Our Common Core

WE KNOW ONLY A LITTLE*

We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that continents move about the surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation “Strange as it may seem,” wrote Richard Feyman, “we understand the distribution in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”

A Short History

of Nearly Everything,

Bill Bryson

*

 At the university I studied; philosophy, history, radical Marxist theory, labor history and the foundations of capitalism along with the arts and a rudimentary range in the sciences: including psychology, anthropology and sociology. I even took a course in Religious Studies (one of whose texts was the “The Varieties of Religious Experience”). I thought of myself as having had a well rounded liberal arts education, knowing a little about everything but surprisingly little about my core (even though I considered myself quite an adventurer). The truth was, however, that I ventured out very little from popular culture when it came to my own beliefs. Arrogant enough to pretend that what I believed was founded on a body of knowledge that was beyond question, I behaved accordingly. After all, my political opinions were based on a thorough examination of social phenomena and anyone who thought differently was, of course, a dolt. All of this education was fine and dandy but it should have told me what I didn’t know rather than to suppose my beliefs and my opinions were based on an infallible encyclopedia of information set in stone. Not only was I ignorant of my own core, I saw nothing  that told me that it had anything in common with others.

    Truly, I am not trying to impress anyone with my credentials. Contrarily, I point them out to say that the the core of the Heart of Compassion opened up to me only when I let go of what I thought I knew and began the adventure of a lifetime by simply looking within. Once I cleared away the obstructions, a light shone through that put all my knowledge in perspective. What I know about my core today is always changing as the dark corners of fear and doubt are exposed to the light of compassion. This was done… this dawning… this spiritual awakening… came about by applying the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. A practical and useful spirituality that was based on what is knowable… not pie in the sky or oogah-boogah religiosity… but a fundamental living relationship with the divine,... our core... yours and mine,  that directs and informs me as I wind my way through the challenges of the day.

geo 5,214

 

* Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 164