The Spiritual World View Continued

This blog is culled from a number of posts I made on a message board. The discussion started with the contention "that truth is no longer a simple place but a vanishing concept." In answering this I went back to first principles and my response may seem rather tangential to the starting question. I decided to edit my responses into a single blog which I have put here. It had a rather piecemeal construction, but hopefully it flows OK.

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In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Or the big bang was the beginning of both time and space, the world of relativity came from the absolute unconditioned by time and space. We have a dual nature of relativity and absolute. As we approach God we move towards the absolute, which is Truth. Maybe our earthly minds will grow to be able to express the Kingdom of God here on earth. There is real meaning to be found.

There is absolute Truth (singular). There are in religion often certain codified beliefs or religious prescription each of these can be closer or further away from Truth, they aren't simply all just relative. I think in pretty much all human thought or at least it's expression in language there is a fair dose of relativity, in Pre Modern thought the Earth was seen as the sub lunar realm a realm of mutability and change. Our consciousness is like various wattage light bulbs through which differing amounts of the divine current can flow through. 

God is Being (Omnipresent), Consciousness (Omniscient) and Bliss (All Loving) and can be experienced but not fully expressed in earthly language. Our everyday mind is a partial mind, we can be rational but our everyday thoughts are not sufficient to climb the ladder of Truth. Truth like the physical world can be experienced and that experience can be expressed cogently (but not fully) in rational discourse. A Commonality across those who have near death experiences is the greater sense of reality and consciousness of the experiences, they directly experience a greater mindfulness than they had in their earthly experiences. These experiences remain crystal clear to them over spans of decades, when memories and dreams become dim. 

I don't think there is a fundamental conflict between religion and science, Truth is one, too often the debate has been falsely framed as between reason and faith. Science is a method of enquiry, mainly into the external world, so far it has had little to nothing that it can say regarding the essential and fundamental invisibilities of human existence Consciousness and Love. All science rests on a base of Consciousness, how can there be scientific enquiry or any kind of inquiry without consciousness? if a scientific philosophy then tries to undermine that and argue consciousness is an illusion, as it sometimes does, it is cutting off its own base.

That there is such a thing as absolute truth is not the same thing as saying there is certainty. 

There are two basic paradigms Material and Divine. I find the later more cogent in explaining experience, I've mentioned problems with consciousness, also Materialism is based on upwards causality yet our experience is that our actions are ruled by our consciousness (downward causality) and every sane person acts as though they are responsible for their decisions. So materialists in one sense believe in upward causality but they can’t live by it, the Divine view is consistent and doesn’t hold this contradiction.

Materialism posits that matter through a mindless process builds life, meaning is like some kind of accidental secretion, from such a world view where there is no objective basis for meaning, reason and truth. A society that holds such views will have meaning, reason and justice seep out of social discourse. 

Materialism is overtly a philosophy of nihilism. If further it posits that human beings developed from the underlying principle of "survival of the fittest" then no matter what gloss you try to put on it you're saying fundamentally 'might is right”.

Life does seem to have evolved on earth, with simple life forms being followed by more complex forms, I see this as a mindful unfolding of consciousness over time. 

We find in modern physics that the observer (consciousness) is intertwined with matter and effects the outcome of subatomic experiments.

If at the sub atomic level matter intersects with mind, then Consciousness exists in some level throughout matter. At the mineral level it's very latent, in plants and micro organisms it shows a greater expression and is capable of showing pain responses (and most likely pleasure). Then you move up the animal kingdom with greater levels of consciousness, human beings have the greatest level of consciousness in the animal kingdom. All of this Consciousness is sparks of the divine consciousness. I think consciousness is going to continue emerging in this world and that it extends beyond it, as has been experienced by people in Near Death and Mystical Experiences. I don't think Consciousness is static in any of us, there are times when we seem to see with a wider view and we experience a feeling of "all being well" in such states the things we do all seem to go right and we feel a great sense of identity with everything around us.

New Zealand's Cultural Life

When I started this blog, I wanted to do my first blog on spirituality and culture and maybe that'll come or maybe it will forever be my 'next' blog. Instead i did a blog on spirituality because i felt like I'd need to have some definition around that first. So this blog I thought I'd do focus on the cultural strand of that initial thought,  there have also been three things lately that have all brought me to think of New Zealand culture. 

I was chatting with an American friend Rich Goodhart about the popular music we grew up with on the radio through the 60's & 70's and he told of wonderful experiences of hearing this great popular music come over the radio, great Beatles songs, Doors etc and I thought of the terrible pap that came over the radio waves in New Zealand. The next thing was the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton making critical comments about New Zealand culture and politics and the media frenzy that ensued. The last thing was John Cleese and Eric Idle talking about doing a tour of New Zealand in the 60's and what a truly strange and dreadful place they found it.

I have slowly built some interest in my family ancestry, my great great grandfather Thomas Bevan wrote a memoir Reminiscence of an Old Colonist which I found fascinating and there is plenty to be fascinated by in the relatively short human history of this country, but what had happened by the late 1950's and early 1960's that it had become such a cultural desert? It seems like there was a very strong inclination to conformity and due to distances and media isolation New Zealand was a cultural backwater. 

Novels, poems, plays, movies and music are all our spiritual food. In New Zealand we always seem to be on the cusp of or to have just found our cultural identity. In music there were those 50's & 60's rocker: Ray Columbus, Max Merrit, The La de Da's, The Avengers, The Fourmyula et al. The Seventies and 80's Split Enz, Dragon, Space Waltz, The Herbs, Dave Dobbyn, Netherworld Dancing Toys, Flying Nun bands were greeted with great delight in the acclamation that the New Zealand scene had coming of age. Eric idle spoke of the amazing change that swept through the UK with the coming of the Beatles and the stuffiness that they swept aside almost over night. But to me New Zealand music generally didn't have that kind of cultural penetration, certainly not the Flying Nun bands. Split Enz's True Colours going to number one and keeping Pink Floyd's The Wall out of the number one spot to me was a more significant National Cultural event, that I suspect the Enz were only able to achieve by being based overseas. 

Personally I'm Ok with the fact that we can feel a warm sense of nostalgic cultural identity when we hear well known tracks from the "Nature's Best" compilations on our radio, although I still think that sense of being on the cusp of gaining a cultural identity is still there, I don't think Lorde will break us through. When I want some New Zealand music I tend to turn to the various permutations of the Finn brothers or My greatest hits CD of Daphne Walker, my favourite artists are not Kiwis, why is that? Do I have cultural cringe? or is it that New Zealand is just always going to be a small part of the greater cultural landscape?

Having art that inspires your internal life recognised in the national cultural life I think makes the individual feel a connection between the inner life and the more external shared cultural life. I didn't really have that sense not connecting with the cultural fodder leaking from New Zealand Radios as I was growing up.

Elanor Catton has caused a bit of a stir by talking of cultural and political issues in New Zealand saying:

"At the moment, New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, (are dominated by) these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture.

They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want."

I might come at this slightly differently but in essence I agree with what she is saying to me the reaction seems to speak more loudly than her words, you can get a taste of it in this New Zealand Herald article:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11394346

Gordon Campbell also wrote about it here:

http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2015/01/29/gordon-campbell-on-the-eleanor-catton-rumpus/

I admit I haven't read Eleanor's novel, I think this controversy will inspire me to do so. I probably read less New Zealand literature than I listen to our music, I read quite a bit of Frame and Ronald Hugh Morrison and other odds and ends. Eleanor I think expresses most people's opinions of New Zealand literature:

"I, for example, grew up just having a strange belief that New Zealand writers were automatically less great than writers from Britain and America, for example. Because we were some colonial backwater ..."

I think the last two New Zealand books I read were Tim Hanna's books on Kim Newcombe and John Britton both amazing practitioners in the art of motorcycle design and construction for racing.  They were to me steeped in New Zealand culture. I have a brother who does amazing feats of engineering in his garage and that image of the garage problem solver holds an incredible romance for me. It's kind of funny because I'm not at all a petrol head and don't even drive. (Yeah we need to get off oil and move to electricity, go Tesla Motors!)

Maybe as Kiwi's we just need to become comfortable with always being perched on the brink of cultural discovery.

Spiritual World View, starting at the Centre

This is my new blog covering everything not covered in my music Blog "Music from under My Skin" it'll cover subjects like: Spirituality, Religion, Art, Culture & politics. Both blogs are to explore the land of heart's desire I need to set the tone so the first blog is on the spiritual world view, that is the view that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, that consciousness and love is at the centre of what we are.  

In 20th/21st Century intellectual culture Atheism of a reductionist materialist kind is the ruling paradigm, it is the expected faith of most scientists (even if it isn't their faith) so it has a social weight, a gravitas, an influence upon our society and culture, but I think it is mistaken and it is time to move on. 

I think we have a spirit that survives the body. Why?:

All enquiry rises from our consciousness it is the only thing that we can be positive exists, it is our direct experience, even the external world is a supposition, although a pretty good one due to it’s consistency. So our consciousness is all we can be certain of, an argument that ends by denying or devaluing consciousness strikes me as undermining the foundation upon which it was built. In materialist philosophy consciousness is called “the hard problem” because it shouldn’t exist. Consciousness shouldn't exist because materialism supposes that matter is without consciousness and human beings are determined wholly by our material make up, so how can consciousness emerge from these determinist unconscious elements.

If consciousness is a byproduct of the chemistry of the brain then that implies that all causality is essentially upwards, that is our brain chemistry produces our thoughts. This directly contradicts how we generally appreciate our actions, that is that they follow our thoughts. I don’t think anyone that follows materialism actually acts in accordance with this supposition, people act on the assumption that we are responsible for our own actions. Thus I think reductionist materialism fails the utility test.

Nearly everyone has had experiences where consciousness seems to act at a distance (this can’t happen if consciousness is a localised phenomena inside our heads as posited by materialism). Two common experiences are the sense of being stared at and knowing who is calling you before you answer the phone. The sense off being stared at, is the experience of feeling that someone is looking at you and then turning around to see that they are (this experience is more common among woman than men). The flip side of this experience is staring at someone and having them turn around to look at you (more common for men than women). Knowing who is calling you on the phone or thinking of someone you haven't seen in years and they call you are experiences that everyone has had and imply telepathy. Materialists will say these are just due to chance, but it is a testable and thus falsifiable theory (probably the main feature of a scientific theory). Rupert Sheldrake (and others) have done studies, one of which was getting four people to ring someone they knew, one of the 4 is selected at random, and the person had to guess who was calling before they answered the phone. Chance alone over an extended period would have the results at 25% but instead they averaged 40%, given the size of the tests was a hugely significant result, massively improbable to attribute to chance. What is more these tests weren’t using psychically gifted subjects but just regular folks, this paranormal phenomena is actually normal.

Millions of people have experienced directly leaving their bodies in either out of Body experiences, near death experiences and shared death experiences. In NDEs the persons body will be in a coma and sometimes as close as it is possible to get to brain death and yet come back, but they can see, hear and feel what is going on accurately usually from above their body. They also move into spiritual landscapes and their sense is of a heightened reality, normal waking consciousness compares to this heightened as sleep to waking, it is that profoundly richer and more real. These experiences have a profound effect on the person having them and lead to them losing their fear of death. They are entirely convincing to the person having them. There have been extensive studies done on these experiences and to me the simplest explanation is that they are just what they appear to be.

Lastly the materialist philosophy seems predicated on Newtonian physics with it’s solid billiard ball atoms and the machine model for the universe (note Newton himself was not a reductionist materialist but a dualist). Modern physics is much odder, where the act of witnessing (consciousness) turns a probability wave into a particle, where quantum entanglement has instant (faster than light speed) interaction between particles and where energy and matter are interchangeable qualities. As has been famously summarised the universe starts to look more like a giant thought than a giant machine.

What difference does it make?

Well for people coming back from near death experiences, their lives are transformed, almost turned upside down, the truth's of the heart become the centre of who they are, if you don't fear death other fears diminish too. If your intellect supports rather than questions those moments when you feel joy and everything falls into place then that joy is likely to come through more often and infiltrate the entire psyche. To me it is a much better paradigm for art, art can actually help us towards the reality of the spirit it is not a pleasant diversion from more serious matters like politics and commerce.

Time to put this first little credo out from my head and out for my handful of readers

Links

Chris Carter on Science and Psychic Phenomena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BM3fASJG4

Rupert Sheldrake, who has written on the sense of being stared at and dogs who know when their owners are coming home as well as on other issues of spirit and biology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg

Some excellent Near Death Experiences:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as6yslz-RDw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbkgj5J91hE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvmABrII35c