The Meaning of My Life
Life is full of ups and downs, elation and depression, good times and bad times. Sometimes we feel good and others we feel bad. Some of us are optimists and others pessimists. It is, too say the least, a funny things life. But why am I here? Why am I currently so happy or sad, lucky or unlucky? Life is crap, life is great and most definitely a roller coaster.
But what is the point of it all? Why do we put up with so much that is unpleasant? Why do we battle through when the easiest thing would be to give up struggling?
Apparently teenagers contemplate suicide a lot more so than is generally realised. I am sure I could check these facts somewhere, but not at the moment anyway as I want to talk about a real case, my case. My educated guess is that I was 15 or 16 at the time. The incident I am thinking about happened must then have happened summer of 1984 or 1985 as it was a warm sunny day as I cycled up Houghton lane on my way to work at Howard’s Hotel, Bar and Carvery, at Crossbush, near Arundel. This 6 mile cycle ride over the South Downs was a familiar routine since I started working weekends as a washer upper when I was 14, usually working Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday lunches. It gave me a healthy income for teenager. Houghton lane is a narrow twisty lane with plenty of blind corners and hidden summits and just a few passing places as well as the obligatory high banks and hedges that stop you from seeing the countryside just behind them. It is incidentally also the place where I nearly killed myself and friend Adrian when I rolled the car 2 weeks after passing my driving license. Anyway this particular Saturday morning I was feeling particularly pissed off, everything was so so so unfair, the world wasn’t helping me and this time it was getting to me more than ever. I stopped at he brow of a small hill, the one that can be seen from the garden of the George and Dragon and dwelled in how unhappy I was. I continued to stew in these feelings of hating everything, feeling sorry for myself and wanting to give up. As the stewing continued the feelings got stronger and the need to do something got ever more intense. From a place beyond space and time arrived the thought of suicide. As far as I know I had never had thoughts in this direction. For a while I seriously contemplated it and how I might best achieve my aims of putting myself out of my misery. These thoughts were penned down a few weeks later in an English essay, the only essay that I ever wrote that got more than some red marks for spelling errors. The teacher praised my efforts and read it out to the class as was his custom when he liked a pupils piece of writing. Kerry, a friend and ATC cadet, corrected my wrong use of calibre of the preferred SLR from 7.26 to 7.62. It is important that you get the details right if you are going to blow your brains out. How could a suicidal person make such a stupid mistake, he must have wondered.
Parents’ evening at the school also followed shortly after this. My English teacher, Mr Harvey, must have enthused about what I had written and this lead to the inevitable question from my parents of whether I was thinking about committing suicide. The easy answer was no, so I went for that one. How an earth is a rebellious teenager, trying to assert his independence, supposed act? Back on the brow of that hill, which looks down on to the River Arun and the teahouse at Amberely, which itself is looked down on by the sweeping incline of the golden South Downs, I continued to stand. Again from a place beyond time and space a new thought arrived. Simply it told me that suicide was pointless as it wouldn’t solve the problems. Of course there are plenty of arguments that could have rendered this idea as absurd. The main one being that as I was a materialist I had no belief in a continued existence after death. When I died, that was end and all the atoms that composed my body would spread round the world, some perhaps forming part of a tree, others floating around in an, preferably warm, ocean and perhaps a few might even make out into space, escaping in the paint on the space shuttle. So the reasoning should really have lead me to the conclusion that it would indeed solve the all the problems. Suicide would stop me having all these feelings I didn’t want. Nevertheless, this answer that I received seemed so obvious, so true and so dammed solid. What is even more peculiar is that it stuck as an idea. So ,despite conflicting with the natural consequences of my beliefs, it became so much part of me that the “suicide question” had been solved. Later in my mid-twenties I stumbled into a whole world of ideas, which gave me a lot more confidence to really believe, and to be able to give a logically consistent defence of the idea, that the intuition about suicide only postponing problems might really be true.
So why am I telling you this story? The thing that I find most puzzling is that a thought, that seems so illogical can have such a profound effect. It came, from a place beyond space and time, and answered a question for me and let me get on with life. In this case that meant carrying on cycling up the Downs and arriving at work on time with no one knowing about the weird array of thoughts that had gone through my head that morning. Thoughts might not be tangible (therefore considered not real), but the whole of life is a tangible expression of the life of thoughts.
I guess I had better explain why I use the phrase “beyond space and time” when referring to the origin of my thoughts. Of course current view and therefore the sane thing would be to say from the “interactivity of synapses and neurons” in my brain. However, there are other logically consistent ways to view the brain and its memory function, for example as a kind of radio cassette recorder or TV video unit and the appropriate tape collection. Most often we function using memory and instinct or learned abilities. This corresponds to the recorder/video function. We can play tapes again and feel comfortable with the familiar. However, at other times we get new insights and develop our thinking. The source of these can be different for example, reading books, talks with people and old experiences would in my analogy be pre-recorded cassettes or video tapes which can be loaded and watched at any time and accessed to find joy or understanding. Up until here I am sure that most people would in principle agree with this metaphor. However, as individuals we also experience completely new thoughts, that have nothing to do with memory. This ability becomes more obvious in geniuses, but also when comparing generations and how the younger ones come with different impulses. Artistic people are generally perceived to be more creative than your average person. The current explanation for these new, creative thoughts that pop up in the brain is that the synapses and neurons have fired in a different sequence, essentially it is seen as a product of chance strongly affected by habitual thinking patterns. However, another way to see the brain is that it has the ability to receive new thoughts. This is certainly more in line with an artists’ experience of their inspirations, “inbreathings” from some hidden source. Charles Dickens maintains that he didn’t create all his characters, but instead that they already existed and the story had already been acted out, all he had to do was to write it down for people that couldn’t see what he saw. It doesn’t create them, the brain is the receiver of thoughts and the flashing of synapses and neurons have to happen if I am to experience the thoughts. In the radio/TV analogy we know that the radio and TV waves surround us all the time, but we only notice them if we turn on the radio/TV and tune in to the right frequency. We also know that if there were no transmitter masts, no amount of tuning would help us listen or watch a program. We certainly know that there aren’t little people in the set acting out what we are seeing and hearing, we are clear about the fact that these actors wouldn’t exist in the TV if there weren’t an aerial pointing in the rights direction or a video tape .
So when I talked about the thoughts of “suicide” and “the pointlessness of suicide” as coming from “beyond space and time” I meant that they had a quality of newness about them, live radio / TV about them, which I don’t attribute to a chance firing of synapses and neurons. What then just occurred to me, I now prefer to see as gifts that I received for some reason.
A bit of forbearance is required here as I want to play with the idea that live TV is analogous to spirit and video is analogous to material. If I am TV video then I can watch either video (which will of course be something that was at some stage new or live) or live TV (which is most likely new thought will have elements of old in it). Watching a given video for the first time is for the individual a new experience and adds something new to the individual watching it. However, the tape is essentially dead. It might reveal certain ideas, evoke certain emotions, but the more often we see it the staler it becomes. NOT WORKING TO SIMPLISTIC It has to do with feeling alive. Consider your TV sports fan. There is a world of difference between watching your favourite team playing in a cup final on live TV. There’s tension, anxiety, joy, euphoria or despondency depending on how your team is doing. Even watching a video recording reduces the intensity of these feelings, but if you already know the result equanimity sets in and the feeling life is hardly engaged.
The Mission of Anger
Getting beyond emotional response (Feel-Think-Will)
Hypothesis – we get into difficult situations to strengthen ourselves
Role of the I, why we struggle to take or maintain action
Impact of negative emotions on our health
2/3 problems psychosomatic – needs a closer look at the placebo effect
1 Thinking
2 Feeling
3 Feeling then thinking
4 feeling and doing
5 thinking and doing
6 doing
My answer to the meaning of life
How to find meaning in life and still enjoy it
The meaning of life is to find meaning, but still living it
An eclectic way of looking at life
Looking for the apple of life/longevity
My (seemingly) irrational beliefs – a defence of
A wake up call to the reality of spirit and its relationship to science
Pan is dead. How can we wake him?
Pan didn’t die, we just went blind
Pan never died
Science, Art and Religion
What is spiritual perception and how do you achieve it
PAN NEVER DIED!
God and Science can coexist
Why are science and religion at loggerheads
Can god be located in the brain
In our age of material well-being, especially in the Western world, it is extremely difficult to even begin to understand how people can have believed so concretely in the gods. The ideas that gods steered our lives, fortunes and misfortunes seems absurd from our modern point of view. The period of enlightenment and resultant onset of the scientific revolution have over the past 400 years quite soundly eradicated many of the beliefs from pre-scientific times.
Even a religious person of our times finds it difficult to talk of god or gods in a clear and concrete way and must at times experience a certain amount of doubt. People might say that God(s) move(s) in mysterious ways, but they can no longer describe those ways as the ancients used to be able to in such clear, concise and real terms.
The successes of the scientific way of thinking have focused our minds, made us critical thinkers who are inclined not to believe in things we can’t see or explain.
However, if we look at the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians or in actual fact all ancient civilizations, truly all without exception, the treatment of the gods as real beings that steer worldly events becomes more and more clear. This clarity improves for the ancients as we go further back in time, whilst our understanding of the ancients, of course, becomes less and less clear the further back in history we go. Different theories abound as to why gods exist in ancient cultures. Some believe that all mythology is a corrupted form of the scriptures. Others maintain that all gods are based on a historical figures, whose stories have been elaborated on. Robert Graves does a particularly convincing job on this one as he mixes it with the theory that they are allegorical, that is to say the stories were created to reflect some religious or moral truth. Alternatively we have the physical theory, which argues that ancient people had lively imaginations and attributed gods to everyday phenomena in their lives, that is to say it is all merely fantasy. For a while mythology was seen as a “disease of language”, but this didn’t stand up to scrutiny, though it offers other interesting observations. Finally there is anthropological theory, which attributes the whole mumbo-jumbo idea to a “silly, savage and senseless” period in mankind’s development. This is the generally accepted scientific take on the subject .
If we move a way from the Western world and look at more primitive tribes that still remain in a pre-scientific way of thinking, again here we find widespread belief in gods and a spiritual world, another side of reality, which to them is obvious and real. In the primitive tribes round the North Pole in Scandinavia, Russia and Canada the shaman still makes his journey of initiation, an inner journey which strengthens the ability to have a more direct contact with the other side. The newly qualified shaman then returns to the tribe to take the role of a guide and doctor for individuals and the tribe. His initiation automatically gives him the authoritative role as he is perceived as being better qualified to lead the tribe and take care of the sick. His sojourn in the spirit world has given him a detailed level of insight over many areas. This insight is to such a level that scientific experts in a similar field would be amazed at his competency and level of understanding in just one of the fields, let alone in all the other ones. However, the stronger the contact these native populations have with Western culture the more the belief in a spiritual reality declines. The anthropologist will of course use this as a vindication for his beliefs. Put simply he will argue that the non-scientific mind realises that science gives a lot of concrete answer to concrete questions. It enables him to deal with the world, to control events and understand many things that were previously considered as the unfathomable ways of the world. The savage has become educated.
However, there is another way of explaining these events, which is logically consistent and leads to a far more interesting ideas and answers and of course new questions. This explanation also helps make better sense of humankind’s seemingly irrational history and equally importantly gives vital insights into modern questions concerning religion and why science can’t rid society of “silly, savage and senseless” ideas. It also enables us to see things from a higher perspective, which makes the different theories (physical, historical, allegorical etc) appear as valid points of view, which also make a great deal of sense when viewed from this perspective.
The idea is simply that there are 2 sides to reality and both of these realities have laws. Science’s great service to humanity is the clarity it has brought to the understanding of the physical, material universe. This clarity is clearest in the inorganic, non-living, sciences. The more science has to try to explain life the less convincing it gets and the more it has to resort to the concept of chance to solve the intractable problems. Let’s be clear, natural-science, as it is called in Europe, has excelled in helping as understand physical processes and to manipulate them according to man’s needs and desires. This is obviously an ongoing process, where time leads to ever clearer and more accurate understanding of natural laws. Characterising science we can say that it has moved from complete naivety of the world and is moving towards a truer understanding of it. This is the one side of reality.
Looking at the other side. Let us take religion to be the institution that is interested in this other side of reality, what I call the spiritual world. Characterizing its development it is more accurate to talk of a development from genuine spiritual insight towards non-understanding, or inability to convince people of its truths. Which ever spiritual tradition you look at you will find the recurrent idea that people in the past had a much purer insight into this other side of reality.
Depending on which way you look at it you can say that science is going backwards in time (in a religious way) in that it is becoming more sophisticated, or religion is going backwards (in a scientific way) in that it is becoming less convincing. This explains why religion has lost a lot of ground to science, because from a religious point of view science is going in the right direction, whilst religion is going in the wrong way from a scientific point of view. Taking a vast sweep over history we see at the beginning of history, taking a naïve view of history, a universal ability to experience the spiritual world directly and a complete disinterest in understanding the material, secular world. Over thousands of years the spiritual senses gradually wane and the physical senses become more and more important and gradually the spiritual senses atrophy so that direct perception becomes rare in humanity. As awareness shifts from the spiritual world to the physical we find mankind engaging more and more in shaping this physical world with his inventions.
In ancient times mankind was blind to the physical processes of the world, its consciousness paid little attention to the material world. Of course the physical world existed for them, it is just that it only had a marginal impact on them. The further we go back in time the more people “dreamed” their way through life. For the moment let us take “dreamed” to mean a state of consciousness which pays little if any attention to the physical world. Let us leave open for the moment the question of how much this dream state can tell us about the other side of reality, the spiritual side of reality. If we work with this idea to see what light it sheds on the past we soon find some convincing confirmation.
Let us first think about the technological developments of the 19th and 20th century. These are fruits of a type of thinking, called scientific. Most people identify their starting point at around the time of Galileo, even though it is actually a development of scholastic thinking, which itself is an Aristotelian response to a Platonic way of looking at the world. The point here is that scientific thinking is new in the way that a rosebud is new in spring. However, it is impossible to conceive this rosebud without the leaves, stem and roots of an entire rosebush. With these reservations in mind let us say that scientific thinking started in the 16th century. If we look back before the 16th century, we see civilizations coming and going. These civilizations each had their slightly more advanced ways of doing things, their technologies, which gave them their successes. However, these technologies and their impact on the world, I am especially thinking about the material world here, are to say the least paltry compared to modern day developments. And it’s not just the scope and impact of the technology, it is also the breathtaking speed at which it is happening now. Consider for a moment how amazing radio, television, computer, cars, aeroplanes, houses, modern medicine, supermarkets with products from all round the world, fridges etc etc would appear to anybody living prior to the 18th century. All these marvellous products are fruits of the scientific way of thinking. But, why, given the thousands of years that mankind has lived on this planet, has the appearance of these wonders happened in such a short space of time? The answer is simple. It is because mankind started being more interested in the physical side of reality than the spiritual side. For reasons also to be looked at a large portion mankind, rather than the few oddballs of previous eras, decided to take the material world, “m.world”, seriously. If we look at the world of art, also here we can discern a definite swing. Although symbolism will always be important in art as it tries to communicate to us the thoughts and feelings of the artist, also here we can see a concerted effort by European artists to depict nature, people, building etc as realistically as possible. Artists wanted to depict the world they saw, one in which perspectives and ratios rule, this was a big break from the purely symbolic attempts of all previous artistic ages. The development of this historical processes becomes thoroughly understandable, though nonetheless remarkable, if we consider it in the framework of man’s shifting field of interest from the spiritual world, sworld, to the material world, mworld. Whilst these scientific and artistic revolutions, evolutions, are happening mankind is also beginning to divorce himself from the naïve perception that earth is at the centre of the universe, he is also beginning to discover new lands. Nowadays we can phone our friends in America, back in 1492 few people in Europe believed it existed.
Let us consider Tycho Brae, Copernicus and Galileo. Why have their names gone down in history as giants of science? It is simply that they observed things with their eyes, albeit with the aid of telescopes. Their physical senses supplied the intellect with material for it to work on. This in turn made them see things differently from the ruling dogma of the day, a dogma from a time and perspective when the material world was less blindingly obvious than it is today. It is often assumed that the heliocentric conception first made its appearance in the 16th century. However, this concept was also known in ancient Egypt. What was different this time was that lots of people were now beginning to use the senses and intellect and could “see” the same thing, and this was at odds with the picture that the church had been feeding people since religion first became necessary.
So when did religion, in the sense of believing in something otherworldly, become necessary? Religion became necessary when people could no longer see the spiritual world. Think about it. All ancient societies without exception believed in the gods and were prepared to let themselves be steered, influenced or whatever by these spiritual beings. Were they were all a bunch of crack heads as anthropologists might have us believe? However, a more convincing answer is that these societies still had larger numbers of people who had some sort of perception of this world. Direct insight in to the spiritual world waned at different rates in different societies, but even when the direct vision disappeared there was still the society’s memory, the group memory, which was so powerful, had such strong foundations that the godless societies of today would be unthinkable.
Of course if the premise in this book is true that there are 2 sides to reality, 2 worlds in the unity, then a godless society can’t actually exist. An ancient might have expressed it like this. You don’t live in a godless society, that is as impossible as living in colourless world, you just don’t know which gods are living in your society. For the ancient this situation is unthinkable. If he could for one minute put himself in the modern view, which sees no spiritual world, then one of his first thoughts will be what type of spirits are ruling this age.
Up until now I have asserted that ancients were somehow spiritually sighted, that is to say clairvoyant. They could see a world that the vast vast majority of 21st century mankind cannot see. Similarly the world that we experience with our waking consciousness, the material world which we understand with our intellect and take in with our 5 senses was an indistinct realm for the ancient. However, what is also clear from history is that this process didn’t happen in an incident. People didn’t wake up one day and say “oooops the spirit world has disappeared, but now I’ve got eyes and ears for the material world”. Whilst nobody is likely to have said this there are actually stories and historical events that support this line of argument.
Let us look at Buddhism. I am here talking about the exoteric Buddhism for popular consumption. It is worth noting here what exoteric and esoteric mean in terms of religion. Most people are just consumers of religion, who for their own reasons predominantly of tradition, belonging and place of birth adopt a religious set of beliefs. They are prepared to blindly belief and have little interest in unearthing the complexities, contradictions and commonalities within their religion. They will often get very upset and defensive if someone calls into question there beliefs as they are both central to their character, yet vague and very difficult to describe in clear cut easy to understand terms. All religions also have an esoteric branch, which seriously seek to shed light on complexities, reconcile contradictions and identify commonalities. Sufis, Freemasons, Theosophists, Cabbalists, Gurus etc etc (extend list). These inner (esoteric) churches question to a higher degree how God/gods of the spiritual world intervene in earthly life. These people are much more able to justify and expatiate on their beliefs and give cogent arguments to support their ideas. They will of course have beliefs, which stand on shaky ground. The more advanced the pupil in these schools of thought is, the more he is clear about the difference between fact and belief, the difference between regurgitated dogma and words deriving from pure, unsullied by desires, spiritual perception.
Returning to our search for evidence for a gradual rather than a sudden atrophying of spiritual perception let us look at exoteric Buddhism. This religion is to say the least strange from other religions’ point of view. The exoteric Hindus, Christians, Jews and Arabs all have a god and spiritual beings or gods that inhabit this other side that normal sight cannot see. Buddhism, however, has none. There is no one almighty with attendant angels, archangels etc, nor is there a pantheon of gods interceding in peoples everyday lives. It does, like other beliefs, talk of some kind of life after death, it has a concept of another world beyond the world of the senses, it talks of reincarnation and like all religions tries to set out a framework in which a moral life is seen as good and beneficial to all and the individual. So how did Buddhism arrive at this strange conclusion, that is to say strange from the perspective of the other religions? Buddhism, like all religions, asserts its authority with reference to its own truths. As with most major religions it has a clear starting point, in this case the time when Buddha received enlightenment whilst sitting under the Boddhi tree about 2500 years ago. Other religions will dispute the purported truths of Buddhism, but one thing Buddhism can definitely be said to reflect is the truth as Buddha saw it 2500 years ago. For our purposes let us called it a godless world, but with a spiritual world behind it. This is a bold one liner to describe the view of the enlightened Buddha of 2500 years ago. Seen symptomatically this seems to be indicating that at least in that part of the world direct perception of the spirit world was to a large extent already extinguished. Like all people Buddha was describing the world as he saw it and he no longer saw any gods, but some sort of perception of the other side of reality meant he could not dismiss it completely as many people would be able to do over the coming 2500 years. The Buddhist’s goal is Nirvana, freedom from suffering, enlightenment. In many ways its closer to 21st century conceptions and aspirations than the moralizing and judgemental tone associated with Christianity and Islam, which were grounded much later. In the founding of Buddhism, in Buddha’s perception of the world we see that this other side of reality was already at the belief stage for many people as long as 2500 years ago. Of course we can’t generalize and say that this was the case for the whole of humanity, but we do know that the prophets of the old testament were having problems with idolatry at this time, which also suggests that direct vision of the spiritual world had also waned for all but a few initiates here as well.
Ragnarök or the twilight of the gods as it is better known is the story of the disappearance of the gods. Nordic mythology’s dark thread of tragedy is to be found in the gods’ knowledge that mankind would lose all contact with them. The gods are depicted as giving humanity the gifts of music, language, writing, metal working etc etc. Odin, Thor, Tyr and Freja are seen to take care of humanity whilst they are on earth and then when they die they return to Valhalla and live together with these most beautiful beings. However, there are also gods who have no interest in the well being of us human beings. There ringleader is Loki and it is his offspring; the Fenris Wolf, MidGard Serpent and Hela were held responsible for all that is evil.
This loss of contact with the spirit world was experienced more acutely than most by the Nordic peoples. The central motif in Nordic mythology is that of Ragnarök, the darkness of the gods (from regin, gods, and rökr, darkness) commonly known as the Twilight of the Gods. These Nordic peoples firmly believed that a time would come when the gods of Valhalla and Niffelheim would die. The giants of Jotunheim would be destroyed, Odin would die at the muzzle of the Fenris wolf and Thor would suffocate in the venom of the Midgård serpent. Nowadays the gods are not only forgotten but the whole concept of a spiritual world full of spiritual beings is either doubted or more probably denied by most. In all ancient cultures these gods were as real to the people as a kitchen table is real for modern day man. This is because organs for the perception of the spiritual world were in those ancient times better developed than those for perception of the material world. Over generations these spiritual eyes and ears atrophied and physical eyes and ears developed as humanity bound itself ever closer to the physical world. As the spiritual eyes and ears atrophied so did the sun go down on the spirit world yet at the same time of this Twilight of the Gods humanity’s interest for the physical world deepened. with it new physical eyes and ears mankind began to explore the physical world in ever more detail.
Returning to the Nordic people we find that attached to this notion of the disappearance of the gods there is also the prospect of a return of the gods. After the wolf, which is a symbol for the power deception, has swallowed Odin, Vidar immediately turns and rushes at the wolf whose upper jaw reaches to heaven and the lower jaw is on earth, and places one foot on his nether jaw. With one hand Vidar seizes the upper jaw of the wolf, and thus rends asunder his mouth and the wolf perishes. This can be interpreted as meaning that a path is left open to human beings to perceive the spiritual world again if they too like Vidar are prepared to kill the wolf. That is to say search for truth and revile deception and lies. One aspect of the truth is that there is a spiritual aspect to reality which is the same as saying it is a lie to that say that there is only a material reality. It is for this reason that the wolf’s mouth, that by which the wolf spreads lies, whose upper jaw reaches to heaven and the lower jaw is on earth must be destroyed.
In the death of Pan, the Greek god of nature and the universe (woods, field, flocks and shepherds to name but a few) over which ancient Greeks lamented we find another story that points to an awareness that a time had come when it was no longer possible to see this omnipresent god. Gone was the time when the Greeks could directly see the spiritual side of reality. They still saw nature and the universe, but no longer the spiritual beings, which to modern man are simply the forces of nature.
The history of development in ancient Greek philosophy clearly reflects this shift of interest from the spirit world to the physical world. Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens” expresses this historical process artistically. In the painting Plato in a red cloak and his book Timaeus tucked under one arm points upwards to the heavens with his index finger, indicating his knowledge is of the spirit world. Aristotle is standing next to him in his blue cloak and has his hand flat with the palm firmly towards earth as if to say, the physical world is my point of departure for knowledge. In this picture we see the representatives of the two polarities of thinking and realms of experience, namely material and spiritual. What the Greeks started, i.e. preference for and increasing understanding of the physical over the spiritual, was further honed by the Arabs of the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries and then developed to even higher forms in Europe after the onset of the scientific revolution which was heralded in by its heroes like Kepler, Galileo and Bruno
So if direct spiritual perception faded out around 2500 years ago, how long do we have to journey back to find evidence of widespread direct perception. The ancient Egyptian civilization which starts almost 5000 years ago, culminates 3500 years ago and ends around the time of Buddha. Looking at the culture of the Egyptians we see a far richer conception of how the spiritual side if life impinges on the earthly. So much of the art work that decorates the temples and pyramids witnesses of a civilization so obviously attuned to the spiritual side of reality that one must wonder how it achieved such remarkable engineering feats. Mythology and belief in gods is generally taken as a sign of backwardness and not being grounded in reality. In a limited way this is of course true, they weren’t as grounded in the physical reality as 21st century man. But the pyramids and temples, feats of engineering which modern day mankind would be proud of, don’t sit comfortably with this theory of backwardness and not being grounded in reality. But looking at it from the perspective of a civilization taking its living spiritual richness and making a big, lasting and monumental statement about it, but on the physical plane, the phenomena become quite understandable. Indeed if mankind of 3500 years ago perceived that the grandeur of the spiritual world was fading then erecting some monuments that spoke of this majestic image seems like a reasonable way to immortalize it. Few people, other than dictators, have statues of themselves erected before they die. Could it be that they pyramids, the sphinx and other ancient Egyptian wonders, especially the art, are conscious attempts to stop the decline of spiritual perception (like yoga). This is left as an open question. Clearly though, if the premise about gradual shifting of consciousness is true then this wouldn’t have been needed earlier in history as spiritual perception was still more widely spread than the emerging physical perception.
Yogic practises, whose roots go back many thousands of years, are also remnants of a time when man no longer perceived the spirit world as free and easily as he had done in more ancient times. The yogic exercises represent, to an archaeologist of the mind, the desire of people of the ancient Indian civilisations to regain the wisdom and harmony that came with a culture more closely aligned to spiritual truths. By stilling the mind and removing material impurities of the body by diet and bodily postures, ancients were able to come closer to a state that allowed spiritual visions and voices to enter the mind.
It is also instructive that all religions hark back to a time when there seemed to be greater clarity. Islam has Mohammed and his prophets, Christianity has Christ and the apostles, Buddhism has Buddha and his contemporaries and Judaism has Moses and the prophets. These are the authorities in the respective religions and the more quotes you can attribute to your ancient spiritual guide and his apostles, the more credence you have with those that share your religion. This relationship makes senses if we see that ancients really did have more intimate knowledge of this world than 21st man. It also makes sense that they have little time for modern day scientists who proclaim to know things about which they, from a believer’s perspective, actually know nothing.
This is some of the evidence that supports the idea that mankind's evolution can be characterised as a moving from a strong awareness of the spiritual and weak awareness of the physical to a strong awareness of the physical and weak awareness of the spiritual. The facts of history fit very comfortably into this idea, which means there may be some truth to it.
What though is spiritual vision? If I had spiritual eyes and ears would I see the same spiritual beings as the ancients claim to have seen or heard?
The answer to this is an unsatisfactory yes and no, which of course needs some explaining. Spiritual vision is seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. It is seeing Platonic ideas, Jungian archetypes, it is seeing the body of forces that allow a cat to be a cat, a dog to live as a dog, but not to confuse these with the cat or dog that you experience with your five senses. Spiritual sight sees the master plan of the cat or dog that exist independently of the thing that we can experience with our five senses. Speaking metaphorically it is the detailed set of plans for a house, before the house has been constructed, it is the directors vision of a film, before filming starts or idea of television, before television was invented.
This sounds simple, but nothing could be more illusory. Consider the plan for a plant, let alone an animal and beyond that the human being. Having the plan here means being able to recreate. Scientific knowledge in the hands of inventors has enabled us to create amazing feats of technology, and for all these inventions there are detailed plans. But can man build a plant, animal or human being in the same way that he can starting from raw materials make a car or computer. The answer is clearly no and here we come to the crunch. But with all the attempts of scientists to understand to understand the plant, animal and human kingdom it is certainly not unimaginable that mankind might one day achieve this, and truly realise what is meant by the phrase “ye are gods” (John 10:34). Obviously this has many possible frightening consequences with the possibility for much evil use. But mankind will have to mature to a responsible usage, because it doesn’t want to go backward in its development. Apparently some pope of the middle ages tried to get the crossbow banned. He was as successful as the CND protesters of the 70s and 80s. Everybody that values human life understands the benefit of outlawing crossbows and nuclear weapons, but the powerbrokers of the world also understand even a defending army needs strong weapons and could therefore give an enemy an unnecessary
.describe science on the path of education…………..