YAM,
Earlier, I posted this note as a response to a suggestion from another subject. I felt however, that this note applies to all the anecdotes that are posted in this section and therefore I am posting this separately to relate to all anecdotes as under.
I agree, but we must be careful how we treat miracles. Miracles should not be the basis of faith as per Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah. What this means is that we do not obey the Imams because they perform miracles. We accept Imammat based on intellect and reason as articulated by Ismaili thinkers at all times. I know today many yogis have acquired the power to perform miracles and indeed Mowlana SultanMuhammad Shah indicated that even magicians perform tricks but the real miracles of Hazarat Aly was to lead you to salvation or 'fanna fi Allah'.
The above notwithstanding, I do believe that miracles have a role as reinforcement to faith especially in esoteric traditions. We hear about Sufi traditions and indeed mystical orders of all faiths using anecdotes alluding to the possiblities of higher existence and hence raise the level of consciousness.
Our Peers have also used miracles in that manner. You will note that after a miracle is mentioned, there is an advice or command to follow the Imam or submit the tithe so that you may attain salvation. the purpose here is to provide a basis of trust in the authority of the Peer and inspire allegiance to the HazarImam.
Miracles also serve as sources of inspiration in the sense that they allude to the potential and possibilities of man. They tell us that, if we elevate ourselves spiritually like the Peers, we will also be in a position to perform miracles and indeed the heavens and the earth will be at our command as mentioned in the following verse of the Ginan, "Sham ku Avanta jo Kahe".
ejee swaamee maaro chatur sujaann hay - aape sreshtth divaan
jeesa ke bharose sthir rahyaa - rahyaa jameen aasmaan........3
My Master is knowing and wise, and his is the supreme authority. He who abides firmly trusting in him has the earth and the sky at his feet.
In the earlier post, I mentioned the incidence of animals to point out that even animals who obeyed the Peer and sought his protection, got it. What can't humans achieve if they followed the Peer.
From a philosophical standpoint, the occurance of miracles at all, is a legitimate mode of inquiry; i.e., we should ask how and why it is possible that miracles happen. I believe that this kind of thinking is the basis for the quest for a higher life. The response to these questions have often lead to genuine work of art. By the work of art I do not mean an object which merely tantalises our external senses, but something that addresses and responds to our deepest existential concerns such as the purpose of life, good and evil, guidance, beauty, etc.
I will end this post with a quote of Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah in his Memoirs (pg 312) regarding this matter.
"Mr, Chaplin is interested in certain psychical and non-physical phenomena, such as telepathy and its various derivatives. He quoted to me Einstein's demand that ten scientists should witness at the same time, and under prescisely similar conditions, every case of this kind submitted, before he would consider these manifestations proven. He and I agreed that the imposition of this kind of test would make all psychical research and experiment impossible, for these phenomena-and the laws under which they occur-are simply not at the beck and call of human beings".[/quote]
Role of Miracles in Esoteric Traditions.
Miracles - Wisdom
YAM,
I came across the following quote which captures the essence of my article above. Reflect upon it.
"A miracle cannot prove what is impossible; it is useful only to confirm what is possible."
- Maimonides, "Guide for the Perplexed"
One of his followers urged the Buddha to perform a miracle in order to attract some nonbelievers. The Buddha replied:
"I detest and will not undertake the so-called miracles of magic power and divination. I and my followers attract non-believers only by the miracle of truth."
-Digha Nikaya
I came across the following quote which captures the essence of my article above. Reflect upon it.
"A miracle cannot prove what is impossible; it is useful only to confirm what is possible."
- Maimonides, "Guide for the Perplexed"
One of his followers urged the Buddha to perform a miracle in order to attract some nonbelievers. The Buddha replied:
"I detest and will not undertake the so-called miracles of magic power and divination. I and my followers attract non-believers only by the miracle of truth."
-Digha Nikaya
Last edited by kmaherali on Sat Jan 08, 2005 10:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
Miracles and Inner Growth
In my earlier post on the significance of miracles in esoteric traditions above, I mentioned that they make us aware of our real potential which is realised through inner growth or enrichment of our Batini lives through Ibaadat (in its broadest sense) as alluded by MHI in his Farmans. When our inner lives are enriched, they act as a shield to confront and protect against any external misfortune and enable us to be independent of externals for our happiness. Indeed a marker of spiritual elevation is the capacity to live alone for extended periods. The following two quotes capture this message.
"Our lives are far richer than we imagine. None of us possess a life devoid of magic, barren of grace, divorced from power. Our inner resources, often unmined and even unknown or unacknowledged, are the treasures we carry, what I call our spiritual DNA." Julie Cameron
"My heart is capable of every form: A Cloister for the monk, a fan for idols, A pasture for gazelles, a votary's Ka'ba, The tables of the Torah, the Quran. Love is the creed I hold: Wherever turn His camels, Love is still my creed and faith." - Ibn Arabi
From Buddhist wisdom
If the element of the truth seeker did not exist in everyone,
There would be no turning away from craving,
Nor could there be a longing for nirvana,
Nor a seeking for it, nor a resolve to find it. - -Visuddhi Magga
"Our lives are far richer than we imagine. None of us possess a life devoid of magic, barren of grace, divorced from power. Our inner resources, often unmined and even unknown or unacknowledged, are the treasures we carry, what I call our spiritual DNA." Julie Cameron
"My heart is capable of every form: A Cloister for the monk, a fan for idols, A pasture for gazelles, a votary's Ka'ba, The tables of the Torah, the Quran. Love is the creed I hold: Wherever turn His camels, Love is still my creed and faith." - Ibn Arabi
From Buddhist wisdom
If the element of the truth seeker did not exist in everyone,
There would be no turning away from craving,
Nor could there be a longing for nirvana,
Nor a seeking for it, nor a resolve to find it. - -Visuddhi Magga
Last edited by kmaherali on Sat Dec 18, 2004 10:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
Miracles
During an interview on TV MHI said that there are no miracles in Islam except for the Quran. I think it is up to the believers to interpret that miracle as a "Living Quran." And that I believe includes Ginans which MHI has said are "Farmans."
Re: Miracles
I think it is important to understand the context in which he said that.al-azhar wrote:During an interview on TV MHI said that there are no miracles in Islam except for the Quran. I think it is up to the believers to interpret that miracle as a "Living Quran." And that I believe includes Ginans which MHI has said are "Farmans."
Roy Bonisteel asked MHI, "Is this a kind of divine authority?" to which he replied, "You have to be very careful not to confuse the concept of religious authority with divinity. The prophet himself never claimed any miracle of any sort. The only miracle in which you have in Islam is the Koran."
Obviously an interview such as Man Alive is very much a Zaheri context. In a Zaheri context MHI has always denied divinity or anything extra ordinary about him. But in Batini contexts he has admitted being divine and also has performed many miracles as alluded to in the various anecdotes of this forum.
The subject under discussion is the role of miracles in esoteric traditions which imply a Batini context.
Upanishads on inner enrichment.
The idea of fulfillment through inner enrichment or self-realization finds expression in the following quote from Upanishad - an example of strength in pluralism. Different traditions expressing the same idea in a different manner yet arrive at the same wisdom – contacts between different traditions reinforce wisdom of each tradition.
”Worshipping this Self in the world of Brahman, the gods obtained all worlds and all desires. Those who know this Self and realize this Self obtain all worlds and all desires.”
-Chandogya Upanishad
The great Muslim mystic expresses the richness of inner life compared to the external world in the following verse.
One springtime Rabi’a entered a house, and did not come out. A follower said to her: ‘Come outside, and see the beauties of the creation.’ Rabi’a said: ‘Come inside, and see the creator. If you see the creator, you become too preoccupied to look at the creation.’
-Attar: Rabi'a
***
Selflessness is the most subtle and difficult characteristic to observe. However, when we discover this characteristic for ourselves, we experience a sense of freedom that words cannot describe.
-Matthew Flickstein, Journey To The Center
Copyright Wisdom Publications
”Worshipping this Self in the world of Brahman, the gods obtained all worlds and all desires. Those who know this Self and realize this Self obtain all worlds and all desires.”
-Chandogya Upanishad
The great Muslim mystic expresses the richness of inner life compared to the external world in the following verse.
One springtime Rabi’a entered a house, and did not come out. A follower said to her: ‘Come outside, and see the beauties of the creation.’ Rabi’a said: ‘Come inside, and see the creator. If you see the creator, you become too preoccupied to look at the creation.’
-Attar: Rabi'a
***
Selflessness is the most subtle and difficult characteristic to observe. However, when we discover this characteristic for ourselves, we experience a sense of freedom that words cannot describe.
-Matthew Flickstein, Journey To The Center
Copyright Wisdom Publications
The following story expresses the folly in accepting a Murshid purely based upon curiosity aroused by miracles. Loyalty based upon witnessing a miracle does not last. What is enduring is a sincere attitude of search.
The Shaikh and a Pigeon
A friend of mine told me this story: When I was young I had a shaikh, one of the greatest human beings I have ever known. I had met him quite by accident. He lived in a small shack in a poor neighborhood. I had to deliver some medicine for my father's pharmacy. Once inside this man's quarters I realized I was in the presence of someone quite unusual. For one thing, he possessed the relics of several great shaikhs of different orders. The day I met him he was having a conversation with two other young men about my own age. Their names were Metin and Refik. After hearing their conversation I began to lose interest in the things that had occupied me. I wanted only to attend these conversations. The three of us were learning so much that we wished that more and more people could also hear these conversations.
We begged our sheikh to allow the size of our circle to increase. One day we were attending the prayers at a great mosque. It was the feast of Ashura, the twelfth of Muharram. We were just leaving the mosque when our teacher paused on the steps because he noticed that a pigeon had just dropped dead from the sky. He picked up the poor bird, which was totally lifeless, held it tenderly in his hands, breathed a long Huuuuuuu...and the bird came back to life and flew off into the sky. Well, this act did not go unnoticed and before long there were many people interested in our shaikh. Many of them asked to attend his conversations and our circle grew.
It was not long before we found that we had very little time with our beloved shaikh. He was too busy to see us, attending to the needs of so many people. Then one day, while doing the night prayer after our zhikr, our shaikh passed gas that was very loud and smelly.
People were astounded that this holy man could do such a thing. In a short period of time most of them had lost their faith in him and our circle returned to nearly the size it had been originally. One night when just the three of us were sitting together, our shaikh remarked: "You see my sons, those who come because of a pigeon, leave because of flatulence!"
From a book catalog put out by the brs. and srs. at the Threshold Society (www.sufism.org)...taken from Kabir Helminski's "The Knowing Heart"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Shaikh and a Pigeon
A friend of mine told me this story: When I was young I had a shaikh, one of the greatest human beings I have ever known. I had met him quite by accident. He lived in a small shack in a poor neighborhood. I had to deliver some medicine for my father's pharmacy. Once inside this man's quarters I realized I was in the presence of someone quite unusual. For one thing, he possessed the relics of several great shaikhs of different orders. The day I met him he was having a conversation with two other young men about my own age. Their names were Metin and Refik. After hearing their conversation I began to lose interest in the things that had occupied me. I wanted only to attend these conversations. The three of us were learning so much that we wished that more and more people could also hear these conversations.
We begged our sheikh to allow the size of our circle to increase. One day we were attending the prayers at a great mosque. It was the feast of Ashura, the twelfth of Muharram. We were just leaving the mosque when our teacher paused on the steps because he noticed that a pigeon had just dropped dead from the sky. He picked up the poor bird, which was totally lifeless, held it tenderly in his hands, breathed a long Huuuuuuu...and the bird came back to life and flew off into the sky. Well, this act did not go unnoticed and before long there were many people interested in our shaikh. Many of them asked to attend his conversations and our circle grew.
It was not long before we found that we had very little time with our beloved shaikh. He was too busy to see us, attending to the needs of so many people. Then one day, while doing the night prayer after our zhikr, our shaikh passed gas that was very loud and smelly.
People were astounded that this holy man could do such a thing. In a short period of time most of them had lost their faith in him and our circle returned to nearly the size it had been originally. One night when just the three of us were sitting together, our shaikh remarked: "You see my sons, those who come because of a pigeon, leave because of flatulence!"
From a book catalog put out by the brs. and srs. at the Threshold Society (www.sufism.org)...taken from Kabir Helminski's "The Knowing Heart"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child--our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
-Thich Nhat Hanh, "Miracle of Mindfulness"
From "365 Buddha: Daily Meditations
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child--our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
-Thich Nhat Hanh, "Miracle of Mindfulness"
From "365 Buddha: Daily Meditations
Create Your Own Miracles
Eight steps to bringing wonderful experiences into your life.
By Michael C. Rann and Elizabeth Rann Arrott
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/188/story_18819_1.html
"Are there really miracles?" Yes, of course, there are. All of us have heard of miracles in the form of physical healings that cannot be explained by medical science. There are also miracles when the perfect solution presents itself at just the right time. There are miracles when some action taken by a person puts him or her in just the right place and results in a greater good than ever seemed possible. There are miracles in finding the perfect job, the perfect mate, and/or money when it's most needed. Miracles happen through natural and normal circumstances, and the "new science" of quantum physics is proving that we are--every one of us--already wired for miracles. The reality is that every one of us can consciously take control and work to create a miracle or miracles in our lives. We are not victims of a random existence in a confusing and possibly hostile world. Life is for us, not against us. Not only is it possible to experience a dramatic healing or find the perfect solution to our problems, but it's also possible to express the dream or desire that we haven't dared pursue up to now and to learn how to bring such wonderful experiences into our lives more often.
To help get you started on the path of creating your own miracle, here are eight simple steps...
Be very clear.
You need to be very clear about the miracle you desire - about the good you want in your world. As you clearly visualize or imagine your miracle, focus only on the end result of what you want, not the means by which it comes about. Let the "how" be up to the Infinite Intelligence that's working for you in response to your thinking.
Expect the best.
We tend to attract that which we love, fear, or steadily expect. So expect the best, even when negative circumstances appear--in fact, especially when they appear. When we expect less than what we want, we get less than what we want. Remind yourself that you do deserve the good you desire. You deserve it by the right of your very existence. Consciously and consistently expect that everything is working to your greatest and highest good.
Let go of fear.
Fear is faith in something negative. Be watchful about your thinking. Your thoughts magnetically attract others like themselves. When you think negatively, your mind will go on a stream-of-consciousness journey into all sorts of related realms of negativity until you consciously stop yourself. All of this will block your miracle. Of course, you can't eliminate every single negative thought for the rest of your life. But all you need is 51% faith and your life will begin to turn in the right direction. When you realize this truth, you will begin to feel empowered, and your faith will become more and more self-generating.
Open your mind to all possibilities.
When we open to a greater flow of Universal Power and Intelligence in our world, we also need to let go of the way we want it. Although miracles always unfold in a very natural manner, they often come through unexpected channels. Whenever we hold tight, mentally or physically, to having things unfold "our way," we run the risk of delaying our good, diminishing it or even blocking it all together. "What" is up to you. "How" is up to Spirit.
See yourself as you want to be.
If you desire health, you need to see yourself healthy and filled with energy and enthusiasm for life. If you desire abundance, you need to see yourself enjoying an abundant lifestyle. And so forth. This does not mean living in a state of denial. On the contrary, you are clear about the facts of your present situation and handle what needs to be handled. But while you are doing all of this, your thinking about where you are headed is focused on what you want, not on what you don't want or where you are today. Keep the power.
Don't talk about it. Keep your miracle secret. To share it prematurely is to dissipate some of the Power of your idea. Further, a negative or envious person will contribute a certain amount of negative energy, either spoken or unspoken, around your idea. The integrity of the relationship between you and Spirit with respect to the unfoldment of your miracle must not be violated. Wait until it is absolutely necessary to share your idea in order for it to continue unfolding. Even then, share as little as possible with as few people as possible.
Do what needs to be done by you.
Through the Law of Attraction, many good things move into our lives, apparently unbidden. But almost always, there are things that you need to do and choices you need to make. When you are very clear about what it is you want or need, your mind becomes calm and focused. This, in turn, provides a clear channel for the guidance and direction you need in making your choices and decisions about what to do--whether it's choosing the right doctor or taking the right job.
Pray. Pray often. Prayer works.
Prayer is effective whether we're praying for ourselves, praying for others, or being prayed for by others. You don't have to be religious for your prayers to be effective. A few suggestions:
Pray at a time and in a quiet place where you won't be disturbed.
Allow yourself to feel empathy, love, and compassion for yourself or for whomever you are praying.
Pray with a complete expectation that your prayer is being answered and that the desired result is right now in the process of manifestation.
After you pray, "let go and let God." At that point, your job in the creative process is complete. Your continuing work is to guard your thinking. Creatively praying several times a day is a major key to success in obtaining your desires.
Eight steps to bringing wonderful experiences into your life.
By Michael C. Rann and Elizabeth Rann Arrott
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/188/story_18819_1.html
"Are there really miracles?" Yes, of course, there are. All of us have heard of miracles in the form of physical healings that cannot be explained by medical science. There are also miracles when the perfect solution presents itself at just the right time. There are miracles when some action taken by a person puts him or her in just the right place and results in a greater good than ever seemed possible. There are miracles in finding the perfect job, the perfect mate, and/or money when it's most needed. Miracles happen through natural and normal circumstances, and the "new science" of quantum physics is proving that we are--every one of us--already wired for miracles. The reality is that every one of us can consciously take control and work to create a miracle or miracles in our lives. We are not victims of a random existence in a confusing and possibly hostile world. Life is for us, not against us. Not only is it possible to experience a dramatic healing or find the perfect solution to our problems, but it's also possible to express the dream or desire that we haven't dared pursue up to now and to learn how to bring such wonderful experiences into our lives more often.
To help get you started on the path of creating your own miracle, here are eight simple steps...
Be very clear.
You need to be very clear about the miracle you desire - about the good you want in your world. As you clearly visualize or imagine your miracle, focus only on the end result of what you want, not the means by which it comes about. Let the "how" be up to the Infinite Intelligence that's working for you in response to your thinking.
Expect the best.
We tend to attract that which we love, fear, or steadily expect. So expect the best, even when negative circumstances appear--in fact, especially when they appear. When we expect less than what we want, we get less than what we want. Remind yourself that you do deserve the good you desire. You deserve it by the right of your very existence. Consciously and consistently expect that everything is working to your greatest and highest good.
Let go of fear.
Fear is faith in something negative. Be watchful about your thinking. Your thoughts magnetically attract others like themselves. When you think negatively, your mind will go on a stream-of-consciousness journey into all sorts of related realms of negativity until you consciously stop yourself. All of this will block your miracle. Of course, you can't eliminate every single negative thought for the rest of your life. But all you need is 51% faith and your life will begin to turn in the right direction. When you realize this truth, you will begin to feel empowered, and your faith will become more and more self-generating.
Open your mind to all possibilities.
When we open to a greater flow of Universal Power and Intelligence in our world, we also need to let go of the way we want it. Although miracles always unfold in a very natural manner, they often come through unexpected channels. Whenever we hold tight, mentally or physically, to having things unfold "our way," we run the risk of delaying our good, diminishing it or even blocking it all together. "What" is up to you. "How" is up to Spirit.
See yourself as you want to be.
If you desire health, you need to see yourself healthy and filled with energy and enthusiasm for life. If you desire abundance, you need to see yourself enjoying an abundant lifestyle. And so forth. This does not mean living in a state of denial. On the contrary, you are clear about the facts of your present situation and handle what needs to be handled. But while you are doing all of this, your thinking about where you are headed is focused on what you want, not on what you don't want or where you are today. Keep the power.
Don't talk about it. Keep your miracle secret. To share it prematurely is to dissipate some of the Power of your idea. Further, a negative or envious person will contribute a certain amount of negative energy, either spoken or unspoken, around your idea. The integrity of the relationship between you and Spirit with respect to the unfoldment of your miracle must not be violated. Wait until it is absolutely necessary to share your idea in order for it to continue unfolding. Even then, share as little as possible with as few people as possible.
Do what needs to be done by you.
Through the Law of Attraction, many good things move into our lives, apparently unbidden. But almost always, there are things that you need to do and choices you need to make. When you are very clear about what it is you want or need, your mind becomes calm and focused. This, in turn, provides a clear channel for the guidance and direction you need in making your choices and decisions about what to do--whether it's choosing the right doctor or taking the right job.
Pray. Pray often. Prayer works.
Prayer is effective whether we're praying for ourselves, praying for others, or being prayed for by others. You don't have to be religious for your prayers to be effective. A few suggestions:
Pray at a time and in a quiet place where you won't be disturbed.
Allow yourself to feel empathy, love, and compassion for yourself or for whomever you are praying.
Pray with a complete expectation that your prayer is being answered and that the desired result is right now in the process of manifestation.
After you pray, "let go and let God." At that point, your job in the creative process is complete. Your continuing work is to guard your thinking. Creatively praying several times a day is a major key to success in obtaining your desires.
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sun ... oc-sbd.htm
Developing Our Hidden Potentials
By Sarah Belle Dougherty
Psychism, with all its allurements and all its dangers, is necessarily developing among you, and you must beware lest the Psychic outruns the Manasic [mental] and Spiritual development. Psychic capacities held perfectly under control, checked and directed by the Manasic principle, are valuable aids in development. But these capacities running riot, controlling instead of controlled, using instead of being used, lead the Student into the most dangerous delusions and the certainty of moral destruction. Watch therefore carefully this development, inevitable in your race and evolution-period, so that it may finally work for good and not for evil. -- H. P. Blavatsky
Today there is a proliferation of techniques for exploring and developing the abilities latent in every person, whether stemming from traditional sources or modern research. Books, tapes, researchers, and teachers hold forth the promise of achieving personal growth, health, happiness, success, powers, and enlightenment through a great variety of means. Many open minds recognize that, in the West particularly, we have been needlessly self-limited and that ordinary people are capable of what heretofore was considered extraordinary or impossible. At the same time we are beginning to realize ever more strongly that oneness is the fundamental reality, whether in the human, global, or cosmic sphere.
Clearly our ordinary awareness, focused on the physical world, is only one aspect of our consciousness. When viewed as our only mode of existence, it tends to limit us to a very narrow field out of the totality of who we are. Considering each person as a spiritual consciousness-center expressing itself through a material form, human development means the purification and training of our intermediate nature so it can transmit undistorted the consciousness of the divine self and, in the process, evolve toward divinity. Our spiritual and divine aspects are relatively immortal, while less evolved aspects including emotions and the lower mind disperse after death. This situation has important implications for what traits and skills we decide to cultivate. Because psychomental and astral powers do not survive intact from life to life, remaining merely as influences and tendencies, to spend our lives perfecting such abilities is ultimately futile. On the other hand, spiritual attributes such as love, intuitive perception, universality, and compassion are not only the most powerful intrinsically, but also the most important to human evolution since they represent permanent growth.
Throughout the ages people have sought to bring forth more of their inner potential, using in this quest many types of meditation as well as yogic, mystic, ascetic, and other practices. Concentrating the mind, becoming unattached psychologically to objects of the senses, penetrating beneath the superficial material aspects of oneself and the world, as well as special techniques belonging to various schools or traditions, often result in such phenomena as visions, voices or sounds, stimulation of the chakras, out-of-body experiences, speaking in tongues, trances, ecstasy, communication or merging with other "beings," and feelings of union with spiritual reality. These may be inevitable and natural byproducts of a given state of human evolution, but more commonly they are induced by stimulation of psychophysical triggers. For example, specialized breathing, chemicals, or sensory deprivation or stimulation can produce temporary changes in consciousness or its content, but these do not reflect the spiritual condition of our everyday self. There is a marked contrast between such transitory manifestations and long-term inner development.
These peripheral experiences, however, are often considered the sine qua non of personal evolution. Mistaking the by-products of growth for growth itself is illustrated by a statement of R. Gordon Wasson:
The advantage of the mushroom is that it puts many, if not everyone, within reach of this state without having to suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John [of Revelation]. It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. -- The Road to Eleusis, p. 19
Yet it is the very "mortifications," intelligently chosen and applied, which lead to permanent transformation of self, the real process of growth from the individual's starting point to a more universal one, not the visions and supersensory experiences that many seekers experience on the way to their spiritual goal. The noble eightfold path of the Buddha, for example, which is his basic recommendation for spiritual growth and enlightenment, emphasizes a way of living, thinking, and contemplation to be practiced with discipline and mindfulness of the inner goal and compassion. Artificially induced states may be indistinguishable from naturally occurring ones, but inner growth represents a way of life, not isolated experiences.
Many mystics and spiritual teachers have held that abnormal phenomena and powers are actually one of the greatest stumbling blocks along the path of spiritual development. St. John of the Cross, for instance, held that these phenomena, whether acting on the physical, mental, or spiritual organs of perception, distract the aspirant from his search for God and often engender spiritual pride and attachment. Such experiences can be addictive, leading the searcher away from the spiritual and back to the phenomenal and egocentric. They may also unbalance and deceive the aspirant who takes his experiences at face value or uses their content as a guide. Phenomena may come either from God or from the Devil, to use Christian parlance, and it is impossible for even the most sincere recipient to distinguish at times the one from the other. They may even be entirely imaginary or self-induced, as St. John of the Cross points out regarding interior voices:
I am appalled at what happens in these days -- namely, when some soul with the very smallest experience of meditation, if it be conscious of certain locutions of this kind in some state of recollection, at once christens them all as coming from God, and assumes that this is the case, saying: "God said to me . . ."; "God answered me . . ."; whereas it is not so at all, but, as we have said, it is for the most part they who are saying these things to themselves.
And, over and above this, the desire which people have for locutions, and the pleasure which comes to their spirits from them, lead them to make answer to themselves and then to think that it is God Who is answering them and speaking to them. -- Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. 2, ch. 29, sec. 4-5
Generally such experiences originate in one's own being, and few can distinguish with certainty whether these are coming from the spiritual or from the limited mental/emotional and psychic parts of themselves.
There are, moreover, positive and negative forces in nature on every plane of existence. Those transcending the physical world generally enter the astral or psychic plane -- a slightly more ethereal form of matter which contains influences and entities ranging from the most degraded to the very lofty. This so-called astral light, the astral body of the earth, is the medium for transmitting forces between more ethereal planes and the physical world, as well as being in its lower reaches the region where people's concreted lower psychological energies (kama-rupas, "shades," or "spirits") remain to dissipate after death. It contains the impress of all the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humankind since the dawn of time. These akasic "records" exist in this more tenuous astral atmosphere which penetrates every portion of the earth and of the individual lives composing it. Impressions are drawn to individuals by affinity and similarity of vibration: all of our thoughts and feelings come to us through this medium, and are thrown back into it again after they have been used.
Most people, unused to functioning self-consciously in the astral sphere, are even more likely to be deceived by appearances and become confused there than in the physical world, where confusion and lack of self-control are common enough. Doorways once opened into inner realms can be difficult to close if unwanted forces and beings impinge on the searcher. Only those who have completely mastered similar aspects of themselves can control and judge correctly these nonphysical forces and entities.
Centuries of denying occult forces and planes of existence have left Westerners ignorant of the inner aspects of nature and man, and in many cases unable to evaluate accurately the consequences of their actions in these realms. There is danger in adopting indiscriminately on an experimental basis very powerful techniques, some of which may contain destructive elements even in their native setting. In the words of an Eastern proverb, only a spider's web separates white magic from black: the same training, techniques, and abilities are used in both cases, the only differences being the motive, uses, and results of development. Along these lines H. P. Blavatsky warned her students about the ignorant use of meditation techniques:
Genuine concentration and meditation, conscious and cautious, upon one's lower self in the light of the inner divine man and the Paramitas, is an excellent thing. But to "sit for Yoga," with only a superficial and often distorted knowledge of the real practice, is almost invariably fatal; for ten to one the student will either develop mediumistic powers in himself or lose time and get disgusted both with practice and theory. Before one rushes into such a dangerous experiment . . . he would do well to learn at least the difference between the two aspects of "Magic," the White or Divine, and the Black or Devilish, and assure himself that by "sitting for Yoga," with no experience, as well as with no guide to show him the dangers, he does not cross daily and hourly the boundaries of the Divine to fall into the Satanic. -- Collected Writings 12:603-4
Spiritual literature and traditions emphasize the importance of competent guidance in self-development. For millennia there have been centers of high spiritual learning all over the globe. Said to have been founded several million years ago by divine beings in conjunction with the most spiritually advanced of mankind, these Mystery schools have served several functions: to preserve through increasingly material eras the wisdom of the divine instructors of early mankind; to benefit humanity as a whole by providing a source of spiritual and intellectual light and a link with the spiritual forces of the planet and cosmos; and to help those whose inner strivings, aspirations, and self-transformation allow their personal evolution to be quickened by training through systematic methods.
We know very little about the teachings and methods of the ancient Mysteries. The oldest records -- generally in veiled language -- go back only a few thousand years, and most of the institutions we know of had become secularized and degenerate to various degrees. The theme of these schools was the second birth, the bringing forth of the inner spiritual person freed from thraldom to the physical body and lower psychological nature. Doubtless various means were used to stimulate and accelerate spiritual unfoldment, including many of those coming increasingly into vogue today. At the same time these public Mysteries, though shrouded in secrecy, were not necessarily the esoteric Mysteries, which might or might not be connected with an exoteric site.
The inner Mysteries were the training ground of the few who wished to consecrate their life to spiritual development, and had the dedication and ability to do so. Here the emphasis was on becoming rather than on a particular visionary experience, altered states, psychic powers, or communication of intellectual knowledge, though these were doubtless involved. The quality of the individual and his ability to transcend the limited aspects of himself or herself was the determining factor. These inner Mysteries have never disappeared and are said to still function actively, though secretly, all over the earth. They are found by individuals whose evolutionary development, high moral character, and selfless aspiration bring them into sympathetic inner, and perhaps outer, contact with those forming this ancient spiritual network.
As in the ancient Mysteries, the heart of human evolution remains the second birth: the growth of the everyday self until its limitations are utterly transcended and it is self-consciously reborn. Each person must decide what the appropriate role of various techniques is for him or her in this process. We need to ask ourselves, however, what we really want and how it can best be achieved. For many the criterion is "does it work?," not whether their motive or the ultimate result is universal and constructive. Often people are searching for more powerful tools to achieve the same limited and sometimes destructive ends. Self-oriented methods, however useful, are an expansion of egocentric, worldly concerns into other realms of being, and as such are not means to inner growth. Even seeking spiritual development to escape "the wheel of existence" or for our own gratification is ultimately an expression of selfishness and egoism, though on a more spiritual plane. It is easy to become caught up in the glamour of supernormal abilities and states both as ends in themselves and as means to personal powers or success, material or spiritual. But human development is a matter of inner discipline and growth, which in its early phases may or may not result in phenomenal signs, psychic powers, personal success, or dramatic alterations in our state of consciousness. It ultimately depends on the accomplishment of the outwardly unspectacular tasks of daily life, on shaping our character, and on making altruism the basis of existence. In this context the various powers and states of consciousness will in time evolve forth naturally.
Today assimilation of a broader range of knowledge from Oriental and traditional sources is beginning to affect many Occidental disciplines, and at the same time psychic faculties are becoming widespread as more people find themselves developing such abilities spontaneously or with relative ease. If we can realize that attaining nonordinary states and powers in and of itself is not an emblem of inner growth and progress -- that the path to becoming truly human, and ultimately godlike, is made of compassion and of centering of consciousness in the more universal aspects of ourselves while making the everyday ego our servant instead of our master -- then the entry of new-old practices into modern life may herald a return to the more spiritual atmosphere of the inner Mysteries that influenced so beneficially certain civilizations of ancient times.
(From Sunrise magazine, April/May 2001; copyright © 2001 Theosophical University Press)
Developing Our Hidden Potentials
By Sarah Belle Dougherty
Psychism, with all its allurements and all its dangers, is necessarily developing among you, and you must beware lest the Psychic outruns the Manasic [mental] and Spiritual development. Psychic capacities held perfectly under control, checked and directed by the Manasic principle, are valuable aids in development. But these capacities running riot, controlling instead of controlled, using instead of being used, lead the Student into the most dangerous delusions and the certainty of moral destruction. Watch therefore carefully this development, inevitable in your race and evolution-period, so that it may finally work for good and not for evil. -- H. P. Blavatsky
Today there is a proliferation of techniques for exploring and developing the abilities latent in every person, whether stemming from traditional sources or modern research. Books, tapes, researchers, and teachers hold forth the promise of achieving personal growth, health, happiness, success, powers, and enlightenment through a great variety of means. Many open minds recognize that, in the West particularly, we have been needlessly self-limited and that ordinary people are capable of what heretofore was considered extraordinary or impossible. At the same time we are beginning to realize ever more strongly that oneness is the fundamental reality, whether in the human, global, or cosmic sphere.
Clearly our ordinary awareness, focused on the physical world, is only one aspect of our consciousness. When viewed as our only mode of existence, it tends to limit us to a very narrow field out of the totality of who we are. Considering each person as a spiritual consciousness-center expressing itself through a material form, human development means the purification and training of our intermediate nature so it can transmit undistorted the consciousness of the divine self and, in the process, evolve toward divinity. Our spiritual and divine aspects are relatively immortal, while less evolved aspects including emotions and the lower mind disperse after death. This situation has important implications for what traits and skills we decide to cultivate. Because psychomental and astral powers do not survive intact from life to life, remaining merely as influences and tendencies, to spend our lives perfecting such abilities is ultimately futile. On the other hand, spiritual attributes such as love, intuitive perception, universality, and compassion are not only the most powerful intrinsically, but also the most important to human evolution since they represent permanent growth.
Throughout the ages people have sought to bring forth more of their inner potential, using in this quest many types of meditation as well as yogic, mystic, ascetic, and other practices. Concentrating the mind, becoming unattached psychologically to objects of the senses, penetrating beneath the superficial material aspects of oneself and the world, as well as special techniques belonging to various schools or traditions, often result in such phenomena as visions, voices or sounds, stimulation of the chakras, out-of-body experiences, speaking in tongues, trances, ecstasy, communication or merging with other "beings," and feelings of union with spiritual reality. These may be inevitable and natural byproducts of a given state of human evolution, but more commonly they are induced by stimulation of psychophysical triggers. For example, specialized breathing, chemicals, or sensory deprivation or stimulation can produce temporary changes in consciousness or its content, but these do not reflect the spiritual condition of our everyday self. There is a marked contrast between such transitory manifestations and long-term inner development.
These peripheral experiences, however, are often considered the sine qua non of personal evolution. Mistaking the by-products of growth for growth itself is illustrated by a statement of R. Gordon Wasson:
The advantage of the mushroom is that it puts many, if not everyone, within reach of this state without having to suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John [of Revelation]. It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. -- The Road to Eleusis, p. 19
Yet it is the very "mortifications," intelligently chosen and applied, which lead to permanent transformation of self, the real process of growth from the individual's starting point to a more universal one, not the visions and supersensory experiences that many seekers experience on the way to their spiritual goal. The noble eightfold path of the Buddha, for example, which is his basic recommendation for spiritual growth and enlightenment, emphasizes a way of living, thinking, and contemplation to be practiced with discipline and mindfulness of the inner goal and compassion. Artificially induced states may be indistinguishable from naturally occurring ones, but inner growth represents a way of life, not isolated experiences.
Many mystics and spiritual teachers have held that abnormal phenomena and powers are actually one of the greatest stumbling blocks along the path of spiritual development. St. John of the Cross, for instance, held that these phenomena, whether acting on the physical, mental, or spiritual organs of perception, distract the aspirant from his search for God and often engender spiritual pride and attachment. Such experiences can be addictive, leading the searcher away from the spiritual and back to the phenomenal and egocentric. They may also unbalance and deceive the aspirant who takes his experiences at face value or uses their content as a guide. Phenomena may come either from God or from the Devil, to use Christian parlance, and it is impossible for even the most sincere recipient to distinguish at times the one from the other. They may even be entirely imaginary or self-induced, as St. John of the Cross points out regarding interior voices:
I am appalled at what happens in these days -- namely, when some soul with the very smallest experience of meditation, if it be conscious of certain locutions of this kind in some state of recollection, at once christens them all as coming from God, and assumes that this is the case, saying: "God said to me . . ."; "God answered me . . ."; whereas it is not so at all, but, as we have said, it is for the most part they who are saying these things to themselves.
And, over and above this, the desire which people have for locutions, and the pleasure which comes to their spirits from them, lead them to make answer to themselves and then to think that it is God Who is answering them and speaking to them. -- Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. 2, ch. 29, sec. 4-5
Generally such experiences originate in one's own being, and few can distinguish with certainty whether these are coming from the spiritual or from the limited mental/emotional and psychic parts of themselves.
There are, moreover, positive and negative forces in nature on every plane of existence. Those transcending the physical world generally enter the astral or psychic plane -- a slightly more ethereal form of matter which contains influences and entities ranging from the most degraded to the very lofty. This so-called astral light, the astral body of the earth, is the medium for transmitting forces between more ethereal planes and the physical world, as well as being in its lower reaches the region where people's concreted lower psychological energies (kama-rupas, "shades," or "spirits") remain to dissipate after death. It contains the impress of all the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humankind since the dawn of time. These akasic "records" exist in this more tenuous astral atmosphere which penetrates every portion of the earth and of the individual lives composing it. Impressions are drawn to individuals by affinity and similarity of vibration: all of our thoughts and feelings come to us through this medium, and are thrown back into it again after they have been used.
Most people, unused to functioning self-consciously in the astral sphere, are even more likely to be deceived by appearances and become confused there than in the physical world, where confusion and lack of self-control are common enough. Doorways once opened into inner realms can be difficult to close if unwanted forces and beings impinge on the searcher. Only those who have completely mastered similar aspects of themselves can control and judge correctly these nonphysical forces and entities.
Centuries of denying occult forces and planes of existence have left Westerners ignorant of the inner aspects of nature and man, and in many cases unable to evaluate accurately the consequences of their actions in these realms. There is danger in adopting indiscriminately on an experimental basis very powerful techniques, some of which may contain destructive elements even in their native setting. In the words of an Eastern proverb, only a spider's web separates white magic from black: the same training, techniques, and abilities are used in both cases, the only differences being the motive, uses, and results of development. Along these lines H. P. Blavatsky warned her students about the ignorant use of meditation techniques:
Genuine concentration and meditation, conscious and cautious, upon one's lower self in the light of the inner divine man and the Paramitas, is an excellent thing. But to "sit for Yoga," with only a superficial and often distorted knowledge of the real practice, is almost invariably fatal; for ten to one the student will either develop mediumistic powers in himself or lose time and get disgusted both with practice and theory. Before one rushes into such a dangerous experiment . . . he would do well to learn at least the difference between the two aspects of "Magic," the White or Divine, and the Black or Devilish, and assure himself that by "sitting for Yoga," with no experience, as well as with no guide to show him the dangers, he does not cross daily and hourly the boundaries of the Divine to fall into the Satanic. -- Collected Writings 12:603-4
Spiritual literature and traditions emphasize the importance of competent guidance in self-development. For millennia there have been centers of high spiritual learning all over the globe. Said to have been founded several million years ago by divine beings in conjunction with the most spiritually advanced of mankind, these Mystery schools have served several functions: to preserve through increasingly material eras the wisdom of the divine instructors of early mankind; to benefit humanity as a whole by providing a source of spiritual and intellectual light and a link with the spiritual forces of the planet and cosmos; and to help those whose inner strivings, aspirations, and self-transformation allow their personal evolution to be quickened by training through systematic methods.
We know very little about the teachings and methods of the ancient Mysteries. The oldest records -- generally in veiled language -- go back only a few thousand years, and most of the institutions we know of had become secularized and degenerate to various degrees. The theme of these schools was the second birth, the bringing forth of the inner spiritual person freed from thraldom to the physical body and lower psychological nature. Doubtless various means were used to stimulate and accelerate spiritual unfoldment, including many of those coming increasingly into vogue today. At the same time these public Mysteries, though shrouded in secrecy, were not necessarily the esoteric Mysteries, which might or might not be connected with an exoteric site.
The inner Mysteries were the training ground of the few who wished to consecrate their life to spiritual development, and had the dedication and ability to do so. Here the emphasis was on becoming rather than on a particular visionary experience, altered states, psychic powers, or communication of intellectual knowledge, though these were doubtless involved. The quality of the individual and his ability to transcend the limited aspects of himself or herself was the determining factor. These inner Mysteries have never disappeared and are said to still function actively, though secretly, all over the earth. They are found by individuals whose evolutionary development, high moral character, and selfless aspiration bring them into sympathetic inner, and perhaps outer, contact with those forming this ancient spiritual network.
As in the ancient Mysteries, the heart of human evolution remains the second birth: the growth of the everyday self until its limitations are utterly transcended and it is self-consciously reborn. Each person must decide what the appropriate role of various techniques is for him or her in this process. We need to ask ourselves, however, what we really want and how it can best be achieved. For many the criterion is "does it work?," not whether their motive or the ultimate result is universal and constructive. Often people are searching for more powerful tools to achieve the same limited and sometimes destructive ends. Self-oriented methods, however useful, are an expansion of egocentric, worldly concerns into other realms of being, and as such are not means to inner growth. Even seeking spiritual development to escape "the wheel of existence" or for our own gratification is ultimately an expression of selfishness and egoism, though on a more spiritual plane. It is easy to become caught up in the glamour of supernormal abilities and states both as ends in themselves and as means to personal powers or success, material or spiritual. But human development is a matter of inner discipline and growth, which in its early phases may or may not result in phenomenal signs, psychic powers, personal success, or dramatic alterations in our state of consciousness. It ultimately depends on the accomplishment of the outwardly unspectacular tasks of daily life, on shaping our character, and on making altruism the basis of existence. In this context the various powers and states of consciousness will in time evolve forth naturally.
Today assimilation of a broader range of knowledge from Oriental and traditional sources is beginning to affect many Occidental disciplines, and at the same time psychic faculties are becoming widespread as more people find themselves developing such abilities spontaneously or with relative ease. If we can realize that attaining nonordinary states and powers in and of itself is not an emblem of inner growth and progress -- that the path to becoming truly human, and ultimately godlike, is made of compassion and of centering of consciousness in the more universal aspects of ourselves while making the everyday ego our servant instead of our master -- then the entry of new-old practices into modern life may herald a return to the more spiritual atmosphere of the inner Mysteries that influenced so beneficially certain civilizations of ancient times.
(From Sunrise magazine, April/May 2001; copyright © 2001 Theosophical University Press)
A God of Surprises
Miracles don't prove anything, but they are a reminder that the world isn't always what we expect it to be.
By Dwight Longenecker
One summer I hitchhiked to Jerusalem from England, staying in monasteries along the way. Halfway through France I stopped at the town of Nevers, where Saint Bernadette (who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes) spent her days as a nun. She died in 1879. Her body is supposed to be uncorrupted and is still on display in the convent chapel.
I have to admit I like this kind of thing. I'm interested in healings, exorcisms, and near-death experiences. I'm a sucker for any kind of miracle story, from the missionary rescued from a well by an angel to a guy who sees the Virgin Mary on a window shade. I'm fascinated by the Shroud of Turin and the blood of St. Januarius. I sometimes worry about my predilection for the paranormal. I fear it is the same sort of instinct that makes me slow down at the scene of a car crash.
So on a summer afternoon, a truck driver dropped me off a few hundred yards from the convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. After finding my room, I made my way down to the dining hall. Everyone was chatting away in French, when suddenly a woman sat down next to me and flashed a big smile. In an accent redolent of the American South, she drawled, 'Ah hope you won't mahnd if ah sit here.'
'Please. Be my guest.'
'My name is Peggy Jane. The sisters asked me to sit here with you since I speak English.'
Peggy Jane told me she was from Alabama and used to be a Southern Baptist. She became a Catholic because she'd had a vision of St. Bernadette. After supper Peggy Jane took me on a personal guided tour of the convent. We saw the room where the saint died in 1879, and Peggy Jane recounted in a whisper the death agonies of the young woman. Then we went outside to the tomb of Bernadette, where I heard all about the exhumation process.
Peggy Jane explained that she knew all about this stuff because her daddy was an undertaker in Mobile. I learned how the exhumation was certified by doctors, lawyers and the town mayor. How on two separate occasions ten years apart a fragrance greeted those in attendance when the coffin was opened. When examined, Bernadette's body remained unspoiled despite the damp climate and the lack of embalming.
Peggy Jane and I entered the neo-Gothic convent chapel, and there she was. Like something out of a Disney film, Bernadette lay in a glass coffin wearing her nun's habit. Her face and hands looked perfect, but they've been encased in a skin of pink wax. The cadaver is inspected now and again, Peggy Jane told me, and although the skin is shrunken and discolored-after more than a hundred years-Bernadette is still intact.
The next morning I shurgged on my backpack and was about to hit the open road when Peggy Jane trotted over. "Before you go I want you to spend time with Bernadette."
So I took my backpack off and went back into the chapel. I knelt down and asked for God's blessing on my journey that day. Then the mass ended and as I was sitting in the silence I smelled this wonderful, intense fragrance of flowers. I looked around. There weren't any flowers anywhere. Outside Peggy Jane asked how it was with Bernadette. I told her about the fragrance, and she beamed, "You have been granted a great grace. You have experienced the odor of sanctity. Many people experience this while praying with Bernadette." She took my hand, and looked me in the eye. "Please remember to pray for me in Jerusalem." I did.
I don't know what happened. Maybe the cleaning lady had a spray can with 'Odor of Sanctity' on the label and she gave the chapel a shot every morning. In any case, I'm interested because it matches up with other stories. There are lots of accounts down through the ages in both Catholic and Orthodox circles, of the odor of sanctity, corpses that exude perfume instead of putrefaction. There's an Orthodox monk in a Syrian monastery, for instance, whose body oozed fragrant healing oil for a couple of decades.
I'm interested not because I am particularly credulous or because I think miracles prove anything. In fact, I'm interested for almost the opposite reason. While I do believe in miracles, and I'm prepared to accept that such phenomena are miraculous, I'm interested in the apparent randomness of it all.
If this is a sign of holiness, why don't all saints smell good when their coffins are opened? Why should Bernadette's body be uncorrupted but not St. Thérèse's for instance? It is all rather wonderful, but like most wonderful things, there's not much rhyme or reason to it all. It doesn't prove anything. The rebel in me likes anything that upsets the status quo. Surely the bizarre is always fascinating and fun, and yet if you mention such experiences in the presence of educated liberals you definitely commit a social error.
The turned-up nose from tasteful folk indicates why weird religious events are ultimately interesting. The paranormal is fascinating because it introduces the unknown and the unexpected to a society that is desperate to keep the material borders intact and the spiritual realm at bay.
Tasteful and educated people, above all, want their physical, suburban world to stay just where it is. They want religion (like everything else) to be tidy and organized. Uncorrupted bodies, angels, and supernatural fragrances are wild cards. They are too zany and unpredictable for those who want their religion cut-and-dried.
I like the miraculous because it smells authentic. What good is religion if it doesn't upset our assumptions and make us think again? Wherever religion is fervent, it allows for the miraculous. Wherever religion is real, it allows for the miraculous. Miracles don't prove a religion's validity or truth, but they do indicate some kind of transaction between the material and the spiritual worlds.
Miracles are also authentic because they attract ordinary folks. I am suspicious of any religion that is the refuge of only the educated and affluent. A religion that excludes ordinary people is more like a set of table manners than a religion.
Finally, I like the kooky end of religion because it reveals a God of surprises. When a body is uncorrupted or people smell flowers when they should smell putrefaction, it's kind of like a divine joke. I think God likes practical jokes. He likes the effect of tricks. He likes upsetting our smug, preconceived mindset about the nature of the physical world. Maybe miracles are given not to prove anything, but simply to remind us that the physical world is not so solid and real and dependable as we think. It's all much more rubbery than that--and more unexpected.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/128/story_12897.html
Miracles don't prove anything, but they are a reminder that the world isn't always what we expect it to be.
By Dwight Longenecker
One summer I hitchhiked to Jerusalem from England, staying in monasteries along the way. Halfway through France I stopped at the town of Nevers, where Saint Bernadette (who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes) spent her days as a nun. She died in 1879. Her body is supposed to be uncorrupted and is still on display in the convent chapel.
I have to admit I like this kind of thing. I'm interested in healings, exorcisms, and near-death experiences. I'm a sucker for any kind of miracle story, from the missionary rescued from a well by an angel to a guy who sees the Virgin Mary on a window shade. I'm fascinated by the Shroud of Turin and the blood of St. Januarius. I sometimes worry about my predilection for the paranormal. I fear it is the same sort of instinct that makes me slow down at the scene of a car crash.
So on a summer afternoon, a truck driver dropped me off a few hundred yards from the convent of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. After finding my room, I made my way down to the dining hall. Everyone was chatting away in French, when suddenly a woman sat down next to me and flashed a big smile. In an accent redolent of the American South, she drawled, 'Ah hope you won't mahnd if ah sit here.'
'Please. Be my guest.'
'My name is Peggy Jane. The sisters asked me to sit here with you since I speak English.'
Peggy Jane told me she was from Alabama and used to be a Southern Baptist. She became a Catholic because she'd had a vision of St. Bernadette. After supper Peggy Jane took me on a personal guided tour of the convent. We saw the room where the saint died in 1879, and Peggy Jane recounted in a whisper the death agonies of the young woman. Then we went outside to the tomb of Bernadette, where I heard all about the exhumation process.
Peggy Jane explained that she knew all about this stuff because her daddy was an undertaker in Mobile. I learned how the exhumation was certified by doctors, lawyers and the town mayor. How on two separate occasions ten years apart a fragrance greeted those in attendance when the coffin was opened. When examined, Bernadette's body remained unspoiled despite the damp climate and the lack of embalming.
Peggy Jane and I entered the neo-Gothic convent chapel, and there she was. Like something out of a Disney film, Bernadette lay in a glass coffin wearing her nun's habit. Her face and hands looked perfect, but they've been encased in a skin of pink wax. The cadaver is inspected now and again, Peggy Jane told me, and although the skin is shrunken and discolored-after more than a hundred years-Bernadette is still intact.
The next morning I shurgged on my backpack and was about to hit the open road when Peggy Jane trotted over. "Before you go I want you to spend time with Bernadette."
So I took my backpack off and went back into the chapel. I knelt down and asked for God's blessing on my journey that day. Then the mass ended and as I was sitting in the silence I smelled this wonderful, intense fragrance of flowers. I looked around. There weren't any flowers anywhere. Outside Peggy Jane asked how it was with Bernadette. I told her about the fragrance, and she beamed, "You have been granted a great grace. You have experienced the odor of sanctity. Many people experience this while praying with Bernadette." She took my hand, and looked me in the eye. "Please remember to pray for me in Jerusalem." I did.
I don't know what happened. Maybe the cleaning lady had a spray can with 'Odor of Sanctity' on the label and she gave the chapel a shot every morning. In any case, I'm interested because it matches up with other stories. There are lots of accounts down through the ages in both Catholic and Orthodox circles, of the odor of sanctity, corpses that exude perfume instead of putrefaction. There's an Orthodox monk in a Syrian monastery, for instance, whose body oozed fragrant healing oil for a couple of decades.
I'm interested not because I am particularly credulous or because I think miracles prove anything. In fact, I'm interested for almost the opposite reason. While I do believe in miracles, and I'm prepared to accept that such phenomena are miraculous, I'm interested in the apparent randomness of it all.
If this is a sign of holiness, why don't all saints smell good when their coffins are opened? Why should Bernadette's body be uncorrupted but not St. Thérèse's for instance? It is all rather wonderful, but like most wonderful things, there's not much rhyme or reason to it all. It doesn't prove anything. The rebel in me likes anything that upsets the status quo. Surely the bizarre is always fascinating and fun, and yet if you mention such experiences in the presence of educated liberals you definitely commit a social error.
The turned-up nose from tasteful folk indicates why weird religious events are ultimately interesting. The paranormal is fascinating because it introduces the unknown and the unexpected to a society that is desperate to keep the material borders intact and the spiritual realm at bay.
Tasteful and educated people, above all, want their physical, suburban world to stay just where it is. They want religion (like everything else) to be tidy and organized. Uncorrupted bodies, angels, and supernatural fragrances are wild cards. They are too zany and unpredictable for those who want their religion cut-and-dried.
I like the miraculous because it smells authentic. What good is religion if it doesn't upset our assumptions and make us think again? Wherever religion is fervent, it allows for the miraculous. Wherever religion is real, it allows for the miraculous. Miracles don't prove a religion's validity or truth, but they do indicate some kind of transaction between the material and the spiritual worlds.
Miracles are also authentic because they attract ordinary folks. I am suspicious of any religion that is the refuge of only the educated and affluent. A religion that excludes ordinary people is more like a set of table manners than a religion.
Finally, I like the kooky end of religion because it reveals a God of surprises. When a body is uncorrupted or people smell flowers when they should smell putrefaction, it's kind of like a divine joke. I think God likes practical jokes. He likes the effect of tricks. He likes upsetting our smug, preconceived mindset about the nature of the physical world. Maybe miracles are given not to prove anything, but simply to remind us that the physical world is not so solid and real and dependable as we think. It's all much more rubbery than that--and more unexpected.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/128/story_12897.html
Why the Paranormal is Normal
By Deepak Chopra
Washington Post Blog
July 21st 2008
In general, it's fair to say that the popular belief in the paranormal falls outside the official picture of reality. The official picture is grounded in science, rationalism, and materialism. It takes a definition of "natural," after all, before "supernatural" can exist. God was natural in the medieval world, and thus miracles, healings, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, stigmatics, and so on, were considered natural. At the moment, it doesn't matter how many people believe in the supernatural. Until the official picture changes, astrology is bogus, astronomy is legitimate.
Ghosts are bogus, apparitions of the Virgin Mary are -- well, that's the rub. Religious people are allowed to cling to a different model of reality, tolerated by the official gatekeepers but not believed in. This gives rise to the curious phenomenon of religious scientists, who manage to hold on to two totally conflicting worldviews at the same time.
Any of us can hold conflicting viewpoints at the same time -- it's called compartmentalization. If the various compartments are tight enough and separated by thick walls, a whole range of phenomena can be believed in without making them consistent. I can imagine a cell biologist who is Catholic, has seen a UFO, reads the astrology column in the newspaper, and hopes to go to Heaven when he dies. It would be far better, however, to promote a consistent worldview, one that allows the walls to come down so that official reality might open up to unofficial reality. And vice versa, since popular belief in certain kinds of totally unproven folk cures, for example, can do harm, just as the official insistence on pharmaceuticals and surgery does its own brand of harm at times.
The only consistent worldview that I've ever discovered places all phenomena, natural and supernatural, on the ground of consciousness. The noted Australian neurologist Sir John Eccles pointed out a truth that materialists, including both scientists and ordinary people, don't remotely grasp. There is no sight or sound 'out there' in the world, Eccles declared, no touch or taste, no beauty or ugliness, no sensation of light or objects. All these things are created in subjectivity, which is to say, they exist only in consciousness. The fact that your hand seems solid is an illusion. A neutrino passes through the entire Earth without encountering an obstacle. Every atom in your hand is 99.9999% empty space. Measured in proportion, the distance between the electrons and nucleus of an atom is greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun. At the next level of reality, atoms disappear into energy waves and then into pure potential, the ghostly state of so-called virtual reality. Only perception makes a hand solid. and perceptions are interlinked to create the world you and I inhabit, so that color, light, sound, smell, solidity, etc. all fit together.
In my view, paranormal events are neither fringe nor unreal. They are simply things not yet admitted into consciousness by our official belief system. Reality has this curious habit of keeping certain things under wraps until the human mind is willing to look at them, and then all at once they appear, changing the world when they do. Germs and gravity were once waiting in the wings but now stand center stage. In ancient India, astrology was center stage and now has retreated again, for the coming and going of phenomena works both ways.
Even so, consciousness never retreats. In the darkest ages, people know that they are aware, and from that basic premise they create a personal reality, and when enough individuals agree, then collective reality comes about. Trying to base common reality sheerly on material objects has been wildly successful in the West, but that means little about ultimate reality, which transcends individuals and groups. In the ultimate reality there is only pure consciousness, which can be conceived of as the modeling clay or box of paints that Nature provides, adding the simple instruction: Use as you please.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... mal_1.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/07/38 ... ormal.html
By Deepak Chopra
Washington Post Blog
July 21st 2008
In general, it's fair to say that the popular belief in the paranormal falls outside the official picture of reality. The official picture is grounded in science, rationalism, and materialism. It takes a definition of "natural," after all, before "supernatural" can exist. God was natural in the medieval world, and thus miracles, healings, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, stigmatics, and so on, were considered natural. At the moment, it doesn't matter how many people believe in the supernatural. Until the official picture changes, astrology is bogus, astronomy is legitimate.
Ghosts are bogus, apparitions of the Virgin Mary are -- well, that's the rub. Religious people are allowed to cling to a different model of reality, tolerated by the official gatekeepers but not believed in. This gives rise to the curious phenomenon of religious scientists, who manage to hold on to two totally conflicting worldviews at the same time.
Any of us can hold conflicting viewpoints at the same time -- it's called compartmentalization. If the various compartments are tight enough and separated by thick walls, a whole range of phenomena can be believed in without making them consistent. I can imagine a cell biologist who is Catholic, has seen a UFO, reads the astrology column in the newspaper, and hopes to go to Heaven when he dies. It would be far better, however, to promote a consistent worldview, one that allows the walls to come down so that official reality might open up to unofficial reality. And vice versa, since popular belief in certain kinds of totally unproven folk cures, for example, can do harm, just as the official insistence on pharmaceuticals and surgery does its own brand of harm at times.
The only consistent worldview that I've ever discovered places all phenomena, natural and supernatural, on the ground of consciousness. The noted Australian neurologist Sir John Eccles pointed out a truth that materialists, including both scientists and ordinary people, don't remotely grasp. There is no sight or sound 'out there' in the world, Eccles declared, no touch or taste, no beauty or ugliness, no sensation of light or objects. All these things are created in subjectivity, which is to say, they exist only in consciousness. The fact that your hand seems solid is an illusion. A neutrino passes through the entire Earth without encountering an obstacle. Every atom in your hand is 99.9999% empty space. Measured in proportion, the distance between the electrons and nucleus of an atom is greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun. At the next level of reality, atoms disappear into energy waves and then into pure potential, the ghostly state of so-called virtual reality. Only perception makes a hand solid. and perceptions are interlinked to create the world you and I inhabit, so that color, light, sound, smell, solidity, etc. all fit together.
In my view, paranormal events are neither fringe nor unreal. They are simply things not yet admitted into consciousness by our official belief system. Reality has this curious habit of keeping certain things under wraps until the human mind is willing to look at them, and then all at once they appear, changing the world when they do. Germs and gravity were once waiting in the wings but now stand center stage. In ancient India, astrology was center stage and now has retreated again, for the coming and going of phenomena works both ways.
Even so, consciousness never retreats. In the darkest ages, people know that they are aware, and from that basic premise they create a personal reality, and when enough individuals agree, then collective reality comes about. Trying to base common reality sheerly on material objects has been wildly successful in the West, but that means little about ultimate reality, which transcends individuals and groups. In the ultimate reality there is only pure consciousness, which can be conceived of as the modeling clay or box of paints that Nature provides, adding the simple instruction: Use as you please.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... mal_1.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/07/38 ... ormal.html
When Things Happen That You Can’t Explain
I WAS sitting in a commuter train to London the first time I felt supernatural power rip through me. I was 23, and one year into my graduate training in anthropology. I had decided to do my fieldwork among educated white Britons who practiced what they called magic. I thought of the topic as a clever twist on more traditional anthropological study of strange “native” customs.
I was on my way to meet some of the magicians, and I had ridden my bike to the station with trepidation and excitement. On the train, as the sheep-dotted countryside rolled by, I was reading a book by a man they called an “adept” — someone they regarded as deeply knowledgeable and powerful.
The book’s language was dense and abstract, and my mind kept slipping as I struggled to grasp what he was talking about. The text spoke of the Holy Spirit and Tibetan masters and an ancient system of Judaic mysticism called kabbalah. The author wrote that all these were just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual reality into this one, through the vehicle of the trained mind. And as I strained to imagine what the author thought it would be like to be that vehicle, I began to feel power in my veins — to really feel it, not to imagine it. I grew hot. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing. And then wisps of smoke came out of my backpack, in which I had tossed my bicycle lights. One of them was melting.
People believe what they believe for a range of reasons, but one of the most puzzling — at least for those who have not had events like these — is an explanation from personal experience. Such moments have cherished roles in conversion narratives, of course.
A young man gave me this account of his first encounter with the Holy Spirit at a retreat to which his girlfriend had dragged him. “So they started praying for me. ... It doesn’t feel necessarily like electricity, but it feels like your body would be, like, touched by some kind of extreme power and you’re just shaking, like you just can’t handle all this stuff that’s being poured into you, and all they’re saying is, ‘Come on, Holy Spirit, and fill him up to overflowing.’ ... I felt like there was somebody else in me, like, dwelling, trying to get out to this extreme degree, and I was just overwhelmed in it.” As one says in Christian circles, it convicted him and made him realize that God was real.
But just having a strange and powerful experience doesn’t determine what you believe. I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality. Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can’t explain.
“The thing happened one summer afternoon, on the school cricket field, while I was sitting on the grass, waiting my turn to bat,” an anonymous Englishman recalled in a passage in an old anthology on mysticism. “Something invisible seemed to be drawn across the sky, transforming the world about me into a kind of tent of concentrated and enhanced significance.” But because the William James-like experience that followed didn’t fit into any of the philosophical or theological orientations he held as a 15-year-old boy, “it came to seem more and more anomalous, more and more irrelevant to ‘real life,’ and was finally forgotten.”
In Scientific American, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, recently recounted such a story. On his wedding day, his bride wished intensely that her deceased grandfather could be there to give her away. Suddenly, the grandfather’s long-broken radio, which they had never managed to fix, came on, for that one day, and then never worked again. The experience rocked him back on his heels, he wrote, but it did not seem to have shifted what he takes to be real.
What makes the difference between conviction and startled curiosity? In a conference last autumn at Esalen, a once-countercultural organization that’s famous for its spiritual retreats, Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, argued that how you think about remarkable experiences depends on your theory of the imagination. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he went to Kolkata, India, to study Bengali texts.
As he tells it in his book “Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom,” something happened one evening: “Although my body was asleep, resting almost anesthetized on its back, not unlike a corpse, consciousness was lucid and clear, fully awake. Suddenly, without warning, a powerful electric-like energy flooded the body with wave after wave.”
Mr. Kripal does not take the imagination to be an electrical byproduct of some naturalist process. He takes it to be capable of more, to be real in a more complicated way.
I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself.
As for me, I never did figure out what was going on with those bicycle lights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/opini ... 05309&_r=0
I WAS sitting in a commuter train to London the first time I felt supernatural power rip through me. I was 23, and one year into my graduate training in anthropology. I had decided to do my fieldwork among educated white Britons who practiced what they called magic. I thought of the topic as a clever twist on more traditional anthropological study of strange “native” customs.
I was on my way to meet some of the magicians, and I had ridden my bike to the station with trepidation and excitement. On the train, as the sheep-dotted countryside rolled by, I was reading a book by a man they called an “adept” — someone they regarded as deeply knowledgeable and powerful.
The book’s language was dense and abstract, and my mind kept slipping as I struggled to grasp what he was talking about. The text spoke of the Holy Spirit and Tibetan masters and an ancient system of Judaic mysticism called kabbalah. The author wrote that all these were just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual reality into this one, through the vehicle of the trained mind. And as I strained to imagine what the author thought it would be like to be that vehicle, I began to feel power in my veins — to really feel it, not to imagine it. I grew hot. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing. And then wisps of smoke came out of my backpack, in which I had tossed my bicycle lights. One of them was melting.
People believe what they believe for a range of reasons, but one of the most puzzling — at least for those who have not had events like these — is an explanation from personal experience. Such moments have cherished roles in conversion narratives, of course.
A young man gave me this account of his first encounter with the Holy Spirit at a retreat to which his girlfriend had dragged him. “So they started praying for me. ... It doesn’t feel necessarily like electricity, but it feels like your body would be, like, touched by some kind of extreme power and you’re just shaking, like you just can’t handle all this stuff that’s being poured into you, and all they’re saying is, ‘Come on, Holy Spirit, and fill him up to overflowing.’ ... I felt like there was somebody else in me, like, dwelling, trying to get out to this extreme degree, and I was just overwhelmed in it.” As one says in Christian circles, it convicted him and made him realize that God was real.
But just having a strange and powerful experience doesn’t determine what you believe. I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality. Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can’t explain.
“The thing happened one summer afternoon, on the school cricket field, while I was sitting on the grass, waiting my turn to bat,” an anonymous Englishman recalled in a passage in an old anthology on mysticism. “Something invisible seemed to be drawn across the sky, transforming the world about me into a kind of tent of concentrated and enhanced significance.” But because the William James-like experience that followed didn’t fit into any of the philosophical or theological orientations he held as a 15-year-old boy, “it came to seem more and more anomalous, more and more irrelevant to ‘real life,’ and was finally forgotten.”
In Scientific American, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, recently recounted such a story. On his wedding day, his bride wished intensely that her deceased grandfather could be there to give her away. Suddenly, the grandfather’s long-broken radio, which they had never managed to fix, came on, for that one day, and then never worked again. The experience rocked him back on his heels, he wrote, but it did not seem to have shifted what he takes to be real.
What makes the difference between conviction and startled curiosity? In a conference last autumn at Esalen, a once-countercultural organization that’s famous for its spiritual retreats, Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, argued that how you think about remarkable experiences depends on your theory of the imagination. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he went to Kolkata, India, to study Bengali texts.
As he tells it in his book “Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom,” something happened one evening: “Although my body was asleep, resting almost anesthetized on its back, not unlike a corpse, consciousness was lucid and clear, fully awake. Suddenly, without warning, a powerful electric-like energy flooded the body with wave after wave.”
Mr. Kripal does not take the imagination to be an electrical byproduct of some naturalist process. He takes it to be capable of more, to be real in a more complicated way.
I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself.
As for me, I never did figure out what was going on with those bicycle lights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/opini ... 05309&_r=0
MHI's message:
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."(CONVOCATION ADDRESS ON THE OCCASION OF THE 10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY - 1994-11-19)
In my opinion ideas based on miraculous phenomena are part of unorthodox ideas alluded to in the above quote.
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."(CONVOCATION ADDRESS ON THE OCCASION OF THE 10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY - 1994-11-19)
In my opinion ideas based on miraculous phenomena are part of unorthodox ideas alluded to in the above quote.
Varieties of Religious Experience
It’s Christmas; indulge me.
One of my hobbies is collecting what you might call nonconversion stories — stories about secular moderns who have supernatural-seeming experiences without being propelled into any specific religious faith. In some ways these stories are more intriguing than mystical experiences that confirm or inspire strong religious belief, because they come to us unmediated by any theological apparatus. They are more like raw data, raw material, the stuff that shows how spiritual experiences would continue if every institutional faith disappeared tomorrow.
Here are some public cases. Three decades ago A. J. Ayer, the British logical positivist and scourge of all religion, died and was resuscitated at the age of 77. Afterward, he reported a near-death encounter that included repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful … responsible for the government of the universe.” Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me.”
As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-wing essayist and atheist, had shocking, unlooked-for experiences of spiritual rapture as a teenager, which she wrote about in 2014’s don’t-call-it-religious memoir, “Living With a Wild God.” The “wild” part is key: Ehrenreich rejects the God of monotheism because the Being she encountered seemed stranger, less benign and more amoral than the God she thinks that most religions worship.
Lisa Chase, the wife of the late New York journalistic icon Peter Kaplan, wrote an essay for Elle Magazine last year about her experiences communicating, on her own and through a medium, with her husband after his 2013 death. There is no organized religion in her story whatsoever. But if you read the essay carefully, it’s clear that her quest was shaped by the fact that more than a few highly educated liberal Manhattan professionals have also had experiences like hers.
William Friedkin, the director of “The Exorcist,” had never seen an exorcism when he made his famous film. A professed agnostic, he decided recently to “complete the circle” and spent some time shadowing the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, just before Amorth’s passing at the age of 91. Friedkin recounted his experience in Vanity Fair this fall; it did not make him a Catholic believer, but it did seem to scare the Hades out of him.
Sometimes at Christmas I’ll write a column that gently tweaks the sterner sort of atheist, whose theories seem ill-matched with the empirics of the universe and the stuff of human life. (I suspect many of them know it; hence the zeal for ever-zanier God-substitutes. Yesterday, the multiverse; today, the universe-as-simulation; tomorrow, some terrifying omnicompetent A.I.)
But the implausibility of hard materialism doesn’t mean the cosmos obviously confirms a Judeo-Christian paradigm. And the supernatural experiences of the irreligious — cosmic beatitude, ghostly enigmas, unclassifiable encounters and straight-up demons — don’t point toward any single theology or world-picture.
I can make the Friedkin and Verhoeven experiences fit with Christian doctrine; Ehrenreich’s aren’t perhaps as distant as she imagines. But Ayer’s weird red light and the ghost of Peter Kaplan? If I were coming to these kind of stories with no preconceptions, I might reach for polytheism or pantheism to explain the variety and diversity of what reaches through the veil.
And not necessarily comforting forms of polytheism or pantheism. As a strictly intellectual matter, I am very confident that God exists. In dark times, though — and this has been a dark year in many ways — I wonder if the Absolute relates to us in the way that my church teaches, if he will really wipe away every tear and make all things that we love new.
This is the wager that Christmas offers us, year in and year out. It isn’t Pascal’s famous bet on God’s very existence; rather, it’s a bet on God’s love for us, a wager that all the varieties of religious experience, wonderful and terrifying and inscrutable, should be interpreted in the light of one specific history-altering experience: a divine incarnation, a baby crying beneath a pulsing star.
The odds on that wager feel different year to year. They change with joy and suffering, tranquillity and crisis, sickness and health.
But I haven’t found better ones. Merry Christmas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opini ... .html?_r=0
It’s Christmas; indulge me.
One of my hobbies is collecting what you might call nonconversion stories — stories about secular moderns who have supernatural-seeming experiences without being propelled into any specific religious faith. In some ways these stories are more intriguing than mystical experiences that confirm or inspire strong religious belief, because they come to us unmediated by any theological apparatus. They are more like raw data, raw material, the stuff that shows how spiritual experiences would continue if every institutional faith disappeared tomorrow.
Here are some public cases. Three decades ago A. J. Ayer, the British logical positivist and scourge of all religion, died and was resuscitated at the age of 77. Afterward, he reported a near-death encounter that included repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful … responsible for the government of the universe.” Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me.”
As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-wing essayist and atheist, had shocking, unlooked-for experiences of spiritual rapture as a teenager, which she wrote about in 2014’s don’t-call-it-religious memoir, “Living With a Wild God.” The “wild” part is key: Ehrenreich rejects the God of monotheism because the Being she encountered seemed stranger, less benign and more amoral than the God she thinks that most religions worship.
Lisa Chase, the wife of the late New York journalistic icon Peter Kaplan, wrote an essay for Elle Magazine last year about her experiences communicating, on her own and through a medium, with her husband after his 2013 death. There is no organized religion in her story whatsoever. But if you read the essay carefully, it’s clear that her quest was shaped by the fact that more than a few highly educated liberal Manhattan professionals have also had experiences like hers.
William Friedkin, the director of “The Exorcist,” had never seen an exorcism when he made his famous film. A professed agnostic, he decided recently to “complete the circle” and spent some time shadowing the Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, just before Amorth’s passing at the age of 91. Friedkin recounted his experience in Vanity Fair this fall; it did not make him a Catholic believer, but it did seem to scare the Hades out of him.
Sometimes at Christmas I’ll write a column that gently tweaks the sterner sort of atheist, whose theories seem ill-matched with the empirics of the universe and the stuff of human life. (I suspect many of them know it; hence the zeal for ever-zanier God-substitutes. Yesterday, the multiverse; today, the universe-as-simulation; tomorrow, some terrifying omnicompetent A.I.)
But the implausibility of hard materialism doesn’t mean the cosmos obviously confirms a Judeo-Christian paradigm. And the supernatural experiences of the irreligious — cosmic beatitude, ghostly enigmas, unclassifiable encounters and straight-up demons — don’t point toward any single theology or world-picture.
I can make the Friedkin and Verhoeven experiences fit with Christian doctrine; Ehrenreich’s aren’t perhaps as distant as she imagines. But Ayer’s weird red light and the ghost of Peter Kaplan? If I were coming to these kind of stories with no preconceptions, I might reach for polytheism or pantheism to explain the variety and diversity of what reaches through the veil.
And not necessarily comforting forms of polytheism or pantheism. As a strictly intellectual matter, I am very confident that God exists. In dark times, though — and this has been a dark year in many ways — I wonder if the Absolute relates to us in the way that my church teaches, if he will really wipe away every tear and make all things that we love new.
This is the wager that Christmas offers us, year in and year out. It isn’t Pascal’s famous bet on God’s very existence; rather, it’s a bet on God’s love for us, a wager that all the varieties of religious experience, wonderful and terrifying and inscrutable, should be interpreted in the light of one specific history-altering experience: a divine incarnation, a baby crying beneath a pulsing star.
The odds on that wager feel different year to year. They change with joy and suffering, tranquillity and crisis, sickness and health.
But I haven’t found better ones. Merry Christmas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opini ... .html?_r=0
Dissolving the ego
You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger
n 1969, the British writer Philip Pullman was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London, when his consciousness abruptly shifted. It appeared to him that ‘everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes’. The author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) wasn’t on drugs, although he had been reading a lot of books on Renaissance magic. But he told me he believes that his insight was valid, and that ‘my consciousness was temporarily altered, so that I was able to see things that are normally beyond the range of routine ordinary perception’. He had a deep sense that the Universe is ‘alive, conscious and full of purpose’. He says: ‘Everything I’ve written has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.’
What does one call such an experience? Pullman refers to it as ‘transcendent’. The philosopher and psychologist William James called them ‘religious experiences’ – although Pullman, who wrote a fictionalised biography of Jesus, would insist that God was not involved. Other psychologists call such moments spiritual, mystical, anomalous or out-of-the-ordinary. My preferred term is ‘ecstatic’. Today, we think of ecstasy as meaning the drug MDMA or the state of being ‘very happy’, but originally it meant ekstasis – a moment when you stand outside your ordinary self, and feel a connection to something bigger than you. Such moments can be euphoric, but also terrifying.
Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That’s partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you’re connected to the spirit world, you’re likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It’s been condemned as a threat to secular government. We’ve become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one’s standing as a good citizen relies on one’s ability to control one’s emotions, be polite, and do one’s job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal, and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.
More...
https://aeon.co/essays/religion-has-no- ... experience
You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger
n 1969, the British writer Philip Pullman was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London, when his consciousness abruptly shifted. It appeared to him that ‘everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes’. The author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) wasn’t on drugs, although he had been reading a lot of books on Renaissance magic. But he told me he believes that his insight was valid, and that ‘my consciousness was temporarily altered, so that I was able to see things that are normally beyond the range of routine ordinary perception’. He had a deep sense that the Universe is ‘alive, conscious and full of purpose’. He says: ‘Everything I’ve written has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.’
What does one call such an experience? Pullman refers to it as ‘transcendent’. The philosopher and psychologist William James called them ‘religious experiences’ – although Pullman, who wrote a fictionalised biography of Jesus, would insist that God was not involved. Other psychologists call such moments spiritual, mystical, anomalous or out-of-the-ordinary. My preferred term is ‘ecstatic’. Today, we think of ecstasy as meaning the drug MDMA or the state of being ‘very happy’, but originally it meant ekstasis – a moment when you stand outside your ordinary self, and feel a connection to something bigger than you. Such moments can be euphoric, but also terrifying.
Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That’s partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you’re connected to the spirit world, you’re likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It’s been condemned as a threat to secular government. We’ve become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one’s standing as a good citizen relies on one’s ability to control one’s emotions, be polite, and do one’s job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal, and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.
More...
https://aeon.co/essays/religion-has-no- ... experience
From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif wa laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif: Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power
Liana Saif
In recent years, we have witnessed an efflorescence of research on Islamic esoteric traditions and occult thought. Such scholarly activity established that occultism is a part of Islamic intellectual history that cannot be overlooked; rather it illuminates an essential aspect of the way people thought about the hidden, the extraordinary, and their potential for partaking in the divine and wondrous. Occult beliefs are embedded in philosophical, scientific, and religious discourses and in this chapter I consider the adaptations and modifications of the metaphysical elements that underpinned occult practices in medieval Islam (eighth to thirteenth centuries), particularly in their relation to the ways whereby nature and the divine were perceived and experienced. I argue that medieval Islamic occult philosophy distinguished the practices it supported from forbidden siḥr or sorcery by identifying legitimate conditions of acquiring power based on two paradigms: association with natural philosophy, and/or an affiliation with mysticism. A shift of emphasis occurred in the medieval period: from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, legitimisation of occult practices derived mainly from natural philosophy, stressing causation and knowledge of signs as the core principles of magical efficacy. Towards the thirteenth century occult practices began to derive their justifications from Sufi doctrines. In the first case, by and large, magic was deemed natural as it functioned according to a causality proven empirically and understood rationally; however, later, the power of extraordinary acts, including magic, became the prerogative of mystics achieved through non-rationalised revelation and contact with the divine, all of which undermined natural causality and transformed the signs from indicators of natural links to tokens of God and supernatural agents that mediate between Him and the mystic.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/11293322/From_ ... view-paper
Liana Saif
In recent years, we have witnessed an efflorescence of research on Islamic esoteric traditions and occult thought. Such scholarly activity established that occultism is a part of Islamic intellectual history that cannot be overlooked; rather it illuminates an essential aspect of the way people thought about the hidden, the extraordinary, and their potential for partaking in the divine and wondrous. Occult beliefs are embedded in philosophical, scientific, and religious discourses and in this chapter I consider the adaptations and modifications of the metaphysical elements that underpinned occult practices in medieval Islam (eighth to thirteenth centuries), particularly in their relation to the ways whereby nature and the divine were perceived and experienced. I argue that medieval Islamic occult philosophy distinguished the practices it supported from forbidden siḥr or sorcery by identifying legitimate conditions of acquiring power based on two paradigms: association with natural philosophy, and/or an affiliation with mysticism. A shift of emphasis occurred in the medieval period: from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, legitimisation of occult practices derived mainly from natural philosophy, stressing causation and knowledge of signs as the core principles of magical efficacy. Towards the thirteenth century occult practices began to derive their justifications from Sufi doctrines. In the first case, by and large, magic was deemed natural as it functioned according to a causality proven empirically and understood rationally; however, later, the power of extraordinary acts, including magic, became the prerogative of mystics achieved through non-rationalised revelation and contact with the divine, all of which undermined natural causality and transformed the signs from indicators of natural links to tokens of God and supernatural agents that mediate between Him and the mystic.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/11293322/From_ ... view-paper
What Wonder Woman and the Buddha Have in Common
Have you noticed that the number of movies and TV shows featuring beings with supernatural powers seems to be on the rise?
Why are we humans so fascinated with superheroes?
Is it because we can’t bear the overwhelming complexities of our world and find comfort in the fantasy that a group of super-ordinary beings could save us?
Or are we sensing into a fundamental truth about the human condition—that we contain within us an untapped well of powers or “supercapacities” beyond the comprehension of our “small self”?
In my work with tens of thousands of spiritual seekers over the past decade, I’ve gradually come to a somewhat controversial conclusion. I believe that all of us have access to a set of extraordinary but usually hidden “supercapacities.”
These remarkable higher capacities are not abilities we need to gradually cultivate or develop.
They are the innate “powers” of the Awakened self.
They arise naturally and spontaneously when our consciousness is freed from the contractions, knots and unconscious habits of our ordinary, unawakened mind.
I realize this may seem hard to believe at face value.
In a world where personal growth and development has become a billion-dollar industry, it might seem almost heretical to proclaim that simply awakening to our own “enlightened essence” could be the key to unlocking many of the capacities we’re all striving so hard to cultivate.
Clearly, this is a radical proposition with far-reaching implications for any of us who aspire to break out of the limitations of the false self and live truly extraordinary, awakened lives.
So I think it’s important to understand that this is not a new idea.
If you survey the literature of all of the world’s great wisdom traditions, you’ll find that one thing they all seem to agree on is that when any human being takes the leap into his or her own enlightened or divine nature, that person is transformed into a kind of super-being.
Indeed, religious traditions almost universally tended to characterize the awakened master, the realized one, as what we would describe today as a superhero.
According to ancient religious lore, the awakened ones could read minds, fly through the air, appear in two places at once, heal at a distance, move objects with their minds, and walk through walls.
To put this in modern-day superhero terms: enlightened masters were something like all the X-Men combined.
However, unlike many of the superheroes in today’s movies, the enlightened ones also had a highly evolved moral center and, fortunately, boundless spiritual wisdom and compassion. They showed a limitless capacity for love and remarkable tenderness and sensitivity.
Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not asserting that spiritual awakening will make you a superhero—either in the Hollywood sense or even the traditional sense.
And I don’t know whether the people who wrote those ancient texts actually believed in the paranormal superpowers they wrote about, or whether they were being metaphorical in an attempt to convey the extraordinary transformative power of spiritual awakening.
But leaving those kinds of truly supernatural powers aside, what all the wisdom traditions strongly and consistently point to is the profound transformation that occurs when a person awakens to and embraces their true nature.
When we discover this already awakened essence of who we are, we feel like we’re unleashed from a prison—unlocked, let out. We discover a life of boundless inner freedom and of unassailable joy.
We find ourselves becoming a conduit for an overflowing fullness and a love that seems to have no end.
When we discover this “super-conscious self,” we also find that we have access to a remarkable type of intuitive knowing that enables us to instantly—faster than the speed of thought—discern powerful truths, see into the heart of a situation, and spontaneously take effective actions, seemingly without any premeditation, and sometimes without even our own awareness.
It is often only after the fact that we realize what we knew and what we did, leaving us wondering: “Where did that clarity and courage come from?”
When we awaken to who and what we really are, we find that we’re filled with a dynamic source of energy that is seemingly limitless—energy to do whatever needs to be done in each moment. This energy is no longer coming from our body, but from somewhere mysterious that we can’t see.
We also find we can tap into a well of creativity that feels limitless. It’s as though the creative power of the cosmos is coursing through us. Whenever we need it, it is available.
We discover we also have access to a wellspring of inner strength that gives us steadiness and confidence in the face of life’s challenges. No matter what life throws our way, we’re not daunted.
We have a fundamental trust that we’ll find our way, that the resources needed to meet the demand will appear. From where, we don’t know, but we trust that they will, and we find that they do.
I’m not talking about trusting that an all powerful God or “universe” is going to take care of us, or that mystical things will happen in our life to make everything work.
Instead, there’s a kind of trust in an inner resource that is seemingly limitless and readily available to us. That’s where the confidence comes from. It’s also where our ability to act so freely and spontaneously and with so much strength and clarity of purpose comes from.
We also find an unprecedented ability to be present in a way that most of us have never experienced.
One of the shocking things about meeting somebody who is highly spiritually awakened is that they are so incredibly present. They are here.
In fact, they have so much weight and consciousness in their field, that we feel deeply held by a great and mysterious power when we’re in their presence.
With this awakening, we also find that we have become unimaginably sensitive. We’re like a finely tuned receptive instrument that can sense into the deeper needs and feelings of those around us, of groups, of situations.
But most importantly, we become receptive to what we might call the evolutionary need or trajectory of the moment. We can feel it with our being. And this enables us spontaneously discern “the way” of positive, effective action with a precision that transcends mere cognition.
Now, I want to be clear. I’m not asserting that every single skill or capacity that we need to get through life is somehow contained in our spiritual super nature.
I’m not saying that your super nature will make you good at math or spelling, or turn you into a perfect communicator, or any of the dozens of other things that we all need to develop in order to be functional adults.
What I will say is this: the most remarkable capacities available to human beings are not abilities we need to cultivate piecemeal.
The game-changing revelation of authentic spiritual awakening is that there is a deeper “essential supernature” that already exists within each of us fully formed.
This “essential supernature” already contains the extraordinary capacities that most of us are striving to develop.
So, rather than spending decades trying to develop each of these abilities one at a time, if we wholeheartedly give ourselves to the process of awakening, we can tap directly into this source of truly infinite potentials and give birth to a completely different order of human life.
https://craighamiltonglobal.com/what-wo ... e=hs_email
Have you noticed that the number of movies and TV shows featuring beings with supernatural powers seems to be on the rise?
Why are we humans so fascinated with superheroes?
Is it because we can’t bear the overwhelming complexities of our world and find comfort in the fantasy that a group of super-ordinary beings could save us?
Or are we sensing into a fundamental truth about the human condition—that we contain within us an untapped well of powers or “supercapacities” beyond the comprehension of our “small self”?
In my work with tens of thousands of spiritual seekers over the past decade, I’ve gradually come to a somewhat controversial conclusion. I believe that all of us have access to a set of extraordinary but usually hidden “supercapacities.”
These remarkable higher capacities are not abilities we need to gradually cultivate or develop.
They are the innate “powers” of the Awakened self.
They arise naturally and spontaneously when our consciousness is freed from the contractions, knots and unconscious habits of our ordinary, unawakened mind.
I realize this may seem hard to believe at face value.
In a world where personal growth and development has become a billion-dollar industry, it might seem almost heretical to proclaim that simply awakening to our own “enlightened essence” could be the key to unlocking many of the capacities we’re all striving so hard to cultivate.
Clearly, this is a radical proposition with far-reaching implications for any of us who aspire to break out of the limitations of the false self and live truly extraordinary, awakened lives.
So I think it’s important to understand that this is not a new idea.
If you survey the literature of all of the world’s great wisdom traditions, you’ll find that one thing they all seem to agree on is that when any human being takes the leap into his or her own enlightened or divine nature, that person is transformed into a kind of super-being.
Indeed, religious traditions almost universally tended to characterize the awakened master, the realized one, as what we would describe today as a superhero.
According to ancient religious lore, the awakened ones could read minds, fly through the air, appear in two places at once, heal at a distance, move objects with their minds, and walk through walls.
To put this in modern-day superhero terms: enlightened masters were something like all the X-Men combined.
However, unlike many of the superheroes in today’s movies, the enlightened ones also had a highly evolved moral center and, fortunately, boundless spiritual wisdom and compassion. They showed a limitless capacity for love and remarkable tenderness and sensitivity.
Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not asserting that spiritual awakening will make you a superhero—either in the Hollywood sense or even the traditional sense.
And I don’t know whether the people who wrote those ancient texts actually believed in the paranormal superpowers they wrote about, or whether they were being metaphorical in an attempt to convey the extraordinary transformative power of spiritual awakening.
But leaving those kinds of truly supernatural powers aside, what all the wisdom traditions strongly and consistently point to is the profound transformation that occurs when a person awakens to and embraces their true nature.
When we discover this already awakened essence of who we are, we feel like we’re unleashed from a prison—unlocked, let out. We discover a life of boundless inner freedom and of unassailable joy.
We find ourselves becoming a conduit for an overflowing fullness and a love that seems to have no end.
When we discover this “super-conscious self,” we also find that we have access to a remarkable type of intuitive knowing that enables us to instantly—faster than the speed of thought—discern powerful truths, see into the heart of a situation, and spontaneously take effective actions, seemingly without any premeditation, and sometimes without even our own awareness.
It is often only after the fact that we realize what we knew and what we did, leaving us wondering: “Where did that clarity and courage come from?”
When we awaken to who and what we really are, we find that we’re filled with a dynamic source of energy that is seemingly limitless—energy to do whatever needs to be done in each moment. This energy is no longer coming from our body, but from somewhere mysterious that we can’t see.
We also find we can tap into a well of creativity that feels limitless. It’s as though the creative power of the cosmos is coursing through us. Whenever we need it, it is available.
We discover we also have access to a wellspring of inner strength that gives us steadiness and confidence in the face of life’s challenges. No matter what life throws our way, we’re not daunted.
We have a fundamental trust that we’ll find our way, that the resources needed to meet the demand will appear. From where, we don’t know, but we trust that they will, and we find that they do.
I’m not talking about trusting that an all powerful God or “universe” is going to take care of us, or that mystical things will happen in our life to make everything work.
Instead, there’s a kind of trust in an inner resource that is seemingly limitless and readily available to us. That’s where the confidence comes from. It’s also where our ability to act so freely and spontaneously and with so much strength and clarity of purpose comes from.
We also find an unprecedented ability to be present in a way that most of us have never experienced.
One of the shocking things about meeting somebody who is highly spiritually awakened is that they are so incredibly present. They are here.
In fact, they have so much weight and consciousness in their field, that we feel deeply held by a great and mysterious power when we’re in their presence.
With this awakening, we also find that we have become unimaginably sensitive. We’re like a finely tuned receptive instrument that can sense into the deeper needs and feelings of those around us, of groups, of situations.
But most importantly, we become receptive to what we might call the evolutionary need or trajectory of the moment. We can feel it with our being. And this enables us spontaneously discern “the way” of positive, effective action with a precision that transcends mere cognition.
Now, I want to be clear. I’m not asserting that every single skill or capacity that we need to get through life is somehow contained in our spiritual super nature.
I’m not saying that your super nature will make you good at math or spelling, or turn you into a perfect communicator, or any of the dozens of other things that we all need to develop in order to be functional adults.
What I will say is this: the most remarkable capacities available to human beings are not abilities we need to cultivate piecemeal.
The game-changing revelation of authentic spiritual awakening is that there is a deeper “essential supernature” that already exists within each of us fully formed.
This “essential supernature” already contains the extraordinary capacities that most of us are striving to develop.
So, rather than spending decades trying to develop each of these abilities one at a time, if we wholeheartedly give ourselves to the process of awakening, we can tap directly into this source of truly infinite potentials and give birth to a completely different order of human life.
https://craighamiltonglobal.com/what-wo ... e=hs_email
A Modern Day Mystic Shares Her Secrets
Hi Karim,
Are you ready for an incredible 2022, that's full of hope, health and happiness?
I know I sure am.
It's safe to say that the past couple years have left many of us feeling unsure about the state of the world.
In all the heaviness that has dominated the news channels, it's easy to forget the many positive things that are happening out there -- and the miracles that are possible for all of us.
I'll let you in on a little secret: The future is far brighter than many of us might think...
But in order to see it, you must heal your mind.
Like every other human in this world, I've been through some rough patches in life. And it wasn't until I began healing the inner scars from these events that true freedom began to emerge. Miracles began to occur.
This might sound woo woo, but miracles come when you get out of your own way and plunge into the flow of life. Once you begin to free yourself by shedding thoughts, relationships, habits, or patterns that no longer serve you, curious and beautiful things show up.
And for most of us, the best way to get started on that path is a little guidance from a master.
My good friend Marci Shimoff is a NY Times bestselling author, modern-day mystic, and a world-renowned transformational teacher. Marci's expertise and years of teaching on happiness, success, and unconditional love have helped her to unlock the key to manifesting miracles, and she's ready to share those lessons with the world.
Marci has set out on a mission to teach people how to live a more miraculous life -- and she's revealing her top three secrets in a free online masterclass!
https://youryearofmiracles.com/mp/maste ... 0772437fb8
Marci and her colleague Dr. Sue Morter will teach you how to increase self-love and experience profound self-worth. Their free masterclass will help you set intentions to attract miracles, so all the good things in life come to you: deeply fulfilling relationships, success and satisfaction in your work, vitality and great health!
Sign up here https://youryearofmiracles.com/mp/maste ... 3ddaa14576 so you can learn how to make miracles show up in your life!
We all deserve richly abundant, joyous lives where the miraculous becomes part of our everyday experience. To live like this, we need to take control and responsibility for our inner lives and outer experiences.
Empowering yourself to make it happen is the key. I was blessed to be mentored by shamans who showed me the way, but not everybody has a shaman show up in their life at the right time.
If you're reading this, maybe Marci's masterclass is appearing now in your life for a reason. Marci can gift you with the transformative tools you need to help you on your path.
If you're ready for 2022 to be your year of miracles, sign up for Marci's masterclass!
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
Hi Karim,
Are you ready for an incredible 2022, that's full of hope, health and happiness?
I know I sure am.
It's safe to say that the past couple years have left many of us feeling unsure about the state of the world.
In all the heaviness that has dominated the news channels, it's easy to forget the many positive things that are happening out there -- and the miracles that are possible for all of us.
I'll let you in on a little secret: The future is far brighter than many of us might think...
But in order to see it, you must heal your mind.
Like every other human in this world, I've been through some rough patches in life. And it wasn't until I began healing the inner scars from these events that true freedom began to emerge. Miracles began to occur.
This might sound woo woo, but miracles come when you get out of your own way and plunge into the flow of life. Once you begin to free yourself by shedding thoughts, relationships, habits, or patterns that no longer serve you, curious and beautiful things show up.
And for most of us, the best way to get started on that path is a little guidance from a master.
My good friend Marci Shimoff is a NY Times bestselling author, modern-day mystic, and a world-renowned transformational teacher. Marci's expertise and years of teaching on happiness, success, and unconditional love have helped her to unlock the key to manifesting miracles, and she's ready to share those lessons with the world.
Marci has set out on a mission to teach people how to live a more miraculous life -- and she's revealing her top three secrets in a free online masterclass!
https://youryearofmiracles.com/mp/maste ... 0772437fb8
Marci and her colleague Dr. Sue Morter will teach you how to increase self-love and experience profound self-worth. Their free masterclass will help you set intentions to attract miracles, so all the good things in life come to you: deeply fulfilling relationships, success and satisfaction in your work, vitality and great health!
Sign up here https://youryearofmiracles.com/mp/maste ... 3ddaa14576 so you can learn how to make miracles show up in your life!
We all deserve richly abundant, joyous lives where the miraculous becomes part of our everyday experience. To live like this, we need to take control and responsibility for our inner lives and outer experiences.
Empowering yourself to make it happen is the key. I was blessed to be mentored by shamans who showed me the way, but not everybody has a shaman show up in their life at the right time.
If you're reading this, maybe Marci's masterclass is appearing now in your life for a reason. Marci can gift you with the transformative tools you need to help you on your path.
If you're ready for 2022 to be your year of miracles, sign up for Marci's masterclass!
Stay curious,
Nick Polizzi
Host of Proven: Healing Breakthroughs Backed By Science
& Founder of The Sacred Science
Christmas Is Weird
When I was growing up, one toy captured my imagination: a Power Wheels Jeep. It was the Christmas present that seemed out of reach of my family’s limited finances. The commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons were a constant reminder of what I would never have. In those 30-second segments, the tiny Jeeps and Corvettes were driven by blond kids zooming through neighborhoods filled with green grass and nice homes.
But every Christmas, I woke up to find that we were still, in fact, poor and I would not be driving my Power Wheels through the hood. Until the Christmas that changed everything. One year my mother, my siblings and I made our way to my grandmother’s house to enjoy Christmas dinner with our extended family. As we approached the home, I saw a red and blue Power Wheels Jeep sitting in the driveway with a red bow attached.
My grandmother had a gambling addiction and played the illegal lotto that operated in the Black neighborhoods of Huntsville, Ala. This particular year, things had apparently gone quite well. She had used her winnings to buy many of her numerous grandkids the gifts of our dreams. That is how I got my Power Wheels.
I have always considered that lottery a Christmas miracle, evidence that God had not forgotten the little Black boys and girls in my corner of the world. But as I have aged, I have been tempted to reconsider. Are these merely the pious memories of a naïve child looking for hope wherever he could find it? Is it wrong to see God’s presence in a gift bought with money of questionable origins?
When my doubts about my Christmas miracle surge within me, I am somewhat comforted by the story of the Magi, the wise men who visited Jesus sometime after he was born.
Scholars are divided on just who these Magi were, but there is unanimous agreement (a rarity among scholars) that they were not Jews or worshipers of the God of Israel. They seemingly had no business anywhere near the holy child.
The Magi were probably Babylonian or Persian religious leaders whose expertise ranged from interpretation of dreams to astrology. They made their way to Bethlehem by means of an astrological sign. To make a modern analogy, it might be the equivalent of someone showing up at church on Sunday after her horoscope suggested that she try new things. The story of the Magi is religiously odd.
But the oddness appears to be the point. The birth of Jesus was not an event that celebrated the insiders, the people who had it all together. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew depict the birth of Jesus as the gathering of not the rich and powerful but the lower class (Mary and Joseph), the common workers (the shepherds) and the religious outsiders (Magi).
And so it is not so unexpected that God would reach into my neighborhood through the gamblers and the addicts, drug dealers and misfits. They were the ones who shoved $20 bills into my hands when I didn’t have lunch money. They told people to leave me be because they saw potential in me when I didn’t see it in myself. Besides, they were the only ones there. The respectable people — the city officials, mayors and governors — had abandoned us long ago. We were the forgotten ones, left to make our way through the land of trauma, helped along often only by miracles.
This Christmas, many boys and girls will wake up in very difficult circumstances. Their basic prayers for food, rescue, safety or a particular toy will go unanswered. Many of my most urgent and desperate entreaties during childhood went unanswered for years on end. Why God answers some prayers with miracles and not others is a question theologians have pondered for centuries.
But Christmas, for the Christian, has never promised to soothe every pain or cure every ill. Unfortunately, life with God doesn’t work that way. Instead, Christmas is the grand miracle that makes space for all the smaller miracles. It gives us enough hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer of something that seems too distant to reach.
Christmas is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The path to that light has taken many forms. For the Magi, it was an astrological sign with roots in a religion far outside the Jewish world of Jesus and the first disciples. For a little boy in Alabama, it was the right three numbers pulled out of a metal cage full of bouncing lotto balls. In both cases, these odd incidents led us directly into the presence of a child who filled our hearts with wonder.
Christmas suggests that God has not forgotten anyone. He came as a child, weak and vulnerable, unable to lift his head without assistance or to wipe his own bottom. He did this so the weak and broken things might feel comfortable approaching the divine.
I did not ride the Power Wheels for very long. In the language of the Walmart brand jeans of that era, I was husky, and I soon became too heavy for the vehicle. But that Christmas Day, my Jeep rumbled across the grass like the chariots of old. There was no bounce to my hair as the wind blew through it, like the blond kids’ on the commercials. My low-cut fade was decidedly stationary. But I felt seen and heard by God, if only for a moment
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
When I was growing up, one toy captured my imagination: a Power Wheels Jeep. It was the Christmas present that seemed out of reach of my family’s limited finances. The commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons were a constant reminder of what I would never have. In those 30-second segments, the tiny Jeeps and Corvettes were driven by blond kids zooming through neighborhoods filled with green grass and nice homes.
But every Christmas, I woke up to find that we were still, in fact, poor and I would not be driving my Power Wheels through the hood. Until the Christmas that changed everything. One year my mother, my siblings and I made our way to my grandmother’s house to enjoy Christmas dinner with our extended family. As we approached the home, I saw a red and blue Power Wheels Jeep sitting in the driveway with a red bow attached.
My grandmother had a gambling addiction and played the illegal lotto that operated in the Black neighborhoods of Huntsville, Ala. This particular year, things had apparently gone quite well. She had used her winnings to buy many of her numerous grandkids the gifts of our dreams. That is how I got my Power Wheels.
I have always considered that lottery a Christmas miracle, evidence that God had not forgotten the little Black boys and girls in my corner of the world. But as I have aged, I have been tempted to reconsider. Are these merely the pious memories of a naïve child looking for hope wherever he could find it? Is it wrong to see God’s presence in a gift bought with money of questionable origins?
When my doubts about my Christmas miracle surge within me, I am somewhat comforted by the story of the Magi, the wise men who visited Jesus sometime after he was born.
Scholars are divided on just who these Magi were, but there is unanimous agreement (a rarity among scholars) that they were not Jews or worshipers of the God of Israel. They seemingly had no business anywhere near the holy child.
The Magi were probably Babylonian or Persian religious leaders whose expertise ranged from interpretation of dreams to astrology. They made their way to Bethlehem by means of an astrological sign. To make a modern analogy, it might be the equivalent of someone showing up at church on Sunday after her horoscope suggested that she try new things. The story of the Magi is religiously odd.
But the oddness appears to be the point. The birth of Jesus was not an event that celebrated the insiders, the people who had it all together. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew depict the birth of Jesus as the gathering of not the rich and powerful but the lower class (Mary and Joseph), the common workers (the shepherds) and the religious outsiders (Magi).
And so it is not so unexpected that God would reach into my neighborhood through the gamblers and the addicts, drug dealers and misfits. They were the ones who shoved $20 bills into my hands when I didn’t have lunch money. They told people to leave me be because they saw potential in me when I didn’t see it in myself. Besides, they were the only ones there. The respectable people — the city officials, mayors and governors — had abandoned us long ago. We were the forgotten ones, left to make our way through the land of trauma, helped along often only by miracles.
This Christmas, many boys and girls will wake up in very difficult circumstances. Their basic prayers for food, rescue, safety or a particular toy will go unanswered. Many of my most urgent and desperate entreaties during childhood went unanswered for years on end. Why God answers some prayers with miracles and not others is a question theologians have pondered for centuries.
But Christmas, for the Christian, has never promised to soothe every pain or cure every ill. Unfortunately, life with God doesn’t work that way. Instead, Christmas is the grand miracle that makes space for all the smaller miracles. It gives us enough hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer of something that seems too distant to reach.
Christmas is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The path to that light has taken many forms. For the Magi, it was an astrological sign with roots in a religion far outside the Jewish world of Jesus and the first disciples. For a little boy in Alabama, it was the right three numbers pulled out of a metal cage full of bouncing lotto balls. In both cases, these odd incidents led us directly into the presence of a child who filled our hearts with wonder.
Christmas suggests that God has not forgotten anyone. He came as a child, weak and vulnerable, unable to lift his head without assistance or to wipe his own bottom. He did this so the weak and broken things might feel comfortable approaching the divine.
I did not ride the Power Wheels for very long. In the language of the Walmart brand jeans of that era, I was husky, and I soon became too heavy for the vehicle. But that Christmas Day, my Jeep rumbled across the grass like the chariots of old. There was no bounce to my hair as the wind blew through it, like the blond kids’ on the commercials. My low-cut fade was decidedly stationary. But I felt seen and heard by God, if only for a moment
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3