master’s degree in theology, during which I studied Hebrew and Greek and developed a deep love of the original biblical texts. I loved their spiritual depth, and in many cases their artistic beauty. I continued to be drawn to the contemplative streams of my Christian heritage.

Then in my early 20’s I had the first of what became a significant variety of cross-cultural and inter-religious experiences. In my life I have lived in East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. I have lived among Muslims and to a lesser extent Hindus and Buddhists. 

Later I pursued a PhD in translation studies, a focus largely inspired by my appreciation for the ways that Muslims approached the translation of the Qur’an in Urdu. 

This further deepened my love for religious texts and drew me to the Bhagavad Gita and Buddha and more.

It was this journey and these experiences which drew me more and more deeply into the life of Moses, and Jesus, and the Qur’an and Muhammad, and into Buddhist and Hindu texts. More recently I also found my way to Lao Tzu. 

In my experience, every heritage has much to offer and teach to the others. Which implies they can each receive from the others. If they were each a person, I would say that they can each be ready to receive and learn, and ready to offer and give, to be transformed together. Each heritage has pieces of the whole puzzle. They can sit at the table and break bread, and grow and be transformed.

That is the framework that I have come to call “mutualism”: 

Mutual giving, mutual receiving, mutual transformation.

This connects with my conclusion over the past weeks that both small e empathy and big E Empathy are at the heart of reality. Just as empathy enables us to put ourselves in the place of others, feel what they feel, think what they think, fear what they fear, so too with religions, empathy enables us to get inside of the heart of an unfamiliar religion to some extent, and to feel and experience its ways of seeing from the inside.

Empathy makes mutualism more fully possible.

What about the framework for religion I label as “art”?

 

Art

Given that this is a podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist, here is where I get to summarize some of what that means, at least.

As an artist, I began to see people like Moses, and the people behind the Gita, and Buddha, and Lao Tzu, and Jesus and Muhammad as more than great religious founders. I began to appreciate each as, in their own right, artistic and creative “founders”. As what I sometimes call “spiritual creatives”. So for me, religions are works of art, creative expressions of human spiritual experiences.

Let me explain further with some basic, obvious observations:

• human beings exist 
• human beings have always created: cave painting, new tools, improved ways of living, or agriculture, but also songs, poems, stories, all of it is creative…we just can’t help it
• human beings have always tried to share their art with others: this is why there are cave paintings…
• human beings have always reported having what I would call spiritual experiences 
• human beings have always sought to share these experiences with others and to do so they have used language to describe them. They have created rituals and ceremonies so that these experiences could be shared, and as a result what we call religions have come into being, humans created them 
• in other words the spiritual nature of human beings required the creative nature of being human to express itself, and so our creative nature has also resulted in the religions we have formed to express our spiritual nature, our artistic and religious selves are entwined

Thus, I see religion as an artistic form (and by the way, I see art as a “spirit form”). Religions are like vast expressions of folk art, their rituals and vocabulary and metaphors and analogies and stories and arts and music and poetry are like vast murals created over long periods of time, by multiple hands, and they continue to feed and nourish the souls of millions and millions today. 

 

The Results of Mutualism in My Own Life

I won’t take the space and time here to summarize what some would call a “theology” of some sort of synthesized mix of these religions; some sort of organized, rational “creedal formula”. Instead, I want to share first what I appreciate about the six great religious heritages I have focused on in the podcast (with apologies to those I have not included such as the Granth of the Sikhs or the sacred writings of the Bahai). After that I will share one of the things I have not been able to assimilate.

This seems like a good place to share again a poem I have shared before that expresses my “mutualist” view of things, “Truth and Truths”.

Truth and Truths 

When my truths 

Hummed in this key, 

And your truths 

Hummed in that, 

Meet, 

And meeting shed each discordant note, 

Align to one true chord, 

Find flight and give voice to living words, 

Then every song will echo thronging vibrant alive, 

Shimmering in a vast chorus of our varied truths, 

Woven in one united opus. 

 

And all, and each, together, 

With full throated glee, 

We will know, and name, 

The Truth.

 

So, what does that look like, then? What follows is very selective, and by no means anything approaching trying to share everything I have received.

 

Moses

Moses experienced the divine as a compassionate, merciful, God who initiated and acted and spoke, created, ordered, and intervened. 

Moses also asked frank, open, hard questions of God and about God. Moses is honest about his self-doubt and frustrations. This is a way of relating to the divine that is woven throughout the Jewish scriptures and into the rabbinic traditions of Judaism.

Moses offers to me and to the other religions a vision of the divine that I would describe as “living” and personal.

 

The Gita

According to the Gita, everything in nature (prakriti) is an extension of the divine energy. Nature is pulsing with the divine, energized by it. The divine being is caught up in, found in, and is connected to everything around me. This view of things has found its way into my experiences of nature and the divine. More about that later on.

The Gita has also shaped my spiritual life through its insights about working and creating without working and creating, and working and creating without worrying about the fruit  or result or response that those things I do or make might elicit.

The Gita also inspires me to ask, as Arjuna asked Krishna, for God to not only teach me or explain to me, but to enable me to experience divine truth and life. 

 

Buddha

I do not have words to express how much I appreciate Buddha's exacting explorations of his inner mental processes, and his profound self-awareness. By that I don't just mean self-awareness of motivations or feelings, but his deep exploration of how the mind works. 

The Buddha provides an extremely helpful framework for me in my own contemplative life and meditative life. I have been helped by incorporating compassion, empathy, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in my meditations (the four brahmaviharas). I keep coming back to those over and over, and they're profoundly helpful to me in my own engagement with people, my life as an artist. 

Then too there are the insights of the Buddha about the interconnectedness, the “interbeingness” of everything which has helped me to see, and experience, and articulate things in a new way.

 

Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu encourages me to be comfortable with mystery and with leaving things, and especially ultimate reality, or the Way (Tao), undefined. He goes so far as to say that if we can define reality then it is not reality that we have defined. His insight about the way that emptiness matters will always stick with me, affecting how I approach time, and work, and my own art. I am thinking here of his example of the clay pot, the essence of which is not its outer shape but its inner, empty space.

 

Jesus

The two things I will focus on here are the person of Jesus and the teaching or path he gave to his followers. 

The texts of the Gospels portray the person of Jesus as so in union with the divine (whom Jesus experienced as a tender, generous, loving “father”) that in some way, the divine heart also experienced all the brutal, painful, bloody mess of humanity that Jesus experienced, and lovingly and took it all into the very being of God and, my word here, metabolized it (and continues to metabolize it). John’s Gospel includes the fact that we are included in this union, we are drawn into the divine life, and the divine life is in us.

In the prior Episode to this one I explained that this vision of the divine, for which panentheism helps give vocabulary, is the only way I think I can continue to believe in a just and merciful divine being in the face of the evidence of human and cosmic history.

The second thing is Jesus’ teaching and the path he gave to his followers. The Sermon on the Mount  is perhaps the most famous collection of his teaching. From the various things Jesus touches in that collection of sayings, I only have space for one example, which is the way he summarized everything in the core principle “love your neighbor as yourself”, extending that to include love of enemies. 

I’ll add that it is in the teaching of Jesus that I find the most direct and clear affirmation that the divine nature is at its very heart, love.

Muhammad

The first thing I will mention is the Quran's metaphorical and poetic power, the fierce beauty of the language of the Quran. Muhammad is unfortunately caricatured and misrepresented in negative ways, especially in the west, but while there are incidents in his life that need to be honestly faced, overall the picture I have of his character is a man of integrity and humility. There is also a deep sense of justice and mercy in his life that I think is quite unique for a man of his time. 

I’ll add two comments about the Islamic tradition as a whole. It won’t surprise people to hear that I'm particularly drawn to the Sufi streams just as I am drawn to the contemplative streams of my original religious heritage as well. 

Also, in one season of life I practiced the cycles of prayer, five times a day. That pause inspired a contemplative, meditative rhythm in life. And while I don't pause five times a day now, finding regular open spaces in the day has remained a part of my inner fabric.

 

The Divine? 

I looked at the various theisms, and came to the conclusion that panentheism best describes me: it seems to make sense of quantum physics, it is in sync with some of the source texts of Christianity, and I would say it accounts for a way to see the truths of the Gita and Lao Tzu on the one hand (which both tend towards the pantheist vision) and the Quran and Jewish scriptures on the others (clearly monotheist).

In addition, panentheism, “all-in-god-sim” and god-in-all-ism”, accounts for my personal experiences of the divine and nature. I have had and have experiences of transcendence, in which I experience the divine as “other”, and I have had and have experiences of immanence, of the divine nearness, union, the divine so entangled in the world around me that the divine and nature seem indeed to be one and the same. 

 

“Other Stuff”?

Does this summary of things I appreciate imply that I just mix everything together and make it all agree? Am I avoiding disagreement and conflict?

No, there are definite points of tension. At some point I want to elaborate more on that (I will say more about what I plan to do in the future in my concluding comments later). For now, I will just share one area that I am unable to digest, and it is one I find in most of the heritages.

When I read the Jewish scriptures and the accounts of God ordering the conquest of the land, and there are similar examples in the Quran, or when I find the Gita seems to treat too lightly the very real suffering of an impending battle, I have to be honest. I do not see how these can find ethical justification. Perhaps it is a limitation of my own moral compass, but until I am convinced of that I am trusting the compass. I do not believe such violence, some examples of which, by any objective measure, would be considered genocide, to be representative of the divine or purpose.

However, something I notice and appreciate is that even in the religious heritages which have examples of the divine being authorizing violence and war, there are also texts encouraging non-violence, or at least passages aimed to mitigate and lessen the violence. 

Values based upon non-violence seem clearest in two of the heritages, in my experience. One is the Buddha’s teaching. The other is the life and teaching of Jesus. 

Further, in the case of Jesus, we also have an example of something more than teaching, for he lived in keeping with his own words in the face of false accusations and torture and death.

Without going into more detail, I stand with the pacificists. But I do so realistically, with the knowledge that non-violence is impractical, and seems a fool’s dream, unrealistic politically. It seems however, the only way for true, lasting, real peace. And I believe there is a tipping point, the point of critical mass when enough people in enough countries not only want a non-violent world but live in keeping with that vision, willing to face whatever that may cost before it is widely embraced. And may that tipping point come soon.

A lot more to say about these heritages, which I plan to do, and I will say more about how later. But now I turn to an attempt to summarize 34 Episodes of my life!

 

Summary of 34 Episodes

Where and when did I begin, I asked so innocently way back when. That sounds like the start of a humorous poem! But I digress! 

Since I have summarized things along the way that I was coming to conclusions about, this will be more of a brief recap. The cosmos, time, and consciousness.

How I see the cosmos:
The cosmos is a vast, constantly changing, emerging, generative and regenerative process, in which everything is entangled in at least three ways.

First, quantum entanglement tells us that subatomic particles respond to each other from vast distances, they are connected and act as if they have minds of their own.

Second, our perceptions and experiences entangle us with what we perceive, and experience. We are not separated from what we experience, what we experience is not separate from us.

Third, another way I understand the entanglement of the cosmos is, to use the word that comes from John’s Gospel, towardsness. Things are entangled, and particles behave the way they do because “towardsness” is the essential nature of everything.

So, we are all wrapped up in everything and each other, in the entangled thing we call the cosmos. We are part of our “where” and vice versa.

How I see time:
First, the present. The present moment is so infinitesimally minute as to be non-existent. At least experientially. The moment something happens, it is gone. The present is never present. 

The future? The future, by definition, is not here.

What about the past?

When I try to grab hold of a present moment, it has already slid past me, and what I “hold” is something I am experiencing with my memory. Memory is the most pervasive ingredient in our experience of time, and thus a major element in our consciousness, in our “I”. This means that memory is a defining element of who we are, of our experience of being selves.

In later Episodes I came to realize that when we put ourselves back into a memory, we are re-experiencing it. That function of remembering, and of putting ourselves back into something that happened, with people who were part of it, is using a part of us that is very much like empathy. 

Thus, empathy and memory are two primary elements in our experience of time, and in our experience of being conscious. 

Speaking of which…

How I see consciousness:
In thinking about consciousness I began from a framework that described different dimensions of consciousness: experiences, awareness of experiences, awareness of being aware of having experiences, and then the possibility of an awareness of the “awarenesses” that others have as if their awareness was my own.

That is a level of entanglement with another subject, or subjects, in which one experiences the experiences of another subject in the first person as the other first person, not just “as if” I were the other.

And that is what led me eventually to conclude that empathy is a more fundamental ingredient of all forms of consciousness than I had ever considered. And that means for me there is a big E Empathy that is essential to the nature of any big C Consciousness there may be.

 

Combined: Where, When, I
Place, time, and consciousness are all entangled and woven together in empathy, our empathy, and in and with big E Empathy, in small c consciousness and in big C Consciousness, in the natural, and the divine.

 

So what?
One implication for me from all of that, is that through practices like meditation and mindfulness we can come to cultivate these elements of Reality in our own being. This is possible because they are Real. They are aspects of Ultimate Reality. And they are aspects of our nature.  

Cultivation of our entanglement, cultivation of empathy, can foster shared ways of seeing, shared emotions, and shared experiences, creating a sort of unified field of experience, in which our individual experiences and minds and consciousnesses are all shaped by the collective landscape of humanity, and ultimately, the cosmos. And as we cultivate these qualities, we contribute to shaping that landscape too, which means changing it.

 

How?

Going back, again, to Episode 1, there are butterfly effects, both good and bad. Because of cosmic entanglement, I, we, can cultivate empathy and as a result contribute to the positive butterfly effects that may impact others, and even the cosmos.

There are Buddhist ways of speaking of this, and there are ways rooted in the New Testament. The latter suggests there are divine butterfly effects, and a divine way of metabolizing evil and suffering, a divine way we participate in. Or can.

And so, again, I have hope that through the cultivation of empathy, in connection with big E Empathy, ultimately everything will existentially become what its ontological nature is.

As I put it in the last Episode: I have hope for a future in which empathy and love will “win.”

And, though I have shared it before, all this talk of butterfly effects suggests to me that for my last creative offering, I will share my song “Butterfly Wing” again. It was in my very first Episode. Here it is again in the final one. Bookending things. And in many ways, if one listens to it through the lenses of all the Episodes between 1 and 35, one can find many ways in which this song summarizes the intention of the Cow Behind the Barn: the song is an expression of how I as an artist experience and interpret humanity, the world, and the divine.  

 

Butterfly Wing

They say that all it takes is the wing of just one butterfly

To change the course of time, in a broken life

A million miles away, a million miles away, a million miles away, oooh, a million miles away

 

They say that all it takes is one gentle whispered word

And even though it not be heard, it can still do its work,  

A million miles away, a million miles away, a million miles away, oooh, a million miles away

 

Shadows fall around like acid rain 

Soak into our souls, leave bitter stains

Pouring out from inside hearts long shattered

Can my tiny soul do anything that will matter

From a million miles away, a million miles away, a million miles away, oooh, a million miles away

 

They say that all it takes is the wing of just one butterfly

To change the course of time, in a broken life

And they say that all it takes is a gentle and whispered word

Even though it not be heard it can still do its work

A million miles away, a million miles away, a million miles away, oooh, 

A million miles away, a million miles away, a million miles away, oooh, 

A million miles away

 

And they say that all it takes is the wing of just one butterfly…

 

As I conclude I will quote myself again from the last Episode: I know my explanations won’t satisfy everyone, but as of today, this is where I stand!

Now what? 

 

What Next?

As I am coming to the end of the Episode, and of the whole Cow Behind the Barn Series. I am very aware of how incomplete and inadequate this all feels, which means I am aware of how inadequate I feel! There are still unanswered questions, and unasked questions I have not thought of yet! There are loose threads. There are connections left disconnected, and tensions and paradoxes and contradictions left unexplored, including in my own thinking.

So, what next? Well, I will keep exploring, for one thing. I hope you will as well.

One way for you to do that, by the way, is a course I helped develop for Table Collective called Wisdom for Artists from Ancient Wells. You can find out more at the Table Collective’s website, www.tablecollective.art.

But for me personally, one of the things I am aware of is that each time I brought sacred texts from the various heritages into the conversations, I always wanted to say more about them. A lot more. And not just in terms of the ways they contributed to whatever theme I was addressing at the time.

So next I plan to find space and time to listen and to let them speak more fully; speak to me, and speak to each other as it were. They do not always agree with each other. They can each add to the others, and they can each receive from the others. 

I want to explore all of that more fully and freely, and to share that with others.

So, at this point, although I am concluding the Cow Behind the Barn podcast, I am planning to begin a new project. I will focus more deeply on some of the sacred texts that most interest me, taking time to, as it were, meet with each individually. But then I will also find ways to let them talk to each other. 

It won’t surprise you to hear that some of the texts I want to explore in this way include the early chapters of Genesis, the Gita, more of the Buddha’s suttas/sutras, the Tao Te Ching, the Gospels of Luke and John in particular, and the Quran. I may end up including others, such as the Granth, we will see.

And how? I am not sure yet…but most likely I will get all that shared on my own YouTube channel, Kevin Caldwell Music.

And, I hope to meet some of you there! 

So, here I am! About to sign off, and so I will end with a slight modification of my normal sign off and say here that whatever “next time means” I hope to see you… next time!