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Welcome doctrines!
Forget personal experience!
The great philosopher-scientist WILLIAM JAMES has this to say:
![[William James]](james.jpeg)
"THE GREAT field for new discoveries,"
said a scientific friend to me the other day,
"is always the unclassified residuum."....
Each one of our various ologies
seems to offer a definite head of classification
for every possible phenomenon of the sort which it professes to cover;
and so far from free is most men's fancy,
that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
has once been comprehended and assimilated,
a different scheme is unimaginable.
No alternative, whether to whole or parts,
can any longer be conceived as possible.
Phenomena unclassifiable within the system
are therefore paradoxical absurdities, and must be held untrue.
When, moreover, as so often happens,
the reports of them are vague and indirect;
when they come as mere marvels and oddities
rather than as things of serious moment -
one neglects or denies them with the best of scientific consciences.
Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and fascinated
by these outstanding exceptions,
and get no peace till they are brought within the fold.
Your Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins
are always getting confounded and troubled by insignificant things.
Anyone will renovate his science
who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena.
And when the science is renewed,
its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them
than of what were supposed to be the rules.
Read
his whole article
NO
STRICT DEFINITION OF SCIENCE:
Du Won Kang,
an academic member
of the Chinese Falun Gong writes:
One of the reasons
why there can be fundamental differences in opinion between scientists
is that the basis of their opinion is largely philosophical
and not entirely scientific.
Of course, the things that scientists and philosophers normally do
are quite different.
However, although scientists
have distinguished themselves from philosophy long ago,
basic advances in modern science were influenced by philosophy.
In turn, advances in science also influenced
the development of philosophy.
Much of modern science and mathematics developed along with philosophy,
and the ties cannot be completely severed.
Much of modern science still rest largely on a philosophical foundation
although many scientists seem to have forgotten this.
Read on..
All of us feel the attraction of great minds
who propound theories that make sense of everything
in line with our own prejudices.
We follow such thinkers like sheep.
Scientists William James, F.W.H. Myers, Sir William Crookes and others,
believed that they had assembled incontrovertible evidence
for the Afterlife.
But not long afterwards the founder of Behaviorism, J.B. Watson,
came along, asserting (in 1915) more as a matter of faith,
than of evidence, that we are biological machines,
programmed by conditioned reflexes,
with consciousness a mere epiphenomenon,
and that therefore an Afterlife was nonsense.
J.B. Watson's philosophy attracted a huge number of academic sheep
for several decades.
Gary deMar writes
briefly
about Behaviorism.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents a
longer
and more evenhanded description,
suggesting why one might or might not accept it.
Thinkers who attract a big following do sometimes change their minds:
Dr Antony Flew,
Professor of Philosophy, author, and debater,
was well known for his atheism.
Now he has become a
theist.
From the impossibility of evolution to the inevitability of evolution:
Anti-Evolutionist
Michael Denton
turns into 'Evolutionist'
A review by Gert Korthof
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![[Stephen icon]](Stephenicon2.jpeg)
St STEPHEN teaches about CHRIST
(Click to
study background)
He had the following to
say on July 8, 1976:
This is one, of nearly 200 teachings.
§ 1 TITLE
[There never was a time when our Lord Jesus was not the Christ,
nor any of the imaged creation of the Father not the Christ. .].
§ 2
In our way we wish to know the nature of us,
why we are here, and for what purpose.
All our beliefs of our religion are for this one purpose,
to remind us of these things, or to help us to recall them.
§ 3
So let me attempt to answer in this way:
First in the mind of the Father, we were conceived,
and from that conception we were created in his image.
§ 4
Do not be confused about the “image.”
We know that what we ourselves would create, firstly has to be imaged.
We know that in our minds, if we image …these things,
then they will in fact be created.
§ 5
Therefore we were imaged, and all that we can see, feel,
and all that we can touch, were thus imaged.
And all was created in that image.
This may spoil some popular misconceptions, but this is so.
§ 6
The image that was created, was the perfect image,
the wonderful image of the whole tapestry of creation
in the mind of the Father,
(in whichever way we conceive him to be). Christ is that image.
§ 7
To save us, we must first ask ourselves,
From what we must be saved?
Our salvation lies in our ability to receive,
and conceive the truth of our own perfection,
and of our own part and participation
in what is the whole of the body of Christ.
§ 8
We do not have to be saved,
and preserved from terrible and dire consequences that we may perceive,
for all that is perfect is here, always has been and always shall be.
All that we need saving from is the conception in our minds
that we are separate from this perfection.
§ 9
We separate ourselves often
by feeling that there is much that we must do to change ourselves,
to be forgiven, to step away from sin, before we may be saved.
§ 10
Yet we are told in many diverse ways,
that the path to salvation is the acceptance of Christ,
or the acceptance of the perfection of all that is.
§ 11
For we must not forget that we were created in the image of the Father,
and therefore must be perfect.
We, all of us, have often failed in perceiving this perception,
§ 12
and for a more graphic illustration,
through One who could accept this perfection perfectly,
we were to recognise Christ.
§ 13
There never was a time, when our Lord Jesus was not the Christ,
neither is there a time, that any of the imaged creation of the Father,
is not the Christ.
§ 14
This we must understand, this is our salvation,
our acceptance of what is.
Once we accept the perfection of all that is,
then as I have said before, there are no disasters,
there are only disasters from the point of view of perfection.
§ 15
The place of men’s thoughts in the future of things,
whether we call it religion or not religion,
is the acceptance of what is perfect.
To continually remind ourselves that all is perfect, and all is well.
§ 16
There is no sin too great that would continually separate you
from the Father, if you would not have that sin separate you.
§ 17
To help us, we have had a demonstration of forgiveness,
a sacrifice that is easy for us to remember,
that is easy in our minds, to conceive as an intermediary,
the intermediary that turns our minds into our hearts,
so that we can see the truth.
Look well and you will.
Dr Richard Cocks
comments:
Quietism.
The best of all possible worlds, and the meaning of acceptance
The thought that Stephen seems to express
is that the world is perfect just as it is. And so are you.
This implies acceptance of the world, just as it is.
What we would like to do, we think, is to pick and choose.
We want the loving moments with our children,
when we are all smiling and enjoying ourselves,
and not the time when we have to be authority figures
insisting that our child does his/her homework.
The later, however, is love too,
even if it doesn’t make us feel very warm and cosy.
In fact, not insisting on the homework is not loving at all,
but a cop out.
We think we would like to refashion our lives;
to take out all the difficult, unpleasant bits;
the boredom, frustration, cold sores and ulcers,
bad-hair days and rude people.
We want to be good pianists, and forget the practice.
We want to be good parents, and never have to redirect, or insist.
We want the good without the bad.
Acceptance sounds passive. A bad version of acceptance would be.
What are we accepting?
We are accepting, for instance, that intimacy requires vulnerability;
not in theory, but in practice.
If you want intimacy, be prepared to be hurt over and over again.
How much love would you be demonstrating
without being prepared to be hurt?
I love you, just so long as loving you is never painful?
Doesn’t sound much like love to me.
Would we value playing the piano so much
if it didn’t take hard work?
We marvel at good pianists
because we know that we wouldn’t have the dedication,
or patience to practice long enough or thoroughly enough.
Would it mean anything to be a good pianist
if it didn’t take a lot of work?
Maybe the dedication and the patience
are as important things to acquire as the actual piano playing.
What if at some point, in order to improve,
some really hard obstacle had to be overcome?
If we could wish that obstacle away
would we have gained so much as actually overcoming it?
Acceptance means knuckling down and doing what needs to be done
and not trying to fudge our way of it.
It means we wouldn’t be good without the bad.
You only get to demonstrate that you are morally good
when being good is not in your self-interest.
If coming to work on time and working hard is the secret to success,
then being good is indistinguishable from the most ruthless narcissism.
You only get to demonstrate goodness and integrity
when you do the right thing regardless of the consequences to yourself.
Seeing the perfection in everything
is not necessarily to think everything is blandly ‘good.’
It means to stop whining about difficulties
and trying to wish them away.
It means to take risks and accept failure and pain.
I’m a teacher (lecturer).
The consequences of wishing difficulties and struggle away
leads to what Ken Wilber calls idiot compassion.
It means that in the name of not making anyone’s life difficult,
we won’t challenge them or require them to grow.
But challenging students and requiring them to grow
(that’s what learning is), is to be genuinely, truly compassionate.
It means you care.
Letting people who you are charged with looking after, teaching, or raising
(I’m thinking of children here), rot is not compassionate.
To try to be someone that no child or student ever resents
is not being good, but its opposite.
Stephen says the only sin is stagnation. Growth is what is beautiful.
Achievement can’t be guaranteed,
and shouldn’t be demanded –
but you can try to insist and encourage trying –
and THAT is the beautiful thing.
My tai chi instructor has actually grown to dislike talented students
because things come easily to them, so they need to make little effort,
which means they do not learn to overcome difficulties, or learn persistence.
Tai chi, like novel writing, is not something you simply master,
but something that you spend your life trying to perfect.
For the talented, trying, persisting,
with no goal visible in sight is not something they have learnt to do,
and they often fail.
So maybe we should pray – God save me from being talented;
from things simply falling into my lap with no effort;
and keep my nose to the grindstone
that I may fashion of myself a being
that reflects the beauty of existence – hardships and all.
The funny thing is, once you are really dedicated to something,
practice and hardwork, not being your kid’s or your
students’ buddy, is just fine.
It’s perfect just as it is.
To reject that, means to eat the cake and frown on baking them.
And if you burn a few cakes a long the way, that’s fine too!
If you can see the beauty in what is right in front of you,
then boiled rice can be a delicious meal.
If you compare and judge, reject and banish,
run away from the difficult, the hard and the painful
you are not overcoming your current limitations,
but condemning yourself to a fatal failure to grow.
To give up preferences makes it hard to lose.
To respond to crucifixion with love and acceptance,
instead of hatred and rejection,
makes it pretty hard for anyone to make of your life a misery.
To accept the hard and the difficult,
means to accept the rude and the oblivious,
the abrasive and the aggressive.
Of course, loving those people may involve calling the police,
evicting them or calling attention to their rude behavior.
Acceptance is not being an idiot.
That would be too high a price to pay!
COMPARISONS and THOUGHTS:
We can compare the faith
of Stephen to that of Paul:
"Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height nor depth, nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8.38,39
Or this faith:
"The eternal God is thy refuge,
and underneath are the everlasting arms."
Deut. 33.27
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This summary of an aspect
of Spinoza's thinking also parallels the teaching of Stephen:
![[Spinoza]](spinoza.jpeg)
(C) It is in the nature of reason
to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity
(sub quadam aeternitatis
specie).
Spinoza,
The Ethics, 1677
(R.H.M. Elwes translation, 1883)
By way of advice about living in a world
in which nothing much is up to us,
Spinoza said that we must try to look at life
sub specie aeternitatis --
from the aspect of the eternal.
This is the way God sees things.
God exists outside space and time -- indeed time and space exist in Him.
He can, so to speak, take the great film of history
and hold it up to the light and look at any frames He chooses.
He can look at the end of your life and then at the beginning
and then at the middle,
He can see the end of time and then the beginning
and anything in between.
All of history, past, present, and future, is known to Him already.
You and I, however, are caught within time.
We cannot see the next frame from the one we are in at present.
Although to God, everything that will happen has already happened,
to us, our viewpoint is mired in the "now."
We worry and wonder what will happen next,
and we think it is all up to us ,. but it isn't, of course.
So the proper mental attitude is acceptance of whatever happens
and to try to understand life and events
sub specie aeternitatis.
We can't do much about events, we have no real freedom,
except in our minds.
In our minds we can try not to be worried and upset about what happens
or what is going to happen.
![[David Bohm]](bohm.jpeg)
Beatrix Morrell summarises
the "gnosis"
of physicist David Bohm.
It is interesting how much his philosophy,
arising from QM physics,
parallels, but neither proves nor disproves
important aspects of Stephen's
spiritual teaching,
which however relates to love,
and our living relationship in every way to the Source of all that is.
Science and what we might term worship are of two orders:
just as physics may describe the patterns of sounds produced by a piano,
whereas Spirit is seen in the creation of the Composer,
the interpretation of the artist,
and the receiving into the heart of the listener.
Bearing this in mind, Bohm's thoughts are summarised:
1. Any individual element [of totality]
could reveal “detailed information
about every other element in the universe”
2. “The unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence
as an undivided flowing movement without borders”
3. Two subatomic particles that have once interacted
can instantaneously “respond to each other’s motions
thousands of years later when they are light years apart.”
(Stephen: “The furthest sun is closer to you than your
tongue.Ӥ46.)
4. Space and time might actually be derived
from an even deeper level of objective reality.
This reality he calls the Implicate Order.
5. Within the Implicate Order everything is connected, and, in theory,
any individual element could reveal information
about every other element in the universe.
6. The Hologram is Bohm’s favourite metaphor
for conveying the structure of the Implicate Order.
“Everything is enfolded into everything”.
The totality of the movement of enfoldment and unfoldment
may go immensely beyond what has revealed itself to our observations.
We call this totality by the name “holomovement”.
This is the “fundamental ground of all matter”
The holomovement is ground for both life and matter.
[Stephen said, two years before Bohm´s work was published,
“True life is all movement.
The whole of life must be the whole of movement”
(§158)]
7. “What is is always a totality of ensembles,
all present together,
in an orderly series of stages of enfoldment and unfoldment,
which intermingle and interpenetrate each other
in principle throughout the whole of space.”
8. The individual is in total contact with the Implicate Order,
individuals are part of the whole of humanity,
and they are the “focus for something beyond humanity”
9. It is this collective consciousness of humanity
that is truly significant for Bohm.
It is this collective consciousness that is truly one and indivisible,
and it is the responsibility of each human person
to contribute towards this consciousness of humanity,
this noosphere.
10. Bohm also believes that the individual will eventually be fulfilled
upon the completion of cosmic noogenesis.
11. intelligence has always been
at the very core of the Implicate Order.
(cont. of 10) 12. It will be ultimately misleading
and indeed wrong to suppose..
that each human being is an independent actuality
who interacts with other human beings and with nature.
Rather, all these are projections of a single totality.
(B) St
Stephen's assertion that the creation of God
is not only 'good' but 'perfect'.
Voltaire's satire about the "best of all possible worlds"
in Candide may come to mind.
Stephen does not deny the blatant evil that we see around us.
Those familiar with Teilhard de Chardin's
Phenomenon of Man
will recognise parallels with the "Noogenesis".
Stephen's Millennium can be compared to Teilhard's "Omega point",
but leaving our individual minds both one and separate,
depending on the point of view.
The word of God, for Stephen, is heard loud and clear
in each succeeding Present Moment.
We hear the word, and each time God addresses us,
the question at issue is, our answer.
We are also reminded of Process Theology
founded by philosopher A.N. Whitehead,
which suggests much the same thing.
(D) "All the world´s a stage, And all the men and
women merely players: they have their exits and entrances..."
Shakespeare As you like it II
vii 139 Our deepest Self, Spirit,
is the observer and experiencer of the play.
(E) We see so much evil in the world.
Can we possibly accept Stephen's teaching?
Can we imagine a world entirely without evil,
entirely without sickness, without accidents, without hunger,
without striving, without the effort of learning,
where nothing untoward happens,
and all our physical needs are supplied
without the slightest effort on our part.
Would this world be perfect
for the purposes of making great and loving souls?
(F) Very many of Stephen's teaching elaborate on this
theme.
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![[globe]](earthani.gif)
![[Carnyx]](carnyx.gif)
![[Rev Michael Cocks]](MichaelCocks.JPG)
![[Rev Victor MacGill]](victor1.jpg)