What is it that will make us spiritually advanced?
Posted on 25 February 2014, 9:31
Will psychic research do it? Talking to the so-called dead through a medium? Verifying that pre-cognitive dreams truly foretell the future? Establishing that telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis are real phenomena? Near death experiences? All these things are very important in establishing that we can believe in the reality of the nonphysical. But I am reminded of the Bible quote from James chapter 2, “But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?…
Will love and service of others do it - make us spiritually advanced? Love and service will indeed take us a long way in that direction. But there again there are dimensions of love that we need to explore.
A couple of days ago I had a dream in which I saw that all the beautiful and good books had been locked in a room, and that we had lost the key. We were in tears, for who could then study them? The answer, it seemed, depended on us, it is us who would have to decide what to do…
When I woke up I remembered the first two verses of John Keble’s poem: “There is a book, who runs may read, which heavenly truth imparts, and all the lore its scholars need, pure eyes and Christian hearts. The works of God above, below, within us and around, are pages in that book, to show how God himself is found.”
It is also a deeper spiritual love when we see the loved person and as such a “book”, as being in the image of God, or as being imaged by God, the universal spirit we call “Christ.” But if we are not happy with words like “God” and “Christ” we may find the theory of quantum physicist David Bohm more acceptable: he sees the universe as a hologram, where each part of the whole tells us about the whole.
The holographic universe
Some time ago I found this quote from Michael Talbot on the subject:
“If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery.[that particles of energy that have been together are instantaneously connected regardless of space and time.] Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.” [http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/hologram.html]
What is this fundamental something? What is energy in itself? It is a hard question. If we choose to say that energy consists of particles of Mind, then that would fit in with some of what seems to be the case. On the basis of the EPR effect and the work of Aspect we can well maintain that energy particles are non-separate. Telepathy, clairvoyance, foretelling the future, communicating with the dead - these happenings clearly show that our minds and spirits are non-separate in time, in space, and are somehow together in an eternal present.
So we can give a special meaning to the words in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” We can do this because the case histories of psychic research show us to be non-separate, and as a fragment of a holographic picture gives us a fuzzy version of the whole, so an individual human gives a fuzzy picture of the mind of the whole. We can therefore detect in each other a fuzzy picture of what we call “God”. Those who advocate what is called The Anthropic Principle argue that there are so many variables to be exactly right for there to be a universe observable by the human mind, that it must be the result of the activity of a holistic mind compatible with the individual minds that observe it.
[The complex argument can be read here] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle]
But I have wandered into the dry language of philosophy, which never in itself conveys Spirit. So let us return to the original question, What is it that will make us spiritually advanced? Part of the answer will lie in love and service of others. Another part of the answer will lie in the “Book who runs may read, which heavenly truth imparts, and all the lore its scholars need, pure eyes and Christian hearts.” Do the people we love also bring us into communion with the Greater, the Whole? Can we discern the activity of the Whole, in these parts, these people? How are we responsive to this activity?
I did so like this hymn, written by a member of our church congregation:
Spirit of love, you move within creation
drawing the threads of colour and design:
life into life, you knit our true salvation,
Come, work with us,
and weave us into one.
Though we have frayed the fabric of your making,
tearing away from all that you intend,
yet, to be whole, humanity is aching,
Come, work with us,
and weave us into one.
God, where history is woven,
you are the frame that holds us to the truth,
Christ is the theme, the pattern you have given,
Come, work with us,
and weave us into one.
Michael Cocks edits the journal, Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His forthcoming book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity and the Fates will be published summer 2014 by White Crow Books.
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