Posted on 29 January 2014, 12:32

In my previous blog I discussed the limits to which we can be certain in science, and the trustworthiness of accounts of exceptional human experiences provided in White Crow Books. I suggested that those books   may well convince that these experiences are real and that the realm of spirit must also be real. But that still leaves us in doubt about the nature of physical reality.  If we refer to the kind of books published by White Crow and similar firms, we will get seemingly contradictory interpretations. For instance, my Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr, claims to have the historical Stephen as the teacher, Conversations with God has God in that role, A Course in Miracles is said to have Jesus Christ as the author.

All three alleged teachers ascribe reality to the eternal realm of spirit, and see the physical universe as illusory, yet we find on the one hand that “Stephen” and “God” see God in all, through all, and above all, while “Jesus Christ” sees God the Absolute as entirely separate, with the physical universe a kind of self-creating mistake.

When we turn to science we find similar disagreement, with the non-materialist QM physicists seeing the physical universe as a kind of projection from the eternal, with the materialist ones seeing everything as the result of purposeless meaningless chance. And if we should wish to pin our faith in the Bible, we will need to choose between the sometimes wrathful God of Israel, or the God in whom we participate, as pictured by Jesus and Paul.

Plainly then, we can be way more certain about some of the well attested cases histories provided through White Crow, than, strangely, the various interpretations scientific or otherwise, of the everyday world that you and I live in.

I think it was the philosopher Jacob Needleman who said we were not to be “explainers and conquerors, but rather conscious participants in the universe.”  If it is true that a deeper timeless realm creates the physical world and the lives we live in it, what then? If   some universal mind creates   the physical, will we ever be able to scientifically explain that mind? Probably not.  But how very much we often want to!

A case in point: From time to time I have experienced extraordinary waves of meaningful coincidences, so striking that I am forced to admit there must be something “fishy” underlying the apparent “normalcy” of the everyday; but what produces that “fishiness” I can only guess. The synchronicities are so powerful and often life changing, so somehow reassuring that my life is “on track” that I long for explanations. Especially when a sceptic gets to hear about them, pooh-poohs them as nothing but reading meaning into chance occurrence, where no meaning exists. But bother the sceptic! The experience is deep and I know it is real.

The more powerful and complex synchronicities appear to bear witness to the fact that each of us are inextricably part of an indivisible spiritual/physical Whole, that sometimes presents itself as the activity of a greater but unknowable Mind.  They bear witness to the primary fact that we are aspects of and participants in that Mind, even though we cannot explain it. We sometimes like to think that we are separate people, each with our separate stories. But it takes little thought to remind ourselves that this cannot entirely be so.

When we aspire too much to be explainers, and attempt to apply science where science cannot be applied, our spiritual nature and our ability to love is hindered, and we can feel separated from other people, alienated from both the physical and spiritual realms. People don’t agree with us, we feel attacked, relationships are harmed.

Even if we put aside thought of the spiritual, and think only of the physical, we cannot truly see ourselves as separate. All that is, is completely dependent on all that is. That I exist is dependent on the unions of countless millions of couples over the millennia, it was dependent on my parents’ care, it was dependent on the infinite complexities of human cooperation. Think for instance how many thousands of people may have been involved in the final production of that loaf of bread we buy from the supermarket. It is dependent on our education system, our culture, on the world’s ecosystems.

Psychic research in turn suggests bewildering further complexities.
Take Conversations with Ghosts by Alex Tanous and Callum E. Cooper: 

“Spirit or soul, personality or individuality, ghost or apparition, here-and-now or past events appearing in the here-and-now? It’s all very confusing to those thinking in linear time and with terrestrial words and their limitations, but makes at least a little sense if we can somehow rise above linear time and recognize that celestial matters do not easily lend themselves to terrestrial thinking and logic. Tanous admitted that he found it all very confusing, commenting that he had come to no definite conclusion. “I do feel that apparitions are some kind of consciousness which makes itself visible and are more perfect than we are,” he offered. “In other words, the higher consciousness can make itself visible to the lower consciousness.’ “

Synchronicities, apparitions, and then add to that all that we have learned about the afterlife, through mediums, NDEs, OBEs, reincarnation, creativity, memory, the Akashic records and anything else one can think of: they are bespeak an indivisible Whole.

“Not explainers and conquerors, but conscious participants in the universe” – such words describe the attitude of the spiritual person. Without diminishing the importance of psychic research in the slightest, we will grow spiritually when we acknowledge and truly feel that we a “members of Christ” or participants in the universe. I have just been playing the accompaniment to a congregation singing, “Fill thou my life, O Lord my God, in every part with praise, that my whole being may proclaim your being and your ways.” That is a very good way of putting it. Many words could be written to fill out the meaning of these lines, words like love and service of neighbour, non-judgement, acceptance, humility, submission to the will of God, and so on. But they point in the right direction.                                             

End of Blog.

Poem on this theme by NZ poet Joyce Cowley:
We are standing on sacred ground.
Let our hearts take off our shoes
And come bare, trembling with awe,
Into the Presence which burns too bright
And too close for ordinary vision.
Only a naked heart can see
That all around us, each clump of grass,
Every leaf, twig, stone and flower
Is a blazing torch, incandescent
With the only fire that has no name
Except “I am.”
And only the naked heart can know
That it too, is a burning bush,
All of us caught in the one fire,
“We are” burning into “I am.”
Brighter than a galaxy of suns.
Words cannot contain the moment,
But let us take with us,
The feeling of awe and wonder.
Tomorrow’s path might be dark.
Difficult and sharp with stones,
But in this sacred place we feel
We may never wear shoes again.

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.

Paperback               Kindle

Posted on 14 January 2014, 9:30

White Crow Books do a great job in providing trustworthy accounts of Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs), such as NDEs, ESP, clairvoyance, synchronicities, séance communications and so on. We usually hear firsthand accounts given by trustworthy people. We usually feel like believing these stories. In the minds of the more cautious of us, though, we may hold an imaginary law court trial, and try to assess whether the person who is telling the story can separate fantasy from fact, is giving the plain unvarnished truth, and generally sounds trustworthy. We don’t think of calling in white-coated scientists, unless we want to set up a controlled experiment in a laboratory.

Take a case history like this: Someone has a frightening dream of a plane crashing in a particular place under clearly described circumstances, and writes a description of it. Sometime later such a plane does crash in that place and in such circumstances.

In looking at a case like this, a scientist will make sure that the written description of the dream was written down prior to the crash of the plane, and will construct theories about causes and effects, which will however always be open to challenge from scientists of different philosophical persuasions. As the job of the scientist is to research about the nature of things, we are usually then left with uncertainty.

On the other hand,  the law court is not primarily researching about the general nature of things, but is simply trying to assess whether or not a particular event happened. Was the dream about the plane crash truly recorded before the event? Is the person reporting the event trustworthy? Do the details of the dream truly correspond to the event?  Can we be reasonably sure that the foreknowledge of the crash was paranormal, and that there was no information of a “normal” kind? In such a law court, the jury will probably acquit the dreamer of making fraudulent claims, unless there is a staunch skeptic among them, who will accept no evidence of any kind.

The method of the law court does not establish the paranormality of the event with 100% certainty. Nevertheless, the greater the number of similar events, the more the law court will feel such certainty.

As said, the White Crow website is providing law court evidence rather than scientific. And this is the case with lawyer Victor Zammit with his book A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife. He does present articles about significant work of QM physicists, biologists, and other scientists and emphasises their importance. But the bulk of the material that he presents consists of first hand testimony, and it is this testimony that is the most persuasive.

The deeper science goes the more uncertainty we find.

As I have suggested, science often sees an event in the light of some theory, which in itself is subject to dispute. Take Rupert Sheldrake’s book called The Science Delusion in the UK and Science Set Free in the USA In that book he challenges the Materialist dogma of some scientists by turning their dogmas into questions: “Is Nature Mechanical? Is the total amount of matter and energy always the same? Are the laws of nature fixed? Is Matter unconscious? Is Nature purposeless? Is all biological inheritance material? Are memories are stored as memory traces? Are minds confined to brains? Are psychic phenomena illusory? Is mechanistic medicine   the only kind that really works? Is science objective?”

Ponder these questions. They are absolutely fundamental ones, and they are all controversial. I do believe that Sheldrake (below) makes a good case for answering these questions in quite a different way from a Materialist. It is a good case, but is it convincingly watertight? Or, on the other hand, can Materialists convincingly prove their dogmas? For them, the dogmas are axioms, and almost by definition, an axiom cannot be proven. In such a controversy then, it becomes clear that certainty is only in the mind of the protagonists.

I do agree with the thinking of Sheldrake, but I have to be open to the fact that he may not have spoken the last word on the matter. In my eyes a firsthand and trustworthy account of experience will attain the greater certainty.

I remarked that theoretical scientific investigation leads to uncertainty. It leads to more uncertainty than we might think. I have been much taken with a book by quantum physicist F.David Peat, friend of QM physicist David Bohm, called From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the 20th Century. Let me quote from page 17 where Peat describes the thought of Einstein, and puts these words into his mouth:
“God has created the universe out of nothing and we, as its creatures, could come to understand the divine pattern of creation. Such a pattern was objective and exists as independent of our thoughts, wishes, and desires. The extent to which this pattern remained veiled from us was a measure of our human limitations as readers of the divine book of creation.

“[Nils] Bohr and his colleagues in Copenhagen adopt a position close to that of the post-modern reader. The ‘properties’ of the electron are not objective and independently existing, but arise in the act of observation itself. Without this act of observation, for creative ‘reading’, ’the properties’ of an electron could not be said to exist as such. This was the origin of the real break between Bohr and Einstein. Einstein had argued against the notion of absolute chance in quantum theory.” [My emphasis.]

And then, on page 23, and we read, “As soon as we ask, What is the nature of quantum reality? What is the underlying nature of the world? Is there a reality at the quantum level? We find ourselves entangled in words, pictures, images, models, and ideas from the large-scale world. The result, Bohr pointed out, is confusion and Paradox. In the end, it is better to remain silent then to create endless philosophical confusion; maybe this is why the discussions between Bohr and Einstein were doomed to end in silence. What had begun as a discussion of chance and uncertainty developed into a radical transformation of our ideas about the very nature of reality.”

Some interested readers may like to investigate the concept of Quantum Entanglement, the EPR effect, and the theorem of John Bell which denies the principle of local causation. It needs to be emphasized that in the field of QM, the views of Bohr have prevailed: “Chance in quantum theory is absolute and irreducible. Knowing more about the atom will never eliminate this element.” (Page 9)

For those of us who are interested in trying to think scientifically about Spirit or dimensions of consciousness, I consider that Peat gives the scientific layman the clearest and most understandable description of the issues raised by quantum mechanics. In the rest of the book he takes the ground from under our feet even in apparently unchallengeable field of mathematics. The genius Gödel is mentioned as describing the Achilles’ heel of mathematics: that it cannot prove some of its own axioms.

Elsewhere in the book Peat explores the limitations of language.

And of course, those of us who have acquaintance with one or more foreign languages will be aware of the difficulty of translating from one to another, because what can be said in one language often cannot be clearly translated into another because equivalent words do not exist. If we look at a thesaurus we will find a multitude of synonyms for many words with slightly varying meaning. We also have a multitude of words each having many meanings. On analysis we find that human languages cannot be used to present an unambiguous picture of reality.

These limitations and many more mean that especially in considering dimensions of consciousness, there will always be an appreciable level of uncertainty. This makes any speculations about cause and effect in this realm very fragile and tentative.

There are endless personal testimonies to the reality of the paranormal phenomena sometimes called EHEs. We can feel sure about their reality. But when we start attempting to find cause and effect in paranormal events we can see that we are on shifting sands, attempting to explain the at root unexplainable subatomic world out of which the physical world emerges.

In a future blog I hope to explore the miracle of meaning that can emerge from the randomness of subatomic processes.
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.

Paperback               Kindle