Tag Archives: christ

Imagine…

Posted on by
Reply

… that the universe is really one and that we and everything in it is connected, a part of the same thing – and so a part of each other. The loneliness and insecurity that is the subtext of all of our living would be illusory. So, indeed would be death. We would be all, part of each other. The making love, the smile shared with a stranger, the sense of one-ness within a brilliant landscape, the tenderness and awe holding your baby… all intimations and pale imitations of what existence would be. If we removed our blinkers. And, this is what scientific discovery points toward. So indeed does our brother, Jesus. What did he actually say? Love thy neighbour (as thyself), by the fruits shall ye know them, forgive over and over and over again (70×7), rich men shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Christ would have been, in our modern world, a revolutionary – but not a divider of people against people. He would have been, and is, the true blueprint of a socialist radical.

Imagine, if the universe is really one and that we and everything in it is connected, a part of the same thing – and so a part of each other. After all its what the science points toward.

Social thermodynamics

Posted on by
4

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This applies to societies. The internal construct, what holds society together, has an external resonance. This sets up a chain of reactions which in turn impact on and shape society. It matters how groups are born and what holds them together.

Nationalism is always, in the end, corrosive. This is why. Societies, like the individual, are shaped in the mirror of those outside them. The other. The internal character is a reflection of the external reference. Whatever the start point, nationalism ends up by defining itself by reference to “the enemy” – which is of course only other ordinary men and women – but externalised and dehumanised. Made other. We project out  all that is negative.  It is the politician’s cheapest trick; to set up the reviled “other”, blame them for anything that is wrong and consequently draw “us” together.

How then can just society arise?

If the impulse that draws us together as community is love, then this will lead to a projection of good on to others. This com-passion with and for others –  in all their glorious differentiation is reflected back, bonding and reinforcing a sense of our greater human community. Simple. First love your enemy.

But loving one’s enemy is HARD. It takes an overwhelming outside force. I personally struggle with it. It is possible though, but only with outside help. One definition of God might be just that. The force of love as an external agency. And the opposite is also a truth. All and any love is God, by whatever name. Only by reference to this external and eternal force can a just lasting and joyful society hope to work. All else is illusion. Strip away any preconceptions about organised religion and focus on what makes for a just society.

You arrive at something like this:

Love other as we love ourselves. Love Love above all. Keep responding with love not war even after 490 provocations. Judge what is right by results not words.

This is of course has been said before, by someone who lived the words.

Passion

Posted on by
Reply

On this day, just before 3pm, as the sky and outlook is darkest. Surely we humans are incapable of redemption without disaster. We are destroying this, our earth. Russians and the West face off to war yet again. Google is moving toward making our humanity an adjunct of its electronic controlled universe. Our children relate with each other through screens rather than face to face. Syrians act with a barbarism not seen since Hitler to their citizens. 1/3 of the world’s population are starving, 1/3 have far too much (me included). Materialism thrives – the new religion – sedating each of us into an animal rather than spiritual state.  Which of us has faith that alone we humans will control our exploding population, or enable just societies where all have respect and place?

 

Thank goodness for Christ’s passion, hope and the Easter redemption which is coming.

 

 

 

The Long View

Posted on by
Reply

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me

For those of us who believe that this is not the only life, whatever our persuasion, then we stand in a similar perspective to that unborn child. What comes next? We don’t know for certain and therefore we are full of fear – as is McNeice’s subject. At least though that baby – all unknowing of what will come in that next life – is assured of there is one.

The poem if applied to most of us, unborn in this life, would be a contemplation of the moment of birth/death rather than of what lies beyond. So many of us get stuck with the question “Is there life after death”, rather than contemplating what it is and beginning to live it now.

Indeed  that we spend so much of our time avoiding the whole subject of death and the wider context of existence –  is I suspect a significant driver behind the rise of materialism. (Consume to forget. Materialism – the opiate of the masses). My hunch is that the most virulent evangelical atheists are those who are most full of fear. Their need is to convert, because like any addict there is at least a temporary relief from their underlying hunger.

I am perhaps fortunate that I almost died as a toddler (meningitis), since they say that this experience in small children – if survived – gives them a glimpse of beyond this life and therefore a context for the living of it. I know someone well who had a different experience though – aged 7 or so their near death experience left them with a knowledge of the short span of this life – much earlier than most – but possibly with the fear of the unknown rather than the hope of life to come.

I will ask their permission to talk further of their experience and journey since (indeed  I would like to understand it better).

However it does seem to me that life is better lived with the long view. The context of what lies beyond this transitory set of experiences. Indeed it is this landscape that gives meaning to existence. Ours, and the worlds.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the      club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,      with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk      to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light         in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words      when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,         my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,            my life when they murder by means of my               hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when      old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains         frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white             waves call me to folly and the desert calls               me to doom and the beggar refuses                  my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God      come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my      humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,         would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with            one face, a thing, and against all those               who would dissipate my entirety, would                  blow me like thistledown hither and                     thither or hither and thither                        like water held in the                           hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.

Louis Macneice

Free will and consciousness?

Posted on by
2

So, apparently…

Physics has found a different state of matter – “perceptronium” – that is conscious. This resonates with Tielhard de Chardin’s postulate that all matter is and has always been  conscious from the outset, and which is coalescing as evolution moves from the physical through chemical and biological to the evolution of ideas – the noosphere.

And it is observation which causes the infinity of potential to crystallise out into the concrete actual. (The collapse of schrodinger’s wave function – thereby forcing the choice between the alive and dead cat).

Who observes? What observes? Is it consciousncess. In any event since the observer causes the collapse or crystallisation it/he/she seems to exercise free will.

And for those who dispute the collapse of the wavefunction – the only way out is to create infinitely splitting universes (Everett’s theory). And this comes to the same thing in relation to free will. It is only that we get to choose which universe we are conscious in. In that case our observation is effectively the point of choice between different splitting universes.

It comes to the same thing surely? Consciousness is. It just is.  Something observes and either creates the actually experienced world through waves function collapse or steers into particular universes by choices at each potential universe fracture.

Consciousness and free will appear then to be related and pertain to the creation of reality. And what is the wellspring of consciousness?

(Thanks to nope@hotmail.com for putting me on to Max Tegmark’s series of articles at Cornell University Press. Am I talking drivel??)

Conjugating Jung

Posted on by
Reply

Animus, Anima.  Declension of nouns describing polarity,  intending integration

Animare. A verb. To live lovingly. Already connected, in conversation. A dance. Conjugation to wholeness.

Animo

Animas

Animaramus?

Our Brother

Posted on by
Reply

Our brother whose heart be heaven

Hallowed be thy pain

Our kingdom come

Our will be one

On earth as it is in heaven

Live us today, within our head

So to give up our trespasses

Seeing you in those who are without us

And lead us not to the isolation

Which delivers each to evil

For ours be thy kingdom, thy power and thy glory

Now and for ever

Mystical Ellipticism

Posted on by
Reply

Why are all the great thinkers difficult to understand, at least with our mind? Perhaps because reality is so difficult for us to perceive – as through a glass darkly. That wouldn’t be surprising I guess. Our brain is evolved to help our bodies survive in jungles. We don’t see polarised light as bees do. The point is – it’s not some kind of perfect instrument designed to understand the outer reaches and meaning of creation. Neither does it have complete sensory input.

At least for me, those who have most changed my life all point to reality in relation. That is to say – reality existing in the magnetism between two points. As opposed to reality in the points themselves,

Carl Jung, for instance, in his search for integration between opposites “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed”. Martin Buber sets out his form of existentialism entirely against a backdrop of relationship – his “philosophy of dialogue” with it’s primary words I-Thou and I-It. Teilhard de Chardin saw the process of evolution (powered by love) toward a shared consciousness. Alfred North Whitehead saw the whole of reality as process.

All of these elliptical thinkers seem to expose facets of the same underlying truth. It’s connection that matters, not matter that connects.

And yet..

For the Dawkins of this world it’s so simple. Matter. Of Fact. Simple(s). Nothing there but things. Science, thought and our brains have solutions. Death comes and there is nothing beyond. Love, kindness, a shared smile – all just twitchings of the material – set in the one-way street of time.(It’s not what science shows, but there you are .. better read Rupert Sheldrake on the subject.)

The writings of Buddha, the parables of Christ, the music of Bach. Complex – difficult. Mystical. Elliptical.