Contents:
See 1 question about The Future of God…. Lists with This Book. Jan 28, William2 rated it did not like it Shelves: Knopf, , pp. Armstrong says that there never was a presumption on the part of early theists that they could grasp God. God was beyond human comprehension. This technique leads one toward the necessary quiet contemplation of God.
So religion was not in its early days about belief at all. No one was expected to believe in God. In fact, the idea of belief as we know it today did not even exist then, almost two millenia ago.
That happened when the scientific revolution came along. The scientific method taught that facts were either right or wrong.
Either you could repeat the experiment, or you could not. Gradually there was a shift from kenosis , from the gentle act of self-emptying for purposes of contemplation of God in silence, to one which began to seek "scientific proofs" for God's existence.
For instance, it was at first thought that the incredible detail revealed by microscopes was a sign of the Divine. William Paley, an English clergyman, wrote about this in his Natural Theology. First were advances in geology. Geology showed that the earth was not created in six days, as stated in Genesis; rather it pointed to time spans hundreds of millions of years almost beyond human comprehension.
Darwin showed us that homo sapiens and his fellows were not created all at one time and set down on the planet in their current form. Evolution showed us that there was no Intelligent Design, for its process natural selection was not in any way directed. That is to say, it was a geologically slow and muddled process marked by eons of struggle, most of it futile, not to mention much extinction.
So here we are in the present day. The fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible or the Koran or the Talmud. Something never required of early worshippers. Somehow it has come to be thought that religion must be match science truth for truth. And religion of course, with its basis in sacred narrative, can never do that. The book is such a morass, such a muddle of half thoughts and inchoate statements, that at first I hardly knew how to begin my review. I suspect it was dictated. Chopra does not seem to have even given this mess a second reading. I surmise it was just dictated, hurriedly, transcribed, and sent to the publisher.
After all, why actually work on a book when you know it will sell a , copies? And Chopra publishes books at an inhuman pace. Chopra attacks those he calls the militant atheists, particularly Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and others. He falls into the very trap that Armstrong laid out in The Case for God. He tries to match proofs with the science of Dawkins et. I was stunned reading that! If he did understand it he would not need to rail against its seeming Godlessness.
For the mechanism of natural selection that Darwin passed down to us does not, to my mind, exclude the idea of a Creator. Unlike Armstrong, Chopra does not argue for the existence of God in our daily lives from its basis in the extensive mythical narratives that have come down to us. Chopra is a very traditional fellow, extolling divine inspiration and healings, which he takes at face value.
I am an agnostic. I admire normal religious people for their ability to reflect inwardly and live confident and productive lives. For a moving portrait of such persons see Marilynn Robinson's fine novel Gilead. So I think the average religious person has an advantage on me in that they have the confidence of faith, while I do not. At any rate, I cannot recommended this book. View all 39 comments. Dec 22, Sonja rated it it was amazing Shelves: Quote The chance that higher life forms might hve emerged in this way [i. A Boeing 74 has around six million parts, and it takes intelligence, design, and planning to fit them all together.
Hoyle wasn't a creationist, and he didn't believe i Quote The chance that higher life forms might hve emerged in this way [i.
Hoyle wasn't a creationist, and he didn't believe in God. His aim was to show that highly complex structures can't be explained by chance. As soon as you reply, "That's not the God I had in mind," the straw man of God the Father becomes irrelevant. Organized religion has been backed into a corner by its refusal to find a viable alternative to God the Father, but such alternatives do exist. Saint Augustine had already rejected a literal reading of the Bible in the fifth century AD. Modern belief has gone much further away from literalism, but it serves Dawkins not to even take a peek.
Einstein suggested something like this in his famous quote about wanting to know the mind of God, although he didn't explicitly say that God was inside the laws governing time and space. In other words, God is not a person but the totality of nature.
As the source of existence, he is the starting point of your being and mine. God isn't our father; he isn't a watchmaker assembling parts into a watch an image devised in the eighteenth century to explain how a single intelligent creator put all the moving parts of the cosmos together ; he doesn't have feelings and desires. He is being itself. All things exist because he existed first. There is no need for such a God to be intricate. He is a unity. Diversity unfolds from this unity, and diversity - the expanding universe, billions of galaxies, human DNA - is bewilderingly complex.
But its source doesn't have to be diverse. Picasso was the source of tens of thousands of artworks, but he didn't have to imagine all of them at once in his mind. Like natural selection, God is allowed to produce the natural world step by step, unless you insist, as Dawkins does that the literal acceptance of Genesis is the only creation story religious people believe. The alternative I posed, that God became the creation, has a long tradition as well. The early cosmos was full of free-floating hydrogen and oxygen, as it is today. DNA cannot exist without water, and the water must have been in abundance for hundreds of millions of years.
Quite the opposite - arguments for the uniqueness of life on Earth still hold enormous power, and they don't have to be arguments based on a Biblical God. God isn't a strange supernatural fiction, as Dawkins asserts. He's the source of our inner world, the same place where art, music, imagination, visionary conceptions, love, altruism, philosophy, morals, and human bonding are born. This world has its own truths.
We can reach them by experiencing them. The visible universe isn't the same as reality. When solid objects are reduced to atoms and then to subatomic particles, they are no longer solid. They are clouds of potentiality. As physics defines it, potentiality is neither matter nor energy but completely intangible, no matter how solid a mountain may be or how powerful a lightning bolt.
Particles in such a state aren't even particles anymore. They do not have a specific location in space; instead every particle emerges from quantum waves that can extend infinitely in all directions They cannot be seen, only inferred. We need a new paradigm for explaining the cosmos. We need to accept first and foremost that the last things to be trusted are the five senses.
More than that, even cherished theories like relativity have become drastically unstable. Dark energy is enlarging the space between galaxies faster than the speed of light. So something beyond space and time serves as the major force for creation and destruction in the cosmos, and whatever it is, it will be as invisible as mind, God, the soul, and higher consciousness. That's the beauty of it. You don't have to pray for wisdom or make yourself worthy of it. As with the concept of grace in the New testament, which falls like rain on the just and the unjust alike, the ultimate truth simply is.
When we catch a glimpse of it, we become more real in ourselves. It is undeniable that the outward appearance of life contains suffering and distress. Wisdom reveals that suffering comes and goes while a deeper reality never changes. That reality is founded on truth and love. What they wait upon is to be noticed. If you are reasonably attentive to what's happening in yourself, you are already responding to the forces listed above.
Growing as a person matters to you. You can see the outlines of a better future for yourself God is realized in the highest state of awareness. Since everyone is aware, God is reachable by all of us. Having done the work of imprinting your brain to have new responses, you can trust those responses. This opens the door for Being. You can "let it be" when your brain starts taking care of you.
You already trust your brain to take care of you in countless ways.
It automatically controls hormone levels. So the art of being isn't foreign to you, it is second nature. There is no other way to get past the dead end where thinking stops being useful. Quiet awareness must step in. If it wants to, awareness is capable of going beyond the material and even the subtle world. This fact is supported by the simplest test: Something creates glowing sunsets and the clap of thunder, along with all the ravishing sights and sounds of the world. That something is personal; it's creating your world right this second.
Genesis is now, but it isn't happening in the brain. You forget the illusion that you are separate, isolated, powerless, and stranded in an overwhelming cosmos. You remember that you are the dreamer who is in charge of the dream. What you perceive through the five senses isn't the same as reality. Go beyond the shadow play of appearances, and reality will greet you, as Rumi say, in "a world too full to talk about. Making them come rue is a great gift. It comes directly from God. When expansion is infinite, the whole project feels daunting.
Why challenge your boundaries, which feel like home? You might go flying outward like a paddleball, only to come springing back on a rubber band. A liver or heart cell is fortunate. To remain alive, it must connect with wholeness. It cannot doubt or opt out, turn its back on its creator, or denounce God as a delusion.
But you are even more fortunate. You have self-awareness, the ability to know who you are. So your spiritual path comes down to choosing an identity. You act like an isolated individual or like the whole. You either align yourself with the universe or you don't. View all 4 comments. Dec 21, Nerisa Eugenia Waterman rated it liked it. Chopra needs no introduction.
Deepak Chopra is one of the most famous global leaders…he has transformed the world with his medicine and teachings for wellness of the mind, body, and spirit.
He is known as a prolific author of 80 eighty books, and 22 twenty-two of those books are New York Times best sellers in both fiction and non-fiction. And last but not least As a Buddhist, one of my most favorite literary genres is Spirituality, and with that said I could not wait to get my hands of this book. However, I have to admit… I read this book twice before writing this book review. I had to read this book twice because the book was so thought provoking… it made it difficult for me to take notes.
I actually got swept away in some of the messages in this book, and not too many books can do that for me. I would like to think that this book is not literally about the future of any one particular God, I think this book is about the future of Religion, Faith, and our existence as human beings in this modern world with an outdated view point of the meaning of Religion and Faith. However, there is no doubt when it comes to Deepak Chopra and his disapproval of militant atheists… which God we are focusing on in this book…a God that is offered to us as God 2. The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. The Yoga of Knowledge.
Maybe bc they have taken on faith the premise that consciousness can be reduced to science. I am finally realizing that it will always be so. Here's how restrictions apply. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Jonathan is a symbol to all those who refuse to conform for the sake of conforming, instead teaching love, forgiveness, and how to reach your true potential.
Breath from the Eternal. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta. Here's how restrictions apply. I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. See all customer images. Showing of 2 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now.
Please try again later. The emphasis is on "practical" to getting closer to God in Hindu or Vedanta practice and meditation.
Although there are essential technical terms, such as Advaita, Atman, Brahman, Maya and Satchidananda, the author Swami Shraddhananda does not overload the reader with a barrel full of Sanskrit terms. Shakespeare and the Bible are also quoted. The author explains the "what" the "how" and the "why" and brings in a small but powerful dose of scriptural authority. Swami Shraddhananda, with a B. Sc in chemistry before he joined the Ramakrishna monastic order, was a brilliant interpreter because he knew how to engage the modern rational mind.
The detailed index aids study. This is not a textbook, but more enjoyable and useful because the chapters are short, about 5 pages, on specific topics; such as Rosary for Japa and The Healing Power of Silence. The writing is warm and friendly, coherent and gently forceful. The editor, Pravrajika Vrajaprana, and other assistants should be congratulated. Written by Melbourne television producer Rhonda Byrne, and based on a film she created in of the same title, The Secret tells of the laws of attraction: Asking for what you want, believing in what you want, and being open to receiving it.
Since its initial publishing, it has gone on to become the most successful self-published novel ever. While many have found the plot corny, the insights within captivate the reader into shifting their perspective. The lessons told of the discovery of your personal legend, being your one true purpose, and of understanding omens, are ones that speak to all people regardless of religion.
The Art of Happiness talks about the importance and attainability of happiness in everyday living. This is a book likely to stand the test of time because it speaks to people without the use of spiritual rules or religious guidelines. In his classic book, Seven Spiritual Laws of Success , Chopra discusses the importance of success in life. For Chopra, success is defined as happiness and the realization of goals, although success is not limited to wealth.
Chopra lays down 7 laws found in nature used to create spiritual success. These laws include karma cause and effect and dharma purpose in life.