1 post tagged “smug”

A modest little title, don’t you think? And even though I only wanted to write about the whole truth, and not actually document everything that is true, and within that target to confine myself to outlining my own metaphysical thoughts, it was still a large task and one I had been putting off for years.

I liked to think that the forces of evil (or possibly good) were holding me back from putting my ideas down on paper. Or that because my ideas were evolving rapidly I shouldn’t start until they were crystallised. Or until I had decided exactly what I wanted to write, why I was writing it, and who I was writing it for. But as this is supposed to be about the whole truth I suppose I must confess to being a sufferer from lassitude, and although the effects of this affliction may have been reinforced by problems with content drift and indecision, it is the chronic condition itself that is the primary reason for the long gestation.

None of the putative barriers had any reality. My world view will probably never settle down – I certainly hope not. And the process by which it changes is one of addition and refinement, so that it should be a simple matter to maintain this as a living document with version numbers. The forces of good and evil aren’t going to be very interested – I would be surprised if I converted even one person to my way of thinking, and for the time being the only people who are going to see my creed are those who know me very well already. Indeed, I’m not sure if I will ever try to publish it more widely. I can’t see why any stranger would want to look at it. Nor why any publisher would be interested. So, why then the pseudonym? Mostly because I like it. I dreamt it up when I was wondering about publishing (it would help keep the cranks at arm’s length), and it fits very well: Thomas because of my permanent scepticism, and Smug because that’s what I am – both in general terms, as those who know me will attest, but also specifically about the paradiggum[1] I’m going to outline here, which I think is rather neat and which has the Lady’s approval – but more of that later on.

But a second reason is that I find writing under a pseudonym easier – the character shapes the literary style. The name summons up for me the image of someone from the Augustan Age, a creation of Fielding or Sterne. Perhaps the title should be “Ye Life and Opinions of Thos. Smugge, Gentleman.” with no mention whatsoever of the Life anywhere in the text of course, and the exposition should be decorated with quirky diversions (like this one).

Opinions, on the other hand, will abound. While I will try to present my ideas in such a way that a scientist might give them the benefit of the doubt, and I expect that some of the ideas could be amenable to scientific investigation, as they stand the ideas are in no way scientific – they are simply opinions. But given that I am rarely slow to express my opinions, even when nobody has asked for them, why bother putting them on paper?

It is because what finally prompted me to start the exercise was my realisation that my primary target readership was myself – selfishness can get the better of lassitude. The process of marshalling my thoughts and putting them into readable sentences would help clarify for me what I really meant. And I think it is working even with this introduction.

I have also had difficulty in explaining what I mean in conversation with friends and family. There are so many points I want to make, nearly all of which need some careful defence from either Christians or atheists, that I never manage to present the whole construction. And it is the big picture that is important. I have long been uncomfortable with the cop-out that science and religion study different realms – matter and spirit – so that the varying conclusions they come up with can be quietly ignored. I am going to try to show here that a synthesis is possible, and that such a synthesis has some exciting implications.

Finally, it is just possible that others may find something of use – scientists uncomfortable with a purely materialistic view of the universe, perhaps, or those of faith similarly uncomfortable with having to believe six impossible things before breakfast – but if so, that is a bonus.

As for the “what”, whether I’m writing a pamphlet, an essay, a book, I’m still not sure – no doubt the structure of the document will mutate as I write it, but to start off I’m going to put down a series of bald propositions with some of my thinking behind them. May as well start big:[2]

 

1.      The Whole Truth should be viewed as an intricately cut gemstone.

 

Each facet represents an alternative way of looking at the Universe. The great religions

would neighbour each other, science would be perhaps “round the other side”, philosophy somewhere in between. And just as if you examine an individual facet of a real gemstone too closely – with an electron microscope for example – not only do you miss out on the overall beauty, but you can even get a misleading picture, because all you can see are imperfections and impurities. You need to pull back and examine it from as many different aspects as possible.

 

2.      Our universe is the result of a conscious act of creation, and has some purpose.

 

Well, what’s the alternative? That it sprang out of nothing, without any purpose? What a bizarre thing to believe! I sometimes wonder how many self-styled atheists understand what they are saying when they describe themselves as such. We have no empiric information, and will most likely[3] never have any empiric information, about what lies “outside” our space-time. All our postulations about what is “out there” – God, nothing, a sea of raspberry jelly, a froth of similar universes popping in and out of existence - are equally valid, or if you prefer, equally lacking in foundation. Indeed, the “nothing” and “zero purpose” hypotheses become vanishingly unlikely compared to the infinitude of conceivable purposes and “somethings”. But even the collection of “froth” type suggestions put forward by the cosmologists – that our universe sits in a higher dimensional multiverse, but that what goes on out there is still purely mechanical – comprise a belief. And one which leaves us with an even bigger “why?”.

I think the problem lies with the success of science and materialism (I’ll say more about this under Proposition 2). Because physics, chemistry and biology describe passably well what is going on in our world, without invoking the supernatural, it is tempting to draw two conclusions:

·      that there is nothing supernatural in the world, and

·      that the same sort of rules ought to apply outside our space-time.

But if you think about it, there can be no evidence in support of the first (negative) “conclusion”, and as I have already argued, it is unlikely that we will ever get any evidence, in support or otherwise, for the second. It is perfectly possible, maybe even reasonable, to live your life without reference to, or caring about anything immaterial, but to make either of these assertions is to confess to a faith. To paraphrase one of my favourite books “The Ascent of Rum Doodle”, to ignore the supernatural is one thing, to deny its possibility is quite another.

Furthermore, as “The Ascent of Rum Doodle” make clear, the true sceptic has to doubt even his own scepticism.

 

 

 

3.      The current scientific view of the world from Big Bang to Darwinism is largely “True”.

 

By this I mean that everything since the Big Bang could have happened automatically, or by chance. The conscious creator, which I shall call God, is outside our space-time. “He” (to be conventional) set up the initial parameters of our universe and then let it run on its own, to see what happened. Consequently He doesn’t (maybe even can’t) fiddle with it while it is running. Why would he need to? He can always start another one with slightly different initial parameters. Within His own “time”  the whole history of our world, including the future, has already happened, and He can study it in detail at his leisure. Maybe He even puts particularly interesting universes on His mantelpiece to impress His friends. Physicists sometimes get bothered that the physical constants of the universe seem to be incredibly finely tuned – if they were only slightly different, then it would be a much more boring place. Stars, elements heavier then hydrogen, people – none of these could exist. But of course, there’s no problem if He set it up to be interesting. He could even have done it in six of His Own “days”, whatever they are.

People who say that simple life couldn’t have arisen by chance, because the odds against it are astronomically small, are fools or charlatans. Here’s a thought experiment to show you what I mean (you can even try it as a real experiment – if you get a friend to help you can do it in a couple of minutes, but it’s quite dull.) Take a dice (or, more pedantically, a die) and roll it 102 times, noting down the number each time. The chances against getting the precise sequence of numbers you note down is 6¹⁰² (six to the power of one hundred and two, or six multiplied by itself a hundred and two times), which by fairly simple mathematics is just over 10⁷⁹ – 1 with 79 noughts after it. This is significant because 10⁷⁹ is our best estimate of the total number of particles in the universe – not stars or grains of dust, but all the protons, neutrons, electrons and so forth. The chances against anything happening are literally astronomical – but things happen anyway.

But I digress. Given that the universe is allowed to run by itself, we need to accept what science says - where there is good evidence. Space-time did originate in a Big Bang billions of years ago. The earth is also billions of years old. Life did appear on it relatively quickly. And the annals of evolution, from amoeba to monkey to man, tell a convincing story. An important corollary of this for the doubting religious is that natural disasters – meteorites wiping out the dinosaurs, floods, volcanoes, plagues – are just that: “natural”. God may well have set things up so that configurations like that of the earth and the moon within the solar system were bound to exist somewhere, and that such configurations give environments just sufficiently violent to allow evolution to progress at a steady pace, but not so violent as to kill off all life. However, individual “acts of God” are nothing of the sort.

But you will have noticed that I said that our current scientific world view is “largely” true, implying that I am not wholly convinced that science will ever be able to give us a complete picture. Physics and biology are running into some tricky problems, and while I may be proved wrong I suspect that these difficulties are highly significant, and some or all of them won’t be resolved. The main ones in physics are the missing mass and the dark energy. These are pretty serious – something like 95% of the mass of the universe, which the physicists reckon has to be there, because of the way galaxies rotate, is in some unknown form. And an unknown force  - a sort of negative gravity - is pushing the galaxies apart at an ever increasing rate. But there is also a host of lesser issues, collectively known as emergent phenomena, which is a phrase we scientists use for “things we can’t explain” – effects that aren’t predicted by the set of physical laws that we have. Examples include many of the shapes that things take up, from galaxies to sand-dunes. In biology there is the small matter of the origin of life – how the unsophisticated blobs from which everything else evolved formed in the first place. We can’t even call this an emergent phenomenon yet, since we can’t find a set of conditions under which the molecules we know to have been around on the early earth can assemble into something blobby. And yet it is probable that simple life is quite common in our galaxy. It established itself early in Earth’s history, and the indications are that it once existed on Mars. So either we have missed something important in our recent extensive researches, or else we need to invoke an extra-terrestrial source, maybe comets. But this is dodging the question for we would still need to propose how it got on to the comets in the first place – did it come from “somewhere else” (as yet undefined), and if not how could it possibly form on the comets themselves?

And then there is the thorniest problem of all: human (or animal) consciousness. We can’t even define what it is, let alone suggest how it emerged.

Unless and until we solve all these conundra the strong materialist position will become increasingly untenable. Grouped together they seem to imply that we haven’t been given all the information we need to give a full scientific description of the world. But the last one, that of consciousness, is for me the most important. I have proposed that the physical universe is strictly non-miraculous, but I don’t completely dismiss the supernatural. It is my contention, and the common experience of much of mankind, that there are things going on “behind the scenes”. However, whatever these forces are, they operate purely through the mind. Which leads me on nicely to my next few propositions.

 

4.      Human consciousness has a crucial role to play in the ultimate purpose of the universe.

 

My reasoning here is rather involved, and not very logical, but here goes: If simple life is indeed relatively common in the galaxy, and there is nothing special about the progress of evolution on Earth, then there should be thousands of alien civilisations more advanced than ourselves, and therefore with the capability of inter-stellar travel. And if so, they would have had plenty of time to sweep across the galaxy. So where are they? Even if most of them are gentle and peace-loving, there should still be hundreds of aggressive species able and willing to wipe out all competition. We should long since have been exterminated. There seem to be two possible reasons why we are still here: either intelligent life is not at all common (we may even be alone in the galaxy) or interstellar travel is practically impossible.

The second explanation may be correct, although currently the physicists seem to doubt it. So I am inclined to accept that we are probably alone, a thought which has some interesting implications. If single-celled life is easy, and the progression from the earliest chordates through to ourselves doesn’t appear very mysterious, then we are forced to the conclusion that the difficult step is getting from bacteria to worms or jellyfish. This in turn implies that there is something special about the terrestrial environment that encourages evolution, and perhaps that the earth-moon-solar system configuration is unique in the galaxy. So we are now bumping into even more fine tuning: a universe where environments like our own are almost, but not quite, impossible. Why would God do that? I can’t imagine that He didn’t mean it. And I therefore can’t avoid the feeling that intelligent life is crucial to the Purpose, and it may be all down to us.

 

5.      The interaction of many individual human consciousnesses produces higher and  lower collective consciousnesses.

 

This is the trickiest proposition for me to defend. I don’t have any arguments to present in its favour, but I do hope to show that it is a useful way of viewing the world. Chemists and physicists familiar with molecular orbitals and band theory will recognise an analogy here, but that is all it is, because I can’t claim any theoretical underpinning for my postulate such as quantum mechanics offers to valency and the solid state. Let’s just call them emergent phenomena for now – like human or animal intelligence themselves. And as with all emergent phenomena the universe must have been set up from the outset so that they could emerge. Futhermore, given that I think that even rudimentary intelligence is not accidental, I have to conclude that the super-intelligences (assuming that they exist) were planned. They are direct creations of God.

 

6.      The higher and lower collective consciousnesses have been recognised for millennia by the great religions.

 

In Christian terminology the higher consciousness has many names: the Holy Spirit, Heaven, Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Light, and numerous others. Elsewhere we find it known as the World of Forms, Nirvana or simply as “Good”. I particularly like “the Truth”, but I will use a variety of names later in my discussions, as the feeling takes me.

One name, however, that I won’t use is “God”. Many religions use the term to mean both the creator and the active spirit, but this is erroneous since they are quite distinct entities. I won’t in fact say much more about God (the creator) for He doesn’t impinge on our mundane existence. “The Son of God” I could live with, although I prefer the term Jesus uses: “the Son of Man”.

The lower consciousness, as you have probably guessed is Satan, the Devil, Evil or Hell. And I want to emphasise at this stage that both consciousnesses can be viewed simultaneously as personalities and as places, as attitudes of mind and as ways of life.

 

7.      The Truth encompasses all that is positive about human existence: knowledge, wisdom, love, cooperation, creativity. Hell is the negation of the Truth: ignorance, stupidity, hatred, aggression, destruction.

 

Many of these opposites – love/hate and creation/destruction for instance, and their relationships to Heaven and Hell – are well recognised in mainstream Christianity, but the similar antitheses of knowledge and wisdom versus ignorance and stupidity, while not denied wouldn’t be accorded the same importance. Given that Heaven and Hell themselves are phenomena that emerge from human intelligence this is clearly a mistake. The heavenly aspects of Knowledge and Wisdom are just as important as Love, Faith, Hope or Charity. How the higher state appears to our minds depends to a great extent on what we call it, or from what angle we view it. When we call it the Truth, or view it as a mind, then the two aspects of Knowledge and Wisdom come to the foreground.

 The search for knowledge and wisdom, of which science is a key part, is an imperative. Study and reflection must be part of the Christian life. Ignorance and stupidity are evil. Obviously, therefore, I am very hostile to biblical literalism. All religious fanaticism is devilish. The devil hates science, because he doesn’t understand it. He also hates the main religions, even though he can pit them against one another, because of the immense amount of Good they accomplish. He therefore hit upon the neat idea of Creationism, which serves two purposes: it helps hold back (mostly) American science, and it helps discredit Christianity in the eyes of the intelligent and educated. If he could make Christianity the preserve of the ignorant and stupid – his own people – he would have won a great victory. I get the impression that in the protestant churches in America at least he is about half-way there, which is very sad, for many of his deluded followers can be generous, cooperative and loving. However, I am more alarmed by creationists who don’t otherwise seem to be ignorant and stupid. We have to assume that such people are knowing and willing servants of Satan, who cackle to themselves over their own wickedness when nobody else is around.

 

8.      The Truth is the conduit through which human intelligence is linked to the ultimate purpose. The Devil may also be important.

 

If I had overcome my lassitude a year or so ago, and written a “Version minus one” I would have treated this differently. Before the idea of Good and Evil emerging out of human consciousness was revealed to me, I viewed them, thanks to a previous revelation, as independent agents put on Earth by God. The Holy Spirit’s job was to help achieve the Purpose by providing a positive influence on human behaviour, the Devil’s to provide some resistance, and therefore in some way to help bring about a more robust solution.

I was mostly right about the Holy Spirit, but I’m now not so sure about the Devil, who may be no more than an unfortunate by-product – I shall have to wait and see. Anyway, both of them can (and do) nudge individuals into actions that they may not otherwise have done, or more commonly block us mentally from doing something that we had been contemplating. But this is all they can do – they cannot force us to behave in ways totally contrary to our nature, and they have no influence at all over inanimate objects. Whatever the scriptures say there are no physical miracles – God doesn’t do them, the Holy Spirit can’t.

The collective consciousnesses have their best chance of influencing us when our minds are at rest: moments of prayer, meditation, contemplation or when we are asleep. This is why our dreams often seem to be telling us something important, and why solutions to our difficulties often suggest themselves after a good night’s sleep.

This brings me to one of the exciting implications I mentioned earlier on. Many scientific problems have been resolved through dreams: chemists need only think of Kekulé, his snakes and his benzene rings. In fact, it is an interesting exercise to study the accounts of the big leaps in science, and tease out the sources of the conceptual breakthroughs. By their very nature the problems don’t lend themselves to simple deductive reasoning – if they did, they wouldn’t be “hard” problems. Cross-fertilisation is very important – bringing ideas from one branch of science into another -  but after that most of the clever ideas appear to come from nowhere. I suggest that the Spirit nudges prepared minds in the right direction. Divine Revelation has been and remains a vital part of the scientific revolution. The Spirit has inspired our current world-view – big bangs, quantum mechanics and evolution – and will continue to do so. To point out weaknesses in this world view is part of the imperative, to rubbish it completely is blasphemy.

 

9.      There are many ways by which the individual mind can commune with the Eternal

 

Near death experiences

Schizophrenia and epilepsy

Psycho-active substances such as psilocybin

Religious ecstasy

Trances

I’ve never tried any of these myself – I certainly don’t intend trying the first two, and I worry that the other three may be too closely related to the first two to be used safely on a regular basis. However, I may have a go at transcendental meditation some time. For now I will content myself with second hand reports, and with my own experiences with a more passive approach: opening the mind for the Spirit to contact you through study and reflection.

            You may wonder why I didn’t include “prayer” in the list. This is because I view it as having two aspects: a contemplative communion with the Spirit (which would be covered by religious ecstasy, transcendental meditation and passive mind-opening) and petitioning (which is a quite distinct activity and which I will discuss later).

 

10.  The Holy Spirit has both a male and a female aspect.

 

Given that they are phenomena that emerge from human consciousness, this would not be surprising. I like to call these aspects Iesu and Sophia. I use the name Iesu and not Jesus because I want to distinguish between the Spirit and Jesus the man (I’ll discuss the precise relationship between them elsewhere.) Sophia (from the Greek for Wisdom) was the name given by the Gnostics to the “sister” of Christ (or the Word). It would be tempting therefore to equate Iesu with Knowledge and Sophia with Wisdom. This is not correct however. We observe the aspects of Knowledge and Wisdom when we view the spirit as Mind. It is only when we view it as a personality, that the male and female aspects appear.

Iesu encompasses all the masculine relationships we can have with the Divine: Father, Son, Brother, Husband, while Sophia likewise has aspects of Mother, Daughter, Sister and Wife.

 

11.  What you encounter when you make contact with the Spirit is very variable, and depends on your education, your expectations and your needs.

 

The brain makes sense of  such experiences as best it can. Thus people of different faiths make different interpretations. Mainstream Christians sometimes report feeling the presence of Jesus, Jews and Muslims their God, Buddhists the Infinite, non-believers their own dearly departed. My own experience brought me in touch with Sophia. Indeed, for quite some time the Spirit was feminine for me, and I was convinced that mainstream Christians had got it badly wrong (although Proverbs treats wisdom as feminine), until I was further enlightened. I can now allow them their masculine Spirit, even though Sophia remains for the time being my only contact with the divine. I think it is to do with what I need – I am used to looking at things from a very masculine, left-brain perspective, and maybe I am being guided to think about things differently.

      This is why people who have had near death experiences not only report feeling the presence of the Divine, but also that of those they have loved. It probably also explains feelings of being haunted. And if there is anything to the art of the Medium in making contact with the dearly departed (which I doubt), then this is where it will come from.

 

12.  Both the Spirit and Satan are co-eternal with humanity

 

They contain parts of the consciousnesses of all those who have gone before us, and all who are alive now. The future however remains undefined, so making contact with the Spirit won’t help us with our lottery tickets. We can get a sense of the future, but only in terms of the myriad possibilities it holds.

Thus both the Spirit and Satan have grown and evolved through history and continue to do so. At the dawn of man knowledge and wisdom were relatively simple, but so were ignorance and stupidity. There is now a lot more to be ignorant about, and much less excuse for stupidity – the wisdom is there if we only look for it. It is probably fanciful, but I like to think that this evolution is even hinted at in the Bible. The Old Testament “God” (in reality the Spirit, not the Creator) isn’t in fact very “good” – indeed He is petty and vindictive – and doesn’t become the gentle, supportive, loving protector until the New Testament. Conversely,  the Old Testament Devil is portrayed as a tempter and an accuser, and doesn’t become the evil adversary until much later.

 

13.  You forge links with both Heaven and Hell throughout your life. At death your soul is portioned between the two according to the strengths of the links you have made to each.

 

You don’t go to heaven or hell when you die – you are already there. Each time you follow the impulse of Iesu or Sophia - loving, creating, acting generously, studying, reflecting -  you make new connections with the higher Mind, much as connections in the brain are reinforced by regular use. And every selfish, destructive, hateful deed deepens your roots in Hell. To return to the band theory analogy, the more you follow the Way the higher is your soul’s position in Heaven, the less deep it sinks into Hell. Nobody is fully heavenly nor fully devilish, although it is a lot easier to end up 99% down below, simply by not doing anything much. We all act selfishly and negatively most of the time without trying, while doing good stuff takes some effort. We may not be down with the really bad souls at the bottom, but even the upper reaches of Hell are pretty miserable.[4]

This partition of the soul has some important consequences:

 

a.      There is no forgiveness for anything.

 

Everything you do goes into the balance. However, it is possible to go a long way towards making amends. To continue the synapse analogy, if a memory isn’t continuously reinforced it fades, as the connections become weaker. This is particularly the case if you have lots of new experiences – the old memories are swamped as new connections are made. But they never disappear altogether – you don’t forget how to swim once you have learnt, and as with Proust and his madaleines, a deeply buried memory can be retrieved by a sight, sound or smell.

Likewise, if you stop making connections to Hell, stop doing things you know are wrong and start reinforcing your connections with the Divine, your position will start to improve immediately. You can’t undo the bad stuff you have done, but you can make it less important to your soul’s destiny.

 

b.      Death bed conversions are a waste of time.

 

You’ve left it too late. Sorry.

 

c.       But conversely, until you reach your death bed, it’s never too late to start redressing the balance of your life.

 

And it is worth doing. You want to die happy, and as we have seen, the most recent connections you have made to heaven or hell are amongst the strongest. Any step up from the darkest depths brings comfort to our repose. Any step up towards the ultimate enlightenment brings us joy and understanding.

 

d.      We[5] therefore have to part company with mainstream Christians when they maintain that Jesus’ sacrifice means that if we are truly contrite about our misdeeds then the slate is wiped clean.

 

Contrition doesn’t help at all in that respect. It is valuable in so far as it prompts us to stop following the ways of Satan, and start following the Truth. But the whole point about the partitioning of the soul is that we don’t need to be judged as saved or lost. We are all partly saved, partly lost. It is simply up to us to ensure that the saved part of our soul is as big as possible.

 

14.  Following the Way of Light is not only beneficial to our eternal souls but can also be very useful to us in the material world.

 

This is largely an indirect effect. The more you work on the good stuff the happier and more self-confident you will find yourself. This is because there is a feedback effect – the more you put into your connections with the Higher Mind, with everything that is positive, the more you receive in return in terms of optimism, encouragement, support. Now these are obviously blessings in themselves, but it is also the case that happy, self-confident people do a lot better in the world, on average, than the miserable, negative types. Who would you rather marry? Who would you rather work for or have working for you? People with positive attitudes are even healthier in the main, because their immune systems work better.

But sometimes the material benefits of communing with Iesu or Sophia can be direct. You will certainly get more good ideas of the type that seem to come out of the blue.

And under particular circumstances it can even appear that the Fates are intervening in your life. Remember that at times we can be merely pawns in the great battle between the Devil and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is trying to advance humankind towards the ultimate Purpose, whatever that is, and the Devil, either with some malign purpose of his own in mind, or through blind destructiveness, is trying to stop her, or at least mess things up. Certainly the Spirit doesn’t merely work through short term tactics; she also has long term strategies, and maybe the Devil does as well. Therefore, if the Spirit needs you in a particular place at a particular time, she can influence things to make sure you turn up. She can only operate through the minds of men and prod them into actions towards which they were already predisposed, but this approach can nevertheless be very powerful. Metaphorical doors will open in the right direction, but will remain resolutely locked if you try to go the wrong way.

You don’t have to remain passive to serve the Purpose. If you want to make the world a better place, and have an idea as to how to do it, give it a go – you’ll usually find you get help from unexpected sources.

But remember: Divine intervention will never clearly announce itself. Everything that happens could have happened without prompting, and it is important that this is so. This side of the grave at least, you will never know for sure whether Iesu pulled strings for you or not, nor whether it was Iesu, Satan or mere bad luck that kept those doors shut.

I promised to expand on the petitioning type of prayer. If you think about it, this is only likely to be effective under a limited set of conditions. The Spirit can only operate through the minds of men, so asking for your lottery numbers to come up is a waste of time. However, you may be able to get help with any of your activities that serve the Purpose by asking nicely for it. Similarly you may be able to persuade the Spirit to guide somebody close to you away from destructive behaviour. But the chances are that if what you are asking for is important then the Spirit is almost certainly on the case already – you won’t need to ask. And if the help you need is very difficult for the Spirit to organise then Her attention may be better given elsewhere. So prayer isn’t going to change the world, and won’t result in amazing miracles, but may be useful in a modest, close-to-home way. Certainly, my experience in talking to people who feel that prayer has helped them is that their fulfilled needs have fallen into this category.

 

15.  The Way of Light has several Paths. It is necessary to explore all of them, and see how far you can get.

 

I like to think in terms of five Paths, and have already hinted at them: Study, Reflection, Love, Cooperation, Creativity. But the number of paths isn’t really five, or any fixed number. Think of trying to climb a mountain – there are infinitely many routes up, but most will cluster along the main ridges.

Nor do these have to be the headings – we all know “instinctively” (ie via the Spirit) what “good” actions are, and the names under which we categorise them, and the weightings we give to the groups are a matter of personal preference. I give quite heavy weightings to study and reflection, since I’m a studious, reflective kind of guy and I want a reason to feel smug about this. The key thing is that everything that I can think of that will strengthen our links with the Spirit can be made to fit under one of my headings, or some combination of them. But in the end these are simply mnemonics. What we constantly need to bear in mind is that maximising our connections with the Divine is a bit like an examination where we have to answer five (or nine, or however many) questions. It’s no good spending the whole three hours on question 1. However good our answer is, we can only get 20% for the paper. Thus those who devote themselves to prayer for instance, or to eleemosynary[6] activity, and neglect the other aspects, are letting themselves and the Lord down.

            It is also important to consider here that “getting in” to heaven is only a start. It is like being selected for a sports team – it is the result of the forthcoming match that is important. Similarly what our souls contribute to the higher intelligence matters in so far as it aids the Spirit in helping those yet to come, and eventually in fulfilling the Purpose. Yes, we need to make the most of our strengths, but just as soccer players can’t limit themselves to their specialist roles – think of defenders having to take penalties -  we have to give as much as we can to the team, and therefore to work on areas where we are weak.

            So we start getting into the area of self-improvement:

·        How can I be more creative?

·        How can I devote more time to study/voluntary work/the family?

and so on. But that’s not something I want to get into here.

            I think I have shown, to my own (self-)satisfaction at least, that a synthesis is possible between science and religion in its broadest sense. More speculative ideas about building a Christian-like credo that a sceptical materialist could be comfortable with will be found in a companion pamphlet, “The Smuggist Christian”. Unfortunately I haven’t written it yet.