The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “science & faith”

17 Aug 2012

RS24: Some Thoughts on Healing From Jesus

A:  I’ve read some interesting theories over the years to explain the healing miracles in the Gospels.  Some of these theories fall under the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” umbrella. There’s the theory that the miracles stories are reports of true supernatural events — proof of Jesus’ divinity and sovereignty over the powers of evil. (This theory appeals to devout evangelical Christians.) On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the theory that the healing miracles should not be understood as fact but as pure metaphor — as literary window-dressing to enhance the credibility of the main character, Jesus. (This theory appeals to liberal and progressive Christians, who often don’t believe in miracles.)

“. . . [Jesus] said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners'” (Mark 2:17). Photo credit JAT 2017.

Then there’s the bizarre group of theories that attempts to “explain” your healing powers through analogy to altered states of consciousness as they’re understood today by some anthropologists and psychologists. Stevan Davies’s book Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995) is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thinking. (At the bottom of this post I’ve pasted in a book review I wrote about Davies’s book for an Historical Jesus course, a review which explains why I’m not fond of Davies’s thesis. This is the same Stevan Davies whose translation of the Gospel of Thomas we’ve been using in the Jesus Redux series of posts.)

So whatcha say, big guy? Were you wandering around the Galilee as a Jewish magician with serious DSM-IV issues? A wannabe charismatic prophet suffering from a dissociative disorder? A delusional shaman who had a honkin’ big need for an olanzapine prescription? Is this who you really were?

J (chuckling):  These guys make me sound like a creepy bad guy from the Criminal Minds series.

A:  Yeah, like that two-part episode where James Van Der Beek plays an UnSub who has a multiple personality disorder (Season Two, “The Big Game” and “Revelations.”) One of his “personalities” (the really dangerous one) is an apocalyptic Christian prophet.

J:  That’s a good example. A person suffering from a dissociative disorder is not a well person and needs intensive medical care from a team of trained professionals. To suggest that it’s a good idea for a religious teacher or shaman to intentionally induce a state of altered consciousness (“spirit possession”) or a permanent state of dissociation in his/her followers is not only morally reprehensible but is also questionable from a legal point of view.

A:  So you didn’t try to teach your followers how to have spontaneous dissociative experiences of being possessed by Spirit?

J (shaking his head):  No. I did not. I taught my followers that the key to knowing God is to first know yourself. This is, by definition, the very opposite of dissociative experiences.

A:  What about Paul? Did Paul encourage these states of “spirit possession”?

J:  Absolutely. He not only encouraged these states, but promoted them as one of the major “drawing cards” of his new religion — buy my Saviour and as an added bonus you’ll receive a free gift from Spirit!  Discover how with my easy salvation you can receive, at no additional charge, a special gift of the utterance of wisdom or the utterance of knowledge or faith or gifts of healing or working of miracles or prophecy or discernment of spirits or various kinds of tongues or the gift of interpretation of tongues (one gift per customer, choice made by Spirit at time of purchase, no substitutions, all gifts subject to laws of Divine Cause & Effect, this is a time-limited offer, so call one of our helpful customer service agents now!).

A:  It never ceases to amaze me how rarely Paul talks about healing in his letters. Why doesn’t he talk about medical healing — the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-touch-your-neighbour kind of healing you engaged in? Why doesn’t he care?

J:  He wasn’t interested in helping people find healing. He had different concerns — occult concerns related to power and order and perfectionism, as we’ve discussed. As far as Paul was concerned, sick people were defective. They’d already proven their imperfection and undesirability in the kingdom of God. Corrupt mortal flesh — sarx in Greek — was an ongoing source of shame and judgment, so who cared? Paul’s focus was the mind and the soul, which were infinitely superior to mere flesh, in his view. To choose to heal flesh, as I did, by starting with the flesh — with the actual physical body instead of the pure Platonic Mind — was an incomprehensible paradigm to Paul. In other words, he thought basic medical science made no sense and was a complete waste of time and divine energy.

A:  But that’s what you actually did. You started with the actual physical body, not the pure mind or soul. You helped heal people’s bodies so they could find the courage and strength to build their own relationships with God.

J:  Early on in my journey as a practising mystic — not as a dissociated prophet, but as a mentally healthy mystic and channeller — my guardian angel (my daemon in the Greek — not to be confused with the English word “demon”) gave me an excellent analogy.  She said this:

“The flowers in the field that you admire, that stop your heart with wonder and beauty, are not like dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in the field.  You cannot treat them in the ways you’ve been taught. You must think of the flowers in the field as the emotions of God the Mother and God the Father — their memories, their feelings, their stories from times far more ancient than you or any other human being can remember.

The journey through this field of flowers cannot be like the Labours of Heracles if you want to feel the wonder of knowing God. You must tread softly. You must not trample in your haste to get to the other side. You must listen with all your heart and all your mind and all your body and all your soul to the quiet whispers of the lilies.

Each person you meet is like a lily of the field. The roots and the leaves of the lily bear the weight of the colourful blossom, but without the unseen roots and the hard-working leaves, there would be no chance for the lily to produce its harvest.

Treat the body of all you meet in the same way you would treat God’s lilies. Respect all parts of the plant, including the most humble and least attractive parts. Even the smallest root has a part to play. Do not despise the leaves for the sake of the flower’s beauty. The flower fades quickly, but the strongly rooted plant produces blossoms again if it is properly cared for.

Care first for the roots and the humble green plant, and, with time and gentle handling, it will reward you.”

This is why I rejected all religious models about the nature of the human body, and turned to a scientific model with the help of my guardian angels and God. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the inner workings of the human body, but one thing seemed clear to me:

If God made these bodies for us, they must be worth looking after.

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Book Review
STEVAN L. DAVIES.   JESUS THE HEALER: POSSESSION, TRANCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY.  NEW YORK: CONTINUUM, 1995.  ISBN 0-8264-0794-3

Review by Jennifer Thomas    November 1, 2007

Breathe deeply before you begin to read Stevan Davies book Jesus the Healer. There’s no index, no table of contents, no glossary, no illustrations or diagrams, not even an introduction to orient you in this book, so if you lose the thread of Davies’s argument, you have to retrace your steps. This isn’t a book where you can jump in at any point and quickly grasp the author’s argument. Davies’s thesis is quite complex, and he keeps adding to it chapter by chapter as he attempts (in his own words) to “bring closer together the two continents of Jesus research: historical scholarship and theological reflection” (p.18). On the plus side, the book is a mere 216 pages long, including its 7-page bibliography.

One puzzling aspect of this 1995 book is the lack of biographical information about the author. We’re told nothing about his education or background. Is he a professional journalist or is he a member of academia? We don’t know. All we know is that he’s the author of three other books. A search of my own bookshelves produced a copy of The Gospel of Thomas (2002), translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, Professor of Religious Studies at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania. An internet search yielded the same information. So we can rest assured that he deserves our attention.

Davies begins his book with a brief overview of research into the historical Jesus over the last hundred years. Rejecting the prevailing view of Jesus as some form of teacher, Davies tackles the less well examined paradigm of Jesus as healer. His approach is secular, not theological. For him, New Testament reports of supernatural occurrences are a goldmine of anthropological and psychological data that other researchers have wrongly ignored. He sets out to show us how we might reexamine the passages about exorcisms, healings, and the Son of God, and reinterpret them in light of 20th century theories about “spirit-possession” and “demon-possession.”

Chapter 2 summarizes the anthropological and psychological models Davies relies on to categorize possession: the state wherein a person’s normal persona is believed to be displaced by a “possessing” spirit or demon. Davies is very clear that it’s the belief that’s important. The belief makes it somehow “real” to the people experiencing it. And this in turn makes it an “historical event.” In other words, researchers of the historical Jesus can use biblical passages about exorcism without fear that they’re endorsing the paranormal. This part of Davies’s thesis may prove to have more lasting value to the field than some of his other conclusions.

In Chapter 3, Davies briefly examines descriptions of 1st century Jewish prophets in Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and the New Testament. From here, he leads into the baptism of Jesus, which he asserts is the correct starting place for understanding Jesus. Davies uses spirit-possession theory to suggest that John’s baptism triggered a spontaneous dissociative experience in Jesus that led Jesus (and others) to believe he was possessed by the spirit of God.

Building on this novel approach, Davies looks at questions about Jesus’ healings (Chapter 5); demon possession (Chapter 6); Jesus’ exorcisms (Chapter 7); and Jesus and his associates (Chapter 8). But all of these chapters are really a prelude to Chapters 9 and 10, where Davies tells us that Jesus induced in his followers an altered state of consciousness (ASC) called the “kingdom of God.” The paradoxical nature of some of Jesus’ parables and sayings is proof to Davies that Jesus was using a healing method akin to the hypnotherapy techniques of American psychotherapist Milton Erickson.

In the last section of the book (Chapters 11 to 13), Davies, not content with a basic model for how Jesus might have healed others, tries to expand his thesis to explain to modern readers why the Johannine-style sayings attributed to Jesus should be considered just as historically authentic as synoptic-style sayings; why we should view early Christianity as a “missionary spirit-possession cult”; and why we must conclude that both Paul and John used “inductive discourse” (that is, intentionally confusing speech) to generate a spontaneous experience of spirit-possession in potential converts.

By the time I finished reading the book, I had found several inconsistencies in his argument, two or three outright contradictions, and an instance where the statistical figures he quoted did not add up (quite literally). Likely these were unintentional errors. And I can look past them. What I can’t look past is Davies’s preposterous theory that the authors of Q and the synoptics recorded only the sayings of Jesus when he was speaking in his own voice as Jesus, and that the author of John wrote down only the sayings of Jesus when he was “possessed” by the Spirit of God (Chapter 11). And that’s two different people, so of course the sayings sound different!

My ultimate impression? I couldn’t escape the sense that Davies had gleefully picked fruit from the tree of knowledge in anthropology and psychology, and had tried to put it in a nice, neat gift basket he could present to other New Testament scholars as a sort of sublime “theory of everything.” Unfortunately, he didn’t know when to stop filling the basket. He damaged his own thesis because he failed to grasp its limits. So I would advise caution in relying on the material in this book.

Jesus the Healer is not currently in print.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dissociation, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, parables, Paul vs Jesus, Purity Piety Perfection, Realspiritik, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness, science & faith and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Aug 2012

RS23: Spit-Wives and Dead Goats

A:  I saw an interesting story on the BBC News site this week about a young Palestinian man named Ayman Safiah who is the only classically trained male ballet dancer to emerge from the Palestinian culture.* He grew up in the Galilee in a town where Arabs and Jews treat each other well, and where some of its artists and writers have achieved international recognition. Despite his success, he’s meeting with intense prejudice from his own community. He reminds me a lot of you. Knows who he is. Doesn’t let prejudice and hatred stop him from doing what his heart and soul tell him to do.

I like the quotes from him: “‘My desire to study classical ballet was simply beyond the understanding of my classmates,’ he explains. ‘They only knew that it was something women enjoyed.  It was completely alien to them.'” He also says, “‘My parents knew that ballet was going to be a large part of my life from early on . . . Even my grandfather accepted my career choice even though he didn’t fully understand what it entailed.'”

Yup. He reminds me so much of you. So stubborn. So determined to break through cultural taboos that have nothing to do with God or soul or faith.

J:  Well, yes, I was told more than once I was more stubborn than a Hebron camel. It was a saying from my time.

A:  Ayman Safiah faces huge opposition from the Palestinian community because men aren’t “supposed” to be passionate about dance. Even the fact that he’s worked extremely hard for many years and has graduated from the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in Richmond, England, has not earned him any respect from his Arab compatriots. Some insist that performing ballet is against Islam. Two thousand years ago, you faced the same kind of rejection and prejudice for daring to practise medicine in the Galilee. Tell me more about that.

J:  It’s interesting that Safiah makes the link between ballet and women. In my time, the same kind of link existed between healing and women. Healing was something that women did, and only women were interested in learning more about it. No respectable man in the Judeo-Hellenistic culture I grew up in would have stooped to the level of the local village spit-wives. But I was passionate about healing.

A:  Spit-wives?

J:  A derogatory term for the women who carried on the ancient traditions of herbal medicine. They used poultices and teas and medicines handmade from various plants and minerals. From time to time they were known to use spit in their remedies. Since bodily fluids, including spit, were considered unclean — religiously impure — in the Jewish religious tradition, these traditional remedies and their practitioners were looked upon with contempt. Women from the lower classes of society shared healing information among themselves and did their best to help each other, since nobody else was willing to help them.

Photo credit JAT 2022.

A (eyes rolling):  Oh come on, now. What about all those religious temples where people could make their sacrifices and prayers for divine healing? Who needs medical science when you can ask a priest to slaughter a female goat for you?

J (smiling):  A sentiment I certainly agreed with and talked about. Often. And loudly.

A:  Didn’t win you any popularity contests, did it?

J:  People of prejudice don’t like to have their prejudices challenged. And prejudices about illness and healing were extreme in my time. There’s a ridiculous idea floating around in liberal religious circles today that people should tolerate and excuse these ancient prejudices because “it’s just the way things were” and “they didn’t know any better.” This is crap. The Greek culture had a long tradition, dating back hundreds of years before my time as Jesus, of treating illness and healing as a field of science. They’d written many treatises about the workings of the body. Some of their scientific remedies were quite effective — not all of them, of course, but there was an ongoing interest in studying illness and healing from a scientific perspective. This was a perspective I sympathized with, much to the horror of my pious Jewish relatives.

A:  Were the spit-wives trying to be scientific, too?

J:  Women who are desperate to care for their families and relieve the suffering of their children can become shrewd and careful observers of scientific principles. They don’t have the time or skills or status to consult with learned scholars of religious scrolls, so they fly by the seat of their pants. They pay attention to what works. They remember what works. They tell their friends what works. They base their decisions on intuition and careful observation, not piety. They catch on fast when you show them how to wash and dress a wound so it won’t go “green.” They might have to do their healing work in secret, where the men won’t catch them engaging in apostasy, but they’ll do it if it means saving the life of a beloved child.

A:  In this model, it’s okay for individuals to take personal responsibility for the problems created by illness. It’s okay for individuals to go ahead and try to fix it instead of wringing their hands and claiming that only God and the priests can fix it.

J:  Exactly. It’s an integral part of the Peace Sequence we’ve been talking about on and off. You’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of bringing Peace to the wider community if you ignore the imperatives of illness and healing. For most human beings, illness and healing are the number one issues. If you don’t have mentors who can teach others about the realities of illness and healing, there’s no way for individuals to move on to the subsequent step of the Peace Sequence, which is personal responsibility. In the world human beings actually live in — as opposed to the world of false myths created by the likes of the apostle Paul — people have to accept that they themselves have a huge stake in this whole “illness and healing” thing. They can’t hand over their power and responsibility for healing to any religious group, no matter how big or successful the group.

All people are part of God’s world of science and faith, and all people are considered equal by God, so all people are called upon to uphold the steps of the Peace Sequence. A big part of this process, as I’ve just mentioned, is to apply the steps of education, mentorship, and personal responsibility to the questions of illness and healing. This is what I tried to do two thousand years ago. I tried to teach others that healing miracles are possible if you let go of prejudice and hatred and treat those who are ill with compassion not judgment.

Angels tread where fools fear to go.

*Please see “First Palestinian male ballet dancer battles prejudices” by Sylvia Smith, posted on BBC News on August 10, 2012, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19202612

 

Addendum May 4, 2017: For those who are scornful of the idea that ancient healers were able to devise useful medical remedies by engaging in objective scientific observation preceded and followed by powerful intuition, I found this article today which is a follow-up to an preliminary story that appeared two years ago. In a story posted by Erin Connelly — “Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics” — the author talks about Bald’s eyesalve, a medieval recipe that contained “wine, garlic, an Allium species (such as leek or onion) and oxgall . . . cured in a brass vessel for nine nights before use.” It sounds terrible to modern ears, but according to the researcher, it’s a highly effective antistaphylococcal agent.

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Posted in healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Purity Piety Perfection, Realspiritik, science & faith, soul purpose and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Sep 2011

RS6: SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain

Day 1: Baseline SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

Day 1: Baseline SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

 

amen-scan-concentration-no-date-resized

Day 2: Concentration Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

 

amen-scan-channelling-no-date-resized

Day 3: Channelling Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

 

In December 2004, I flew to Orange County, California, to participate in an ongoing Normal Brain Study at the Amen Clinic.

Dr. Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist who finds it remarkable that psychiatry is the only field of medicine that doesn’t actually look at the organ it’s treating before starting treatment. He has amassed the world’s largest database of SPECT scans of the brain. Somewhere in this vast database are the 3 pictures of my brain posted above.

I first became familiar with Dr. Amen’s work shortly after the publication of his book Healing the Hardware of the Soul: How Making the Brain-Soul Connection Can Optimize Your Life, Love, and Spiritual Growth (New York: The Free Press, 2002). Dr. Amen has published several other books since then, but the 2002 book continues to be the one I find most helpful. Most recently he’s been working on a project to talk about the dangers of head injury, especially concussion. I think this is very important work.

You can check out the homepage for his clinics at http://www.amenclinics.com. He has tons of information there. He also has an on-line version of his professional SPECT image atlas. If ever there were a place where a picture is worth a thousand words, this would be it. You can check it out at https://www.amenclinics.com/gallery/.

In the summer of 2004, I was scrolling through Dr. Amen’s website when I came across the call for subjects to participate in a Normal Brain Study. I immediately wrote to the Research Director. In the initial e-mail I sent, I was candid about the fact that I’m a channeller. This didn’t seem to phase the Research Director, who promptly wrote back and asked for more information.

Because I was asking to be enrolled in a Normal Brain Study, I had to meet the criteria that applied to all members of the study — no history of head injury, no major mental illness, no family history of major mental illness, and so on. The questionnaires were quite detailed. In addition, psychological assessments were carried out, both by phone interview and by additional written questionnaires (some of which went to a family member and to a non-family member who knew me well). After several weeks, the research team agreed that I could come to California and have my brain scanned as a research subject at no cost to me other than my travel costs.

At that time, the procedure was for research subjects to come to the clinic on two consecutive days. On the first day, a final interview was carried out, then the subject was injected with a radioisotope and asked to lie quietly in the SPECT scanner and “not think about anything in particular.” (In other words, try to rest and relax while staying awake). This was the Baseline scan that gave information about which regions of the person’s brain were most active during a resting but alert state (which tells a great deal about overall brain connections). My Baseline scan is the top series of 3-D Active Views shown above.

On the second day, research subjects would return for a second scan, this one designed to capture the function of the brain while focusing on a concentration task. A computer tossed random symbols onto a screen, and the participant was supposed to press the space bar on the keyboard when one particular symbol appeared. I remember that on the first few tries I was trying to anticipate ahead of time when the right symbol would appear, and naturally I was flubbing the test. So I made a conscious decision to be “present in the moment” and wait patiently for each symbol to appear before I made a decision on how to act. Whatever that conscious decision was, it improved my test scores immensely, and the corresponding brain activity which resulted from that decision is reflected in the second series above, the Concentration Scan.

Normally the testing would have been over at this point, but the research team asked me to come back for a third test. This was done the next day. They wanted to record my brain physiology while I was channelling Jesus. This was no problem for me, because I channel when I’m fully awake and alert, and I need no special preparation or external tools in order to talk to Jesus through my channelling circuitry. They asked me to ask Jesus a specific question and then “listen” for the reply. This process was captured in the third series above, the Channel Scan.

After the team reviewed the results of all three scans, they told me I have a very healthy brain, and my scans would be suitable for inclusion in the database of normal brains (as opposed to the database of dysfunctional brains).

They gave me copies of all the scans, which is what you see posted here. I had my birthdate removed from the information column for privacy reasons. Other than that, these scans appear exactly as they did at the Amen Clinic in December, 2004.

For those who already have some familiarity with 3-D Active View SPECT scans, you can see right off that I have full, even, symmetrical activity, and all major parts of the brain are intact and fully interconnected.

Aren’t you already curious to know why my primary visual cortex is so active in the channelling scan?

And I’m not even a visual channeller.

 

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, mystic, mysticism, Realspiritik, science & faith, soul purpose, SPECT brain imaging, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
06 Sep 2011

RS5: Faith: A Relationship With God That Endures in the Absence of Sacred Texts

A: This morning it seemed clear that you and I need a simple, solid definition of what we mean (that is, what you and I mean) when we use the word “faith.” So this is the definition we came up with today: Faith is a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts. So let’s talk.

J: The religious folk out there won’t like this discussion.

A: And neither will the Christian atheists, who believe there isn’t an actual person we can think of as God.

J: It’s interesting that in the raging debates between atheists and conservative religious believers, everybody focuses on the sacred texts. Atheists attack traditional religious claims on scientific grounds (as they should), and conservative religious folk counter with their own interpretations of the sacred texts. Both sides act as if the sacred texts actually have authority. It’s sheer folly to accord any authority to sacred texts when the testimony of these books is challenged every single day by the realities of God’s own language — the complex, highly sophisticated language of God that interfolds science with art and music and time and joy. You can no more speak cogently about God using only science than you can by quoting only scripture. Black and white thinking about God has got to go.

Photo credit JAT 2024

A: Some Progressive Christians want us to reject the idea that God is a person, and they want us to reject the idea that you, Jesus, ever lived as a real person (a favourite thesis of Tom Harpur), but they want to keep the Bible and interpret it in “new, symbolic ways.” How do you feel about that?

J: Well, it’s a choice that can be made. But it’s not a choice that leads to faith as you and I have defined it, because the focus isn’t on relationship with God. The focus is on the sacred texts. When push comes to shove, there’s a desire to keep the authority of sacred texts, and dispense with anything that gets in the way of that authority. Even if it means dispensing with the idea of God as a person (well, two people actually).

A: I suppose this seems easier than confronting the narcissistic intent that fills so many pages of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

J: The Bible is like a very old backyard sandbox that’s filled with the religious detritus of many centuries. If you dig in it long enough, you’ll find some good stuff — some treasures and trinkets of spiritual wisdom from years gone by. But you’ll also find lots of rusty metal that carries tetanus plus broken shards of glass that will cut you if you’re not careful. You can’t brush aside the harmful potential of the rusty metal and the broken glass by deciding to “reinvent” the rusty metal as “proof that the ancients understood the cosmic patterns of Creation” or the broken glass as “a hidden gem of lost mystical knowledge.” Rusty metal and broken glass are what they are. Excavate them. Be honest about them. Put them in a museum if you must. But don’t pretend they say something wise and mysterious when they don’t.

A: I think a lot of people are afraid that if one takes away the sacred texts, there won’t be any starting point for people to be in relationship with God. They won’t have a framework for understanding God’s language.

J: If they’re looking for a framework for understanding God’s language, they won’t find one in these sacred texts. Not a framework that God agrees with, anyway. The Bible doesn’t reflect God’s ongoing voice. The Bible reflects the need of human leaders to acquire authority for their own narcissistic purposes. Most of the Bible, especially books such as Genesis and Luke/Acts, have a human agenda. Of course, as I said above, there are passages in the Bible that do have something meaningful to say. But it’s very hard for regular people to find these passages.

A: You said all these things 2,000 years ago.

J: Yes.

A: I’m amazed that the majority of Progressive Christians I’ve conversed with, both on the Progressive forum and in my university classes, see no conflict in stating they embrace the teachings of Jesus and in the next breath stating they don’t believe in a theistic God.

J: If they say they’re embracing the teachings of Jesus, it justifies their continuing admiration of scripture. That way they can keep the sacred texts and dump the personal responsibility they have to try to be in daily relationship with God.

A: That’s a nice way of saying they’d have to try to listen to what God is saying to them today.

J: A person of faith is never afraid to hear what God is saying, even if change or confusion or temporary pain accompany the honest truth being conveyed to them by God.

A: If a person pretends there really isn’t a God, or if he/she pretends God is too far away from us to hear us or care what we’re thinking and feeling and doing, there’s no motivation to try to be in relationship with God. There’s no motivation to listen to God’s ongoing suggestions.

J: And when things are really going badly, you can always blame God for not being there to help you. That way it’s never really your own fault — it’s always somebody else’s fault, and you’re off the hook as far as loving, forgiving, and learning go.

A: I’ve known some 3-year-olds who were more mature than this.

J: That’s because most 3-year-olds still know how to love, forgive, and learn. Most 3-year-olds still have faith. Most 3-year-olds can’t read anything, let alone the sacred texts, but this has never stopped them from living their faith.

A: There you go with the Kingdom teachings again!

 

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Posted in "4 S's", atheism, Bible, faith, historical Jesus, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, narcissism, personal responsibility, Realspiritik, relationship with God, science & faith, the right to be right and tagged , | Leave a Comment
20 Aug 2011

RS2: The Importance of Ethical Mysticism

A: The universe has a sense of humour. Two days ago, on Thursday morning, you and I decided this blog site would try to focus on the question of science and faith. Thursday afternoon I went into work, and there on the lunchroom table was a newspaper article by Tom Harpur entitled “Where science meets the Divine.” Interesting timing.

J: As I remember it, you weren’t too happy when you read Mr. Harpur’s article.

A: No. As readers of the Concinnate Christianity site will know, I’m not too fond of Harpur’s neo-Gnosticism. He and I don’t agree on much. He seems to be yearning for mystery, but when he’s presented with an actual mystery — one that confounds his belief system about God — he rejects it without first carefully examining it. At least that’s what he did with me, when I wrote to him in May and June of 2005, and he responded in writing that he didn’t accept my experience of mystical conversation (i.e. channelling). Hey, I understand people’s suspicion, and I support the idea that a mystic should have to prove he or she isn’t floridly psychotic, etc., etc. There’s no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific investigation. But for a spiritual writer and researcher to not take the time to ask a few thoughtful questions of a modern-day practising mystic . . . to my way of thinking that’s just sloppy and a waste of information that could turn out to be quite useful.

J: Your problem is that you told Mr. Harpur in the beginning you’re channelling me, and he doesn’t believe there ever was a me. So he wouldn’t find it useful to learn that he’s been incorrect about me.

A: After you’ve published a book like The Pagan Christ, it’s pretty hard to back down from the position that the historical Jesus never existed. So I can understand that from his point of view it would’ve been much more convenient if I’d never written to him.

J: There’s those Popperian black swans again. Showing up to bug the hell out of both theologians and scientists.

A: I find it interesting that in this week’s article Harpur wants to make the point that religion and science need each other and are both part of a cosmos that is an “infinitely vast, interconnected unity in which every aspect of every facet and particle is knit from all the others.” He’s certainly very poetic. But unless I’ve missed something about his academic training, he is not and never has been a scientist — that is, a person standing in a lab mixing solvents and solutes and running analytical tests on the products. He’s a philosopher, writer, theologian, and former professor. Which is great. Except he’s not a scientist, and he doesn’t think like a scientist, so he has to rely on what other people say about the intersection of science and the divine. He can’t decide for himself about the scientific merit of certain arguments because he doesn’t work with primary sources in science. He doesn’t read that particular language. Philosophy of science — which is Harpur’s area of interest here — isn’t the same as science itself. Plato was a philosopher of science. Aristotle was a philosopher of science. But these guys weren’t and aren’t scientists.

Harpur’s thesis about the unity of the cosmos sounds no different to me than Plato’s anogogic and apophatic mysticism from Phaedrus and Timaeus. For goodness sake, can’t we hear something new about the relationship between science and faith? Can’t we be honest about the fact that faith and religion have as little in common as science and religion? Do we have to live in the hamster wheel that Plato devised 2,400 years ago? Do we have to cling to the mystical teachings of Paul and the Gnostics? These people were barking up the wrong tree before. Why do we suddenly imagine that quantum physics is going to prove that Plato’s tree was the right tree after all?

J (chuckling): Don’t forget the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals would like those trees to be real, too.

Willow in the stream at UNESCO World Heritage site Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. Photo credit JAT 2025.

A: Harpur has an interesting quote. He says, “What is most striking about the complete revolution in physics that has taken place over the last century is that the old materialist philosophy of the past has been given the axe.” I find this ironic, since Pauline thought and Gnostic thought are both forms of Materialist philosophy, and Harpur is nothing if not a keen fan of Gnosticism.

J: Materialism still reigns in almost all spheres of human thought and human activity. Certainly most physicists would rather cut off both legs and both arms than admit to the audacious idea that non-locality exists as a verifiable force within the universe. They’re trying very hard these days to redefine non-locality and lessen the overall message it conveys.

A: What message is that?

J: The overall message of weirdness in the universe. Of instantaneous communication between consciousnesses. Of a very annoying measure of unpredictability in the way things work. The quest for a Grand Unified Theory is an example of scientists’ desperation to avoid the non-materialist implications of non-locality.

A: I’m not a physicist, and I’m not up to date on the mathematics of current quantum theory (not that there’s any agreement on current quantum theory), but I know one thing for sure: Einstein was wrong about non-locality. He was wrong to reject its existence. Every day my experiences as a mystic teach me that Einstein couldn’t have been more wrong.

J: Yes. Theologians who want to unite science and religion find a lot of support in Einstein’s theories. The problem is that Einstein was wrong about a number of things, so his theories are of limited use for a theologian who wants to talk about Divine Science. Flawed scientific doctrines are no more useful for helping people of faith than flawed theological doctrines. There has to be constant reexamination of both scientific and theological doctrines as people of faith move forward in the third millennium.

A: The operative word being “forward.” Not “backward,” as in looking to Plato for answers.

J: A strange thing sometimes happens to highly educated, highly intelligent physicists and theologians. For years they operate on the assumption — the absolute conviction — that the universe obeys strict Materialist laws of Cause and Effect. They shape all their research, all their “observations,” all their conclusions on this assumption. They’re certain of their rightness.

One day, they have what might be called an epiphany. They have a sudden awareness deep in the gut that maybe there is a God, that maybe there are more levels of connection in the universe than they once dreamed of. This insight is good. It means the biological brain has finally got the message the soul has been whispering for years. But they tend to stop right here, right at this point. They stop at the very beginning of the journey. They think the awareness of interconnection is the end of the journey. In fact, it’s the very first step. They haven’t begun to ask the questions about relationship and learning and growth and change. Let alone the questions about redemption and forgiveness and the mystery of divine love. They stop dead in their tracks at the idea of “Oneness.” Of unio mystica. Of unified field theory. They don’t continue along the Spiral Path to find out what it really means. They never learn that the universe only works — only holds together — precisely because it is NOT a Oneness. It is, instead, a relationship. A relationship of mutual respect. A relationship where boundaries are everything, because without boundaries there can be no individual consciousnesses, no individual souls, no individual children of God, and no God.

A: Without clear boundaries there can be no God?

J: God isn’t a force field. God is two people. Two actual consciousnesses. Very big and very old compared to us, their children, but still people. They have bodies (just as we have bodies). They have minds (just as we have minds). They have talents (just as we have talents). And they have a heart — a big, mysterious, blended place of shared love and learning and tears and laughter that we call the heart. It’s God’s choice to create the sacred shared place of the heart that allows all souls to exist as separate but interconnected children of God. If you try to speak of God as Divine Mind while ignoring the other aspects of God — body and talent and heart — you’re not really speaking about God. You’re speaking about human narcissism, the kind of narcissism that imagines logic and reason and the Materialist laws of Cause of Effect form the core essence of the cosmos. These thinkers never speak about the chaotic and unpredictable nature of divine love. Thus, they never speak of miracles. In their view, miracles are impossible. Miracles can’t exist.

A: Yet miracles happen all the time.

J: Miracles take place because God and God’s angels choose for them to take place. This is where non-locality comes in. This is where classical physics goes out the window. It’s all very messy. It’s too messy for people who’ve chosen to be Non-Whole Brain Thinkers. There’s too much emotion involved. Too much trust. And too great a sense of personal responsibility.

A: A Non-Whole Brain thinker would rather try to “escape” into unio mystica than deal with difficult emotions such as love and trust.

J: And the sacred religious texts Mr. Harpur is so keen to preserve make it very easy for people to try to escape.

A: In his recent article, Harpur says, “Sacred books on the other hand deal with the spiritual and psychological verities behind and beneath the human search for meaning and purpose. They speak a different language, one of myth, parable, poetry and symbolism because life’s deepest core can only be explored that way [emphasis added].”

I disagree vehemently. Myth, poetry, and symbolism are the languages of religion and traditional mysticism, and even more frequently they’re the languages of successful psychopaths and political ideologues and purveyors of the HDM Myths. How can God’s ongoing communications with us be clearly identified, remembered, understood, and acted upon if symbols and myths are given more credence than identifiable scientific facts? Seems to me that Harpur’s promoting a foundation of moral quicksand.

J: He is.

A: I don’t think that’s very ethical.

J: It’s not. But anogogic and apophatic mysticisms have never been about ethics. They’ve always been about “escape” — escape from the hard work of healing and transforming the self. The hard work of learning to trust God.

A: Trust. You mean trust without the theatrics and wailing and chest-beating and false humility and self-pity and chosenness of orthodox Western Christianity.

J: I think you’ve just described Paul’s themes of salvation and escape quite nicely.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", Cause & Effect, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, historical Jesus, miracles, Mother and Father God, mysticism, Oneness, Paul, Plato, quantum theory, Realspiritik, science & faith, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment

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