The Sense of Being Stared At
It’s time for some belated reviews.
The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake is another interesting little piece in the puzzle of religion, spirituality and the paranormal.
Sheldrake has become infamous for his theory of ‘morphic resonance’ - which I’m not too invested in either way or the other - but what I find particularly interesting about his work is that in investigating paranormal phenomena (particularly telepathy-like occurences) he does not focus only on humans, but also on animals. If his findings are to be believed (and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be, if you believe any of this stuff) then animals are at least as good as, and in many cases better than, humans at second sight or sixth sense. And that certainly fits with the pop mythology. It’s a cliche in ghost stories that ‘the cat/dog reacted strangely’. Oscar the hospice cat is a current example. This raises interesting questions about the nature of consciousness and the soul: like intelligence (or potentially sentience), it doesn’t appear to have a hard cut-off point between species, if dogs are able to tell at a distance when their owner is planning to come home. An African Grey parrot featured in the book is apparently able to read its owner’s mind.
(This opens all sorts of weird-science ideas to me. Could we use African Grey parrots in space missions, using telepathic instructions? If a parrot is able to access the psi dimension, which presumably means it has a soul, then what about a planaria, or an e. coli? If we either a) get enough computing power to simulate an organism at the atomic level, or b) develop a teleportation technology (remember, we can already destructively ‘teleport’ whole atoms, preserving quantum state) and get to the point where we can teleport living things, and then want to determine ‘does the process of simulation/teleportation destroy the soul’ - well then, don’t bother waiting until you can send through a human or even a great ape - just run a psi-attuned African Grey through! And see if it behaves the same afterwards.)
One of Sheldrake’s experiments involves the power of gaze: he believes that humans and animals have the ability to somehow detect when they are being looked at intently (or rather, I expect, that it is about the detection of the intention itself - the idea that the universe is constructed primarily of intentions rather than objects recurs a lot in the mystics and in the Gospels - the parable of the Widow’s Mite, for example). I personally have never noticed that I have any particular ability to attract the attention of people by either looking at them or concentrating on them. In fact I feel like I’m spectacularly under-endowed in that department. But the idea is intriguing and it would be easy to run the fairly simple experiments he describes.
Sheldrake also has a fairly weird-sounding take on how human (and animal) vision works; he feels that (in accordance with ancient belief) it involves the eye sending out ‘rays’ to the subject, rather than the processing of incoming photons. This makes absolutely no physical sense, but it does have a certain kind of logic if you view the universe as a computational or simulation system, where the value of a quantity is not calculated until there is a request for it: in fact, this is exactly how the CGI methodology of ‘ray tracing’ works. I am not sure if this is precisely how Sheldrake is arguing, but I can see how (if attention is a real thing, at an underlying ’spiritual’ layer to the universe) focusing one’s mind on a distant object - by means of ‘paying attention’ to the signal path of a physical receptor - could send some kind of underlying ‘probe’ back up the line of sight to the object being studied. So even ‘passive’ sensors could leave an ‘active’ trace on the universe at a subliminal level. Which is a pretty freaky thing when you think about it. It’s the sort of weird aliveness we take for granted in computing - that merely by interrogating an object you can alert it of your presence - but we moderns tend to live under the reassuring assumption that the outside, physical universe is ‘dead’ and doesn’t notice when we pay attention to it, until we start bringing out the sharp sticks to stand well back and poke it with.
This ‘deadness’ is of course what religion has always argued strongly against - religion is all about the universe being alive, and is why the existence of religion seems so weird and unnatural to the modern mind - but intellectually subscribing to that idea is one thing. Becoming terrifyingly aware that everything you do, in fact every thought you think generates real and literal interactions with the cosmos - not limited in any way by any of the usual physical quantities like space, time, energy or matter - is something else. What does that awareness do to science? If our very breath, less than a breath, stirs worlds - how can we move, how can we possibly have any space to exist as separate beings? Science is all about making sure our sticks are sufficiently sharp and sufficiently long and then poking at will - if it turns out that you can’t make a stick long enough to isolate you from karma, how can we move without hurting ourselves?
Or put a little more bluntly: If we can’t vivisect a cat without scarring our soul, how do we develop new eco-friendly detergents to replace the ones that kill fish?
(The answer would seem to be: we’re not separate beings and it is impossible for us to be. And that an acceptance of deep interaction, wired-in at the lowest levels of physics and sub-meta-physics, does us no harm. And that we have to accept somehow that there exists something more than karma, more than cause-and-effect blowback: forgiveness, release, repentance, centering, whatever it is that allows us to somehow realign ourselves with the True World. And that somehow there are two kinds of science, knowledge of the outer world, and knowledge of our inner selves, and our greatest ignorance seems to lie in the second.)
September 24th, 2007 at 3:03 am
“All you need is love”
September 24th, 2007 at 3:03 am
or concentrated energy? Bundled energy=heat=light=knowledge=understanding=identification=unification= love=creative force. The universe constructed and influenced by intentions born out of love.
September 24th, 2007 at 3:03 am
or rather the universe constructed by spoken intention born out of love. How does that sound?
September 24th, 2007 at 6:06 am
GOD IS LOVE [1. John 4] and I say: The love of God is greater far than human tongue or pen or computer can tell, it goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Are teleportation and astral travel related?
September 24th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
ABOUT STARING: One can stare at oneself or one can stare at others. Staring at oneself makes energy flow inwards. Staring at others makes energy flow outwards. Suppose this energy is a good one, what does it do? Let’s say it creates warmth. Warmth softens. Maybe it creates heat. Heat burns. What is softened and burned? Resistance? Walls? Disconnection? Harmony is created. Oneness. Communication.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
“or concentrated energy? Bundled energy=heat=light=knowledge=understanding=identification=unification= love=creative force. The universe constructed and influenced by intentions born out of love.
or rather the universe constructed by spoken intention born out of love. How does that sound?”
That’s pretty much the set of ideas I’m orbiting around, yes. Though I’m not entirely sure how to parse “spoken”, given that we tend to understand “speech” as the modulation of waves of air compression in the audio wavelength. As a computer programmer I personally understand “speech” more abstractly as meaning “the conscious manipulation of symbols in patterns”. I don’t necessarily grant any particular spiritual significance to the moving of the lips as opposed to, eg, the moving of the fingers across a keyboard.
Though maybe the involvement of the breath, the lungs, oxygen in voiced speech has some living quality to it that text doesn’t. But it’s easier for me - maybe not more correct, but easier - to imagine God The Creator as something like a computer programmer behind the ultimate EMACS screen, all green trails of Matrix Code and tables of data for every quark and gluon, than as a Stone Age shaman singing the ancestors into being. Mere waving the hands and lips seems sort of shoddy, slapdash, in comparison to the total intensity of circuit and algorithm design. But perhaps there is a sort of messy analog warmth to God’s speech that we still can’t get in our best binary approximations.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
“Are teleportation and astral travel related?”
Not in the sense I use the words, no, not in the least, but there may be an older Myers-era definition of the word ‘teleportation’ which has paranormal overtones. Usually ‘teleportation’ nowadays has three very physicalist definitions:
one, the real hard nuts-and-bolts phenomenon of today’s ‘quantum teleportation’, involving subatomic particles;
two, the notional ability to literally deconstruct an object into such particles and transmit it to a receiving station and there reconstruct it - appearing in science fiction at least in the 1950s with The Fly, and of course made famous by Star Trek, but maybe earlier. Until real quantum teleportation was discovered, it seemed like the Uncertainty Principle would prevent this from being physically possible, which is why the real thing is so very interesting. *Can* we scale the effect up above the size of atoms? Do we have the nanotech capability to do the rebuilding? Could we teleport a prion or virus, and would it still be biologically viable? This is ground-breaking stuff and we don’t know what’s on the other side of that territory.
three, a slightly more/less plausible (depending on your theoretical views) idea based not on molecular deconstruction but on just chucking the whole object through a wormhole. No messy atomic reconstruction needed. Of course while wormholes aren’t theoretically impossible (depending on how you interpret Einstein), the equations offer no clues to how we might make one. Small black holes are the usual likely suspects, and those aren’t fun things to mess around with in the lab. The good news is it might take more power than the output of the Sun to make one big enough; the bad news is if you did make one, you might destroy the Earth. All in all, perhaps it’s best we don’t find out.
Astral travel, on the other hand, appears to be a well-documented but extremely spooky phenomenon involving the capabilities of the soul rather than of the body. I really know very little about it, and from some accounts it seems like it might be an unnatural and dangerous thing to play with. Personally I’d rather keep my soul - as much of it as fits - safely in my body until it’s time to go.
Of course, there are interesting issues of what would the spiritual impact of the first, purely physical, type of teleportation be - does the soul get ‘confused’ and would it become temporarily without a home if the body got destroyed and then instantly recreated miles away? If we duplicated the transporter beam, can the soul be cloned like a photon, or does it pick one and stick with it? Just how unique *are* our souls, anyway, if we all share 99.x% common humanity? Science fiction loves to play with these ideas, but it’s very difficult to think about honestly and coherently without getting a headache. Usually SF takes the cosy, conservative Star Trek approach of ‘it just works like stepping through a door, don’t ask how’.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Creating God in ones own image here? Better correct than easy! God does not need a computer. He is already everything anyone can figure out for their computer and more. A singing sage would be quite a nice image,but the real story as we know, is found in Genesis 1 and John 1.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
For the non-cosy approach, of course there’s The Fly which suggests that molecular teleportation of living beings, even if not messing directly with the soul, could have subtly horrific effects due to the potential for introducing mistakes into DNA. Then there’s the videogame Doom and the movie Event Horizon which take the (also rather cliched in SF) idea that a purely physical wormhole or hyperspace drive might open a portal to some spirtually Really Bad Dimension and literal demons could come pouring out. I doubt that if that happened, that they’d bleed if you hit them with a shotgun, though.
Oh, and (spoiler alert) there is a fairly scientifically literate movie which was recently in theatres which played for a pivotal plot point on the ethical implications of full-body quantum teleportation (with cloning as a side effect) of humans.
I’m personally happier myself with the wormhole approach. That seems like it should work just like walking through a door. Ripping apart my molecules, I feel squeamish about. But if it was physically possible, I would expect one of three things: 1) we get a really, really reliable way to induce Near Death or Out Of Body Experiences on demand, 2) if cloning is impossible and the first copy of you is always destroyed, nothing mystical occurs and you just blink and you’re elsewhere, 3) if cloning is possible, you walk through the teleporter and it’s like you toss a coin and ‘your’ consciousness walks out of one of the two randomly. Then you discover you have a new twin who has all your memories and claims to be you. That’s my deductions using standard baseline materialist reasoning on consciousness. I don’t yet know how the presence of a soul would influence these.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
“Creating God in ones own image here? Better correct than easy!”
What do you consider “correct”, then, given that we can’t literally visualise God at all?
“God does not need a computer. He is already everything anyone can figure out for their computer and more.”
I don’t literally understand God to have a computer, no. But in terms of my understanding of God’s omnipotence, the two best metaphors I can bring to mind are of a computer programmer, or of the author of a novel. Both exist in a realm “outside” even the physical fabric of their creations, and are able to “know” their creation perfectly.
Do you have a better metaphor that conveys this level of intimate knowing to you?
“A singing sage would be quite a nice image,but the real story as we know, is found in Genesis 1 and John 1.”
How do you picture this “real story”? What images do you use to translate it? I find the words in both passages very terse, extremely cryptic and difficult to put any kind of sense to. Rather than have just a jumble of disconnected words in my head, I want to look for the meaning in what’s written in these ancient texts.
September 24th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
If we can’t, then maybe we should not. [Don't make any image or likeness]…..
September 24th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
How is the real story pictured? And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said:………………………Creation by the Word through the Spirit? …..Sound and Breath?
September 25th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I’m not so sure an author can know his creations perfectly. He can only know himself and that only to an extent. His creations would then all be only an imperfect image of himself or some chaotic unrealistic creature. Whereas God should know his creation perfectly.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
“If we can’t, then maybe we should not. [Don’t make any image or likeness]…..”
Would our ideas about God be more holy without art, poetry and metaphor? Even the Psalmists paint word-pictures of the God who they forbid to image in sculpture. Are we better than them? Should we be utterly silent and say nothing at all, either good or bad? Should we hold our minds tightly closed, and dare not link one thought with another, in case we should offend God by vain imagination?
September 25th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
If you give me some word-pictures I’ll think about this. And if you tell me if an image and an idea are the same thing or not.
September 26th, 2007 at 2:02 am
WOULD OUR IDEAS ABOUT GOD BE MORE HOLY WITHOUT ART, POETRY AND METAPHOR? This sentence contains 4 issues, that would need individual clarification. 1. OUR ideas about God. 2. What is HOLINESS? 3. What is meant by ART here? 4. IDEAS ABOUT GOD AS EXPRESSED THROUGH PAINTING, POETRY AND METAPHOR.
September 26th, 2007 at 3:03 am
1. OUR ideas about God; should we have any or not, that is, should we have any apart from the Word of God? Well, I guess thoughts are free. Anyone can think anything they want to. A Christian is meant to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ [2 Cor. 10:5], which means our thoughts need checking. As for me, I’m probably not that imaginative in my thoughtlife, that I would be able to come up on my own with all kinds of weird or wonderful ideas and metaphors about God, which makes it easier for me to stick to the ideas as expressed in the scriptures, which makes me happy, because that limits my chances of being off the wall and I prefer being close to truth to having a fanciful mind. This is not a matter of pride. Neither do I have anything against a creative mind, on the contrary, but just when it comes to God and scripture I think I am safer in believing what He says, since He knows best…… So the subject I’ll have to tackle later would be: GODS IDEAS ABOUT GOD AS EXPRESSED THROUGH PAINTING , POETRY AND METAPHOR.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Holy = separate, set apart……………. With this meaning in mind the sentence does not make sense to me. Therefore I’d like to rephrase it, hoping I still get the essence of what you are asking. The question then would be: Are we more righteous if we discard art, poetry and metaphor when talking about God?………….Is that what you mean? So, I’m waiting for some word-picture samples before I go on.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
3. What is meant by ART here? In our context I take it to mean “image- making. I found a nice, simple statement by someone named Claes Oldenburg [I like the statement for this purpose, but that does not mean I vouch for his art, of which I only saw a few examples on the net just now. Neither do I know anything about any other statements or philosophies of his. Just a little disclaimer] So the statement is: ART IS A TECHNIQUE OF COMMUNICATION. THE IMAGE IS THE MOST COMPLETE TECHNIQUE OF COMMUNICATION…………If we take the biblical idea of man as consisting of body, soul and spirit and assume that communication takes place on these 3 levels, then the physical form would be the tangibles of a painting or sculpture, its materials like canvas, paint, sand, wood, stone, whatever you can feel…Communication of the soul would take place through the subject of the picture and its mood…But the spiritual communication, how does that work? That is where one has to start thinking? Or is it stop thinking?
September 26th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
3.continued: Can you think with your spirit? I don’t think I can. So what do you do with your spirit? Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. BE STILL AND KNOW…If you can, you can know [recognize, see] with your spirit. Then what is communicated on the spiritual level from the painter to the spectator? I assume the spiritual part of the painter. Can you put it in words? I don’t think so. In as far as the painter and God are one, maybe God is communicated somehow. I don’t know. But even if that was so, it would be a tainted communication and not a direct one.
September 26th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
3.continued. ” As no form of God was seen at the Revelation on Mt. Sinai, it follows that representing Him under any image is forbidden, as HE IS A SPIRITUAL BEING WHO CANNOT BE PICTURED UNDER ANY IMAGE” [from " The Pentateuch and Haftorahs" Edited by Dr. J.H.Hertz, C.H. Late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire]
September 27th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Very interesting response. We seem to be similar in our thinking in many respects, perhaps differing in others. I’ll try to do it justice.
“1. OUR ideas about God; should we have any or not, that is, should we have any apart from the Word of God?”
Should we have ideas about God? I believe definitely yes. If we try not to have ideas about God, then we have false ideas, because God is everything that truly Is. I also think that our ideas will never quite match up to the reality of God, but that God doesn’t expect more of us than we are capable of. God is not completely unapproachable by us, He is not completely unimaginable; we still have dim inklings of Him that the Holy Spirit can move over and fan into closer resemblence. So I think it is part of our duty as humans to attempt to have the best ideas possible about God, though all the media available to us, even knowing that they’ll never be quite enough, and then trust that He’ll do the rest - give us the part that is (literally) unrepresentable in words or images.
I also believe that the Word of God is not the same thing as the Bible, in the same way that the Spirit of God is not the same thing as the Church. The Bible is one place where that Word can be found, and the true Word of God does not contradict itself; but God’s communication with mankind did not begin with Moses and did not end with John the Revelator. He speaks to us through many channels of communication.
You might disagree with this, but I’d ask you before you class me as a heretic, to ask yourself what did the apostles mean by ‘the Word’ when there was no New Testament yet written? Obviously they found great inspiration in the Jewish canon, but John calls Jesus himself, in all his unmediated, human physical life, ‘The Word’ - which says very strongly to me that the Word (big W) of God comes to us, like Jesus, through the experience of our lives, not primarily as words on a page.
“Holy = separate, set apart……………. With this meaning in mind the sentence does not make sense to me. Therefore I’d like to rephrase it, hoping I still get the essence of what you are asking. The question then would be: Are we more righteous if we discard art, poetry and metaphor when talking about God?………….Is that what you mean?”
I admit I was rather startled by your strict division here between ‘holiness’ versus ‘righteousness’. I suppose I disagree with your definition of ‘holiness’ as ’separateness’. I don’t think that quite captures, for me, what I consider holiness to be (and that is probably at the root of our differences about religion, and particularly about the church we were both in). That church, like many early Pentecostals, did believe that the main attribute of holiness was the being-set-apart-ness. And certainly that idea of apartness, forbiddenness, is a part of words like ‘holy’, ’sacred’, ‘tapu’ (for Maori), and so on. But I don’t think it really does quite nail the concept - it’s a negative word, describing how God is *different* from the world we see, rather than a positive word of what God *is*.
To me, ‘holiness’ describes the essential nature and character of God - and has a sense more like ‘all-inclusive’ and ‘not-separate’ - ‘not breakable apart’, ‘integrated’, ‘perfect’, ‘oneness’. The essential nature of the One God being that He Is, and He is One. And that we share His nature, being His creations (and children, as Jesus says - ‘I have not called you servants, but brothers’). This to me is one of the deep irreducible teachings of Christianity, that God is *not* ‘holy and separate’, forever apart from us, but that we have been ‘made holy as He is holy’. That God is not like some fragile kid in a bubble, polluted by us, untouchable, kept apart, but is in fact the loving force that draws us together, more powerful than death, undisfigured by the Cross, unable to be broken by the worst that humanity can do, forever loving us and forever healing us, giving His holiness to us.
‘Righteousness’ - I guess I’ve never been entirely sure what it means as a special word, I just parse it as ‘right living’ - the demonstrable, earthy aspects of the special Christian approach to life - and Paul even says that ‘righteousness was imputed to them by faith’, which to me puts it in the same category as holiness. We cannot ‘become righteous by works’, but we become righteous for the same reason that we become holy - because God gives His righteousness to us.
I suppose if I were to try to separate the two it would be that ‘holiness’ is the invisible, inner aspect of the change that Jesus works in our lives, and that ‘righteousness’ is the outer, visible, aspect - but I’m really not sure that God actually separates them like that. I think from His perspective, all he sees is our holiness *and* our righteousness, all in one, and even from before our birth, as a sealed package, because He sees us through the eyes of Love.
In the sense that I used the word, what I meant was ‘do you think that we express the nature of God (which is what I mean when I use the word ‘holy’) better by abstaining from art or thought, from the process of model-making and representation-creating, or from active involvement in these? And for me, I have always taken the line from Job ‘there are yet more words to speak on God’s behalf’ as an invitation to do just that, speak words - no matter how fragile or foolish - about God.
And I do not understand how I can speak words *about* God without in some measure making and advocating models *of* God. Saying ‘God is Love’ is saying something about the nature and character of God; it is comparing the Infinite to a fragile, limited human experience; it is a flawed comparison, a partial metaphor, and we can make inferences from it at our peril, but it seems to me it’s better than nothing, and it moves at least in the right direction.
But if I merely *repeat* the words ‘Deus caritas est’ without knowing or speculating or imagining what that might mean for me - how does that help me grow closer to God?
So this is why I am trying to ask whether you think that the process of imagining and rephrasing, going beyond the bare words to something more personal — whether you think this is harmful, because I think it’s actually very important.
“3. What is meant by ART here? In our context I take it to mean “image- making. ”
If you like - but I was also thinking about all the arts, not just the visual arts, but music, drama, photography, sculpture, film-making, poetry, writing, performance, as well as the sciences (which are all about building models of parts of the universe and reflecting our understanding of ‘how things are’ back to us, which is similar to the goals of art except more formal in its methods). I don’t tend to see hard lines of division between things, which perhaps makes me a little unusual, but as I see it, reality isn’t easily subdivided into ‘this is this kind of art’ versus ‘this is that’ - genre-crossing is where some of the most interesting art (or science) happens. A reason why I am particularly interested in science fiction is that it is an art form that lives to cross the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences.
“Communication of the soul would take place through the subject of the picture and its mood…But the spiritual communication, how does that work? That is where one has to start thinking? Or is it stop thinking?”
Yes, I think I agree with you here. I think that in all art, as in all communication, we can only say so much in the physical or mental aspects, and we do have to stop at some point and let God shine as unmediated Spirit through the hole in the middle of what’s left.
“Can you think with your spirit? I don’t think I can. So what do you do with your spirit? Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. BE STILL AND KNOW…If you can, you can know [recognize, see] with your spirit.”
Yes, that’s exactly how it seems to be for me. The ’seeing’ comes not primarily from my mind, but from that stillness (or quiet activeness) inside.
Sometimes it feels like almost a tangible sense - a little like light, like laughter, like a magnetic pull in my stomach - when I read some books or browse some media. This is what I feel as ‘the witness of the Spirit’. I try to be guided by this sense of lightness and joy in the books and artworks I collect, and then work from there to find out what they are saying in terms of philosophy or theology, and try to understand what it is they are saying that seems to resonate so strongly with me at a spiritual level.
“As no form of God was seen at the Revelation on Mt. Sinai, it follows that representing Him under any image is forbidden, as HE IS A SPIRITUAL BEING WHO CANNOT BE PICTURED UNDER ANY IMAGE”
I agree that God is spiritual and can’t be represented by any specific image, though I’m not sure that Christianity takes the same hardline approach towards all representative art as, for example, early Judaism and most of Islam. I think, though I haven’t studied the subject, that this is a large part of the split between Judaism and orthodox Christianity over the person of Jesus - if God cannot be pictured, then surely He could never ‘come in the flesh’ in the person of a touchable, visible human being, and therefore ascribing the attributes of God to Christ must be a grave error. But the humanity and yet divinity of Christ seems to me to be one of the core, irreducible Christian doctrines, so where does that leave us with the prohibition against images?
Possibly it means that we should consider art’s purpose to be the representation of God through the representation of humans? That if we focus on doing and showing what it is to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’, then the hard part - loving the invisible God with our fragile human heart and mind and soul - will come naturally?
And does that mean that we shouldn’t use the G*d word at all, but just talk about people, and what it is to love them? ‘Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky’? But I do believe there *is* a heaven above us, and that it’s not just the sun’s rays glancing through a thin layer of atmosphere.
September 28th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
You don’t have to imagine God, He is there already. He does not want to be approached with the mind. He wants to be approached with the heart. He wants to be loved, longed for.
September 28th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Somebody said: ” Art is longing for God ” Ps. 42:1-2
September 28th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Do I think, thinking is harmful? Whatsoever things are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely…….think on these things. If they are good thoughts, they can’t be harmful. As for personal experience, isn’t that what one really wants? So the right thoughts can lead on to a receptive state and if one can turn off the thinking machinery for a while, maybe one gets somewhere. Be still, be still, be still and know……………………………….
September 28th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
KNOWING=SEEING=LOVING=BEING ONE…….. John 17: And this is life eternal, that they might KNOW thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. ……………..Nathanael knew, saw, loved, was one with God and Jesus did the same. There was mutual recognition under the fig tree.
September 28th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/james/varieties.v.html after the little blue 28: Here is a longer and more developed experience…….
September 29th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
It’s great that you’re quoting William James, the father of modern scientific psychology and whose philosophical and metaphysical speculations are at the foundation of Irreducible Mind, the book I reviewed a few months back. But I’m not entirely sure *why* you’re quoting ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ to me at this point, since I don’t disagree in the least with anything you are saying here about spiritual experience.
Except that where you say “God does not want to be approached with the mind” I would say “God does not want to be ONLY approached with the mind”.
Many well-meaning but confused Christians have told me over the years to “stop thinking and just listen to God”. Half of this is good advice. I intend to listen to God and continue to think.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Am I allowed to quote things only when you disagree? I am not quoting William James, but I am quoting the experience of a certain clergyman. Did you read it? Maybe I am not only quoting it to you, but whoever reads this. Why I am quoting this particular piece is because it demonstrates what I believe to have happened under the figtree.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
How much of your energy goes into thinking? And how much into listening? Honestly! Actually it takes more effort to be quiet and listen. I have a running monologue in my head without even trying. Maybe those confused Christians are not all that confused. But they are definitely well meaning.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
“I am not quoting William James, but I am quoting the experience of a certain clergyman.”
But William James was quoting that experience as support for his beliefs, therefore you *are* quoting him. What led you to The Varieties of Religious Experience rather than any number of other documents out there?
“How much of your energy goes into thinking? And how much into listening? Honestly!”
You sound irritated with me. Why? What makes you think I’m not listening?
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Or more to the point: what about my beliefs makes you think that they would change if I ‘listened’ more — rather than that, as I believe, I have been led to these exact beliefs *by* the ‘listening’ I have done, and the more I ‘listen’, the more I am led to think?
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Sorry…. I read the book in the early 70s. This particular experience corresponded to one I had. I never forgot it and looked for it and found it again.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Cool - I haven’t actually read TVoRE, it’s on my list, but I’m interested in it now because of coming across the works of William James from other angles.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
You don’t need to change your beliefs, Nate.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
You have not actually read what?
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
“You don’t need to change your beliefs, Nate.”
Oh good - I thought you were objecting to what I was writing about on this blog, which describes my beliefs. Sorry I misunderstood.
“You have not actually read what?”
The Varieties of Religious Experience. It’s on my list, sometime after I finish Brian Broom, David Bohm, Mary Baker Eddy, and Frederick Myers.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Sorry for being irritated. I’m under tons of pressure here, you have no idea.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Well, there’s nothing wrong with being irritated - I wasn’t reading it as a personal attack, just that I felt you were disagreeing with my statements about thinking being a good thing - and that’s fine too, that’s the whole point of having discussions, to see whether we agree or not, and maybe we do and maybe we don’t. But when I asked you to elaborate, so I could find out just what I said that you didn’t agree with, you seemed to back off, so I’m getting confused as to what you meant in the first place.
I know I don’t know what you’re going through, but you have my sympathies and my prayers, if that helps. (And thanks again for the card).
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Did you notice TVoRE is on the ethereal library?
September 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thanks, it sure helps.
October 4th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
“I try to be guided by this sense of lightness and joy in the books and artworks I collect”……………..Matisse:”What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity, of serenity, devoid of all depressive subject matter; an art that is an appeasing influence, like a good armchair in which to rest.”