Creation and Evolution - Part 13 - Involution and Evolution

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION

Thomas Troward and Ernest Holmes made it clear in their writings that there are two fundamental processes going on when the Creative Principle is at work. First there is the process of THE WORD, or a clearly expressed thought, which impresses upon the undifferentiated substance of the Divine to create a FORM. Plato intuited that for every thing in the world there is an invisible idea, or form, which represents the ideal of that object. As a crude example, a machinist can only approximately turn a perfect circle, but we can certainly imagine a perfect circle - so it exists as an idea in Divine Mind.

The process of expressing an clear idea in thought is called INVOLUTION, from the root word 'to invoke', and the Divine Matrix (sort of like in the movie!) responds to begin to bring about that idea, but must follow the laws of Mind and Matter to do so. The process of bringing about the physical result from the original idea is what we call EVOLUTION.

These two, involution and evolution, are not really separate - they are two sides of the same coin. The idea, if clear and unequivocal, produces a response from Spirit which, if it proceeds to its logical conclusion, results in a physical object, appearance, or experience.

Thought creates invisible forms, and a clear thought expressed with genuine conviction provides a form that stirs the substance of the cosmos, beginning a process which commands the physical appearance of that form.

Once understood, it can be seen that creation IS evolution, evolution IS creation, but working itself out through the laws of the universe, which include the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and so forth.

Creation is a action in the mental realm, and as such is not subject to science. Science cannot measure an artists vision, or a poet's dream, thought they may be able to measure some of the physical effects, such as brain waves - these are but the evidence of thought, not thought itself, just as a tire track is not a Chevrolet.

Creation, or involution, takes no particular time - it can be a flash of inspiration, or a carefully thought-out plan. Perhaps the Earth could be thought of in six days, whether those are 'days' of the galaxy wheeling about or of the earth around the sun. That does not matter to Science, because Science is designed to study not the causes in the mental realm, but the EFFECTS in the physical realm. Those effects take the form of evolution. Science is designed to tell us how things come to be - but only in the physical sense.

To hold a controversy that places creation and evolution as opposites reveals a consciousness of duality, which is present in the world of effects. Our material world is a world of effects, which are illusory. We know scientifically that visible matter is not solid as it appears and energies are mainly invisible. The world of effects is the world of duality, of dichotomies, or polarities. Whenever one sees such duality, it is a sign that the Truth (capital T) is some higher concept which brings the dual sides into Oncness - because Oneness is the Truth of All That Is.

Whenever a dispute arises which has some sort of duality at its core, the correct understanding is at some higher level of understanding. From a higher perspective, we know that all is One, and that all must be in perfect synchrony. Knowing this, we would not argue in an either-or sort of fashion. We would know that there are two points of view, and that both viewpoints are looking at the same reality, each from their own perspective. We are back to the old Hindu tale of the blind men and the elephant, where each could feel only a part of the beast.
All things are created through the dual processes of Involution and Evolution. There is the invisible process in thought, and the visible process in physical unfoldment. This is why it is said, "As above, so below" in the Hermetic tradition, and in the Biblical tradition, "On Earth as it is in Heaven."

Creation and Evolution - Part 12 - What is God?

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Who or What is God?

There has been some sort of concept of a Creator-God in nearly all societies. Often casual observers of foreign cultures are easily mistaken by what they witness, and may fail to properly grasp the God-concept at work in an unfamiliar society.

Ancient cultures placed objects or found objects to serve as physical representations of the Divine. More recent cultures profess to hold a more abstract concept, but then go on to use an object, place, person, or thing which they will regard as somehow more holy than its material surroundings. We may smugly think ourselves better than those who erect statues of different forms; of elephants, multi-armed icons, animals, or simply human figures…..but then we may go on to use crystals, candles, crosses, stones, ancient ruins, or modern sanctuaries, investing them with our notion of mystic energy. This is not wrong – it is merely unnecessary. To put it in perspective, a teacher of mine asked her class to imagine a modern-day equivalent version of Christian worship – with an electric chair mounted on the wall of a sanctuary! Might we have done that, if Jesus had lived in a more recent era, or if technology had been developed earlier?

There appears to be a human need to bring God down to our level, by somehow squeezing the Infinite into a space that we can grasp. This is, I feel, a philosophical cop-out. The awe that we ought to feel when contemplating the Infinite, by straining to grasp the Ungraspable, by trying to realize the immensity of what we are communing with, is diminished by substitution of something vastly smaller, whether inanimate or human.

So what is God, that we should be mindful of It?

We structure our perceptions by the process of defining and naming things; and we can do no different with God, because that is how our minds operate. We have defined God as the Creator of All. Whether we know it or not, we started in the very first line of Genesis, “In the beginning, God…..”

Now we have gained some physical understanding of this, too. Science now knows that our universe unfolded from some sort of multidimensional space-time field of potential and possibility, in an event which is popularly called “The Big Bang”. The Creator, or Creative Force, is presumably the impetus behind this. We have in fact defined it so. God, for us, can never be more than we can comprehend.

So God is what we know as the First Cause in the chain of cause and effect which we now observe and measure and figure out. Human knowledge is the sum total of all the causes and effects which we have figured out so far.

As First Cause, we are saying that this Thing we call God, (what Ernest Holmes called The Thing Itself) provided the impetus, the will, the intelligence, to initiate the processes of creation. This impetus is the force for change, and it is a property of Mind. This is why we say that God is Mind in action. Creation is not a physical action; it is an act of Mind, of ideation, of imagination.

As First Cause, we can deduce more about the nature of God. We can ask, “If God made the universe, what did God make it out of?” Because if there was anything here before, then we could ask “Who made that?” and then we would have to have a First Cause before the First Cause, which gets really silly. God therefore also includes the substance of creation – the stuff that all things are made of. For if there was 'stuff' before God, then Who or What made the stuff? We would have to have a God before God, and we go down a nonsense road with that.

So since we know from Einstein that matter is energy, God is both the Energy of the Universe, and the Intelligence that shapes or forms that Energy, and thus God creates the material universe out of Itself!

This means that all of the physical universe is comprised of energy and intelligence, and indeed we can demostrate this to varying degrees. Intelligence is that which creates form, form being that which is distinguishable from randomness or chaos. Whenever we encounter energy bound into form, we are able to recognize and distinguish it, categorize it, name it, observe it, study it.

There is an old saying that if we found a watch lying in the vastness of the desert, even knowing nothing about watches, the complexity alone would signal to us that intelligence had created this thing. We are only beginning to appreciate the quantum complexity in even the simplest rock. The old poetic phrase “See the universe in a grain of sand” is prophetically true. Wasn't it Blake who wrote it?

So far, our picture of God is not one we can easily relate to. That is the reason why the peoples of the world build those statues, those symbols and icons. We need something to relate to. We will find that that Thing is not hung on a wall or in a niche; it is within ourselves.

If we can simply accept that there is, at the center of all, an ungraspable power; not a being, but the essence of Being Itself, then we can set aside the need for physical or visual crutches, and begin to work out the truth for ourselves.

Why would I say not a being? Because a being has a form, a beginning and an end, and a being is something partial. A being leaves room for other beings – we should know, because we are beings. To regard God as a being is to whittle the infinite down to manageable size. What is left after that process is not God, but merely an aspect, a form, a partiality.

God as a being is exactly what the Greek and Hindu and other statue-makers were trying to portray. But since each is only a partial representation of the Divine, then we need an infinite number of them to fully portray the Allness of God. This is where we begin to understand the reasons for polytheistic cultures. What is being portrayed are various aspects of Deity- the activities of Godly power.

We have also created these forms within the umbrella of our so-called monotheism, without fully realizing it. We too have our many forms, but we see them as many aspects of Jesus. We have the teaching Jesus, the righteously angry Jesus, the healing Jesus, and the suffering Jesus. Then we have Mary, the mother figure, and all the vast army of saints. Each form we say is representative of God in action, and so it is; but so are Vishnu, Krishna, and Ganesh. So are Mercury, Hera, Athena, and Zeus. So are Thor, and Loki, and Freya. Many of these figures were real people once, who were regarded as heroes, and long after their death came to be regarded as Gods. Sound familiar?

A particular being cannot fully portray an infinite. Any of our God-figures can only partly reflect to us one or a few of the aspects of the Divine. To begin to approach a correct view, we must reach the conclusion that God is the very Essence of Being; that Beingness which is common to all beings, that spark which enables all to live. God is the Thing which enables Life, which permits Intelligence, which supports the movement of Power. God is the Matrix for all creation. The Creator provides the Law, or IS the Law by which the essence of Being itself can be manifested. Each being carries the stamp of the Creator, without which Being could not be.

Being is not enough, since it encompasses inanimate things, which also can be, as well as the animate. There is more than being to us; there is life. Life is the spark that provides not only awareness, but the urge to extend, to multiply, to grow. We have in us not merely an urge to be, but to become. Thus we have in us the urge of the Creator to further create. This is life.

But there is also more than merely life; life itself is a manifestation of intelligence within matter. It starts as simple pattern, as in a rock. It expands to programming, as in simple life which can reproduce itself, and it proceeds up the ladder of intelligence to Self-Awareness, and beyond that to Wisdom and Enlightenment, the ability to see beyond self to the oneness of the underlying reality.

We can see, then, that there are different degrees of livingness within life. Life is like a light, either on or off - it is either there or it isn't. But our life is different is character and quality from that of a virus or a bacterium. We can do more with our life than they can, and some have called this scale of quality livingness. It is related, it seems, to complexity, as more complex creatures have clearly more scope for livingness. It is related to evolution, as those beings with greater livingness seem to have evolved from those who have less.

This march of evolution could be interpreted as evidence of Spirit creating more and more scope for Itself to act in the physical realm. We like to think that we are the end point of evolution, but are we? More likely we are somewhere in the middle, as God is in the process of unfolding It's mightiness from the invisible into the visible. Jesus can be seen as a prototype of some future man, while we strive and struggle to approach his level of embodiment of God's nature. It that the end, or is that just the best that can be achieved with the human species? What is to come after us? Only time will tell.

Creation and Evolution - Part 11 - Mind and Life

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MIND AND LIFE

The existence of form is the evidence of intelligence, or mind, in its most rudimentary appearance. At some higher level of pattern complexity, matter has gained the intelligence sufficient to replicate itself. This level of order separates nonlife from life; one being order as opposed to chaos, the other being a level of order which is able to expand the amount of order relative to the amount of chaos.

Life creates an increasing higher order, using lower forms of material order. The lowest forms of life show a level of awareness; being able to seek food, seek one another, seek light, and follow chemical signals. This is unconscious awareness.

At the highest forms of life, self-awareness emerges, superimposed on all the other lower layers of Intelligence. Self-awareness is the faculty of examining the nature of all these layers, and the sense of identity. It is the emergence of a point of view.

Our self-awareness is layered on top of all the other levels of Mind. In summary, these are:

1) Material form or recurrent permanence - the Matter Principle
2) Growth and replication of form - the Life Principle
3) Unconscious impulse - the Interactive Principle
4) Conscious awareness - the Self Principle
5) Expanded awareness - the Unity Principle

The latter step, which we might call Superconscious awareness, or the Enlightenment Principle, is one in which the Self - awareness gives way to a broadened awareness of the Unity of things, without losing entirely the concept of viewpoint. This is reported by many people but the use of language seems to be a limiting factor in describing the experience. It seems best described in poetic terms. This has been the experience of enough people that it deserves attention.

Why poetic terms? Because unconscious or superconscious understanding is only made aware to the conscious mind through symbolism and imagery. This cannot be placed adequately into language, which is linear and logical in construction. Poetry is the only use of language which may come close to describing the impressions of the unconscious.

This may be uniquely a problem of alphabetic languages. Pictographic languages are probably closer to being able to express unconscious perception. Thus, the users of languages such as Chinese, or ancient Egyptian, may have an edge in achieving this kind of expanded awareness and understanding.

Creation and Evolution - Part 10 - Intelligence

INTELLIGENCE (MIND)

We are so hyper-involved in our physicality and in materialism that we think of evolution as a physical process, where the physically simple forms migrate through random processes toward forms that are more complex. I believe this to be a limited view. If we are simply physical, then there continues to be no explanation for our self-awareness, the I AM that is us.

The story of evolution is also the story of forms which have evolved as vehicles for Intelligence, or Mind.

The history of the Universe is the history of the evolution of intelligence from recurrent order (like the rock) toward expanding order, awareness, and finally to self-awareness and self-directed evolution.

The physical history of the Big Bang that we normally think of is the EFFECT of this evolution of mind. Does Mind exist independently, outside of the Universe? Who knows? Is God in the Universe or outside it? That is the next BIG question. Let's address it.

The argument for a God outside the Universe is a tricky one, because normally we define the Universe as being the sum total of everything. If everything is in it, how can anything be outside it? Of course we cannot just step out of the universe to have a look. Science has estimated what may have occurred just AFTER the big bang, but is simply not able to get a grasp on anything which may have come before.

For now, we will side-step the question of whether there is such a thing as before or after. If time is a feature of the created physical universe, then we don't have to worry about it in the 'before'.

Quantum mechanics may have the answer for this as well, because it implies that energy is inherent in the very fabric of space itself, and the matter we observe is merely a protrusion of energy patterns into three dimensional space of a multi-dimensional reality. That's like saying there's more to the world than we can see and touch. We are seeing only a piece of what is there. Just as we can't see electric fields; we can't see magnetic fields; we can't see most wavelengths of radiation. Much of what is there, we cannot see. But the stuff we can't see makes up the Universe as well.

We know that the Universe contains intelligence, assuming we consider ourselves intelligent. We also can see, or think we can, that other lifeforms contain greater or lesser degrees of intelligence. What we have not quite figured out is where to draw the line. The answer, I think, is that there is no line. There is a continuous scale of intelligence from the simplest inert matter, through complex molecules, viruses, unicellular life, plants, animals, through man, assuming that man is indeed where it stops.



Software people understand that intelligence is programming. The physical Universe is energy, formed into patterns. The patterns themselves, as in the structure of the atom, are a program for the recurrent re-creation of the atom thousands of times each second, according to the quantum mechanical laws of physics. Inert matter is the energy of the Universe locked into definite form. Those forms follow some rules (programming rules?) which dictate the layout of atomic orbits and quantum energy levels.

Material forms are patterns superimposed upon the basic energy 'stuff' of the Universe; what we might loosely call the fabric of space. Most of the patterns are recurrent; if they were not, matter would fade and disappear with time. A few are temporary, as with certain particles which are created in nuclear research devices under extreme conditions.

Could it be that the programmer is one with its programming? Are the forms which make up our world just the substance of the intelligence that created them?

Creation and Evolution - Part 9 - An Alternative

AN ALTERNATIVE WAY TO THINK

Modern mathematical theory has pointed a way out, which points the way to a new philosophy. The evolution of Chaos Theory in the latter part of the 20th Century resulted in some interesting insights. One of these is the finding that randomness cannot seem to manage to persist for very long. There appears to be a mechanism built in to the universe which produces a form of order out of chaos, with only the slightest perturbation being required.

Hence the 1970s song by The Moody Blues about “Butterfly Sneezes” creating major change. It has been said that a butterfly flapping its wings may stir the air to create a tornado at some later place and time. Such examples are both fanciful and illustrative. It is questionable whether butterflies play a major role in the weather, but it is predicted by chaos theory that there can be no perfectly random motion of particles without eventual perturbation, clumping of molecules, followed by formation of patterns which display order.

The implication of this is profound. It means that order is the natural state of the universe, and that randomness, or chaos, cannot persist for more than a short period of time.

This is remarkably close to some of the theories of creation by emanation. There is an innate tendency for organization, built into the very fabric of the universe, such that creation at the most basic level must take place. So we could take emanation as our model, but only at the most elementary and basic levels at which creation takes place.

Given that creation must occur, we can safely assume that we inhabit a world in which the intelligence for pattern formation, which is the essence of creation, is an essential part. The world contains its own innate rules which overcome randomness with organization, given enough time. The amount of time is likely pseudo-random, that is, a certain level of organization has a certain probability of taking place within a certain time frame, as set by the unique properties of space and material at the starting point.

Intelligence is either a fundamental property of a thing (such as ourselves, assuming we take ourselves to be intelligent), or else we say that intelligence is built into a thing. This description is a new one since the computer era, but we say that intelligence is built into our appliances, into our desktop computers, and so forth. It is our way of saying that it is programmed to behave a certain way. Intelligence has not been known to grow by itself, in our experience; it is obtained either from the environment, or by deliberate input, or else it was innate, like the oak tree’s fundamental character was contained in the acorn.

If we find Intelligence in the world around us, or in ourselves, we could say that, from our experience, this Intelligence was placed in the world, or in us, by a combination of means; but all the Intelligence we find was present from the start. It found its way to us by a combination of means, by genetic programming and by learning, but either way, It was present in one form or another.

The intelligence that resides in our individuality has the quality of being consciously held. We can call it up at will, wield it in whatever way we choose. This differs greatly from the intelligence of most of the world. We can choose to be a farmer, a fireman, or a writer. A tree can only choose to be a tree; but we can choose to make it a china cabinet. I doubt we would be prepared to say that the tree chose to become a china cabinet by utilizing us to do the work! The tree is not conscious; it reacts to things – it does not act.

So we can choose to view the Intelligence as being innate in the world, in an unconscious way; but being conscious in us. We are individualized points of Universal Consciousness, through which the Universal Intelligence may be directed for desired ends.

We can choose now to take this responsibility and run with it, or put our heads back into the sand.

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Creation and Evolution - Part 8 - Randomness

RANDOMNESS AND CERTAINTY

Science has found that much of what takes place in the world is governed by random processes – by probabilities. This upset Einstein at one point, who said he refused to believe that God plays dice with the world. Yet we have increasingly been forced to deal with probabilistic means for measuring the world – the weather is a prime example. We simply cannot deal with all the factors which would provide a perfect forecast of the weather.

At first it was thought that this was simply a limitation of our ability to measure and track the countless factors in nature. But at subatomic levels, it was found that probability rules the day – and when Heisenberg announced his Uncertainty Principle, it caused Einstein’s outburst; because the good Albert could find no flaw in the reasoning, and yet could not accept the result. How perfectly human of him!

The Uncertainty Principle states, in crude terms, that the full nature of a particle may never be known, regardless of how measured. It is like this: to know fully the nature of a particle we must know, among other things, its mass and motion. However, it is not possible to know both at the same time. A measurement of mass alters the motion; and measurement of motion renders the mass unmeasurable.

This in itself would not be too surprising. The part which bothers everyone is that this uncertainty is shown to be not a function of the measurement, but a function of the particle itself! Nature is too slippery to be got hold of; and that revelation forever changed the nature of science.

Since that time, the implication of the Uncertaintly principle have been expanded to included particles which disappear from one spot to reappear at another; and particles which, having once collided, remain forever linked to one another, so that changing one affects the other at a distance. Things are not knowable with certainty, only with probability. This uncertainty appears to be a property of the universe.

Our need for certainty has led us to create, in our minds, models of the world which are more stable and predictable than the world itself. Most of our thinking consists of us playing with our mental models, instead of experiencing the real world. So we watch the world on our equivalent of television and don’t get exposed to its uncertainty. We remain one step removed from the world’s randomness at most times.

Religious dogma serves a similar purpose for us in putting us one step removed from God. Rather than experience the connection to all creation, we prefer to hang on to the stability of our everyday life. We stick to the rules. Our love for dogma is a creation of the human ego, which needs the illusion of stability and constancy to feel safe.

The human race has created numerous religious sects and groups out of its own ego-consciousness. In the case of most, there is a deity which is dedicated to the enforcement of a set of rigid rules. The deity is often wrathful and very strict; this is to provide a feeling of security that the rules will not be easily or frequently broken. The result is a religion which may be confining and restrictive, but which provides a means of social control. In many societies there continues to be a need for this to prevent chaos and anarchy. However, such societies are blocked from evolving because self-control has been replaced by external control. Such societies are often characterized by a belief in strong government as well, up to and including absolute monarchy or dictatorship, which may even occasionally assume a democratic guise.

The fear which the ego supplies is intended to be protective. People regularly surrender a portion of their freedom of action in order to gain safety and security. So to gain the illusion of certainty in an uncertain world, people settle for the illusion of freedom as well.

In this way, most people deal with the randomness of the world.


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Creation and Evolution - Part 7 - Genesis - Love or Fear

THE UNIVERSAL MIND, LOVE AND FEAR

Maybe at this point it is worthwhile to recap.

Consciousness is a function of individualization, since it requires an object - something to be conscious of. This implies that in the Beginning, when nothing was yet created, there was only Oneness, and therefore the initial creation may have been by emanation, an unconscious process. Perhaps this is what the early church fathers were getting at.

One should realize that since time and space are functions of the created universe, to refer to 'The beginning' is just a convenient way of dealing with the matter from our time-rooted viewpoint.

Genesis speaks of 'the waters being separated from the waters'. Since water is a Biblical symbol for Spirit, this may be referring to the division, or individualization of Spirit, to create conscious entities, points of view from which the Creator could look consciously upon Itself. The 'firmament' thus mentioned in Genesis could refer to the forms thus created. The process goes something like this:

- Thoughts are things.
- Thoughts have form - so thought creates forms.
- Spirit responds to thought and puts substance into form.
- The result is a physical manifestation of the thought.

The Biblical term for a clearly expressed thought is "The Word"

So, initial creation took us, it appears, from Unconsciousness to individualized consciousness. This could be viewed as the beginning of the evolution of Mind, or simply the outward expression of Mind. Like the seed, God expresses what was in Mind to begin with. The oak is just the outward expression of that seed’s inner potential. So our individuality, which is expressed in form in the world, is the outward expression, or part of it, of God’s inner potentiality, which we take to be infinite. Our seed analogy breaks down here, since the seed’s potential is limited and finite, at least in quality. In Quantity, the oak may grow bigger, and may produce more seeds and more oaks, but the quality will always be recognizable.

Perhaps the quality of our Creative Originator also remains constant, like a trademark stamp on creation. Perhaps we look too hard at the differences between things,and don’t see the unity that is there. Perhaps the quality is found in the Law of Nature, and the Law of Mind, which governs all things equally without variance.

Unconscious creation is creation not from a specific vision or imagination, but from an urge. When we say that "God is Love" we are saying that this is the nature of the urge that led to the first creation. Many of us are creating from our unconscious every day. Most of the things we don't want in our life are creations from our unconscious. The result is seldom specified, but if the urge is there, it will create something that symbolizes that urge. If it is fear that drives us, then the outcome will be a fearful situation, but the specifics of it will be randomly generated. When is says in Genesis that "God saw that it was good," that tells us that ours is a world created from Love.

Anything in your life that does not look like Love has been created from the opposite of Love - Fear. Since ours is a universe of Perfect Law, created from Love, then our fear must be based on errors in our thinking.


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Creation and Evolution - Part 6 - Perfect Law

In New Thought, including Religious Science, we do not accept the notion of a descent to imperfection – not that there isn’t imperfection in the physical world, but we believe that it comes from errors in our belief which find us believing in imperfection, and hence creating it anew at every turn. Fear is the motivator for most erroneous belief – the fear that we can be harmed, which flows from the failure to trust our spiritual nature.

We are each spiritually perfect beings, having been perfectly created, and our physical experience reflects a perfect Law in which we perfectly create from the sum total of our thought. Erroneous thought therefore creates perfect error; and this is the source of humanity’s misfortune. We are performing perfectly in our imperfection; and this is indeed a perfect world, reflecting to us all our error. Because the Law works perfectly for us, we suffer the consequences of our fears.

This is reflected by Job’s eventual realization, after his descent into poverty, illness, and despair; where he finally exclaims, “That which I most feared has come upon me.”

Religious Science is a teaching of practical, everyday mysticism, wherein prayer is taught as an everyday tool for directing the mind and the life along desirable ways. Looking at mystical traditions will show the role of the emanation concept in shaping mystical thought.

In the Jewish Cabala the idea of emanations as the origin of the world is taught; and this makes a connection with The Gnostics, and the Neoplatonists. This is likely to have influenced early Christian thinking.

Another early mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite is often regarded as a link in the teaching of emanation. However, his idea of an efflux from God, and the resulting heavenly hierarchy, are not emanated one from the other, but all directly from God, all from one Creative Source.

More recent examples come closer to the New Thought belief.

Erigena writes of primordial cause, which continually, eternally proceeds from God. Not only is God in the creation, but the creation is in God. In the tradition of scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas is quoted as removing the dividing line between God, the powers of God, and the world.

It simply makes sense that if you believe that God preceded Its creation, then there originally was nothing but God. If there was God and something else, then how what created that 'something else'? So we believe that the 'First Cause' created out of Its own substance, the body of God, and we exist as forms within this body. We are collectively part of the body of God, what Jesus referred to as the 'Son'.

The entire created universe is the 'body' of God, in which perfect laws operate to produce experiences that perfectly match our dominant thinking.

creation and Evolution - Part 5 - Emanation

Will vs. Desire

At this point it is important to make a distinction between will and desire. A desire may be either conscious or unconscious; but will implies a conscious act. Desire implies an urge, a drive, which may or may not be voluntary. At the point where creation begins, we may postulate a single unitary Mind, which is conscious of nothing but Itself, and which within Itself has no differentiations or structure; nothing of what we would describe as form. Without form there is no distinction, and without disctinction there is nothing to serve as a focus for awareness. We cannot be conscious without being conscious OF something.

Creation from this point forward may be of two kinds; it may flow from desire, or it may be the product of some random fluctuation. Ceretainly the mathematics of chaos theory indicates that uniformity or invariability cannot persist without being stirred, leading to a division of matter and energy. We know of no mechanism by which random fluctuation would produce the sort of complexity we are familiar with – therefore it is normally agreed that creation began as a nonrandom act.

So we now come down to the concept of emanation – the notion of initial creation as an unconscious action, though fuelled by desire – in this case the pressure for greater expression; the desire to be more. This is the same impulse which the seed uses to sprout and begin to form a plant. It is innate within the seed, and is thus not an act of will on the part of the seed. By the nature of the seed, it sprouts and grows. By the nature of the Creator, it Creates through establishment of form, within Itself, by Itself. And the form thus created permits the awakening of Self-awareness, by creating many within the body of the One.

We have a clue to this in the origins of the very word "desire", which is of French origin as "De Sire", meaning "of the Father."

Hence Jesus, speaking as one with God, was able to say, “This is my body” as he broke the substance of the bread. All things are formed within the body and substance of God, as there is no other substance. If there were, it would need a creator, existing prior to that which we have defined as the original creator. He is, I suggest, speaking not of his particular personal body, but of the larger body of Spiritual Substance, of which we all are a part. It is ALL our body.

So the notion of emanation does hold some validity for that first instant of creation, that moment which Genesis refers to a separation of ‘The waters from the waters’, which is Spirit separating Itself from Itself in order to experience Itself; in order to express Its potential just as the seed must break open and grow into the oak to be be fully expressed.

There were many other types of emanation concepts in history which fall short of explaining the act of creation as we might view it. For example:

The Vedic Upanishads hint at the idea of emanation, thus:

"From this Atman originated space, and from space the wind, and from the wind the fire, and from fire water, and from water the earth, and from the earth plants, and from plants food, and from food the seed of man, and from the seed of man himself."

In the religion of ancient Greece, emanations are thought to flow from objects in the world, to account for our sensory perception of them. In the absence of a modern theory of light, it was thought that we see by the reception of emanations from the things around us. As the Greeks evolved early atomic theory, they felt that objects must give off atoms. Of course now we know that we observe things by reflected light.

Such aspects of thought and emotion such as wisdom, love and anger were often partially personified and regarded as emanations of a sort, as lesser Gods which influenced humankind. Though today it may seem silly to us, It is no more sillier to personify love (as goddess Aphrodite) or anger (as the god Mars) than it is to personify evil as many do today.

Emanation was not apparently part of Egyptian belief, and though some Romans referred to the soul as an emanation of God, they considered it to be part of God, not spun off and diminished in quality.

The Emanation concept appears more strongly in early Christian thought, and in the Neoplatonist philosophies. In the Gnostic teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, emanation was foremost. Each successive emanation was referred to as an eon, and these eons were given off in stages from a Source which Itself was uncreated. The emanation was an unconscious act, by a law of nature; something the Creator couldn’t help, and the Creator lost nothing of Its completeness in the process. The Unity becomes the source of the plurality.

Early Christian thinkers used the concept in relation of the Son and Holy Spirit to the Father, and so the idea of emanation is part of the foundation of the Trinity concept. The part which was added later in Christian philosophy is the concept of a descent into imperfection, which is not present in the original writings. Early writers such as Athenagoras, Origen, and Arnobius- Tertullian borrowed from Valentinus, while repudiating one idea – that the ‘eons’ were separated from the ‘Nous’ or intellect, which was the origin of creation.

Though Valentinus (not the same at St. Valentine, a Roman priest) was among the most influential early church leaders, When he failed to be chosen Pope, it signaled the beginning of a purge of Gnostic thinkers which altered forever the direction of Christianity.

Creation and Evolution - Part 4 - Emanation

Now let us take a side trip for a short while to examine some concepts of creation which have been put forward over the centuries; beginning with a Greco-Persian concept which was adopted by the Gnostic Christians at one point, before they were purged from the Catholic church – the idea of ‘Emanations’

THE CONCEPT OF ‘EMANATIONS’:

Let me start by saying that I do not believe the idea of ‘emanations’ is a perfect fit with the essential beliefs of Religious Science, although some aspects of it come quite close. I found a good definition in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.utm.edu/research/iep)

The concept of emanation is that all derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the more primary.
It is distinguished from the doctrine of creation by its elimination of a definite will in the first cause, from which all things are made to emanate according to natural laws and without conscious volition.

We have defined God as the Creator, therefore God is "That Which Creates." Notice that any definition we put forward is a limitation or a box into which we can place a concept. The concept may or may not represent Reality - and do we know what Reality is?

The best way to describe emanation is to think of a rose. The scent of the rose emanates from the rose, but it also IS the rose. The color of the rose also emanates from the rose (albeit by reflecting light outward) and is part of the rose. A flower with no color or scent could not be a rose, because those are the very definition of the thing.

So does creation emanate outward from God, since we define God as Creator? If so, then it is not done by volition on God's part, but unconsciously - and thus creation is not what God DOES, but what God IS. Just as a rose is more than its scent or its color, so God is more than Its creation.

So in this model of thought our world flows from a source which cannot help Itself, and has no conscious will or direction, but which creates according to natural laws. Does the Creative Principle give off lesser beings and objects like a boiling kettle gives off steam?

The immediate problem here is two-fold: First, how can free will and volition, which we clearly believe we have, flow from a Creator who has none? This does not appear to make sense. Some doctrines got around the issue of our free will by having the entire world created by emanation from a lesser being, itself created by the Supreme Deity; then humanity created directly by the Deity, superior to the creator of the world, and master of all creation.

The Bible hints at this; in one spot it suggests that man is created to be above the angels. This is not normally pointed out in churches! This is a concept worth re-visiting, and we will do so.

Secondly, where do the natural laws come from? Were they created, and if so, by what, or whom?

There is another problem which is less obvious. Creation through emanation runs directly counter to evolution as we observe it, because it runs in descending stages, whereas evolution takes us from the simple to the complex in an ascendant fashion.

In most versions of the emanation concept, the Supreme Creator emanates or gives off lesser beings, not through an act of will, but because that is It’s very nature, and It can do nothing else. What can a Creator do but Create? However, it does seem to reduce the idea of God to a smaller stature than we feel comfortable with, as it implies that God does not Create through will, and since God’s role in the universe is to Create all things, it would suggest that God has no will at all. So much for the idea of the ‘will of God’, which gets blamed for most disasters!

This has a smattering of validity because in the absence of individualized Spirit, consciousness is not possible. Consciousness requires something to be conscious of, and hence an undifferentiated Being cannot express consciousness. Therefore at a certain stage of creation, the act of creation must be an unconscious one, since even self-awareness relies to some degree on a demarcation between Self and Other.

This raises the possibility that our individualized consciousness is part of a process of God becoming conscious of Itself, through giving birth to billions of 'points of view'. Perhaps we are the eyes through which God can look around at Its creation.

Creation and Evolution - Part 3

THE MIDDLE GROUND

Scientists are correct in having identified that there are, in fact, random processes which govern all of physics in the absence of a creative impulse. We know this in our own lives. When we abdicate all direction in our lives, randomness takes over and leads us through a series of ups and down in life, which can be chaotic. When we let our lives drift, we are asking for the extremities of chance to land upon us.

What some scientists will either challenge or ignore is the very notion that the evolution of life has behind it an intelligence which provides direction. Some may be persuaded when they consider that over the billions of years, there has been a clear direction from simple to complex; from fixed to motile; and from environmentally directed to self-aware and self-motivated. Surely something accounts for this.

Fundamentalists challenge or ignore the notion that the Biblical account is not literal, but is a symbolic description of the action of Creative Mind. There are those who cannot accept this, and the best evidence is the simple fact that they continue to deny the blatant evidence of the geological layering of the earth and the accompanying fossil record, preferring to see this as some cheap trick of nature, or worse, a trick of temptation by some malevolent force or being.

The clearest of evidence was first explained away by pointing out the lack of various ‘missing links’ in the fossil record. Then, as some of those (not all) were filled in, and theories were adjusted, then the fact that theories were alterable was put forth as evidence of their inadequacy. The very strength of a scientific approach, that it adjusts to accept new evidence, was made a weakness, as if rigid, blind belief were somehow superior.

One of the peculiarities of the mind is that when we start with certain biases or prejudices, they act as a filter on our perceptions. This means that we always see or experience life in such as way as to confirm our own beliefs, whether they are aligned with genuine evidence or not. Those who accept beliefs from others without question will always sift the evidence in accordance with those beliefs.

This is not unlike what we see in a hypnotist's demonstration, where those who accept the suggestions made will proceed to experience all sorts of things unseen to any other person watching. We too are hypnotized by parental, community and cultural influences, so that the views we come to jointly hold seem quite obvious.

At any rate, fortunately there is always a middle ground, where Creation is proven by the evidence of evolution. On that ground, I choose to dwell.

Creation and Evolution - Part 2

THE CREATION-EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY


The creation – evolution controversy has for some time created a peculiar sort of one-sided argument, where many fundamentalists have taken aim at the findings of science in the post-Darwin period.

The theories – for there is not one theory, but a vast network of interlinking theories of science which make up the scientific body of knowledge related to the evolution of life on Earth – have flowed from centuries of discovery since Darwin, and have tended to confirm and support the basic Darwinian thesis of evolution, while at the same time clarifying many issues, and creating a large number of new mysteries. There has now been dozens of decades of constructive criticism.

The destructive criticism has tended to flow and be supported mainly from individuals who are only partially educated in fields which do not touch directly on the studies of archaeology, geology, or other areas which now rely upon the evolutionary theories for such practical matters as dating geologic formations, finding coal, oil or other minerals. It would seem that the proof of pudding should be in the eating, but such is not the case.

No one seems to manage to stand in the middle of this heated debate for long. Indeed it can be a disturbing place to be, full more of heat than light, since those who have genuine knowledge are far too busy furthering it to pander to useless debate.

I intend to try to sidestep the debate, since I do feel it to be senseless, and I will propose a calmer examination of the concepts of creation from a historical and, I hope, sensible point of view.

No doubt it has occurred to some that since there is a massive body of evidence for the evolutionary development of life; and since there have been numerous mechanisms identified for bringing it about; and since we can observe at least some of these mechanisms at work today, that perhaps we ought to accept evolution as a proven theory, in a general sense, with some lingering details still to be straightened out. To accept this is to leave behind the view of things as starkly black and white, and open our minds to not only shades of gray, but to the many shades of color that the world is really made of.

The good news is that this acceptance need not be cause for abandonment of our philosophical and emotional need for belief in a Creative Mind at work. The argument is useless because it is needless, pointless, as there is a much greater concept of creation which awaits us.

To adopt it, however, requires one thing. It requires the thinkers to let go of literalism, loosen their fervent grip on fundamentalism, and accept that the Truth of the Bible is a greater truth than merely a collection of accurate factoids. The Truth is of a Spiritual kind; and the fact is that evolution is the physical mechanism of creation, the clear evidence of a guided upward advance. It is the greater Life of the Universe unfolding Itself into the physical realm.

Science too must let go of something, and in many cases, it has already done so. The reliance of purely random processes to bring about the genesis of life has already been partly superseded by the more recent theories of the quantum universe; in which space has no real emptiness, and instead lies curled into at least ten dimensions of incredible energy. The development of chaos theory has shed some light on the way the universe behaves. The latest mathematical exploration reveals a Universe which has a bias toward order – the urge for creation is built into our world.

We have now offended both camps somewhat, and so we will never satisfy those who wish to hang on and argue. We can only stay in our own corner and explore our own thinking on the matter. Perhaps the most flexible among the combatants will eventually sit down and join us in a calmer exploration of the Creative Principle.

Creation and Evolution - Part 1

New Thought, more specifically Religious Science, doesn’t really takes a stand on the issue of creation versus evolution, because we tend not to see it as an issue. The geologic fossil record is interesting, and reveals many interesting things about the physical world, but Creation is not a physical thing – it is a act of Mind, which then unfolds itself into the physical. Creation is not of this world – it is in this world, but not of it. In looking at the evidence for evolution, which I would consider to be indisputable by this time, we are looking at a physical unfoldment of something which is beyond the scope of physical science; firmly in the realm of metaphysics.

Quite simply, there is no cause for argument. And as Einstein said, “No problem can be solved at the level of thought at which it was created.” Therefore those engaged in argument based on the assumption that creation somehow negates evolution, or vice-versa, may need to expand their thinking to a new level, in order to accommodate both views. Each is correct from its own frame of reference.

This is not the same thing as Intelligent Design, in which every specific element of each creature’s anatomy is sculpted by some unseen hand. If there was a God who meddled in the life of the world like that, free will would be a mockery, and we would be back to helplessly trying to figure out the next thing about to happen to us, instead of taking responsibility for our life and making intelligent decisions.

We believe firmly in a Universal Creative Principle, which we may call God, or any one of a number of other names and titles. How does one properly use words to describe the indescribable? We believe in the God that Jesus spoke of, and we believe that we are One with this BE-ing. We believe that our recognition and acceptance of Oneness is the key to our health and happiness.

Ernest Holmes described the Creator first as THE THING ITSELF, going from that open-ended concept to develop numerous names or descriptive words to move nearer to an understanding of that which is our very Life.

In summary, he chose two aspects to describe the action of God; Love and Law.

Love in this context is not the romantic notion we often ascribe to it; rather it is the urge to outwardly express, just as in love we want to share ourselves, reveal ourselves, multiply ourselves. Love calls on us to express our fullest BE-ing, not alone, but in relationship to others. Love is relationship. Love is desire, and only through desire is anything made to change. Love is the thought which creates a form, and the form is realized through the operation of the Law.

Law is the impassive fulfillment of desire. It is the companion to Love. The Law of mind is simply that experience unfolds according to desire. The movement of thought creates through the Law. The Law operates without favor or judgment; it is mechanical in its operation. It has been described as Fate; Karma; Providence; but it does its work intelligently. It is the medium in which we exist; like the air we breathe. We exist as the result of a chain of thoughts and desires, spiralling upward in complexity, culminating in an apparent individual capable of independent creation.

Rather than the idea of the unseen meddling hand, we recognize a bias in nature, a pressure if you like. Just as a farmer’s hand might wave to shoo the little chicks toward the door of the shelter, so does the hand of Spirit exert but a gentle guidance, tilting the randomness of chance toward an ever-increasing scope of living.

Understanding the Creative Process is the key to erasing the false dichotomy and showing that evolution is the physical result of creation in the invisible realm of the Universal Mind. Creation is virtually instant; how long does it take to have an idea - to be inspired? The process is called INVOLUTION, from the verb 'to invoke', and it represent the power of Spirit, of the Word (or the thought) going into a FORM, which then starts a physical process of EVOLUTION, a tendency for that form to be realized through physical laws.

These are two sides of the same coin, inseparable. One cannot exist without the other. Science does not approach involution, except from the study of psychology, and only in a statistical manner. This is why creation lies outside the realm of science, and has no place in it. Religion, on the other hand, deals in the realm of involution, the other side of the coin, and lacks the tools for dealing with scientific endeavor. Taken together, they would tell us much. Taken apart, each tells only half the story.

Using Human Imagination to Understand the Miracle of Creation.

Using Human Imagination to Understand the Miracle of Creation.

Imagination is at the heart of human creative ability. Therefore imagination must be the key factor that has been imparted to us to enable us to be creative.

We can use our imagination to help us understand the Mind and the motivation of our Creator. This is one way that we can gain insight not only into the nature of our own creation, but into the purpose of it.

To start with, let us imagine the pre-universe (our universe not having been created yet) in which there is only One Thing – that is, Creative Intelligence and Intelligent Substance, one and the same thing. That which Ernest Holmes called The Thing Itself, meaning something which cannot be described by a name, is outside of time and space as we know it, since both time and space are aspects of our created universe. Therefore, there is timelessness; and there is no sense of dimension. There is only a Mind together with undifferentiated substance.

Why a Mind? We can infer a mind, because creation flows from thought. The very act of creating is a movement of thought. Thought provides the definition of form, and it is form which defines created things. Created things are only identifiable by their separation from one another, by their differentiation in shape, color (reflectivity), and other material behaviours. In the absence of created things, there is no differentiation – therefore no thing, which is identifiable.

Prior to creation, Mind is unconscious. Why? Because consciousness requires an object, it cannot exist prior to the existence of separated objects, or created things. There must be something to be conscious of. Even to be conscious of nothing must mean the identification of nothing as compared to – something. So in the absence of any created thing, mind remains unconscious.

Mind cannot be conscious of Itself, unless there is a reference, a point-of-view, from which to regard the self. Humans regard each other from a particular point-of-view; a reference point that we think of as somehow in our head, an imaginary point behind our eyeballs, from which we imagine ourselves looking out at our world, and down at the ‘rest’ of ourselves. Self-consciousness, for us, is the creation of that point-of-view.

The miracle of consciousness occurred when the Master Intelligence, the Universal Intelligence, developed that point-of-view. To do so, It had to separate itself, from a unitary consciousness, into a subsidiary consciousness, which then regarded Itself from an external viewpoint, just as we do. God Itself had no externality, nothing outside Itself, until the miracle of creation.

In the Bible, water, and sometimes air, is used as a metaphor for Spirit. The intent is to convey something fluid, something that penetrates all things, which dissolves the hardest things, which lies calmly upon Itself; there are varieties of useful parallels, as we can see.

In the first lines of Genesis, we are told, “The Spirit moved upon the face of the deep”, and “The waters were divided from the waters” by a “Firmament”.

This can be taken to mean that Spirit acted to divided Itself from Itself, and place the limitations of form upon Itself (the firmament), so that virtual copies of Itself would be created. This would enable the creation of:
1. Two or more points of view
2. Recognizable forms
3. The Physical world
4. Subsidiary intelligences linked forever to their origin

In this we can recognize most of the significant roots of our metaphysics.

We can also recognize in it the findings of our science; the ‘quantum energy’ of space lying at the core of everything, while superstrings provide the means for our physical universe to exist, while not separate in any way from the underlying cosmos.

Thus, at least in our imagination, we can picture the how and the why of fundamental creation. How – being the virtual separation of consciousness through creation of form, into which the fundamental intelligent substance of the Cosmos separates Itself. Why- in order to permit the Universe Itself to become conscious – having multiple points-of-view, and to therefore regard and presumably to appreciate Itself.

Our consciousness, looking out at our surroundings, our very experience as we move through life, is the Creator Itself, experiencing Itself through us.

Our purpose in life is to make that experience a positive one, a joyful one; by so conducting ourselves that we achieve not only personal happiness, but help provide it for others around us as well.

We are given the complete freedom to do this, because without it our viewpoint would be restricted and conditioned. It would not be truly independent, and would be suspect, just as we doubt the word of someone who is overly beholden to us, or who stands to gain from shading or coloring their communication with us. Freedom of thought is the Creator’s gift to us, is order that we be true and clear observers of life.

Quantum Living Booklet on LULU.com

For those who enjoyed my blog series on 'Quantum Living', I have created a booklet containing all the blog series and it is available on www.lulu.com. It can be downloaded for $3.00 or ordered in print for $6.00.

In Which I Proceed to Review My Own Book.....

Today I want to show a few excerpts from my book "Turn the World On Its Head. This book can be bought in either print or download format from www.lulu.com.

http://www.lulu.com/content/1092140


The idea for this book was the result of something called "Divine Discontent." The idea just worried at me till I sat down at the keyboard, and the whole thing just flowed out in a way that I couldn't explain or control fully.

The idea is this: Do we believe that we are spiritual in nature? If this is a world created by Spirit, and if we are spiritual beings, then are we acting like it? Are we really looking at the world as a spiritual creation? What would the world seem like to us, if we seriously determined to accept a spiritual nature as ours?

Turn the World is my attempt at going over various aspects of life and looking at them differently- and often that calls for looking at things upside down from what is considered 'normal'.

Even before the scientific age (of which I am very much a part as an Electrical Engineer), but especially in this age of science, we start with the material aspect, because that's all Science really can deal with. Therefore we define human beings as bodies with spirits attached. Furthermore, we merge the concept of spirits and souls, but that's a subject for another time.

The New Thought concept is that Spirit is One - it is not fragmented, but it is the infinite field of Mind which existed before the Universe, and which cannot be confined. It can be INDIVIDUALIZED, which means that a part of it is associated with each one of us - we each use the Universal Mind to create our individuality.

We are therefore not bodies with spirits, but we are Spirit in body. Spirit has individualized Itself as us, and our body has grown according to physical laws, as a vehicle for Spirit in this experience.

Turn the World describes how we connect with the physical world as we become accustomed to it:

"We begin early to learn about the world around us. As we interact with objects within reach, we explore them with our vision, our touch, taste, until we form a sense of repeated recognition and the ability to ‘predict’ the nature of the things we perceive.

While we are doing these things, we also begin to attach ‘meanings’ to things which go beyond the things themselves. Some shapes and touches we will associate with Mother’s love, some smells are linked with Father’s strong arms. These emotion-linked associations will stay with us for life. The result is to make food more than food in our eyes, fabric more than fabric. To us they mean Love, Safety, Caring, or perhaps, sadly, Cruelty and unpleasantness. Linkages work both ways, engendering attraction or aversion.

Over time, we build up a finely detailed mental picture of our world and our place in it. Each item added to our ‘model’ is anchored there by a dab of emotional glue, happy, sad, relieved, afraid. Each item is anchored in our model by a feeling, with which it is forever associated. The feeling constitutes the caring which led us to remember that individual item. Without caring, there would be nothing to make that item stand out from the background.

As we mature, we increasingly interact with our mental model of the world, and not with the world itself. We still look at, touch or taste things in our environment, but in the act of perceiving them, we substitute the mental image we have, along with the meaning we carry, for the thing we are seeing. We taste the apple pie, but in our mind, we are thinking of the pie Mom used to make, and today’s pie is contrasted, compared and judged. Whenever we judge (as we usually do), we are replacing the external observation with an internal perception. This substitution is so commonplace, so normal to us, that we seldom realize it is happening."

This book is intended to be used as an supplementary text for 100 series Science of Mind classes. It is designed to be an easy read, it is relatively short (92 pages), and it covers the following chapters:

1) Our perceptions of the world around us
2) The ‘Real’ world explored
3) Creation and the part we play
4) Big and Small
5) Relationships
6) Harmony
7) Abundance
8) The Purpose in Life
9) Health and your body
10) Arguments for the Spirit-Centred View
11) A few words about God

Another excerpt:

"Our external stimuli from the five senses, or however many we may think there are, are rarely sensed directly; rather they serve to drive a comparison against our mental reference, followed by our judgment of the stimulus against a set of meanings, based on our lifelong context as well as the context of the moment.

The end result of the original stimulus is an experience which is purely internal, involving our response to our own judgment. This ensures that virtually all situations live up to our expectations, as they have been, neatly or otherwise, fitted into the templates of our mind. We find it hard to experience that for which we have no means of recognition.

This raises the question, “What of the Real world?” If we are not experiencing it directly, then how do we know what it is like? And how may it be unlike our way of experiencing it? It turns out that we have gained some understanding of the world in recent decades; enough to know several facts about it which our senses cannot reveal directly."


And another, on harmony and relationship:

"Our relationships are transformed when we realize that our critical thoughts of others are really a form of self-criticism. Those things that really bug us about those we meet are those things that we have suppressed within us; that which Jung called the Shadow Side of ourselves.

Our relationship to the Earth, or Nature, is healed by thinking spiritually. The idea that all things are one causes us to respect our environment and our surroundings as an extension of our own selves. The environmental movement is really a sort of spiritual enlightenment, although most of the participants don’t fully realize it.

Our very concepts of Time and Space are altered by thinking of all Life as an interplay of energy, the visible emerging shadowlike out of the invisible. Instead of defining our life by a series of physical events strung out in Time, we might better define our life in terms of an evolution of goals, feelings, and realizations. In other words, we would use the growth of our mentality as our reference point, not the growth of our body, property, or bank account."

I hope I have encouraged some readers to evaluate this little book and make use of it.

Answers to he BIG QUESTIONS From a New Thought Perspective

Every once in awhile, life seems to hit a brick wall, and that's usually when a BIG QUESTION comes up. God often figures into these BIG QUESTIONS, and it reveals either our ignorance about God or about ourselves.

I decided to answer most of the BIG QUESTIONS for you today. You're welcome.


1. How do I know there's a God? It seems like superstition.

Depends on what you think God should be. The kind of God most people picture likely doesn’t exist. But Something exists, and we make guesses at what It might be like. How do you know something exists? Look in the mirror. Do you exist? Are you something?

If you don’t believe there is a God, maybe it is that the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Down through the centuries there have been many Gods that we now think never existed. Maybe the idea you had of God is one of them. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something that is the Source of the creative activity in the universe.

Do you believe in cause and effect? Everything is caused by something, and that cause is caused by something, until eventually there is a Some Thing that was the first cause of everything. That’s what we call God, but we only guess at what It is, or what It is like. Ernest Holmes called It The Thing Itself. Of course it is likely not exactly a thing as we think of it, but a Power, an Intelligence, a Principle of action.

We have different belief systems and religions in the world because different groups of people have made different guesses about the nature of that First Cause. It is far beyond us, and so we will never grasp It fully.


2. Where is God, anyway?

Where is First Cause? Because It existed before anything else existed, everything must be made from It, within It, and the complexity we see around us is actually the complexity of It’s thought. God is all around us, through us, and in us. We are not God, but God is us, right here, and right now. Before you get too cocky, God is also that guy around the corner that you can't stand. Get used to it.

We are like fish trying to figure out the water, except that unlike fish, we can’t jump out of it, or touch the bottom.


3. Where was God when I needed her?

The energy and intelligence, which we call God, is busy being You all the time. When you look outside of yourself for answers, God must wonder what’s wrong with you.


4. How can I trust God?

God does not have human characteristics, except in form, as you and your fellow humans. Can you trust yourself? God doesn’t have any need to manipulate or trick you – It is beyond any of that. Can you trust the sun, the air, and the water? Can you trust gravity, or electricity? These forces of nature are other aspects of God that are independent of any humanlike fears or failings.

The Creative Power’s only action is to give Itself freely to It’s creations. That's called the Grace of God. There’s no agenda other than to create in harmony (because It can’t be opposed to Itself), and in multiplicity (because creating the same thing all the time is not creative, it’s obsessive-compulsive!

When we don’t trust ourselves, or other people, or the world around us, it leads us down a path to an unhappy life. We waste enormous amounts of energy trying to trick the world into giving us more of what we want. It’s less trouble to take the straightforward route, ask for what you want, and listen for the answer – but that takes faith, and if you don’t trust, you don’t have the faith you need to live the easy way.

The biggest problem with lack of trust is that our mind automatically works so that we seek out the things that confirm our belief system. Believe that people and things are untrustworthy, and your unconscious mind seeks out betrayal with every step you make.


5. How come God didn't answer when I prayed?

While I don’t really know if there’s a wrong way to pray, certainly some ways are better than others. Many people pray for something when they’re really not clear if that’s what they want, or they haven’t really thought it through. Your mental impression of what you are praying for is the template for what you get. A fuzzy template brings an uncertain result.

This Thing we call God doesn’t answer so much as It responds, and it responds by corresponding to the belief you have. If you pray for the moon but seriously don’t believe you will get it, the Divine Power responds to your sincere belief by not giving it to you.

Some people are good at ‘asking’ but not good at ‘accepting’. The answers to prayer often come in a form slightly different than we have in mind. We need to be open to alternatives. Ask for a new car, and a second job comes available. Your new car may be hidden in the job offer. See?


6. How do I know God's will?

You’ve heard “Where there’s a will, there’s a way?” YOU have the will and God has the way. God’s will for you is your will for you, but not at the shallow surface level. At your innermost level, there is pure Spirit with a desire to express Itself in the world, as you. That desire lies within you at your deepest level, and you can contact it if you simply be still and listen…. and listen…and listen. This is called meditation.

It is said that prayer is talking to God – while meditation is listening to God. Do you want to learn something? Listen.

There are countless styles and types of meditation – one of them will work for you. It can be a formal type, or it can just be long walks in the park. I prefer sitting in the dark and listening to jazz. You can try this and that and find out what works for you.

What’s it all about? The key is to get your conscious ego-mind to shut the heck up, so that the unconscious can bubble to the surface with images, sounds, or ideas that speak to you at a soul level. The idea of meditative practices is the either put your surface mind to sleep or to distract it for a while.


7. If God is so great, how come there's evil in the world?

We have a habit of misusing Power and then blaming the source. It’s like saying “If electricity is so good, how come there’s static on my radio?” The Power that made the world is everywhere in the world, right now, making everything happen. It’s not good or bad; It just IS, in the same way that electricity just IS in your wall socket. Misuse it, and it shocks you – maybe kills you. That doesn’t mean that evil was in the electricity, it just means that our relationship to it was incorrect.

This Power and Intelligence that we call God just is. That’s what God told Moses, when Moses asked, “Who are you?” The answer was “I AM THAT AM” or “I AM THAT WHICH IS.” So if Power just is, and the ocean just is, and lightning just is, and we just are, then it’s our job to treat it right and treat each other right. The Power works through everything, including us, and we are free to misuse it, or else we wouldn’t be free at all.

The word Sin, apparently, is an old archery term meaning to miss the mark. We miss the mark on a lot of things, but if we start looking for some evil lurking in the woodwork, we don’t just miss the mark, we miss the point. The point is that we are responsible for finding out how things work, and then placing ourselves in proper relationship to things.

I like to think of the word responsible as made up of response – able. We are able to respond to the forces and events around us. We can let go of guilt, shame and all the lurking emotions which people have been saddled with. Just assume responsibility – your ability to respond. That will let you bring out the best from every situation, even if the situation is one you don’t like.


8. If God is everywhere, why do we bother with churches?

Good question. Churches are human institutions, built to fulfill an inner human need to band together. Somehow there is an energy that is built up and released, an enthusiasm, when we not only group together, but together go through a ritualistic kind of action.

We need help to keep our focus on the answers to big questions, and we need reinforcement when the circumstances of life pull our attention away from the Good and onto life’s problems. Other people can help to pull us back on track.

Having said that, the kind of church we belong to will depend on our fundamental beliefs, about whether we believe in freedom and flexibility, or authoritarianism. So long as there are people who believe in different ways, there will be a need for different kinds of churches.

There likely are people who have no need for churches. That’s OK. But for most people, they seek a church that will reflect their beliefs, and their prejudices, back to them. That may feel comfortable to them, but most people do not progress away from their rigid patterns of thought until they start to examine the kinds of things that are being reinforced in their chosen group.

In the office cafeteria, most of the complainers will sit at the same table. They reinforce each other. People with rigid and inflexible viewpoints also gather, to reinforce each other. It goes without saying that people who want to keep a positive outlook, who want to learn and to grow, should also join together to reinforce one another.

Many spiritual ‘seekers’ who resist dogma but have a burning desire to understand the spiritual Principles that underlies all existence are drawn to churches of the New Thought movement. There have been many great Catholics, Baptists, and others who have opened their minds and hearts to and intuitive understanding of Truth. Some of these have been defrocked, excommunicated, and in the distant past, even burned or worse. Organizations often move forcefully or even violently to protect their structure and their control over people. When they do, they move away from Truth into the realm of Dogma.


9. What’s the difference between Dogma and Truth? Isn’t it a matter of opinion?

Another tough question to answer, but here goes. Most religions from the distant past to the present are rule-based. They list a set of rules, and as time goes on, the list tends to get longer. These rules include lists of beliefs that you must hold if you are to be considered a member of the group. In other words they are not inclusive.

Some modern religions are Principle-based. Principles are statements of Truth, which may be obvious or not. Principles are not invented by people but they are discovered by people. Principles hold true regardless of circumstances, regardless of time, space or situation.

Rules are made up to deal with the EFFECTS of the action of Principles. When you know the Principle, and how it works, you can write your own rules and they will be valid, useful and correct.

We have some examples in the world of physics. Gravity is a principle. It applies everywhere, whether there is anything to provide it or not. Your weight is an effect of gravity, and it would vary at various points in space, including being absent if you were in orbit.

The Ten Commandments are a set of rules. Later on, the Hebrew people added hundreds of dietary rules, behaviour rules, and ritual actions. When asked, Jesus reduced these to two Principles, “Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbour as yourself.” These are actually three, because “Love yourself” and “Love your neighbout” could be considered as two things.

There are some familiar physical principles, which operate throughout the universe. There are also mental and spiritual principles, such as the Creative Principle, which is taught in courses such as The Science of Mind, and also in some secular programs, like Psycho-Cybernetics. This principle is broken down into sub-categories, such as the Law of Attraction, the Law of Compensation, the Law of Cause and Effect, or Karma, and others. Each ‘Law’ is a principle from which you can derive moral and useful rules for living.

New Thought Churches teach these Universal Principles that apply to any and every situation, and from these you can deduce or develop any rules you need to live a good and useful life. These churches do not insist on a specific belief, but they teach that your thoughts, including your belief set, will work through the Creative Principle in all Its forms, to produce your experience of life. From there, it’s up to you, and if you keep thinking what you’ve always thought, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.

Quantum Living - So What?

Let's talk about the Big Bang, the event that becomes apparent when you project the movement in the universe backward to its origin.

Half a century ago, astronomers noted that the material of the universe was moving apart. Not only that, but those things furthest away were moving the fastest. Since the speed of light has been shown to be an upper limit for things to travel, it meant that things further away have been traveling longer, and the light we see from them took longer to reach us. Many expensive experiments were done to measure and test these things.

So what?

The movement shows that something started things moving outward. This THING is called the Big Bang - the event at the beginning of the universe we live in. This is the "Let There be Light" moment and beyond it, the Cause of it, is the subject for Religion and not Science. On this side of, we can use Science to track what occurred. As to WHY anything occurred, back we go to Religion. See how nicely they work together?

In the Beginning, there was not only an unknown impetus that started us all up, but Science mainly agrees that it is unknowable. Religion calls it God, but Science has to stick to what it can prove. Those are its rules.

Immediately AFTER the beginning, the universe was smaller than a beach ball (still being argued) and from the temperature of things today, the temperature back then can be estimated. It was so hot that not only could matter not exist, but the particles that make up matter couldn't exist, either. The 'ball' was pure energy, but as it expanded and cooled, the building blocks of matter began to condense out. As further cooling took place, eventually matter formed as simple hydrogen and some helium. These swirled together into the first stars, etc. Enough about that process - for now.

Let's get back to quantum science.

It had been theorized that any two quantum particles which have been associated with one another will retain an association no matter how far apart they move. This is called 'quantum entanglement', and of course it was called a silly idea - until experiments were designed which prove that entanglement takes place. Entanglement means when you change the properties of one such particle (say its spin), the other particle has to change to keep the original spin relationship equivalent- no matter how far away the particles are! Turns out it works - just as the mathematics had predicted for some time.

Since ALL matter in the universe emerged from a single ball of energy (no one is quite sure how small) then everything could be assumed to be subject to entanglement with everything else. In other words, the universe was, and still is, a single interdependent system. This is likely stretching the theory a bit, but it makes sense to me.

Here is where science meets religion, because religions (some of them, anyway) have been saying something like this for centuries.

There is only ONENESS.
("Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is ONE") Mark 12:29

I believe that the essence of religious teaching is that there are dual thought systems, dual paradigms, two fundamental modes of conscious awareness (There are actually more, but these two are enough for most of us, for now.)

One mode of awareness is the understanding that all things are one. Most of us have this in the form of a suppressed, subconscious understanding. I am not referring to a cold intellectual appreciation of the interconnectedness of things, I am talking about a gut-level awareness, a feeling-level knowing that informs our every action. Jesus taught this when he said, "What you do unto the least of these (others), you do unto me."

The other mode of awareness is what we consider normal. We identify ourselves, and all things, as separate, apart in space, or in time. We live in a world of THINGS - of him, her, and it. We then may feel alone and isolated in dealing with the complexity of the world. Of course life is complex when we have to navigate through a million separate things and people every day!

Our common mode of awareness- of separation- is referred to in the book of Genesis. When we ate of the fruit (tasted the results) of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we shifted into a mode of judgment, separating things and labeling them, some good, some evil. We divided creation into camps, and we created our sense of separation. By rejecting what we judged as evil, we set ourselves apart.

A tree as a metaphor is an idea rooted deeply in the material world, but reaching upward toward the spiritual realm. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil refers to an idea that is rooted in materialism, but affecting us spiritually. The serpent is a symbol for our emotions, which are tightly coupled to our physical body (as the snake has no legs). Emotion is driven by chemical changes in our endocrine/glandular system, and carried chemical to every part of the body.

When we judge others and not their actions as evil, we reinforce our separation from others. Actions can be changed, but the labels tend to stick. Instead of healing evil, we thrust it away from us. You can't heal what you don't acknowledge - right, Dr. Phil?

Many of the world's religions aim at healing our sense of separation. They take different paths to do so, and people must choose what fits. The Christian message of atonement is AT-ONE-MENT, realizing the oneness of all. The Buddhist message of detachment is detaching from the world of THINGS, in effect separating from the separation!

There is only one reality - whatever that is; but there are several ways to look at it, and experience it. The Garden of Eden story is a story of breaking away from our sense of Oneness, which in early man was likely intuitive or instinctive. We became human by gaining our conscious awareness, which led us to a sense of isolation and separation - a life of difficulty outside of Paradise. Now maybe we are ready for the next step, to regain our realization of Oneness, but at a conscious level.

One reality - both science and religion are trying to uncover it, from two paradigms of thought. We must eventually combine the insights from both, if we are to progress as a species, or as spiritual beings.

Quantum Living - the End

This concludes my fourteen part series of blogs on the societal impact of the Quantum theory. I know it has been a bore for some (no comments received) but I have to allow my thoughts to wander where they will. Following this, we will get on to something else - who knows what?

Quantum Living - Part Fourteen - A Quantum Society

Quantum Society

As we turn from pure materialism, there are many mistaken ideas that will need to be shed. One is that a non-materialistic life is one where we all have to make do with less. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our present society is enormously wasteful in the name of competition, and this waste is costly. Stores throw out valuable product daily, rather than allow them to be discounted and 'spoil' the market. In a paradigm where harmony and co-operation were the norm, we would reap the benefit of reduced waste and the result would be greater abundance for all. Quality products are cheapened continually in the name of price competition - the result is a lowest common denominator, a product that works reliably but not well.

The old paradigm, the physical, sees each of us as separate, joining together briefly now and then to accomplish various tasks. We build institutions which are of slightly greater permanance for the purpose of carrying on larger and more complex functions. For a time, we may identify ourselves with one or more of these groups or institutions.

What might a new paradigm look like? We would start with the knowledge that we are not separate, but one. As one, all institutions are outgrowths of the One. Therefore, there would be no philosophical basis for competition between institutions. A new philosophy of co-operation is needed which can accomplish the purpose now served by competition, or maximizing the overall efficiency of the larger group.

This new model may be made possible now by using the new forms of electronic communication to permit mass decision-making on a grand scale - the 'instant plebiscite'. Perhaps a large societal group can begin to mimic the behaviour of a single organism.

A different way of Life must be visualized in order to bring this new paradigm into being. A detailed and complex picture must be formed and spread widely so that the vision becomes commonly accepted. We have a lot of work to do, just to identify the ways in which our thinking is locked into the model of separateness and isolation.

It generally seems to take at least 100 years for a fundamental new discovery to lead to a new way of thinking. Although the beginnings of the quantum revolution were in 1905, with Einstein, the impact of quantum theory did not blossom till well after mid-century. Today, we see products everywhere that are based on quantum effects, but without the consumer's knowledge or understanding. This includes digital tuners, microcomputers, laser and memory devices. But this is all just hardware. People don't really 'get it' that ours is a world of interlocked electron orbits. Nobody really stops to think that our 'solid' world is 99% empty. Electric fields are the origin of our so-called reality.

Ours is a culture based on material, which means, in effect, that it is based on an illusion, on Maya, as the Hindus told us centuries ago. When we accept that and integrate that into our philosophy of life, I can't predict what might change for us - but in 50 more years, we should be seeing something new.

Quantum Living - Part Thirteen - Need for Faith

THE NEED FOR FAITH

When we accept that things are both impermanent and, for want of a better term, ethereal, then we must look elsewhere for our sense of security. To know that our entire sense of well-being relies on a purely mental construct, having only a loose correspondence to materiality, may cause us to be more hesitant in our plans, less sure of our decisions day-to-day, if we do not adopt a thought-model that steadies us in our confidence.

The quantum paradigm calls for an expanded use of a much neglected power. It calls for a renewed sense of Faith. When we know at a deep level that our beloved material world is really somewhat immaterial, that our possessions are less than solid, less than permanent, then we must develop a trust in our place in this shifting, drifting world. We must develop a knowing that we will be supported, that we will be all right in the end, even though our certainties are false.

Faith has had no place in the scientific, material view of the world. It has come to be regarded as a childlike attitude, which is true, and has been largely replaced by the model of materiality which is almost universally adopted.

Those who have seen the error of the model in times past have been thought unbalanced, insane. It has been the norm that faith has been considered an element of old-fashioned thought, bordering on superstition. Thus the field of religion has been split apart from the knowledgeable disciplines, left to itself, as a remnant of a bygone era. Not that people have had no faith; they just have not felt that daily life depended on it.

We do have faith, of course; we just do not call it that.. We have faith in our institutions, our schools and our banks; we have faith in governments and corporations. Since these are essentially organizations of people, it is tantamount to saying that we have faith in people. Above all, we have blind faith in our mental construct of the world, since it is taught from birth and is largely held in the unconscious.

Maybe we can let go of some of the faith we currently have in money, property and possessions - you know, all the stuff that we can't take with us when we leave the planet. Remember, nobody gets out of this experience alive!

A great paradigm shift will have to take place, if quantum reality is to be incorporated into our mainstream thought.

Quantum Living - Part Twelve - Paradigms for Living

LIVING IN THE QUANTUM AGE

BUILDING CERTAINTY

As we go about our daily lives, we make most decisions with certainty. In the morning, we know we will find our clothing and belongings where we left them last night. We 'know' that our appliances will work as intended, and our routine is disrupted when they don't. Uncertainty makes us uncomfortable, and therefore we seek certainty. Our sense of security is important to us. Why else do we buy insurance?

IT'S ALL IN YOUR MIND

Over many human generations, we have built up our mental model or world-view using concepts that change only rarely. We make our plans using this model, because it is more 'dependable' than the real world in many ways. When we plan a trip, we plan it by leaving out all the ever-changing variables, such as detours, traffic, accidents, and such.

We have two ways of dealing with everyday life. First, we stick with the Newtonian model, which relies on simple cause and effect, and which treats all events as objective. The subjective component is ignored. We apply classic interpretations of events, accepted by most if not all our peers, so that we don't need to develop individual and personal views of each thing we encounter.

Our sense of certainty about things is part of our mind construction, and so long as we can stick to our model and ignore the variables in the world around us, it works. It gives us a sense of security which allows plans to be made in confidence. However, it comes with a price. The price is ignoring and missing the half of everyday occurrence that does not fit the model. We ignore thousands of happenings each day because they vary from the smoothness of our mental construction. And at the end of the day, we say, "What trouble?"

NEW PARADIGMS

The paradigms which make up our model are mostly held in common with others of our cultural group. Other cultures will have paradigms which vary slightly, but in general many are shared the world over. They start with things that we consider 'obvious' but which are not necessarily so in the light of quantum understanding. Some of the 'obvious' truths are:

- The permanence of material objects
- things stay where we put them; things last unless they are altered by physical force.
- The solidity of matter, and the impenetrability of hard surfaces.

Both these 'truths' are subject to some modification in light of current knowledge. They apply only to a point and then are invalid. The matter of our world is NOT solid; it only seems solid to us. Our senses are too crude to perceive the truth of it. Reality for each of us is simply the character of the illusion we have accepted- it is our set of judgments.

Most people are rooted directly in the illusion of physical reality; in what the eastern philosophies have called Maya. Their focus is on the manifpulation of the ‘things’ in their physical surrounding; they would even argue that there is nothing else, or that it is foolish to consider anything else.

There are a few who are rooted in another paradigm- what might be called an energy awareness, or as I like to think of it a flow consciousness. This is a feeling kind of awareness that they are in the flow of ideas, of possessions, or money, of all things. They attract things that then flow to them, and they release things to flow back into some gestalt of the world. They don’t have to manipulate the world, but they simply intend, and know, and things arrange themselves based on their knowing.

Sadly, most churches are led and filled with people who are tied to the former, more materialistic worldview. Accordingly, they view a world in which matter is insubstantial and subject to Mind as lying in the realm of miracle, if not fantasy. Thus they interpret the ultimate reality as existing in some alternate realm, not this one.

Few have glimpsed the truth; that there is ONE ultimate reality, and we are in it now, and that there are many modes of awareness, or paradigms of consciousness, through which we can perceive the multi-dimensional world.