Posted on 22 May 2014, 15:47

..and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” But while we are driving to work, in heavy traffic, and doing everything necessary to earn a crust, we are focusing on life in a way in which the Bible quote makes no sense.  We can call it the Sensory-Physical focus where we focus on all the separate things in the world which can be counted and measured.

Spiritual experience, and the work of many scientists, can push us also to focus on things from a very different point of view and think of ALL THAT IS as a GREAT THOUGHT. It is when we   focus in this way, that the Gospel of John states a fundamental truth. We see “God” as “the one and undivided Creative Mind or Spirit”, and   “Word” as, “What can bring a Thought into Being”.  All aspects of the Great Thought.

In the GREAT THOUGHT “all things were [indeed] made by Him, and without Him was not made anything that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of [humanity].”  [John 1:1,3}

Putting it in scientific language: many leading physicists and also those researching into the nature of consciousness would agree that the material world as we know it is produced by a timeless, spaceless dimension of Mind. And the best way to represent   “timeless and spaceless” is with a full stop, or a point: “. ” The Big Bang is said to have exploded from such a “.”  Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, or the “Akashic Records” exist in such a “.”

So do communications from the “dead.” For instance, we can ask what distance of time and space exists between the St Stephen who died 2000 years ago, and the St Stephen and ourselves who were talking with him forty years ago through medium Tom Ashman, now also “dead”? We can also ask, what time and distance separates the person dreaming for the future, and the future event foretold? What time and distance separates the elements of a synchronistic event?  Always we have to answer, “None.”  We always come back to the “.”  So “.” is indeed a good symbol for the Eternal.

Space and time, number and measuring, belong to the physical. But we cannot count, measure or divide Thought.  Thought which brings events into being in the physical world is not divided, and is therefore One.

In January, I wrote that we should not be be “explainers and conquerors, but conscious participants in the universe.” We cannot explain Creative Mind… we cannot bring the Oneness of Mind into the laboratory to be weighed and measured. But what we can do is to develop our intuitive minds in every way we can, and thus be more conscious participants in that undivided Oneness. (Yes, and that Oneness does include the events that seem to us to be negative.)

Let’s come back to, “In the beginning was the Word.” The undivided Whole, the undivided Mind images, and through its imaging creates and brings into being. The Word images directly and through symbols, just as the Cross is a word that can evoke ideas of sacrifice, love, suffering, punishment. The creative Mind can use words to create, but can also use anything to symbolise anything else to create in physical or spiritual reality. Creative Mind can thus be a poet and create through its poetry.

Maybe when we were children we chanted, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” But that was not exactly true. Names can hurt us, they can make or break us. They can create our reality. They can destroy our reality. I keep coming back to Guy Lyon Playfair’s If This be Magic (such a valuable book) where he gives examples of the power of the mind bringing ill or good health to the human body. Under hypnosis people can sometimes be cured from cancer and other serious disease.

A friend Brian Broom in his book Meaning-full Disease tells of people cured from advanced cancer through counselling and prayer.

The creative mind can produce strong physical effects: Sir William Barrett (1884-1925: a prominent English physicist and psychic researcher) wrote about Table Tilting in his Deathbed Visions: “The table then began to rise from the floor some 18 inches and remained suspended in the air.  “I was allowed to go up to the table and saw clearly no one was touching it, a clear space separating the sitters from the table,” Barrett continued the explanation.  “I tried to press the table down, and though I exerted all my strength could not do so; then I climbed up on the table and sat on it, my feet off the floor, when I was swayed to and fro and finally tipped off. The table of its own accord now turned upside down, no one touching it, and I tried to lift it off the ground, but it could not be stirred, it appeared screwed down to the floor.  At my request all the sitters’ clasped hands had been kept raised above their heads, and I could see that no one was touching the table.  When I desisted from trying to lift the inverted table from the floor, it righted itself again on its own accord, no one helping it.”

Those familiar with work of Uri Geller, will recall many such marvels illustrating the power of mind over matter.

“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible ...‎Matthew 17:21  ‎

Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”

In the Bible story [Consciousness] “said, Let there be light! And there was light.” God, through his word, is like the conductor of an orchestra. With the baton of his word, he brings all things into being.

(And God is in all through all, and above all, and also in the phenomenon of the lantern fly which develops the head of an alligator, the predator of the predator of the lantern fly.[See my previous blog])

If we focus on the Sensory-Physical we see things one way, when we see things in the light of the Great Thought, we focus quite differently.

But whichever way we focus, it is the same reality.

From time to time I refer to a book by Lawrence LeShan, Alternate Realities. It was published in 1976, and should be a “Bible” for people thinking about the relation between the spiritual dimension and the sensory-physical. Here is some of what he has to say about focusing on The Great Thought. His name for this focus is the Clairvoyant Mode.

1.  All objects and events are part of the fabric of being, and cannot meaningfully be separated from it.  You are most important aspect of any object or event is that it is a part of the total ONE and it has to be primarily considered under this aspect.  Considering it under any other aspect is an error.

2.  Boundaries, edges, and borders do not exist.  All things primarily are each other, since they are primarily one.

3.  This lack of boundaries applies to time also.  Divisions of time, including divisions into past, present, and the future, are errors and illusion.  Events do not “happen” or “occur,” they “are.”

4.  Since no object or event can be considered in itself without considering the all of space and time, the concepts of good and evil do not have meaning.  Any application of them would automatically mean the application applies to the total context of being, to everything.  The universe cannot be categorised in this way.

5.  All forces or situations in space-time, or places where the fields of activity are weak or strong move with a dynamic harmony with each other.  The very fact of the universe as a flow-process universe means that moves with harmony.

6.  One can only be fully in this mode when one has, if only for a moment, given up all wishes and desires for oneself (since the separate self does not exist) and for others (since they do not exist as separate either) and just allows oneself to be, and therefore to be one with the all of existence.  To attain this mode, one must –at least momentarily – give up the doing and accept being.  Any awareness of doing disrupts this mode.

7.  Valid information is not gained through the senses, but through a knowing of the oneness of observer and observed, the spectator and spectacle.  Once this complete oneness is fully accepted, there is nothing that can prevent the flow of information between a thing and itself.

8.  The senses give a false picture of reality.  They show separation of objects and events in space and time.  The more completely we understand reality, the less it resembles the picture given by our senses, by this sensory mode of being.

9.  This is the only valid way to regard reality.  All other ways are illusion.

“these words are apparently primarily adapted to dealing with the processes that are completely out of our sensory range.  They are not adapted to biological survival; it would not want to cross a busy highway while using them.  Uniting with a truck is not good for you, biologically speaking.  At the present time there must be used by three classes of individuals or, to put it more correctly, by individuals attempting to obtain three types of experience..  These are theoretical physicists working with relativity theory, trying to understand how reality works; mystics attempting to experience their oneness with the universe; and clairvoyants attempting to obtain paranormal information. (telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition are the usual divisions we usually use to discuss paranormally gained information, information that did not arrive through the senses or from the extrapolation of information that did.”

.....A long quotation from Lawrence LeShan.

I hope to discuss it further in future blogs.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The 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 will be published summer 2014 by White Crow Books.

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Posted on 06 May 2014, 15:02

If we can agree that there are both spiritual and physical dimensions, then we can ask which dimension is boss, so to speak. Some people say it is the see-and-touch world, others say that world is, so to speak, a kind of illusory dream, created by the spiritual dimension. But perhaps the fact is, that there is a kind of interdimensional tennis match going on.

Let’s look at some of the evidence for the “tennis match”.  First we have to put aside as evidence the normal psychic phenomena, such telepathy, clairvoyance, communications from the dead: they don’t settle the question, which is boss? We have these experiences because all of us are spiritual-physical beings.

High up on a list of evidence for the “tennis match” would be the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake who does accept that evolution occurs through survival of species with advantageous genetic change, but maintains there is also a process he calls formative causation, involving a non-energetic organising field which he calls a morphogenetic field. (From the Greek morphe = form, and genesis = coming into being.)  By a process he calls “morphic resonance” the morphic field is formed and modified by the experience of the organisms it helps to create. The morphic field is probably timeless and spaceless, and can be seen as a kind of Akashic record, a memory belonging to the Whole. That such a field exists is suggested by a number of phenomena: Monarch butterflies for instance have a regular migratory path of several thousand kilometres from one specific location to another, which takes several generations of Monarchs to complete. The locations are specific, and there can be no conceivable way of instructing individual butterflies as they are born as to the route and eventual destination that the progeny of their progeny will eventually arrive at. This leaves us with the impression that they must be following some kind of map or instructions that is exterior to themselves, i.e. a morphic field.

The bar-tailed godwits annually fly between Alaska and rivers in Canterbury New Zealand. Certainly an individual bird does complete the whole journey of many thousands of kilometres between specific locations, but it would still make sense to suggest that they are following instructions from a timeless, spaceless memory field.

I find the following, in Guy Lyon Playfair’s If this be magic: He writes that the psychologist William McDougal carried out a lengthy “experiment designed to see if a trained group of rats could, over the generations, learn a task progressively more quickly than the untrained control group and its descendents. The experiment took fifteen years, and thirty-two generations of rats, and was later repeated in Australia with fifty generations….MacDougall found that there was a gradual increase in learning, which is what Sheldrake’s hypothesis would predict.

There was something else… an increase in the control group’s learning rate as well.” (p158) This implies that rats in general were learning, not merely those involved in the research.  Such results support Sheldrake’s idea of “formative causation”: namely that the memory of the animals and birds is recorded in this spaceless timeless field, which in turn becomes the memory of the new born bird, animal or insect, and determines their behaviour. If we consult Sheldrake’s many writings, we will find many more persuasive examples of our “tennis match” with the ball going backwards and forwards over the net.  Sheldrake also gives many examples where group human learning has also been enhanced.

The “tennis match” idea is suggested by the case of the lantern fly, Laternaria servillei. (below). “It is about 85 mm long, a third of its length being taken up by its head, most of which is hollow. What is astounding is the way the head had evolved into a perfect miniature model of the head of another animal species twenty to thirty times its own size, namely an alligator. It has a bulging pair of false eyes, in addition to its real ones, and there is even a little white mark on them that imitates light as reflected from a real eye. The jaws are open to reveal a row of false white teeth which are.. rendered not only in colour, but in bas-relief.” (p.165 Playfair)

Would it be reasonable to suggest that the fly’s head is the result of random genetic change? When we think of the tiger’s stripes, the giraffe’s neck, the many ways sea creatures disguise themselves from preditors, “random” changes don’t seem credible. Much more likely, there is a “tennis match” of varying kinds.

“Presumably, this little insect deceives predatory birds into thinking it is an alligator, bird-brains being thought to be more receptive to information on shape and colour than on size. This imitation is not of a predator but of its predator’s predator. It is all very well to say that it evolves its alligator-like appearance in order to frighten off the birds. It did not work that out for itself. It cannot have any idea what an alligator is… This intriguing mini-monster shows to what extent information can be received at an unconscious level and translated into major alterations in a physical body.” (p.165)

I personally see this mystery as an example of the phenomenon of synchronicity, where unlikely combinations of events come together so meaningfully that chance cannot be put forward as an explanation. The components come together so meaningfully that they can only be seen as components within a Great Thought.  I do not think we are going to solve the mystery of the lantern fly by seeking for chains of cause and effect. We live in a mental universe, where thoughts have no boundaries.

Here is a quote from the renowned physicist Arthur Eddington, (Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington) where he expresses similar ideas:

“In physics we have outgrown [A for] archer and apple-pie [non-abstract]  definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, It is part of the A B C of physics. The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse, illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil. The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.” [From the introduction to The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures (1927)]

I was prompted to entitle this blog “An interdimensional tennis match” with Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields in mind. If we see this world of see and touch as solid, and the spiritual as otherwise, then “tennis match” will do as a picture.  But, as Eddington points out, we cannot take any picture too seriously.

We may remember the quote from physicist-astronomer-mathematician James Jeans, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”

If it is the case that the universe is a great thought, then other questions arise: What is the boundary between the thought of breakfast yesterday and dinner tomorrow?  In a great thought there are no boundaries, no dimensions, no distances. In which case there is no “tennis match”, no cause and effect, and the lantern fly exists as part of that thought.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The 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 will be published summer 2014 by White Crow Books.

Paperback               Kindle