Posted on 22 September 2011, 10:22

It’s obvious, when you think about it, that nothing is seen, nothing is remembered except from a point of view. What did I do with my purse, or my wallet? Did I leave it in the living room? Under the bed?  Only I will remember. Unless of course there are other people around, who remember what they saw in those rooms, from their points of view. There is no such thing as consciousness, or a conscious memory apart from a point of view.  Truth also, is always seen in the light of our personal knowledge and experiences.

That is why, in my book, Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr, even before one starts reading the text, I devote a whole page to quoting Stephen’s words, “For what truth I speak is but my truth; my truth comes only from my experience, and alas, my judgements.”  I quote his words, not to diminish his importance, but to underline that fact about points of view.

Scholarly study of what Stephen says in English and also in Greek, and study of ancient documents, clearly shows that it is really Stephen, and that what he says about historical matters is likely to be correct. We learn that his parents came from Thrace, that one parent was a Celt, another a Jew, that he was born near Ancyra where the ruling classes were the Celts and Jews. Ancyra was in the province of Galatia, which was ruled by the Celts. When Stephen was quite young the family must have moved to Judaea or more likely Galilee. Joseph and Mary, Stephen said, were Esssenes, and after serving a two year novitiate, Stephen was admitted into the Essene community to which Joseph and Mary belonged.  Jesus, we read in the Gospels, was rejected by his family, no doubt because he refused to be bound by many of their strict rules. It would appear that Stephen too left the Essenes to follow Jesus.  All this was part Stephen’s point of view.

And I, an Anglican clergyman have a point of view. Can you understand that when I found myself talking with Stephen the Martyr, my world was turned upside down?  Stephen, friendly, humorous sometimes, talking such sense about things of Spirit, was he really the historical Stephen?  In what sense could it be Stephen? Why was he talking to us? What kind of reality do we live in that this can happen?  I tried to answer my questions from all the points of view that I could.

In my book you will find that much of the time I have let Stephen speak for himself.  But I also enquire whether the picture that Stephen paints of things is consistent with pictures painted by modern QM physicists, and their views of spiritual reality. I investigate Stephen’s Greek in perhaps tiresome detail. Is it genuinely the Greek current in Thrace 2000 years ago?  Can Stephen be right, when he says he was an Essene?  Is the information to be gained from certain Dead Sea Scrolls consistent with what Stephen is saying?  Stephen sometimes contradicts what we can read in the New Testament. Would reputable modern scholars agree with him?  Can we compare Stephen’s teaching to any ancient philosophy? Would it be possible to live my life in accordance with what Stephen taught?

Each time I have questioned from a new point of view, the more I found what he had to say to be self-consistent, and consistent with likely fact. Thus I have been the more able to trust him and what he says.  The more I probed, the more my own consciousness changed, the more I wanted to know the bigger picture.  After all we all live in one world, where everything is connected.

Another factor was the huge number of complex synchronicities that I was observing: it dawned on me that I was actually experiencing, on a very broad canvas, the reality that Stephen was describing.

My electronic journal, www.thegroundoffaith.net/stephen attempts to combine the spirituality that Stephen points to, with reports on the afterlife from many sources, scientific articles, personal experiences. I reproduce articles from the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, especially those of Michael Tymn, The Christian Parapsychologist, Victor Zammit’s weekly communications, and material from various blogs such as that of Jime and his Subversive Thinking.  Some readers of the kind of books offered by White Crow may like to submit articles, or accounts of experiences, for possible publication. Please feel free to subscribe and to be in touch at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) .

“For if I say that I am Stephen, I must first create Stephen, and be he. For I cannot be nothing. For once I decided I was nothingness, then I have learned nothing of nothing”  Stephen: Section 145

Other Reading:

Bill Meachem:The Soul is a Point of View

From his blog: Philosophy for Real Life, May 23, 2011

Michael Cocks, together with more information on ‘Stephen’ can be found at www.thegroundoffaith.net/stephen

http://whitecrowbooks.com/books/page/afterlife_teaching_from_stephen_the_martyr/

Sample chapter

Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr is published by White Crow books and available in October 2011 from Amazon and all good online book stores.

Posted on 03 September 2011, 10:02

Michael Cocks introduces himself:

All my forebears were early immigrants into Canterbury, New Zealand, between 1840-60, one a Scottish farmer, another a German businessman, another an owner of a stock and station firm, another, great-grandfather Bromley Cocks, was an early Anglican clergyman. My grandfather John, my father Maurice and I, have also been devout but open-minded parish clergy. (The last five years of my ministry were as British Chaplain in Gothenburg, Sweden.)

Three generations of us have honours degrees in philosophy, my father and I belonged to the UK Modern Churchman’s Union, and have been interested in the mystics of all religions. I read theology at Oxford, at St Catherine’s, and at Ripon Hall, a modernist theological college, and in vacation time, lived with its former principal, Canon Dr HDA Major and his wife Mary.

An incident in 1932 may have started my intense interest in the psychic: a pine plantation around our vicarage at Mount Somers caught fire. One of those helping to fight the fire, died. At the height of the fire my grandmother in Christchurch, 100 miles away, put in a toll call to ask what the trouble was. For whatever reason, throughout my childhood, adolescence and as a young man, I was obsessed by the belief that psychical research was the way to prove the reality of Spirit. I was aided and abetted by a great-aunt whose guiding light was the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg.

In 1973 I was the Anglican vicar of a parish in Christchurch, New Zealand, when one day an acquaintance knocked on the door. She had come down from the North Island partly to deliver to me a hand-written book of prophecies, the product of a woman unknown to me who once had belonged to the Plymouth Brethren. There were about 100 pages of these prophecies, largely based on the Book of Revelation, casting me in the role of one of the Two Witnesses in Chapter 11 of the book. She had plainly taken immense pains with her prophecies and my acquaintance had incurred the loss of time and money to bring them to me. I hope that I received the gift graciously and acknowledged the caring and depth of belief which prompted it. All the same I could not regard it as other than the product of irrationality.

And yet, on the other hand, I found out later that the gift was almost simultaneous with Stephen the Martyr’s first words to my friend Olive Ashman, through her husband, Thomas, who, although not previously aware of his mediumistic abilities, was in trance. They were living at the time in Sevenoaks, Kent. Three months later, the strangest circumstances were to have me talking with Stephen in New Zealand.

In the meantime the Ashmans had come to live in Christchurch and I had met Olive in a psychic library that I on a whim had visited. She talked to me about Stephen and I was interested to find out more. When I eventually learned that Stephen and the prophecies had come together in time, and had reflected on how I had come to talk with him myself, multidimensional reality appeared more and more strange, for many of those weird prophecies had close parallels with Stephen’s teachings.

A private group with varying membership, meeting almost 200 times over a period of eight years, asked him many questions, some of which can be read in Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr. Concurrent with these conversations, were complicated and overwhelming synchronicities, which seemed to underline and reinforce what Stephen was saying. The whole Stephen experience brought many of us to view reality in a very different way, and indeed from the point of view of the mystics.

Of course, the Stephen experience has only intensified my interest in psychic research, and research into the nature of the reality to which the world’s great religions point. For the past eight years I have been editor of an e-journal, The Ground of Faith. Every two months I republish articles from the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Inc. including articles from Michael Tymn; also from The Christian Parapsychologist, Victor Zammit’s weekly newsletter, and from many other sources. To subscribe, and be notified when the next issue is uploaded .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).