Darkness, pt 1: Standard Model Blues
If then the light that is in you is darkness,
how great is the darkness!
-- Jesus, Gospel of Matthew
I'm no Jedi.
I'm just a guy with a lightsaber and a few questions.
-- Kyle Katarn, Jedi Outcast videogame (Raven/Lucasarts, 2002)
If you accept the reality of psychic (or any kind of fringe) phenomena - and there's more than enough evidence for me to make it apparent that something very interesting is going on with channelling, near death experiences and remote viewing / anomalous cognition -- then it becomes obvious that the fundamental physical models on which our best mainstream science is currently based are wrong.
At least, they're wrong to the extent to which they consider whole classes of demonstrated phenomena (such as those involving faster-than-lightspeed transmission of information) to be 'impossible'. And that seems a pretty hard thing to accept. Aren't general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics all hugely well-attested theories with terabytes of data in their support? Wouldn't accepting that 'thoughts can influence matter' or 'some people can see the future' or 'life can exist beyond physical death' require completely abandoning all science, because science is based on the discrimination between 'what can exist' and 'what can't possibly exist'? Isn't, therefore, belief in psychic phenomena, UFOs, antigravity, God, Bigfoot, etc, all just part of a public rejection of Knowledge, and if Knowledge is the ultimate good, then isn't belief in the paranormal or supernatural actually wilful rejection of reality for insanity - in other words, a form of ultimate evil?
That's the approach that the CSICOP/CSI people - and the likes of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins - take. It's probably valid, from a certain point of view that doesn't accept data points that I do.
Thing is, though, if you look at the data - and not even the fun fringe stuff, just the mainstream history of science and physics in the 20th century - the layperson might well start to wonder just what the point of high-energy physics research has been since WW2. The crude form of the question is so where the heck are my flying antigravity cars?, but even put more subtly it seems confusing at best. I am not a particle physicist, but as far as I can piece together the story goes roughly like this:
1. There appear to currently be two fundamental physical paradigms: General Relativity (Einstein, 1916) describing gravity, and Quantum Mechanics (various dates, but let's say 1928, when Paul Dirac described the electron).
2. Since then lots of particle-smashing at ever higher energies has led to a whole rather dishearteningly hairy particle zoo, captured in a formal theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics (kicked off say from 1964 when quarks were proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, and pretty much assembled by 1974 when it was described in a single report by John Iliopoulos), but still being tinkered with by researchers; the Top Quark wasn't found until 1995 (but its mass was way bigger than predicted) and the Tau Neutrino until 2000, and when the Large Hadron Collider fires up this May this year (2008) it hopes to find the elusive Higgs Boson, the last predicted particle. Or not. Not finding the Higgs would be interesting indeed, since the Higgs basically mediates mass itself and without it - perhaps - the whole Model falls apart. Or not. The Standard Model looks so ugly that by all rights it should have fallen apart decades ago, but still there it is.
3. The Standard Model is particle-centric and based on experimental evidence: it incorporates Quantum Mechanics and is compatible with General Relativity as far as it goes, but it doesn't really 'do' gravity. It describes all fields as being carried by particles except gravity - the so-called 'graviton' isn't part of the Standard Model.
Whoops. That's kinda a big hole to leave out. Of course, gravity is actually a weak, long-range force, so though it's a big deal to us macro-sized creatures, at the kind of high energies and tiny scales flung around inside a particle accelerator, gravity doesn't really affect the outcome much.
But still. No gravity in the real world of macroscopic distances == YOU FAIL IT. So we have to augment the Standard Model with good ol' Mark II General Relativity, unchanged from 1916.
Think about that. It's 2008, we've had a century of stunning advances in uber-tiny-scale physics, quarks and gluons and pi-mesons and stuff sprawling all over the place, and we're still using a model of gravity nearly a century old. From practically before there was widespread electrical lighting. A theory of fundamental physics from the middle of World War I, when there was still an Ottoman Empire and a Prussia and Russia was a monarchy with serfs.
Isn't that kinda weird, when you stop and look at it? Why did gravity get frozen in time while the whole subatomic world got invented, overthrown, and consolidated into a whole new dogma?
General Relativity has outlasted both the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. But when you look at that, is that a good thing?
What's so special about gravity, that it gets a free ride while everything else burns?
5. Because the Standard Model doesn't do gravity, and gravity lives off in its own secluded micro-theory, a general assumption has grown up that there can't possibly be any linkage between gravity and the other forces (except through astronomical-scale masses and energies), and that anyone who suggests any kind of theory allowing for 'room temperature antigravity' is by definition an insane crank.
This isn't said out loud, though, not as such. What's actually said (when the mainstream science journals have to actually respond to such a distasteful obviously-insane subject as antigravity, thankfully a rare occurrence) is something along the lines of 'Sorry, that's not replicable (ahem, and never will be). Also, the Standard Model, and Einstein... We'd like to not have to say outright that you're a fraud, so please withdraw your claims quietly. Remember Cold Fusion. Irrational exuberance, and all that.' And then a bit of public-spirited hand-wringing about how poor the state of science education is that such outlandish ideas are even imaginable, and How to Fix That.
5. But there's not actually a conspiracy of mainstream physicists against new science. Nobody actually *likes* the Standard Model. It's ugly and inelegant and from a mathematical point of view, quite obviously wrong (or at best woefully incomplete).
The problem is that it fits the data, and all the other theories so far are worse.
6. It's now fashionable to hate on string theory (the previous best rival for the Standard Model's crown) for not making any useful predictions.
But for all its data-fitting, the Standard Model hasn't actually done much worthwhile to justify itself in over thirty years. Except provide reasons to build ever-larger particle accelerators, which are justified purely because they provide opportunities to tune the Model.
The Large Hadron Collider is twenty-six kilometers long and spans the border of France and Switzerland.
Where are the actual spin-offs? The technologies?
What are quarks for?
Stand back, look at the long view of the bare data with a layman's eye, and think.
If quarks were proposed in 1964 and the Standard Model was formulated in 1974:
The United States built fission bombs in the 1940s and fusion bombs in the 1950s without the Standard Model.
The United States put people on the Moon in 1969 without the Standard Model. They didn't even need nuclear to do that: chemistry, astronomy and electronics.
The Internet doesn't use the Standard Model (unless there are very exotic transistors out there.)
The Global Positioning System, started in 1978 and finished in 1995, needs relativity (or at least Lorentz transformations) to do its maths, but it doesn't need the Standard Model.
We have electron-based technologies. We have atom-based technologies. We have a whole shed full of photon-based technologies.
What quark-based technologies have even been proposed in a lab?
What does learning this new stuff let us actually do, rather than fill in blanks on a bingo card?
Spintronics, maybe? Quantum computing? Something with Bose-Einstein condensates? Those seem cool. But the general vibe one gets from mainstream physics right now is a cautious 'Don't get your hopes up, there are fundamental limits and we long since reached them. No faster-than-light for you. No teleportation. Quantum encryption, maybe, but no FTL communication. No gravity control. No cosmic radiant energy. No time travel. Tiny black holes, hardly likely. Fusion, still twenty years to ignition (the world will melt first). The best we can do is make silicon chips smaller and atomic fission slightly less toxic (but not really).'
So far the most interesting thing for the everyday person that CERN has created has been the World Wide Web: a spinoff, yes, but not of particle research.
So why are we firing up the LHC? In the hopes that this time, the dry well will finally spring a gusher?
Is it a wonder that the best minds of the 1980s went into banking, and in the 1990s and 2000s into Google and Facebook? At least in computing there's still actual frontiers.
Or: you could opt for the increasingly-popular paranoid layman's view that 'of course they found all sorts of cool applications for quarks and gluons: but the US government classified it for military uses'. Hyperdrive, aliens, mind-control deathrays, secret bases on the Moon: it's all there for the dreaming, if you can bring yourself to believe that evil is triumphant, that reality is a disposable farce, and that nothing the common person can do is worthwhile.
I'm not quite ready to go there yet. I think our history is mostly true, as far as it goes. But I think there are some huge blind spots.
7. This huge lack of imagination in physics is coming to a head in the Mundane Science Fiction movement: the problem (from the artistic side) is described quite well in this article The Science Fiction Event Horizon (found via the intriguing blog Spooky Paradigm).
In a nutshell: science fiction used to be a mix of fantasy and scientific extrapolation. Now it's just fantasy, because we've run out of imagination. In direct contrast to the early years of the 20th century, the best science available now tells us that the universe is vastly less full of wonders than we imagine, on any scale accessible to us. The most interesting thing we'll ever know is Earth's biosphere, and we're killing that as fast as we can, in fact it's half gone already: we're well into in the Sixth Extinction and it seems even money that it will be our own.
The best hard science available tells us that our time here is up, we're pretty much doomed as a species, and there's really nothing more to find and nowhere else to go. No God, no Heaven. No fairies, no Klingons. Just some dead particles, dead moons, dead stars, and lots and lots and lots of hard vacuum. And then oblivion.
That's not a story we want to hear, it doesn't make a good movie so we don't publicise it often, it's a story that if you take it into your bones will drive you stark staring mad, but it's the Higgs Boson's honest truth.
If you believe the Standard Model (plus Einstein) is all there is.
8. This is the darkness we live in.
This is the darkness we struggle against, even as we accept it.
This is the best science available to us, the light of truth as we know it, and it is toxic to our souls, radioactive ash in our mouth.
It kills us to believe it, but we feel we have no choice. The data has spoken. There is no there there. There never was a living Spirit in anything but our imagination. We must bow to harsh reality. To dream is but to dream; to wake, desolation.
We are in the greatest Age of Light the world has ever seen, and how great is the darkness.
Monad, Process, Hologram
Reading the Monadology of Gottfried Liebniz, a name that has come up linked contexts with Holographic Universe theories, and it resonates with me. Some interesting passages:
56. Now this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe. (Theod. 130, 360.)
57. And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad. (Theod. 147.)
58. And by this means there is obtained as great variety as possible, along with the greatest possible order; that is to say, it is the way to get as much perfection as possible. (Theod. 120, 124, 241 sqq., 214, 243, 275.)
which has strong echoes for me of computational graph knowledge-representation theories such as the Semantic Web.
There's also a huge lot of stuff here that links with the recurring philosophical worldview described by people with near-death and afterlife experiences: that God is intimately involved with the tiniest details of our lives, and is in fact somehow 'wired in' to the very fabric of the universe - a fabric which is not necessarily primarily physical but mental. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I have to fight the temptation to quote the entire thing, because I think Leibniz here came pretty close to cracking some fundamental ideas about cybernetics, biomechanics, complexity theory and spirituality which we still struggle with today:
63. The body belonging to a Monad (which is its entelechy or its soul) constitutes along with the entelechy what may be called a living being, and along with the soul what is called an animal. Now this body of living being or of an animal is always organic; for, as every Monad is, in its own way, a mirror of the universe, and as the universe is ruled according to a perfect order, there must also be order in that which represents it, i.e. in the perceptions of the soul, and consequently there must be order in the body, through which the universe is represented in the soul. (Theod. 403.)
64. Thus the organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. It is this that constitutes the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between the divine art and ours. (Theod. 134, 146, 194, 403.)
65. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.)
This is basically the Holographic Paradigm in a nutshell, or a variant of it. And he's right, it's the fractal recursive cellular structure of organic things that gives them their 'living' quality - this is also the line of thought that Christopher Alexander has been following up in his Nature of Order.
The idea of nested souls is also the Powers Theology of Walter Wink, Arthur Koestler's Holons, Dee Hock's 'Chaords', Alexander's 'Centers', Napoleon Hill's 'Master Minds' (I think), and a whole bunch more.
What stuns me about Leibniz is how much his theory revolves around God being a part of the picture:
83. Among other differences which exist between ordinary souls and minds [esprits], some of which differences I have already noted, there is also this: that souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of created things, but that minds are also images of the Deity or Author of nature Himself, capable of knowing the system of the universe, and to some extent of imitating it through architectonic ensamples [echantillons], each mind being like a small divinity in its own sphere. (Theod. 147.)
84. It is this that enables spirits [or minds- esprits] to enter into a kind of fellowship with God, and brings it about that in relation to them He is not only what an inventor is to his machine (which is the relation of God to other created things), but also what a prince is to his subjects, and, indeed, what a father is to his children.
85. Whence it is easy to conclude that the totality [assemblage] of all spirits [esprits] must compose the City of God, that is to say, the most perfect State that is possible, under the most perfect of Monarchs. (Theod. 146; Abrege, Object. 2.)
86. This City of God, this truly universal monarchy, is a moral world in the natural world, and is the most exalted and most divine among the works of God; and it is in it that the glory of God really consists, for He would have no glory were not His greatness and His goodness known and admired by spirits [esprits]. It is also in relation to this divine City that God specially has goodness, while His wisdom and His power are manifested everywhere. (Theod. 146; Abrege, Object. 2.)
The word 'glory' here jumps out at me, because I'm pretty sure Leibniz is using it in its original meaning: something like 'radiance' or 'outshining', IIRC. The idea being conveyed is that the glory of an object is not what we might today use the word to mean, 'social status' -- rather it means what is transmitted out from it -- 'glow' or 'aura' or 'field' or 'corona'.
This doesn't mean that God 'gets some kind of ego boost' out of having an audience (and therefore is some kind of needy emotional cripple dependent on praise) but that we, technically speaking, are God's corona: the aura shining out from Him, the energy field that is transmitted. God's nature being to replicate, we are that wave of replication.
(There is a page on Computational Monadology which is intriguing.)
The other philosopher/theologian I am interested in right now is Alfred North Whitehead, also with a computational science sort of background -- worked with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematical -- and his ideas on 'process philosophy'. The same connections show through, this time with the body of work known generally as 'systems theory' -- to which I personally would add Korzybski's General Semantics as part of the same broad stream -- but Whitehead is one of the more consciously religious of the modern systems theorists, and like Leibniz, also seems to have an immensely strong vision of the immanence of God as 'kubernetes' or steersman of the vast cybernetic system that is the universe (physical and mental) in which we find ourselves.
There is a whole lot of related work here that I want to try to cluster together somehow; one of the main ideas that seems to link this material is a kind of East-West philosophical bridging centering around bringing (back) into Western philosophical and religious awareness the notions of flow and ecology: that all (created) things are part of a linked whole system, within which limited borders or subsets can only be drawn from the perspective of an observer. Walter Russell also seems to me to be very important as an early 20th century promoter of this link, from an overtly Christian-mystical perspective (and also with computing links, being a friend in late life of IBM's Thomas J Watson) - also with a strong vision of the immanence and constant involvement of God in the unfolding life of the world.
I suppose the central idea here to me is that there is a sort of process of 'reenchantment' going on, here in the early 21st century: a 'reweaving' of the idea of God as not a 'cosmic absentee landlord', a caricature which has been rightly rebelled against and discarded, but as something even more startling: a living source of creative intelligence energy active at the very core of our being. A 'Vast Active Living Intelligent System', as Philip K Dick struggled to describe his glimpse of the Infinite. And yet, is not a new image of God so much as it is one that has been lost or forgotten during the years of industrialisation.
Teshuvah, Metanoia
A friend of mine said recently 'I'd like to go to churches, but they're always talking about sin'.
One of the fundamental theological concepts in Christianity is 'repentance'. There are at least two words translated as this English word: the Hebrew 'teshuvah' (returning), and the Greek 'metanoia' (change of mind, or more literally, thinking beyond, or thinking about thought).
Both of these words, looked at as words, seem to carry a very different resonance than what the word repent! conjures up for English speakers: dark suits, forbidding expressions, angry scowling faces, crazy people waving placards, endless guilt and inner torment. But the idea also constantly recurs in spiritual writings that seem on the face of it far more gentle. Some even go so far as to say that the entire purpose of life on Earth is to learn to repent. So what does it mean?
Returning suggests that there is something to return to: something more fundamental, more healthy, more integrated, more real than what what we consider 'human nature' to be. 'Metanoia' is almost the inverse of this idea, but parallels it: it looks to the future, considers the human mind considering itself, and suggests that everything is open to reevaluation, meta-judgement; that all our decisions can be reevaluated in a different light.
At the moment the idea resonates strongly in several books I am reading:
J W Dunne's The Serial Universe, from 1938, argues that time is a construct of mind which allows us to easily experience the self observing the self in a recursive progression. In other words, at least as I parse it, the reason we live in time is so that we have the luxury of changing our mind, of observing and learning from our mistakes: metanoia, mind-thinking-about-mind.
Dunne is a mystic, but also a logical thinker, and I find him fascinating; he argues as would a professor of computer science, but the wisps of a wider world wind around his thinking.
In 1982's The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes edited by Ken Wilber, David Bohm and others (but most interestingly Bohm) discuss a very similar worldview friendly to both mysticism and science, in which things and minds are aspects of an interpenetrating whole, which itself is the merest aspect of an intelligence beyond which cannot be contained in human thought.
Bohm talks about the problem of the world, as he sees it, in terms which though inspired by the philosophy of Krishnamurti, seem to me to map very closely onto the Jewish-Christian idea of sin and repentance:
We could call that the corruption of mankind, that the brain and the consciousness and the deeper levels, not only in the manifest levels of the brain but also in the nonmanifest, that there has been left this pollution, which is this whole view which leads to all this violence, corruption, disorder, self-deception. See, you could say that almost all of mankind's thought is aimed at self-deception, which momentarily relieves pressures arising from this way of thinking, of being separate, and it produces pressures. When a person is under pressure, any thought that comes in to relieve that pressure will be accepted as true. But immediately that leads to more pressure because it's wrong and then you take another thought to relieve that thought....
...And that whole corruption of the nonmanifest - that pollution which has accumulated over the ages - we could call the sorrow of mankind. It is not just in an individual. It is in the nonmanifest consciousness of mankind.
The view Bohm is talking about here is very much like that of A Course In Miracles (and Mary Baker Eddy): that mind and matter are linked (in fact that matter is sort of a final product of mind; we can see that this is obviously true in, for example, built human structures like cities and machines, less obvious but still present in ecology and mind-body diseases, and startling to contemplate when looking at 'purely physical', apparently nonliving, noncreated systems). Like them, he also goes further: he believes all human minds are also ultimately linked, in fact, ultimately one.
This sort of philosophy maps very nicely onto Jesus' teachings about 'doing unto others' and 'loving our neighbour as ourself', and onto the reports of near-death experiencers and afterlife communications that describe the world as seen from the realms of spirit as composed primarily of intentions and being interlinked, interpenetrating and ultimately one. There can be no 'individual salvation' (though there is an individual saving work to do, as we personally confront our own view of the darkness and lighten it, starting from the inside) - any more than there can be 'self-righteousness', because none of us stand apart from the whole of humanity, judging it, separating from it. We all share in the sin, and we all share in the redemption.
Sin, war, disease and all forms of badness are in this worldview all corruptions of humanity's shared consciousness - from which (or perhaps more strictly, through which, since the creative Intelligence which makes the world doesn't seem to originate in us as much as it acts in us) all that we see as 'physical' and 'real' ultimately appears.
This is a very strong view of the reality and power of 'mind' compared to 'matter', but I think Bohm (alongside Eddy, and Dunne, and the writer of ACIM, and any number of mystics) makes a very strong argument that it is in fact the case: and that coming to terms with this apparently bizarre idea will lead to a huge simplification in basic physics as well as an apparently new (though in fact very old) approach to human relations: love your neighbour because at some level we don't understand but which is literally and really true, we are all parts of each other.
Alfred Korzybski's General semantics, from the 1930s like Dunne, makes a very similar argument to Bohr about the ultimate oneness and non-describability in symbols of reality, and I think it comes from similar roots. There seems to have been a huge explosion in serious academic understanding of mystical experience and its relation to philosophy and physics around the turn of the century to World War II, feeding into and out of the new ideas of physics, the quantum and relativity revolutions -- but the generation that followed seems to have lost ground, or at least, those ideas were laughed out the academy and took to the street in the form of the New Age movement and a scattering of new religious groups and cults, where they continue to have huge popular appeal but are laughed and scorned (and deeply feared) in the halls of learning.
And interesting enough, with the abandonment of the mystics, our fundamental physics also seems to have struggled: General Relativity was in 1916, quantum mechanics seems to have been mostly complete by 1932, and the two are fundamentally incompatible; the Trinity explosion in 1945 marks the high-water mark of radically new physics; everything else since then, with the billions of dollars of research spent on nuclear weaponry and high energy particle physics, has been just tweaking the parameters of the Standard Model, and a deep skepticism about the mere existence of any other ways of conceptualising physics seems to have replaced the playful experimentation of those early decades. The leading contender for an integration of the whole system, String Theory, appears to have spectacularly lost its way. We've innovated hugely in engineering and in materials science, but practicing physicists, though they may watch Star Trek in private and long for hyperspace, tend to pour venomous outrage onto concepts like antigravity and cold fusion, with the anger Scientific American normally reserves for religion and the paranormal. Why is this? Why aren't mainstream physicists jumping all over Lifters and low energy nuclear reaction? Surely even the merest hint of a shadow of a possible new physical effect should attract hordes of well-funded researchers desperate for a scoop - but it doesn't. Yet.
But is the tide turning, and are we at least seeing a way to integrate seriously thought out mystical concepts both with practical, lived commonsense science, and with traditional religion? For my part, discovering all these documents feels like a literal answer to prayer: ideas which bridge the gap between religion and science without compromising either.
The more I think about this though the sadder I get when I look at my life and see how little I actually practice anything like teshuvah, metanoia, and living forgiveness. To take something like oneness seriously would entail, as Jesus said, forgiving 'seventy times seven': and what does that do to my relationship to order, justice, law, orthodoxy, economics, and all the social apparatus of judgement, scarcity and punishment which keeps our world running?
Opening the Stephen Box
Long and wide eternity from side to side
Lead me through the rapids, guide me to the shore
There's a place that's far beyond this time and space
When each of us comes face to face with something more
If I open up the channel will you send me information
If you tune me to your station I'll receive
If I navigate the river would you take me to your island
Sing a siren song so I could never leave
Alan Parsons, Siren Song
It's been about two years now since I read The Stephen Experience, and in that time I've collected a whole bunch of similar documents in the after-life communication, near-death-experience and 'inspired writing' spectrum. I think it's time to try to somehow put the pieces together, such as they are.
I grew up in a non-denominational fundamentalist Pentecostal church which had withdrawn largely from society and had a fairly standard-for-the-milieu view of an approaching End Times, though we were vague on the details. (That's an oversimplification, because there were a lot of interesting spiritual influences on my life which I keep rediscovering, but it will do for now.)
The Pentecostal faith cluster is not at all the same thing as 'fundamentalism', which is usually narrowly defined by a baffled and uncomprehending secular world as a sort of rigid rejection of modernity. There's that in the mix, certainly, but it's not the main point; and the Pentecostals were deeply at odds with the Fundamentalists in the early 20th century even as their theologies later came to overlap. No, the defining characteristic of Pentecostalism is not what it rejects but what it stands for: the belief in the present power of the Holy Spirit in the world. It was not a rejection of modernity but a faith founded on the direct experience of the mystical and the miraculous in the midst of modernity, and in direct contradiction of the established teachings of early 20th-century science and theology. This conflict did create a darker side, of isolation and psychological coercion, but that was not the primary point of the movement; the direct experience of spiritual power was.
Because theirs was an experience-driven faith, often with working-class origins, and there was not a language for what they were doing, the early Pentecostals tended to create their own jargon or argot drawn from semi-random Bible quotations which persists today, and to outsiders often sounds like meaningless babble: phrases like 'the Annointing', 'slain in the Spirit', 'speaking in tongues', 'open heaven', 'word of knowledge' refer to real phenomena, but are frustratingly difficult to correlate with the terminology of science. And the Pentecostal hostility toward both science, psychic research, and organised religion did not help.
Growing up with the terminology of Pentecostalism, but not its power, it was not actually until I left that particular church and joined other groups that I actually discovered what some of those words were referring to. In Pentecostal and Charismatic services in the early 1990s, I witnessed what is called 'the baptism of the Holy Spirit', which is something that is very difficult to describe clearly but was extremely real.
When dealing with Pentecostal spiritual phenomena, a couple of metaphors come to mind. The experience is partly tangible and partly mental; it feels like a flowing liquid, light, or a magnetic field. It can be either intensely calm or vibrant; in its 'calm' mode it can cause something like an instantaneous light trance state; such a state can cause rapid loss of muscle coordination, which is what lies behind the (in)famous 'slaying in the Spirit' experience where a 'fired up' Pentecostal preacher touches someone lightly on the head and they fall to the floor. There is a space/time component to the experience; on the long term it manifests in global 'waves' or 'flaps' which can last for months at a time, but tends to fade over longer periods; on the short term, it can manifest either in a single person or in groups and can have very strongly varying intensies, which is why Pentecostals talk about 'the Spirit moving' or not and 'breaking through to the Glory'; it can be 'transferred' or 'caught' from one person to another; it can be carried by text or even thought.
There's also the experience of glossalalia, or 'speaking in tongues', which is deeply linked to the whole Pentecostal phenomena cluster, and feels similar to a light trance state but one that allows full conscious functioning (if not conscious parsing of the 'language' that is being spoken; in my experience, it has the feel of a mantra or liturgy, with sets of specific repeated phrases).
The 'word of knowledge' is a kind of psychic reading function where symbols or words or physical sensations are sensed internally (asking practitioners how they do this gets very frustrating answers like 'it's just there' or 'I feel them') describing a person's psychological state or physical symptoms that require miraculous healing. Some practitioners describe the purpose of the 'word of knowledge' as to create faith in the listener who can then access the healing power themselves. When this 'gift of the Spirit' is operating, it can be a very startling experience, and can rapidly break down psychological barriers in people who see this happening. 'How did they read my mind?'
Pentecostals speak of the sort of 'energy field' that seems to 'power' these abilities (when present; as confusingly, it's not always there) as 'the Annointing', but beyond a fairly immediate practical working knowledge of how to summon and work with this energy (ascribed to Jesus Christ) there is not much in the way of deeper understanding. Most Pentecostal and Charismatic training in 'moving in the Spirit' is on an apprenticeship system and there is little encouragement (in fact much active discouragement) of investigating how these 'powers' work and comparing with other psychic experiences. What knowledge exists is mostly scattered and in the form of in-house 'folklore' and rules-of-thumb, encoded in various churches' oral histories, the structure of their services, lyrics to hymns, and the personal patter and mannerisms of individual preachers. The Pentecostal tradition and habit of taking a 'showbiz' approach and being fascinated by strong (small-c) charismatic leaders has tended to hurt the movement badly; these are skills that desperately need to be taught and studied, but as even the practitioners often don't understand how they're doing these things, it can be difficult to penetrate the sense of confusion and 'insider talk' that surrounds them.
The interesting thing is that while being strongly open to this particular set of spiritual experiences, most mainstream Pentecostals and Charismatics today maintain a strong guard against other aspects of psychic functioning, such as channelling, generalised clairvoyance, and any form of communication with the dead (other than Jesus). Being Protestant in their outlook, communication with Christian saints, including Mary, is also forbidden.
It is against this backdrop that I discovered the Stephen book and found myself confronting the existence of another aspect of what appeared to be authentic Christian spirituality that lay next to but outside the Pentecostal framework: the literal existence of the Communion of the Saints - in other words, speaking with the dead.
And what I have found so far as the the experiences reported by generalised clairvoyants, mediums, and channellers, and the Pentecostal equivalents, seem to be very similar; in that they seem to share the same mental or spiritual mechanisms. And not only that, but as ESP and paranormal researchers are discovering, these experiences can be mapped out to some degree (though they are notoriously difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting with no emotional connection).
The question in my mind then is where do these phenomena connect, and are there two kinds of spiritual force or power that both acknowledge Jesus Christ as the source, that are indistinguishable in their effects, or is there as the Apostle Paul said, 'many manifestations but one Spirit'? And if the latter - then it seems to me that Christian Spiritualism and Pentecostalism, for example, are not two completely separate religious movements as has been believed, but two branches of one movement which need to find each other to be complete. Add a third stream of Christian Science / New Thought into the mix, and the picture seems to get even clearer.
The first step, though, for me, is to come to terms with the role of saints in my Christian cosmology, and what opening up such a huge channel of communication might mean for personal prayer and meditation practices.
It's kind of an overwhelming thought if you accept the idea that we may all be literally in communication with real people who are 'in Spirit' and have assignments to guard, advise and protect us. It's not something that you can come to terms with all at once; and even rationally believing that it is true doesn't make it emotionally any easier. If the mental universe is so huge and so closely-connected, what happens to privacy? How do we learn to differentiate the 'good' voices from distracting or 'bad' ones? What rights and duties do we have when dealing with non-physical friends and strangers? More importantly, if we accept that telepathic communication can be literally real, what does that then do to the modern idea of madness as being the belief in internal voices? Have we as a society mislabelled people as having 'brain chemical imbalances' who literally are, as older and simpler cultures would have said, troubled by spirits? Is the ancient idea of a 'muse' perhaps literally true? Are many of the great artistic and technical works of 'genius' actually partnerships between a living person and one or more spirit mentors - and if so, what does that do to the idea of intellectual property?
These are the sorts of valid questions that lie inside the Stephen box (and of course it's not just Stephen, there's been a steady stream of after-life communication material for the last century). Once we open that box, for real, it's going to be increasingly difficult to put all the pieces back together the same way the world was.
(Edit: updated to be a little more descriptive of about our church's theology)
Near Death Experiences
For comparison with my last post, an interesting website summarising the insights reported during near death experiences.
Review: The New Dispensation
The New Dispensation, As Presented by THE SPIRIT WORLD Through the Automatic Writings of FRANCES BIRD
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind that I am actually awake.
I have been collecting a small pile of 'interesting' spiritual books in the last couple of years, which are fitting together in a rather startling way. This is one of them. (I'm now reading a 2002 book by Mary - yes, the Mary, as far as I can tell, or at least a very similar Mary to the Mary of Medjugorje - which is even more exciting, but I'll write that one up when I'm done).
Frances Bird is a lady I have been able to find little about on the Internet, which in itself is surprising. There seem to be a set of four fairly large books written by her, of which The New Dispensation is one; I found it in the New Age section of a local second-hand bookstore. This edition is 'Copyright 1988 by LC Publishing Company, California', but the actual text has to date to the World War I era, so I am confused as to why there's not an out-of-copyright edition up on Gutenberg somewhere. There is an 'Editor's Note' from Walter F Prince from the American Society for Psychical Research claiming that the ASPR was very impressed and had requested a copy for their archives.
The book has a curiously old-fashioned, scholarly tone to it, which can make it somewhat dense reading, but it's divided into short essay-like chapters. The general theme is 'the end of the age', and gives what appears to be an overview of a time of increasing change on Earth, starting from World War I. There are a number of theological threads which really need more in-depth examination, but what struck me most is the deep parallels between this, a 'channeled' book, and the Pentecostal 'prophecy' The Harvest.
What keeps being repeated is that this era is a time of transition, a time of increasing personal freedom and individual ethical choice/responsibility, and of increasing connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. As well, the idea that wars and natural disasters are not 'sent from God' so much as created by human intention; that 'everything grows from seeds' and that what happens 'legally' is allowed to exist; but that 'what is visible is ended' in the sense that creative power only happens in the invisible, interpersonal realm of mind; when a war happens, it is because a large number of people have decided to have a war; but at the same time, the physical manifestation of that war is also the end of the matter - the devastation being revealed brings us a chance to change our ideas and decide not to do that in future. This follows on from the idea that we should forgive and hold our pasts lightly because nothing in the physical world 'really exists' in the same sense that mental intentions do; the present is already history, and we do not have to be tied to our history, at every moment we have a chance to 'decide again' and change our plans.
There's a lot more, and I feel like I'm babbling a bit, because putting all this stuff into simple words is difficult, even though the ideas feel enormously simple. Basically what I am looking at here is the sort of 'unified God theory' I have been searching for for years; a map and outline of the spiritual territories describing how things fit together and what the purpose of life on Earth is. It turns out that the common understanding of the Christian gospel is, by and large, correct, but there are a few mistakes that have been picked up by various sects over the years which aren't necessarily helpful; the important issues are love, mercy, kindness and forgiveness rather than religious observance as such; the 'dead' really do watch and interact with the 'living' on Earth, and the whole spectrum of saints/angels watching over us is literally true; while the Christians are right about Jesus being 'the Saviour' (though we don't yet really understand even that bit), God looks at our hearts and is more interested in our attitudes to other people, so it's not about religion per se but about love; the Eastern concepts of 'karma' and 'maya' are also pretty much on the ball, but karma can be shifted (which is where prayer for others, and especially prayer for our enemies, comes in); there is One God, so yay for the montheists, and in some sense that is hard to articulate He is both separate from us *and* a part of us (and we are a part of Him); but there also are a whole lot of saints/ancestors/angels, so yay sort of for the polytheists/pagans; reincarnation in some sense may be true, though again whatever happens there is difficult to map onto existing physical ideas; the spiritual universe is composed of intentionality rather than matter, so time and space are fluid where saints are concerned; the purpose of life is to grow and develop our spiritual capacities, of which love/compassion/kindness is the key; even in Heaven there is regret if we fail to accomplish our personal 'mission' in life; everyone is going to be saved eventually, but there does exist a Hell-like place, which is created by our dark impulses, and you really don't want to spend any time there, so all the stuff about 'saving souls from Hell' is also literally true; 'eternal damnation' is only as eternal as we want it to be; you can repent or grow spiritually after death but it's a lot slower than doing it on Earth; everyone is here because they chose to be, literally, and we also choose our experiences; all suffering is karma (caused by human choice) but not necessarily by our choice; we may have chosen to endure someone else's pain in order to become more compassionate; the glib Evangelical Christian slogan of 'God has a wonderful plan for your life' is in fact literally true; basically relax, we are all living in The Matrix, but it's not run by evil machines but by a loving Father.
Oh yes, and a whole planet-load of trouble is heading our way (like we didn't already know that) - but some of it can be averted if we have compassionate intentions and actions, and what remains is an opportunity to learn new skills and basically buff our stats and level-up.
A Dilemma
The more I read about spirituality, after-life communication, and see glimpses of how all the things we believe as part of organised religion could actually make sense as descriptions of a wider universe in which our temporary physical world is embedded, the more I come up against this problem:
1. Christianity teaches that God is love; that we are all children of God, created by the Father's love; that what is not love is not God; that the Father delights to fulfil our prayers and knows what we want before we ask, so that even to desire something is to receive it; and that it is perfectly safe to ask anything because the Father will never give us anything that is against His wider purpose for our lives.
2. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the only Son of God, the only mediator between God and man; that believing this is the chief, perhaps only means of salvation; that 'no man comes to God except through Him'; that we must be exceedingly careful how and where we pray because there are many false Christs and false spirits who could lead astray 'even the very elect'; that opening our hearts and minds to the spiritual dimension through any methods except those sanctioned by the Church is very dangerous because the Father refuses to communicate with anybody except 'in the name of Christ'; that 'broad is the way that leads to destruction, but narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it', so we must be on guard the most fiercely against teachings which are the most similar to Christianity, because even if they teach in large measure what Jesus taught, if they do not speak His name then these could be wedges to drive us away from the Light.
The dilemma can be summed up as: Can a universal Christ, and a unique Christ, coexist in the one faith?
(I think the answer is yes, but I think there are many Christians who would disagree.)
Edit: Perhaps a clearer way of putting the dilemma is this: 1) God is love, so all we need to do to approach Him is to wish to do so in our heart; 2) Christ is the only way to God, so we cannot approach God without getting Jesus' permission first.
If I had to choose based on what I actually believe, I'd pick (1) and reject (2), but I'm not entirely sure how to justify that from the Bible.
Advent
I seem to be constantly running at the moment somehow, with little time to catch my breath. It is December; the rough beast of Southern Hemisphere Christmas shambles toward Bethlehem, with stress, gift-buying and end of year panic in its wake. I ended up going to three separate churches this Sunday: Anglican, Baptist alt-worship, and Catholic (ecumenical). It's 1am and I still haven't quite managed to finish the day.
The Urban Seed Advent in Art calendar inspires me. I'm still not used to the whole Advent thing; it's not something we used to do formally in the churches I've known previously. But it does provide a slightly more peaceful counterpoint to the rush and hassle of the season.
It frustrates me that I think in pictures yet I don't draw. An image has been haunting me for a while now: manga space Christmas. Whenever I see a 'stable and manger' painting I think not of animals but a grimy space garage, full of hulking machines. Mary wears a blue NASA jumpsuit. Joseph has a wrench for an arm. The Wise Men are aliens, their gifts a mystery of tangled wires.
In the baptism scene Jesus rises from a hydroponic pond, a ventilation duct fan turning slowly behind. John is startled by the arc of neon plasma in a light fitting overhead.
Good Friday is an explosion ripped through deck plating, a white hiss of oxygen dispersing into space. He lies broken on a gunship's prow. Yet it is the cyborg centurion who has flipped back his own helmet plate and kneels in surrender.
In the garden pod, a wrecked sleep capsule holds no body inside. Mary II turns, attention captured by the figure entering frame lower right with a living branch for a staff, whose face we cannot see.
The Medjugorje Apparitions
Marian apparitions are a subject I have not learned much about, but last week a Catholic friend of mine showed me a newsletter from Medjugorje.
Medjugorje is a small village in Bosnia-Hercegovina which since 1981 has been host to a series of alleged visitations - and messages - from the Virgin Mary to a small group of 'visionaries' who were children when the apparitions began, and are now adults in their 30s. Its status according to the Catholic Church is unconfirmed, and in some cases there is outright hostility to the idea that these messages may be genuine. Nevertheless, it has become something of an unofficial pilgrimage site.
Other than that a link to this place has appeared in my backyard, the messages themselves interest me for several reasons: they're freely available online, they're recent, they're regular and ongoing, they are of a type loosely consistent with other aspects of 'mental mediumship' (such as trance channelling and automatic writing), and the content has a character I have come to associate with the spiritual messages I personally consider 'interesting': a quiet simplicity and gentleness, and for such a war-torn piece of the world, a constant emphasis on prayer and peace.
One of the criticisms of the Medjugorje communications is that there is nothing overtly provably supernatural about them. But is that how we would judge the authenticity of a communication from any ordinary living person? The other major criticism seems to be that this instance of Mary seems to quietly ignore much of the Catholic bureaucracy, chooses her own visionaries and happily fellowships with them regardless of Church procedures and rulings. Which is probably more of a problem for Catholics than it is for Protestants (in fact for Protestants it's actually the opposite).
Reading these messages I notice 'Mary of Medjugorje' talks quite a lot about the Rosary, and has turns of phrase ('Dear children... I want to present you to God without sin...') very reminiscent of St John and St Paul.
According to Wikipedia, there are two schools of thought on the origin of the Rosary. The modern view is that it evolved gradually over centuries; however older tradition has it that the Rosary was given to St Dominic (founder of the Dominican order) directly by Mary in the 13th century. Something about the Mudjugorje messages (and the way this Mary refers to the prayer of the Rosary as hers) makes me wonder if that could in fact be at least partially true. Any time there is an ongoing, regular, intelligible spiritual communication it seems to centre around a call to meditation, often involving a simple system, and the Rosary (a bit like the Workbook of A Course In Miracles) has a sense of being just that kind of device: a mnemonic or spiritual tool, easily learned, easily memorised, portable, demanding little from its users except attention. Just looking at it quickly with an outsider's eye, there seems to be a sort of elegance that pops out and makes me think 'this could be a designed thing, and a teaching aid at that'. A sort of extreme compactness, a feeling I associate with survival kits, first aid manuals, and textbook quick-reference cards. Procedures slimmed down to essentials.
(I get a similar kind of feeling, on first glance, from Reiki, and indeed its inventor claimed to have 'received' it. But I've not investigated Reiki and still am not sure how to go about integrating my generally safe initial feelings about it with my religious scruples that say 'anything spiritual and not specifically Christian could be dangerous'.)
All Saints
This Sunday we celebrated All Saints Day at the little Anglican church I go to. It got me thinking about just what it means to believe in saints, and whether it has any connection with the taboo of all good Protestants everywhere on speaking with the dead.
The culture of saints is strongest in the Catholic church, I think, but as a new Anglican (I suppose I am; I mean I go there and I take communion, but I was baptised a non-denominational Christian in a Pentecostal context; and I have sympathies with a wide range of Christian tendencies from Quaker to Baptist to Anabaptist to Trappist to Spiritualist; the list gets bewilderingly long and yet remains bewilderingly Christian as I grow older) -- as a person new to the Anglican tradition, they do still stick out. St Mary's Addington is dedicated to guess who, and the phrase "May Mary and all the saints pray for us" in our liturgy is beautiful, but not one I'd encountered much in the evangelical-charismatic Pentecostal/Baptist/Vineyard world. (What I used to consider 'genuine Bible Christianity' while somehow filtering out that there do exist much older organisations that worship Jesus; or worship the Father and believe in Jesus, depending on how exactly one wants to phrase a distinction which is complicated and simple at the same time. But more on that later, perhaps.)
The most famous saint (if you don't count Jesus himself; and is he not a human?) is of course Mary (of Nazareth, not Magdala; though the other Mary is getting more popular press lately). I never used to get into Mary (you practically have to hand in your badge as a Protestant of *any* kind if you express interest in her; at least in any active saintly capacity, as anything other than a nice Palestinian girl who had a superstar child). But there's a tapestry of Mary on the wall and it's one I really like. Plus I've read a few stories about Marian visitations, or near-death experiences, and they seem to have similar resonances. She sounds, by all accounts, as if she's a very real, very loving person who has interesting things to do.
How does one square the idea of there being actually existing saints - in the Catholic sense of ordinary people who actually have God's ear, or some kind of permission to violate the Prime Directive separating heaven and earth - authority to listen and intervene on their own behalf?
How, when one comes right down to it, does one square the idea of Jesus of Nazareth, an otherwise perfectly ordinary person, being such an entity as 'the Christ' - whatever exactly that means - but seems to involve having keys to all the locked doors of the universe, at once, everywhere?
From a Jewish or Islamic perspective, the idea of a human being 'the Son of God' is as blasphemous as the idea of a human 'ascending to Godhood' sounds to a Christian; or as praying to a saint and expecting a miracle not in God's name, but in that of a mere human, sounds to a Protestant. But why do we believe in one, and not the other? If Jesus is truly human, are his friends not also human? If Jesus truly has the Christ power or title or role (and again, I can't really comprehend what that might be; except that it makes Superman, the Silver Surfer and Santa Claus look like wannabes) - then does he also give that to his friends?
What does 'to be a Christian' mean other than to have some portion of what it is that Jesus had (and presumably still has)? Or can such a thing as 'unity with the Divine' even exist in portions less than the whole lot? Can it even be given singly, to one person here and there and not to the whole intersecting mass of humanity, everywhere, across all time and forever? Can God Himself be divided? By definition (at least by the Jewish definition which Christianity inherited) I'm not sure the One God can be anything other than One.
And what does being 'a saint' mean other than the humility to listen to cries for help and the authority to perform miracles - either in this life or the next?
Or: are saints merely a lapse, an error, a slide from true faith in the One Living God Who Alone Answers Prayer back to polytheism? Are saints a back door to necromancy, consultation with the unquiet dead? If (and I am not now speaking hypothetically) - if an entity appears in a psychic channel (which is a fancy term for saying 'a voice speaks to you in your mind') - claiming to be a saint, and giving reasonably good evidence for in fact being that saint, and doing the things saints are popularly supposed to do (which is: answering questions, giving knowledge, performing miracles, pointing the way to Jesus, or to Christ, or to God): if this happens, how should we react to it?
If there are no saints, and if all contact between the dead and the living is forbidden, the province of evil, then presumably any entity claiming to be such a thing would be either an illusion or worse. But what if it just turned up in your head, unexpected, uninvited? Can evil powers do that? I do believe that there do exist limited spiritual entities or powers or personalities who aren't good friends. But all indications are that getting in touch with one of them requires first doing serious damage to one's soul; much like bacteria get into a wound, or the old myth about vampires and invitations. If there is bad stuff around, just how thin is the veil between this world and the next, and how afraid should we be of sneezing - or thinking - in the wrong place and attracting demons?
But it's so tempting. The Anglo-Catholics have some really neat saints. St Anthony of Padua - patron saint of lost things. How do you get that job, anyway? Is it like you go up to heaven and say 'you know what, now I understand my eternal vocation. Healing, ennh. I've always just wanted to help people find... stuff. You know, missing stuff. Car keys, that sort of thing.'
It's probably a sign of my inherent geekiness that I could see myself actually signing up for that. It sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
Well, that or psychopomp. Escorting people into the afterlife would rock. 'Hi, guess what, you're dead. Now you're going to find out what's really going on. Trust me, it'll blow your mind.' It would be like the afterlife equivalent of preschool educator. They'd be all totally random little bundles of joy and you'd just almost want to die all over again to get that seeing it for the first time feeling.
Or saint of matching lost socks.
Is there an opening for a saint of PHP debugging? Or did that come from the other place?
