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Contents of publications: Study Guide and Understanding & Managing Stress

These publications were also the basis of interactive seminars for students and their parents, for mature-aged students, and for members of U3A.

 The Student's Guide to Study

Memory, Learning, and Study Skills for any Age

The Manual discusses the philosophy of study and the right attitude. The brain/mind (consciousness) model, using ideas from modern physics, describes how energy & resonance are the keys to understanding memory and learning; and how we can separate memory into two levels - recall and recognition. There are two groups of rules about the way we memorize and reinforce  memories. Firstly, the mechanical rules - frequency, spacing, sense, and pattern (pictures). Secondly, using two reinforcing factors - emotion and motivation. There is a 4-stage review technique called relax-recall, used to prove that you have learned and understood, and at the same time as an initial revision exercise. The manual describes such things as memory blocks, mnemonics, etc. One section (stage 4) deals with exams - before, during, and after.

Stage 3 of the manual gives a relaxation technique to reduce tension, for example in exams, and for the recovery of blocked memories.

Stage 5 provides some answers to aging memory, including mature aged students.

There are two appendices to the manual. The first is about the parents' role in learning and study, and a special drug-free method they can use to help deal with stress, and its negative effects on their children. The second describes the use of intuition in learning, problem solving and creative thinking.

STRESS

The U3A lecture and the manual 'Beat Stress Before Stress Beats You', help participants to understand and monitor the effects of stress in their own lives, and if possible find the  cause and select the treatment, or, hopefully, a cure - if their level of stress is potentially damaging.

The following provides an idea of the scope of the contents of the manual and the lectures

This explanation of stress is based on a physics model of consciousness/energy/resonance;  brain/mind (consciousness) interaction is explained. Stress is cumulative, and is equated with emotion, and emotion is equated with energetic memories reinforced by the body’s adrenaline response. The psychosomatic effects of these emotions or stresses are described, and the sorts of medical and emotional problems created or exacerbated are discussed. 

Post-traumatic stress disorders, and related problems, such as negative habits, phobias, and addictions, including addictive thinking, are explained – and how they may relate to some suicides and homicides. Accidents are often stress related. Intervention of the counselling type can reinforce the problem; a change of mental direction and thinking is required - nevertheless the sub-conscious memory of the PTSD will always remain, ready to breakout in moments of inattention, or a triggering circumstance. 

The inescapable mental 6W pattern (What, Where, When, Who, Way, Why) is explained, and how it can be a major source of stress, conflict, even fatigue. It is also the structure of every plan or goal in the memory, so it is the springboard of motivation – or de-motivation, and stress from what is called 'unfinished business'. Some other causes of stress are – boredom; aging; discrimination; information overload; anticipation or fear of violence, illness & disease,pain,or death; belief conflict; disturbed or broken relationships. 

Simple ways to manage and control stress: Avoidance; visualization method; formal & systematic method of stress control – useful for correcting PTSD. Meditation. There is a special technique for parents of young children who have stress related disorders, and it avoids the use of drugs. Finally, there are segments on memory, insomnia & sleep disorders, and simple depression.

If you are interested in obtaining copies of either of these manuals you can ask for details by emailing me on studious@optusnet.com.au

                       Home     About the Author     Lectures on Scientific Thought 

KALEIDOSCOPE

The Art of Self-Deception

We only see what the kaleidoscope permits us to see.

It is this walling off of reality, and the projection of

illusion, that separates people, cultures,

 religions, and nations.

It is also this walling off from reality that prevents

us seeing that we live all our lives in a state of

self-deception. We have a foot in two worlds, so to

speak, but two worlds which turn out to be one.

The visible physical, and the out-of-sight world of

 the mental, spiritual, or metaphysical.

Interpretation of the cosmos has been undergoing a revolution. Anyone familiar with modern physics will appreciate the ferment of change that has been taking place in science over the last few decades, But some of the greatest discoveries of physics have not always come from research, but from intuitive insights that pre-date research and facts. Research and fact that often turn out to be highly subjective.

A serious and instructive study was made of the 42 eminent scientists who were given the task of examining the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo Mission. In part, it said, ’The greater the scientist the more speculative he was seen to be... who wouldn’t hesitate to build a whole theory of the solar system based on no data at all... at the other extreme were those who wouldn’t be able to save their own hide if a fire was burning next to them because they’d never have enough data to prove that the fire was really there.’  With that pre-amble, let me begin.

My father died nearly 50 years ago; suddenly, and unexpectedly.  Being mortal, sooner or later, we are all forced to come to terms with our own, and each other’s mortality.  Ultimately, the experience led me to realise that life is like looking through a kaleidoscope, in which just a few pieces of coloured glass, when rotated, produce an infinity of changing patterns which are personal to me – no one else sees them, or can describe them. Everyone’s mind is a kaleidoscope through which they view and interpret life, and which becomes their view of the world. The coloured pieces represent the constantly changing images and ideas stored in the memory. As thinking and experience rotate the kaleidoscope, the changing patterns determine how we perceive, and what we make of that other reality, the world that is outside ourselves.

Everyone believes that they are dealing with real things in a real world; the region ‘out there’, in which they live. But that region, which is believed to be real, turns out to be largely a projection of their Kaleidoscope. No one can start to understand the region ‘out there’ until they understand the region ‘in here’, and why it determines and interprets all regions; regions which are merely extensions of this most primary and private of all regions; that of the mind and memory. As individuals we create our own personal world.  It is the edifice you and I keep on erecting throughout our lives as we build on perception, education, experience, intuitions, and evolution: idiosyncrasies, delusions, prejudices, skills & talents, strengths & weaknesses, successes & failures, loves & hates; a self-image stored in the inner region-of-the-mind. What we think of as ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

       The region of a farmer’s mind might be the cattle, the sheds and equipment, and the pastures, within the perimeter fence of his 500 hectares. A meteorologist’s region might fill a few thousand cubic kilometres of earth’s atmosphere, while an astronomer’s region stretches billions of light years into space. No wonder people have difficulty communicating - regions and words overlap only at the fringes. Even the same words mean different things to different people because each kaleidoscope projects different images and meanings. We interpret, reinterpret, and misinterpret the world  ‘out there’, in terms of our own kaleidoscope. In its ever-changing patterns lie the buried Jungian-like archetypes that mysteriously appear and disappear like a gestalt drawing; one minute we see a vase the next a face, depending on which way we look at the picture. They are like the hidden patterns in colour blindness tests, some obvious, others vaguely recognized, some not at all - depending on the ability to perceive. As the white-haired, seventy-year-old Yaqui Indian shaman, don Juan, tells the young graduate anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, ’You look but never see’. For Juan, seeing meant throwing away the kaleidoscope: a difficult, and at times a fearful task, for Castaneda; forcing him to abandon the security of his private and familiar world.

Nearly forty years ago I had an operation on one ear to correct an inherited deafness. In those days it was a miracle of delicate surgery performed under a microscope.  The surgeon removed the fine inner bones of the ear that had become cemented together, and replaced them with a tiny mechanical piston. For many days afterwards, not only did I hear in that ear, but the sounds I heard, such as the roar of an engine, or a spoon dropped in the sink, vibrated loudly inside the ear. It wasn’t an illusion, because that’s where the vibration actually occurred - in the piston. Only gradually did my mind recreate the illusion of hearing, and project the source of the sound to its more distant origin – my mind overriding reality.

Someone who wears spectacles fitted with inverting lenses initially sees the world turned upside down. At the start his kaleidoscope functions as it has been trained to function in the absence of the glasses, and the result is distortion and crisis. But he learns to reinterpret his new world, and after a period in which seeing is simply confused, the entire visual field flips over. Thereafter, objects are seen again as they had been before the spectacles were put on. His mind, or kaleidoscope, has reinterpreted what is looked at to again force the outer reality to come to terms with what the inner believes is the way things should be. We live in a world of illusion. Our kaleidoscope is ever changing, ever confined - a mental prison. A region filled with facts and fantasies; the inventions of our own imagination, our own thoughts, our own projections. It seals us off from the reality that is ‘out there’, forcing our personal shape onto that other world: nature, man’s physical structures, and man himself - in both the collective and individual sense.

Professor Thomas Kuhn, specialized in the history of science, and he made a significant contribution to understanding personal spaces – kaleidoscopes. In his essay, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, he calls our kaleidoscope, a paradigm. Anyone embracing a new paradigm, a new interpretation of some reality, is like the man wearing inverting lenses.  He knows he is looking at the same objects but now he sees them differently, and finds them transformed. But, in most cases, sooner or later, his mind will flip back to the way it has always been, and he will lose sight of his new vision; he will look but not see.

We live on a planet where spaces are confined within geographical, national, state, and titled boundaries, and boundaries imposed by the laws of nature; for instance, we must have oxygen, water, food, and light. Inside the man-made and natural fences everyone occupies their own personal space, a different region-of-the-mind from his neighbour - even from husband, wife, or child - and an even remoter region from someone in another job or profession, another religion, another state, of another colour or country. The space occupied by an alien in some remote cosmic civilization would probably be unrecognisable by us, because the kaleidoscope through which we view our space would not have the appropriate bits of ‘glass’ through which to view his space, no matter how we rotate it. Each of us believes his or her region-of-the-mind to be the truest one, without being aware that it is our own invention, a personal projection that interprets for us the colours, the shapes, and meanings of the world. Everyone looks at the same world, the same central truth, but only sees and interprets it through their own attenuating region-of-the-mind. A man who sees the outside of a box from above would possibly dispute the description of a woman who sees its inside from below, but it is the same box. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph in a physics laboratory, a student may see confused and broken lines, but the physicist will see the familiar tracks of elementary particles. Only after a sufficient period of experience will the student develop a kaleidoscope that is common with that of the physicist, and be able to inhabit his world, and see what he sees. It is possible to drive to work over the same route, or travel by train, for weeks, even months, and not see, until it is pointed out by a fellow commuter, a sign, or a house, or a tree which is quite a feature of the landscape. We look, but most of us do not see things around us, because we project our personal kaleidoscope, our own paradigm, onto the world. We only see what our kaleidoscope permits us to see. It is this walling off of reality, and the projection of illusion, that separates people, cultures, religions, and nations.

Some claim that more education will break down the wall, and bring people of different colours & cultures, communities, nations, closer together, but as Thomas Kuhn points out, education tends to make personal paradigms, personal kaleidoscopes, even more remote. Talking about scientists, he says, ’Insulation from the larger society is greatly intensified by another characteristic of the professional scientific community, the nature of educational initiation, where he relies on textbooks, not exposure to other creative work. This provides a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other than except perhaps orthodox theology.’ To some extent this applies to all education, particularly now, in the twenty first century. We train in specialties that are generally unintelligible to anyone but the specialist. For example, computer literacy and illiteracy is creating a caste distinction between youth and age. Education is not designed to produce men and women who will easily discover a fresh approach to other people’s problems and needs, except, maybe, within their own specialty. Education, and particularly professionalism and specialization, tends to lead to an immense restriction of vision, and a strong resistance to paradigm change. The medical profession could be cited as an example; some doctors miss the truth by trying to force a diagnosis into their familiar textbook paradigm. Lateral thinking – peripheral vision – is rejected as a dangerous aberration. Fortunately, there are now more enlightened practitioners who admit they do not know everything about sickness and disease, and who recognize, and even recommend, alternate forms of treatment.

At this point you might legitimately ask me, ‘Where am I coming from? What pictures does my kaleidoscope project?’ While cleanliness is supposed to be next to godliness, I grew up in a home where books and reading edged a close second. Having a bibliophile grandfather who collected books like some people collect stamps, I grew up surrounded by collections of authors; like Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and Shakespeare, and the important poets. I recall reading, at a relatively early age, the speeches of Demosthenes, the dialogues of Plato, the Bible, and of struggling to make some sense of Kant and his categories. As it turned out, Kant’s ‘Categories’ are our kaleidoscope; he imagined the mind fitted with pairs of spectacles through whose different categories we view and interpret everything the mind thinks it knows.  It wasn’t until a more mature age that I took up the study of science. My grandfather’s library hadn’t contained such material, because, while he ran his own private school, he was a mathematician, and one of Australia’s first statisticians after Federation; as a linguist, his main love was literature and history. Consequently, while I graduated in science, and worked in the field for years, the influence of those early formative years ensured that I never became completely immersed in its paradigm. Even today I see unexplained things, mysteries, outside the scientific paradigm. My Kaleidoscope contains patterns that have not always been congruent with those of science. Today, these patterns are merging towards a greater harmony.  Universal changes in the emphasis and direction of education, on a global scale, are needed to break down the isolation created by personal and professional kaleidoscopes, and to help individuals everywhere understand with tolerance each other’s world. This may well become a necessity in the 21^st century, if the world is not to self-destruct through the antagonisms and conflicts between regions; which are merely regions-of-the-mind. Perhaps this is the next great leap in the evolution of Man.

Australian biologist, the late Dr Darryl Reanney, in his book, ’Music of the Mind’, discusses the implications for a divided society of the ideas within modern physics, he says, ‘Acts of selfishness have the effect of weakening the links that bind universes together whereas acts of compassion and cooperation have the effect of strengthening them; thus, ultimately, a cosmos of selfish choices unravels and disintegrates...in this context justice and tolerance are not human inventions but cosmological principles, the very foundations upon which worlds are built...realities that do not ‘hang together’, sooner or later unravel and blow away.’ He goes on to describe, in his own way, the effect of our personal kaleidoscope. ’We project onto the world of perception the images stored in our minds. The world within paints itself across the world without...It can never know what is because it can never see what is. Ceaselessly, using fictional symbols in the restless inner domain of conceptualisation, ego invariably projects those fictions out onto the world and thereby blocks communion with the world at its root’. As don Juan said, we look but we don’t see. We only recognize what the mind resonates with, and it will only resonate with patterns, ideas and symbols, which are congruent with those that are already stored in its kaleidoscope. We interpret what we see in terms of what we think we know; the changing patterns of our personal kaleidoscope. ’The world within paints itself across the world without,’ is a vivid way of describing it.  For example, we admire the beautiful colours in the world of nature. But it is an illusion. Colour is not an intrinsic characteristic of, say, a red rose, a blue sea, or auburn hair. In themselves they are colourless; just an energy field. Sunlight falling on a head of red hair interacts with, and is absorbed by its field, except for a limited band of wavelengths. The beautiful colour we see is that part of the spectrum that is not absorbed, but is reflected; it is our kaleidoscope that interprets the hair as beautiful and calls it red. Beauty is in the mind of the beholder, always.

Every thought in our minds, and every image we perceive rotate our kaleidoscope and change the patterns that we see. We are continually modifying our view and interpretation of the world: the more powerful the thought, and the feeling that goes with it, the greater the rotation. I began by writing of my father’s death 50 years ago. When confronted with any strong emotional experience the kaleidoscope is forced to rotate more than usual, as it searches for a pattern that makes sense of what is now seen as a new and different world. Confronted with a crisis of unrecognisable patterns, we may even become temporarily disorientated, as when wearing inverting spectacles.

When we encounter a crisis, such as any of the myriad of crises confronting everyone in modern society, the kaleidoscope turns in an attempt to resolve that crisis and eliminate any conflict; it even invents modifications to its view of the world. Darryl Reanney felt compelled to look for a new pattern after the death of his mother; his books, Death of Forever & Music of the Mind, are testament to that re-assessment.

Crises begin with confusion, a blurring of the rules we normally live by, and depend on. There is often a decisive difference between the world as we used to see it, and how we see it now. It is the same world, but now we have to re-arrange the pieces of glass into a different pattern because suddenly they have a different meaning. Like a visible gestalt, instead of seeing the picture of a vase we now see a face, but don’t recognize it. Even a minor breakdown, or shift, in congruence between the inner and the outer realities – the mental & the physical – may begin the first blurring of the rules, and be sufficient to induce in someone a new way of looking at the world. Some forms of conversion, say, religious or political, may follow this route. A key experience may convert a conservative industrialist into an environmental activist; a right-wing politician into a socialist; a Roman Catholic priest into an Anglican Rector – or visa versa. Between the first sense of trouble and the recognition of an alternative paradigm, odd things can happen to someone’s kaleidoscope, and a new gestalt may arrive quite intuitively, without any logical thought or reason. This is the creative process, when the answer to a puzzle springs into the mind unexpected and unbidden, such as going to bed with a problem and waking with the solution. (see my essay on Intuition)

At times of crisis and revolution, when traditions change – times like today – perceptions of the world must be re-educated. Like the student’s interaction with the bubble chamber; he must be taught to see a previously familiar situation through a new gestalt – from lines and scratches to particle tracks.

Except during periods of crisis, we feel secure, our world stable, and the inner and outer realities in harmony; yet, it is an unstable harmony, always open to challenge, and it takes little to disturb the balance; as is happening in our Australian society and throughout the world today. But, like creative intuition, progress does not, and cannot, always build brick on brick, using pure logic and reason. Our private and minuscule region-of-the-mind ‘floats’ in a much greater region-of-the-mind; like an ice crystal floats in the watery matrix from which it was born. Jung called this the Collective Unconscious, I prefer the term, Sea-of-Mind, because I’m not convinced it is unconscious; it is only out-of-sight, and therefore out-of-mind (conscious). But whether conscious or unconscious, in moments of personal crisis it induces an intuitive change in the kaleidoscope – a new insight. The chemist, Kekule, while struggling to understand the structure of benzene, in his sleep dreamed it as a ring, and solved the puzzle. Highly creative geniuses like Edison, Tesla, Pauling, and Einstein, and the musical and poetic giants, all made a habit of tuning into this hidden well of inspiration and wisdom; searching for insight. The re-education of our kaleidoscope often arrives as an intuition, as a leap of enlightenment, and in the same picture we not only see, but, now understand the face as well as the vase.

It is crisis that brings about revolutions in thought, and progress in history; the movements against slavery, and child labour; the French and Russian Revolutions; the industrial revolution; the religious Reformation of Luther and Calvin; and the great scientific breakthroughs of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and others. All were responses to crises in the accepted paradigms of their time; what they ‘saw’ could no longer be tolerated by the kaleidoscope they had inherited from the past.

It is happening today. A typical example is the rise of the conservation movement, which, among other things, sees more value in old growth forests than as fodder for woodchip mills. Perhaps, intuitively, conservationists see farther into the future, and discern a threat to our children and our children’s children in the wanton exploitation of the world’s limited natural resources, including cutting down trees, and burning fossil fuel with its damaging effect on the earth’s climate. That’s their new paradigm, while others cling to the historic paradigm; that it’s better to preserve jobs now than trees, that it’s better to burn our sources of energy now because it fuels industries that provides jobs, wealth, and profits now. Both look at the same world, but see different things. Both have valid arguments, but their kaleidoscopes project entirely different patterns; even the fringes of their region-of-the-mind seem unable to overlap. And herein lie both our national and our global problem.  Every party to a dispute uses its own kaleidoscope to argue its own case. Forest workers use their collected data, while conservationists use a different set of data.  The resulting circularity does not, of course, make either argument wrong or ineffectual. Each provides a clear projection of what the world will be like for those who adopt the other’s point of view. The status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It can never become logically compelling for those who refuse to step out of their own kaleidoscope into that of the other. How difficult it is to step out of a white mind into a black or yellow mind, and visa versa.

People who work in the same occupation or profession share the interests and methodology of common practice; and are bounded and controlled by their shared region-of-the-mind. The public status of their occupation is generally proportional to the success it has had in solving problems and providing services that society values. Timber milling & forest products, for instance, or coal-fired power stations. Medicine and teaching are two more of a multitude of insulated professions. But, to have been successful is not necessarily to have been always and altogether successful, and, in a rapidly changing world, certainly does not guarantee success in the future. It is almost impossible for the whole body of practitioners from any occupation or profession to foresee future crises and change their point of view; their inertia is too great, their vision too limited. It takes a few independent lateral thinkers, sometimes only one, to see a new gestalt shining through the traditional pattern. A new way of looking at the world, at society and its problems, emerges only with difficulty, resisted by those who have a commitment to, and a vested interest in, the inherited kaleidoscope – the status quo.

A typical example of this inertia and resistance to change is Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, by accident, while he was investigating cathode rays. Surprise and shock greeted his announcement. At first, the famous physicist, Lord Kelvin pronounced X-rays an elaborate hoax. Others, while they could not doubt the evidence, were staggered by it. Though X-rays were not prohibited by established theory, they violated deeply entrenched expectations.

 In the absence of crisis, anticipation of change is generally ignored, so change becomes much more acute and distasteful when it finally arrives. Progress can be achieved only by discarding previously held beliefs or procedures, and, at the same time, replacing them with new ones. For anyone who has staked a career on the inherited paradigm, this sort of crisis becomes a personal and emotional crisis, a traumatic upheaval; kaleidoscopic patterns no longer project reality. So they reject or deny the new reality, and refuse to accept the new truth. It is the principal reason for resistance to the reformation of dogma and ecclesiastical form in the Church. A switch from a coal-fired power station to natural gas is resisted fiercely by those attached to the old technology, using both genuine and spurious arguments. The movement from public service employment to sub-contracting and privatisation is resisted in the same way; the government looking through one kaleidoscope, workers through another.

In principle, a new way of looking at, and doing things, might emerge without reflecting destructively upon any part of past practice. It is not always necessary to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The new approach may be simply an extension of existing practice that is able to absorb both the old and the new within a wider paradigm (eg. Newton vs Einstein); a common kaleidoscope which transcends and combines the best of both worlds. But such solutions are rare, and only possible when regions communicate, not at the fringes, but by superimposing their kaleidoscopes, or paradigms, for the purpose. This seldom happens, because each is fearful of a takeover once they put all their cards on the table, and their privacy is invaded. Yet, without such opposing paradigms, dialogue would be impossible, and no new synthesis could emerge. There could be no evolution and progress.

Proponents of competing points of view are always at cross-purposes. It is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs, or logic, or facts. Standards and definitions are different. Their activities are undertaken using different regions-of-the-mind. The opposing groups see different things when they look from the same ground in the same direction. Both are looking at the same world, and what they look at has not changed, but they see different things, and in different relationships one to the other.

Perhaps the solution to the problem is not about converting one or the other individual, or group, to the opposing point of view, but rather searching for the sort of community that generally, sooner or later, precipitates out to form a single group with a common kaleidoscope. It is often the hard-headed people, who lead the opposing groups, who are the least qualified to think laterally towards a community of interest; Government ministers & union leaders, for instance.

It is important that at least a few individuals should feel that a new idea is headed in the right direction, even if only for personal or aesthetic considerations. Such an intuitive feeling about what is right may spark the push towards a new paradigm.  It wouldn’t be realistic, given the current condition of society and the world, to claim that existing institutions – political, industrial, legal and religious – have ceased adequately to deal with the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created, either by commission or omission. This is the sort of malfunction, or dissonance, that leads to crisis, and is the prerequisite for revolution.

Political and bureaucratic regions-of-the-mind is often forced upon us. The bureaucratic resumption of land or property for its own purposes, the logging of old-growth forests and wood chips, full steam ahead for power generation with greenhouse abatement put on the back burner, Mabo. Every case for has its counter-case against. It isn’t whether one point of view is true, or whether one is right or wrong, but merely a projection of what some individual sees as right or wrong; often based upon an inherited paradigm, upon precedent. That individual may be a bureaucrat, a politician, a pope, a judge, an aboriginal, a timber worker, or a greenie, maybe just you and me. There is no final arbiter of truth, of right or wrong; even a High Court Judge isn’t free of the confines and limitations of his own kaleidoscope; neither are a Pope, or a Bishop, or Australia’s Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet, or the Leader of the Opposition.  As we have witnessed around the world, political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that these institutions themselves forbid, because they try to protect their own interests – so they frequently lead to anarchy, even violence. Because there is no superior institutional framework for the adjudication of differences, parties to the conflict finally resort to mass persuasion, and sometimes force.  Much of the dissent in our community, some for change, some for the status-quo, some for so-called ‘rights’, emanates from ‘lobby’ groups: aboriginals, forestry workers, conservationists, pro and anti abortionists, those for and against women priests, the gun lobby, unionists - the list goes on. Mostly they resort to mass persuasion, but, sometimes, strikes, even violence. Politicians legislate according to their party political paradigm, which leaves those outside the paradigm isolated, with no higher court of appeal.  When, in the kaleidoscope of a bureaucrat’s, a politician’s, or a judge’s mind, a boundary changes, a dispute often arises about perceived authority and power, and of ownership. What we see acted out on our streets throughout this country between different ethnic and indigenous groups, between other countries – between Indonesians and Timorese, between Russians and Chechens, between Northern and Southern Irishmen, between Serbs & Muslims – are mere reflections of individual and collective regions-of-the-mind; projections of greed or fear or power which do not exist in nature, but only in men’s minds, their kaleidoscope. We try to project our personal paradigm, our pattern of belief, onto others to force them to conform to our pattern, otherwise the dissonance may eventually force us to change in order to merge with their region. Such a change means that a little or a lot of our region must be discarded, lost, and loss means death; above all else we fear death.

Mabo legislation and Aboriginal rights is a case in point that will continue to divide, rather than reconcile, black and non-black Australians for generations to come.  Aboriginal lore, their sense of space and sacred sites – regions or song-lines, that stretch uninterrupted from one end of the land to the other – cuts across the rigidly delineated secular spaces of other men; if not physically then certainly in the imagination, or kaleidoscope. Modern physics and metaphysics is already asking the question, ‘Is there any real difference between the sacred and the secular?’ It would appear not, in Aboriginal thinking.  While Mabo may be fought out in the courts and on the land, unless there is a meeting and reconciliation, a synthesis, of two entirely different kaleidoscopes, the problem will never be solved or go away. It is not all one sided; aboriginals find it just as difficult to accept that there is a non-aboriginal culture that is just as valid as their’s, and that the two must somehow merge their aspirations so that the synthesis is seen to be fair to all, and beneficial to all, irrespective of history – because we tend to look at and interpret history through the eyes and experience of the present, not as it was at some previous time – history becomes distorted. An enforced solution to Mabo, one way or the other, will leave lasting bitterness on one side or the other, or on both; there must be a better way.

Like the borders of a country, we continually push the perimeter of our paradigm, that which circumscribes our region-of-the-mind, farther and farther out. The bigger the imaginary space we build around us, the safer we feel, and the less threat we perceive from neighbouring regions. It was the French mystic priest and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, who pointed out one of the potential dangers of increasing population. It puts more than added pressure on the environment; it presses people closer together, reduces their personal space, forces changes which are resisted by all sorts of negative responses, not least of which are increasing violence and crime, ignoring or turning one’s back on one’s neighbour, and trying to coerce others into joining our personal paradigm; as do many religious and political ideologies.

Every time we share an idea, or reject someone else’s idea, or just think about them, we build a bridge, a resonance between their region-of-the-mind and our region-of-the-mind through the subconscious telepathic resonance between the energies of our common memories. Perhaps it is the subconscious conflict that results from preserving our region (our ego) unchanged while, at the same time, resisting the influence of others – fencing off our private space – which leads to much of the stress, and its associated problems of health and disease, which afflicts modern society.

The kaleidoscope is like a mandala - a symmetrical pattern with a circumference, and a centre where we sit, desperately trying to avoid being thrown off the rotating wheel. Figuratively, we dig in our fingers and toes, and stay away from the perimeter where the speed of change is greatest, and where our private world overlaps the worlds of others. Anyone who has enjoyed playing on a rotating floor knows that the nearer you get to the edge the more certain it is that you will be thrown off. Nevertheless, it is at that dangerous edge, the line of crisis, that creativity flourishes, and new paradigms are born.

The Relativity and Quantum-Mechanical revolutions would never have germinated and flowered had Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and others, held rigidly and securely to Newtonian mechanics. Theirs was a revolution in thought that was challenged by most of their contemporaries, who were afraid to discard a theory that had answered most questions since Newton.  Kuhn calls Einstein’s discovery of Relativity, a ‘thought experiment’. It happened in his region-of-the-mind, his kaleidoscope – the region where all revolutions and movements begin.

The personal kaleidoscope, the individual mind, is the furnace where burn the fires that ignite our most emotive actions: creativity, love, compassion, cooperation, sharing. But also burn the fires that ignite murder, suicide, greed, violence, war, corporate takeovers, strikes, and litigation. They all originate in someone’s kaleidoscope, someone’s mind. Thought is the motivating force behind all action. While an action may appear spontaneous, it is always the result of a prior thought, conscious or unconscious. Young malleable minds, viewing violence, or being indoctrinated with prejudice and hate, create a kaleidoscope that, when projected onto life, gives a distorted, and often anti-social, way of dealing with difficulties. When faced with a problem, their pre-programmed kaleidoscope rotates until a perceived solution takes shape – then they deal with it in the way they see as appropriate, but which is often socially inappropriate.

The world needs more people, young and old, who are fearless, and determined enough to break open the prison they have created, and become citizens of the world; not of some parochial, perhaps anti-social, region-of-the-mind; not trying to force the world to conform to their region, for reasons of security, selfishness, dogma, or some inherited belief; nor becoming subservient to another’s region; but ready to enter into and accept other’s regions; to work for consensus, a community of oneness in a world of divisiveness: to become catalysts for change; to see as well as look – the eyes of a blind world.

I explained where I was coming from, so where am I going? Today, I don’t think any self-respecting scientist can say where they are going. Kurt Gödel’s Theorem – Gödel was a famous mathematician - implies that we can never discover the ultimate, because the quantum world that we experience as the cosmos, unfolds from a deeper order of reality that will always be outside our region, our kaleidoscope. Evolution, and the search for truth, for ultimate understanding and wisdom, for reconciliation and oneness, will go on towards infinity but never reach it, because there will always be something left to discover; some new kaleidoscopic pattern to see, and explain in a new way.

Evolution is an on-going process, which responds to crisis by moving forward, not gradually as was once thought, but in giant leaps, by revolution. There are those who intuitively believe Man is on the verge of another spectacular evolutionary leap, breaking out of the current crisis and kaleidoscopic confinement into a new paradigm: a paradigm that reflects the reality that we live contemporaneously in both a physical and a spiritual, mental, or metaphysical world.

As William Blake, the mystical painter and poet, said, ’If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see things as they are, infinite.’

Belief  

A New Creed for a New Millennium 

A Lecture given at Wollaston Theological College 3.9.2005

Perth, Western Australia

To a Day Conference of SOFIA 

                         The certainties of the past, when our earth provided                                                         the secure centre for the universe, and to which we                                                                               anchored our existence, and on which we also centred                                                                               our faith, have been swept away by modern physics and                                                                      cosmology.  

                             Any religion, which relies on the belief and devotion                                                        of its followers, can frequently claim success, and falsely                                                                       justify a claim that its particular god is the only true God.  

                            Does it matter then whether we believe in a God called                                            Father, or Mother, or Allah, or Great Spirit, or Jesus,                                                                                 or Krishna,  or Brahman, or as an intelligent Power,                                                                          a  Mind that pervades Its own creation?                                                                                   The name means nothing, just  a semantic peg on which to hang the same                                           central Reality wearing a different disguise.                                                                                                  It is only the personal experience which counts.   

When I talk to a group, I do not always expect them to agree with me, because I do my best to challenge them to confront and think about their own personal ideas and beliefs. Whether you agree with me today, or whether you believe what I say, or whether what I say will change your point of view or belief, will depend  on your personal interpretation of what you understand to be the truth. 

So let me start by asking that same question Pontius Pilate is recorded as having asked 2000 years ago – ‘What is Truth?’ 

In talking to scientists about truth – because it is important for them – I divide truth into four categories. As truth is just as important for theologians and their followers, we can treat religious truth, and truth about God, in the same way. 

We generally think of science as organized or systematized knowledge – at least that’s the impression given by textbooks. But textbooks don’t spell out all the contentious arguments, and bitter battles that have gone on over the years between protagonists for alternative theories, and that still go on today. It is only when one theory becomes dominant for a time, or appears to be true, that it becomes enshrined in a textbook – but even textbooks become superseded and out of date. The same can be said of religious knowledge and its textbooks, which are the scriptures relating to that religion, but unfortunately they don’t become superseded when they become out of date. 

How do we judge whether something is true? The answer to this question is very important for all of us.  

Let me explain: We can divide truth into three broad categories – there is contrived truth, then there is adopted truth, finally there is absolute truth. We could add a fourth category called temporary truth.

A lot of Mathematics is a form of contrived truth. Because A=B and B=C then A=C. This is true because we have chosen to make it so by definition. In football and cricket and other games, and our legal system, the contrived or invented rules lay down what is the truth for umpires and players, and the police and justice system, to follow. Of course, whether a particular event is inside or outside the rules or truth is always open to interpretation or misinterpretation, as commentators or lawyers are frequently heard to debate. We could call the 10 Commandments such a set of rules.

We judge ‘truth’ using a physical process called RESONANCE. New sensory information – from seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling – arrives in the form of energy patterns that selectively seek out and resonate with, and are then compared subconsciously with similar patterns we have already stored in our memory. If resonance creates a pattern match they could be accepted as true, for us – or they could be rejected as false. In much the same way that Euclid proved congruence between triangles, laying one triangle over the other to make sure their angles and sides match. But where do these pre-existing patterns, or memories, come from? From many sources, but mainly  parents, siblings and peers, teachers, ministers, books, people in authority, or those with supposed credibility – whom we have generally believed, without challenging what they told us. These are ‘adopted’ truths. We progressively construct this edifice of adopted truth from our earliest years, and add to, consolidate, and strengthen its matching memory patterns as we build our conviction about what we are told and think is true. For instance, many of the bible stories and the creeds which have been repeated week by week, and generation after generation for hundreds of years, have sunk deep into the psyche of our culture, and our memories. Whether they are true or not is another matter, we just adopt them.

So, Adopted truth is the truth that we have received from those that went before us, imagining it to be true, and against which we measure truth for ourselves today by comparison with these past memories, using the resonance between similar patterns. Mind and memory, like everything else in the universe, runs on energy, and energy has this inbuilt ability to transfer itself and recycle itself, carrying information patterns backwards and forwards between similar resonating systems – eg. radio and cell phones. In our case, between brain and mind, or memory. As suggested, the system operates by a method  like Euclid developed to prove congruence: we lay the new fact over the old fact in the subconscious memory; if there is a resonating match then we label the new fact with as much truth as we gave to the old memory.

On the other hand, we can never distinguish and isolate absolute truth, because against what would we measure it: Against whose experience, and with what tests? Undoubtedly absolute truth surrounds us on every hand but we can never label it as such because we can never prove that it will never change or be superseded.

So we could add the fourth kind of truth – ‘temporary truth’. For example, the sort of truth surrounding a scientific theory, or a religious dogma, that seems to be true until new data and theorizing overturn it. This revolution in thinking is generally rejected or opposed by the efforts of the inventors or propagators of the temporary truth in order to retain the status quo. This is happening all the time in the advancement and evolution of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately it is also happening in religion, with religious knowledge.

In a small book, ‘Science in Search of Truth and Reality’, Laszlo Szergo reminds his readers that the theories and models of nature developed by scientists are merely theories and models (We should add, so are the theories and models of God, which have been developed by theologians, prophets and seers – of all ages). They are true and real only within certain conditions and limits – similar to ‘contrived’ truth. He points out that they should not be confused with absolute truth and reality. He uses the flat earth example; it was supposed flat for most of our history, because a flat earth explained all the observations men were then capable of making, so it gave a useful model of what was seen and therefore believed. And for generations all but a few resisted embracing the fact that the earth is round and rotating – and that it revolves around the sun – not only because it was obvious, but because the Church followed the advice of Aristotle, and insisted the earth was stationary and the centre of the universe. Even today many of our theories possibly fit into the flat earth category – they are just theories that are useful models until something better turns up. We should treat religious theories, and ideas about God, in the same way.

So how does all this relate to Fundamentalism? This is an important issue, because many people are fleeing to Fundamentalism, and in places like the USA it is starting to intrude into politics with dangerous potentialities. Even Australian politics is not completely free of this Fundamentalist influence, as we see the registration of Fundamentalist-type Christian political parties. Even John Howard, at times, seems to be tainted with this religious orthodoxy, no doubt inspired by his friend George Bush. It is difficult for politicians to buck the popular and accepted paradigm of the day and keep their job.

There are important reasons for this reversion to Fundamentalism, both historical and psychological.

As one of the few writers on superstition, Peter Lorie, has pointed out, using his words: whenever you start doubting that life has a purpose, that the cosmos is a friendly place, and that a beneficent power is in charge, you tend to return to the wisdom of the past, to superstitions which provide instant answers and solutions for a society bereft of wisdom and faith. 

And that is what the Fundamentalists are doing; reverting to a past history where they felt secure like their parents and grandparents, even though it may be a false picture of reality. Where there is no terrorism, or personal threat, and where they feel secure in what they believe is a God-controlled world. Of course, there are those who like to take advantage of this fear for reasons of control, power, even financial gain. Such as  some of the TV evangelists. 

As we will understand a little later,  we are all bonded at the subconscious level by resonating memories – such as in a family. Being associated with others of like mind in an emotionally motivated Fundamentalist group, sharing common beliefs, memories, and motivations, whether true or false, creates this bonding, and provides a cloak of confidence which shields them from facing the stark realities of existence or non-existence. I’m not suggesting that this bonding is a bad thing, if it helps them feel safe and secure in an uncertain world – providing that’s as far as it goes.  It is also this bonding and its emotional motivation which activates many suicide bombers. 

In a sense, science is to blame for this flight of religion back to the dark ages. As the Lutheran Theologian, Karl Heim, has graphically pointed out in his book ‘The Transformation of the Scientific World View’, its discoveries and theories have created doubt and uncertainty in many minds:  The certainties of the past, when our earth provided the secure centre for the universe, and to which we anchored our existence, and on which we also centred our faith, have been swept away by modern physics and cosmology.  

It is not hard to imagine how this can happen, particularly for anyone who has not thought through the consequences of scientific discovery for faith and belief. Many feel lonely and disturbed, even deserted, when they think of God in terms of the Creator of a cosmos which science tells us is so vast that we can only think of it as infinite. It is nothing like the comfortable story in Genesis on which many of us were brought up – God creating the world in 6 days, after which ‘he made the stars also’, His after thought. Scientists have recently been able to calculate more accurately the size of the sister galaxy to our Milky Way – the beautiful Andromeda Galaxy – and found it is several times larger than previously thought; it is 220,000 light years across. Light travels at 300 thousand kilometres a second, and in just one year it travels nearly 9½ trillion kilometres, so calculate 220,000 years in terms of distance. Now try and imagine, if you can, the giant galaxy in the Constellation of Virgo, targeted by the Hubble telescope; one of many galaxies in that particular constellation, and 52 million light years from earth – that's about 45 thousand million million million kilometres. Physicists have calculated that the black hole at its centre has a mass of about 2.3 billion suns like ours, and that it is rotating at a speed of 1.9 million kilometres an hour. Just the centre of the galaxy is 500 light years across, and yet the black hole itself, which contains the mass or energy of 2.3 billion suns, is only about the physical size of our own solar system. These figures are so enormous that we have no scale against which to measure or even imagine their vastness. It is no wonder that with earth-bound perceptions and limited vision we can become overwhelmed, confused, and disorientated when confronted with such immensity; even perhaps dismiss it as irrelevant, forgetting we belong to and are also a creation, ‘children’, of that same energy or force; of the same Cause which gave birth to and grew that giant galaxy 52 million light years away, and other innumerable ones, billions, like it. It is almost beyond belief that the pictures recorded by the Hubble telescope are already 52 million years out of date, and that what is happening to that galaxy right at this moment in time won’t be seen or known on earth for another 52 million years - such is the vastness of the cosmos. 

You may justifiably ask, how can the Source of such stupendous structures - not one, but untold billions of them - be identified as a personal God, which is what traditional dogma suggests? If Jesus knew what he was talking about, and we rate him as an honest and knowledgeable person, he is reported to have said that God is aware of every hair on your head, and even when a sparrow dies and falls to the ground God knows. This is consistent with the contention that not only is the energy of matter distributed throughout the universe, but so is consciousness, or Mind. Personal experience tells us that mind is the location of awareness, of knowing, and of memory. If that ubiquitous and all pervasive mind, or consciousness, stores the history of our life, isn’t it reasonable to assume that Mind also stores the Source’s memories or history?  

Before proceeding further, let me suggest how this consciousness and store of memory is necessary if evolution is to make sense, and is relevant to our search for what we can call the real God.   

Professor Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced study at Princeton, where Einstein spent his last years, writes: “It’s one of the joys of physics that matter isn’t just inert stuff. In the Nineteenth Century one thought of matter as just chunks of stuff which you could push and pull around, but they didn’t do anything. Quantum mechanics makes matter even in the smallest pieces into an active agent, and I think that is something very fundamental. Every particle in the universe is an active agent making choices between random processes.” (Like we do – why should we function any differently from the universe as a whole, and  vice versa?) 

As Dyson says, this explanation is based on what is called Quantum Mechanics – which I don’t propose to discuss today – except for two brief mentions. The brilliant young German Physicist Werner Heisenberg discovered the Uncertainty Principle – which led to our understanding that we influence matter at the most fundamental level through our personal involvement – the interaction between the observer and the observed. Then the great Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed his famous wave equation, which shows mathematically how this happens. This evolved into the scientific belief that we actually create our own physical reality through our thoughts and intentions, our observation (this is called the Copenhagen interpretation, after Niels Bohr). 

The following limerick is based on this idea: 

There was a young man who said, ‘God

            Must think it exceedingly odd

            If he finds that this tree

            Continues to be

            When there’s no one about in the Quad’. 

And God replies;           

            Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd:

            I am always about in the Quad,

            And that’s why the tree

            Will continue to be

            Since observed by

            Yours Faithfully, God. 

As Dyson points out,  matter, and therefore the universe, is conscious and is evolving through its own choices, like we do. In May this year (2005), at a conference on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Evolution, Dyson said, ‘The evolution of the universe and the evolution of science can be described in the same language as the evolution of life.’ If we study evolution in the broadest possible context (matter and energy are equivalent, E = MC²) – from energy to particles, from particles to atoms and molecules, to hydrogen gas, to primary and secondary stars and galaxies, to the elements or stardust that make life possible, finally to life as we experience it – every stage requires memory. To remember what works and what doesn’t – in exactly the same way that our memory functions and enables us learn, be creative, and to evolve as individuals. So memory is not something confined in human heads – but is a universal characteristic of total reality, and a part of what we call consciousness, or mind. We seldom realise how significant memory is in our existence and in our evolution – we can’t even see things moving without memory. 

This idea is amplified by the quantum physicist, the late Professor David Bohm, and his team at London University – in an interview he said – Through us the cosmos, even as we dialogue, is changing its idea of itself… it questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort parallel with our own, to decipher its own being. This, as I reflect on it, is awesome. It assigns a role to man that was once reserved for the gods. (In other words, the cosmos is evolving, and uses memory like we do). 

We can draw on one further piece of evidence to show that consciousness and memory are inherent elements of a total reality, not just in human heads – as the orthodox paradigm would lead us to believe.  It is Intuition. I don’t propose to discuss intuition in detail, it’s a subject on its own, and if anyone is interested they can request a copy of my lecture, Intuition – From Physics to Metaphysics, delivered to members of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in September 2004. (my email address is burnardmorey@optusnet.com.au) Intuition is the process by which we access information and memories, other than our own, which are stored permanently in the universal consciousness that surrounds us. Again, Resonance becomes the key that opens this infinite library of information. 

As an aside; according to a report in August 2005, a dispute about evolution has recently split the Vatican Hierarchy. A close associate of the new pope, Cardinal Shönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, published an article in the New York Times refuting Darwinian Evolution and extolling ‘Intelligent Design’ – which is Creationism by the back door. The Vatican astronomer, and Director of the Vatican Observatory,  Father George Coyne, a distinguished professor who is also involved in research at the University of Arizona, fiercely attacked Shönborn in the Vatican newspaper.  Apparently George Bush has said that Intelligent Design should be taught in American schools alongside evolution, and it looks as if our Federal Government is again following Bush – through spokesman Brendan Nelson – recommending ‘Intelligent Design’ be taught in our schools (Sunday Times 14 August). The idea of evolution I have outlined here is similar to, but beyond Darwinian Natural Selection. In a sense it could be said to support survival of the fittest as consciousness and memory select matching choices from new intuitively discovered patterns – and then tries them out, building in the successful ones and discarding the faulures, as it evolves its design. Consequently it slowly grows a design which works as the cosmos and nature evolve, not because of some supposed pre-existing intelligent design..  

Many of Nature’s designs are not intelligent, are wasteful, and become extinct because they cannot survive in the changing environment. Intelligent design as suggested by the Fundamentalists should have had God inventing man rather than dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers, and mammoths, and the other myriads of species that evolution has developed, experimented with - depending on time and place - and which have become extinct. 

As Professor Carl Sagan concluded about this strange universe that we are privileged to share and participate in:

‘For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be as static and dull as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.’ 

Just to conclude this introduction: that genius, the late Professor Richard Feynman, cautioned his physics students, using these words – ‘. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. 

That should spell  the end of fundamentalist dogmatism! Although I suspect that many believing people separate their creeds and biblical beliefs, and the facts about science and the cosmos, into separate mental compartments so that they don’t have to think about them together, and  reconcile the irreconcilable. 

Let’s now get back to religion and the church. 

Christianity is going through a revolution, not only of gender (women priests, homosexuality, etc), but also of dogma. Whether it will survive, in its existing form anyway, is a matter of how well it can adapt to the world's relentless pursuit of knowledge, which doubles every seven years. The Church can no longer rely on blind acceptance of its teaching, dogmas, and creeds; although there are fundamentalist sects which, for reasons of ignorance, fear, arrogance, or power, are unable or unwilling to think through the implications for their beliefs of modern scholarship and discovery. This can be said of Islamic Fundamentalists equally with Christian Fundamentalists. Of course, few of them ever bother to concern themselves with modern scholarship and discovery. There is a movement emanating from the USA, and now moved to the UK, where Fundamentalists are withdrawing their children from the normal education system and either educating them at home, or in special schools of their own making – the purpose is to prevent them being exposed to modern thought and discovery; their curriculum is riddled with fundamentalist principles. Today the Encyclicals of a Pope, or the Catechisms of a Curia, are not much more than of academic interest for a great many Roman Catholics, particularly in the western world. One can understand unquestioning faith in religious dogma before the time of universal education and enlightenment, but not in today's world. The Church's primitive and dogmatic approach to what a younger, and better-educated generation understands as reality leads to alienation from the church.              

Some churches claim to be attracting young people back to their ranks, but this may be largely because they are even more disillusioned, even more fearful, by what they find elsewhere. They may commit themselves to a 'blind' faith because they cannot confront the alternative that the modern world offers them - almost the 'dark night of the soul', as the mystics call it. As Professor Karl Heim pointed out; the certainties of the past, when our earth provided the secure centre of the universe, and to which we anchored our existence, and on which we also centred our faith, have been swept away by modern physics and cosmology. Planet earth turns out to be an infinitesimal speck whirling through a vast, limitless sea of space, which is filled with terrifying energy, chaos, and uncertainty. Rather than say - almost as a throw-away comment - ‘And He made the stars also,’ many now ask the question that the Psalmist did thousands of years ago, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?"  

The teaching of the man Jesus, upon which the Church founded some of its dogmas and creeds, (most of it is founded on Pauline doctrine), was delivered in an allegorical or parable form suitable to a simple agrarian and largely uneducated population - certainly by 2005 standards. Yet the Church took literally, and largely still takes, these pictures that Jesus, and particularly Paul and others, painted to create the Gospel, and interprets them to suit its particular ends. It even elevates Jesus to the status of God, something he never claimed. In fact, if we place any credence upon the record, he  repudiated such an idea on more than one occasion. This anthropomorphising of God has been the Church's greatest mistake. Einstein called it a ‘childish analogy’. Paul did it for a ‘political’ reason, to bring his religion into line with the other religions of the middle east, and so make it more acceptable. ²  

²  The Church has done even more damage than this. In his book, The Magdalene Legacy, published in 2005, Historian and Art Conservator, Laurence Gardner exposes, through his carefully documented researches, how the early church (first 300/500 years or so) based in Rome, falsified, destroyed, and in other ways suppressed the truth about Jesus – even resorting to murder and genocide – all to enshrine its own dogma and power, and create a false history to support its claims. As the publisher says – ‘revealing the implications for the history of the whole of  Western civilization.’

Perhaps certain Fundamentalist elements in Islam are using the same methodology to enforce their own version of dogma and power. Of course they have access to much more sophisticated and deadly technology than early Christianity.  

There will be many who claim that the success of the Church is vindication enough of the truth of its teaching (note, Islam could claim the same justification). And that is the contention I am about to make; that because of a natural law, belief creates its own success - good or bad, religious or sectarian. [see the endnote note on good & evil] So, throughout the centuries,  the Christian Church has often been able to get away with immoral, sometimes downright evil and criminal behaviour, alongside its ethical and humanitarian activities; in many cases, claiming that its deviant behaviour was authorized and sanctioned by God. Any religion, which relies on the belief and devotion of its followers, can frequently claim success, and falsely justify the claim that its particular god is the only true God.  

I believe that one clear unequivocal message of Jesus was: the Power of the Source (God)  is immanent, and in each of us, and that our ability to release and use this power is proportional to our level of belief. Study the record of his healing ministry: I don’t think he ever claimed that God came and did the healing; it was always your faith (belief) has made you whole. Because of this indwelling Presence, the Consciousness of the Source, we are all destined to achieve what the Church likes to call ‘eternal life’- a reward, which it claims will only be yours if you follow and believe in its particular teaching.  

Interposing here:

Possibly we suffer from the flat earth syndrome when we think about life. We make the assumption – because that’s all we presently see and experience – that life must be physical, that the physical universe must be the beginning and end of life, both ours, and probably life on other as yet undiscovered alien planets in this vast cosmos. Universal consciousness almost predicts this. And so we assume that life must be associated with a physical body if it is to be conscious, experience, evolve and create. But, we’ve just seen that mind and consciousness also operate independently of the physical body, and, in the broader context, are greater than the physical cosmos, because they exist as part of an even greater reality which supports cosmic evolution. So it seems reasonable to suppose that life doesn’t necessarily need a physical body to exist, evolve, learn, and create. Recent discoveries using the Spitzer Telescope have found the molecule which is the primary building block for life distributed throughout the cosmos - perhaps something we should expect from universal consciousness - the number exceeds all the other molecules put together.

Back to the Church:

Had the Church focussed its attention on God rather than on Jesus, something Jesus himself taught, then, it would have avoided many of its mistakes. Today it would be               proclaiming a message much more in keeping with the times; a creed in which both old and young could find hope and a real faith for living while inhabiting this               strange and mysterious world. A faith in the spiritual power and purpose, the Consciousness, belonging to each being - which has nothing to do with any particular religion, or with religion at all for that matter.

 Had the Church understood, that by accepting, a priori (that is, from cause to effect), that this universe (and all the others) is the effect of a Cause or Source which was the God they worshipped - something the Church has always claimed but never really understood, and often rejected in practical terms – then, as knowledge about the Cosmos grew, its perception and understanding of the Cause would have also grown, rather than remaining rooted in a static anthropomorphic dogma. The Church would have welcomed new knowledge rather than persecuted those with enquiring minds. Instead, it has been governed by fear rather than faith, divisiveness rather than 'Oneness'; a Oneness which is the true metaphysical meaning of what the church calls Divine Love, and the basis of Jesus’ Second Great Commandment. It would have realised that an anthropomorphic God does not fit into the scheme of this universe, or its Source.  

In talking about his own belief and God, Albert Einstein said, ‘It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere - childish analogies.’ 

 It is interesting to note that even scientists like Paul Davies and Roger Penrose (ABC – Compass 8/3/2004: ‘Testing God: Killing the Creator’) still refer to God in orthodox terms – they too seem to be locked into the traditional paradigm. Although Roger Penrose did say, that arising from the current debate in Physics, it appeared that it would be necessary go to a deeper level of understanding. In this Compass debate we have two or three atheists on one side of the fence, three theologians on the other, and at least a couple of mugwumps who are hedging their bets. They can’t all be right, or all wrong, so the mugwumps, who are scientists, maybe wise to bide their time. 

The law of belief, strangely, is often an impediment to such wisdom. If a Christian, implicitly believing in the dogmas of the Church, and that Jesus is God, seems to receive an answer to prayer, his or her faith and belief is reinforced, even though it may be based upon a false premise. When a primitive native, whom a Christian would label a heathen, and try to convert, invokes his spirit gods to favour his crops and bring rain, and the rain comes and his crops flourish, why shouldn't he assume his gods have answered, and his faith in their reality be reinforced. Like the Christian, he has used the same natural law of the universe to help achieve his goals. [There is a need to re-examine and re-assess what we mean by prayer, and its effect – scientists are starting to do this, without a great deal of success, as yet – personally I feel we should be researching the effects of subconscious bonding and belief as the basis for effective prayer]. 

Perhaps this effectiveness of belief is one anthropological explanation for the rise and power of religion, which we find throughout history and in every land - that it works - irrespective of the 'god' upon whom the worshipper calls, because the worshipper's belief taps the power of the One Source of this universe. It suggests that the reason behind the ritualistic nature of religious practice across all faiths is to enhance and consolidate the belief of its devotees, and therefore the effective outcomes of their faith, and to demonstrate the existence of and release the power of its particular god. By our standards some religions may be filled with ignorance and superstition, and often with perversion, cruelty and fear as a means of instilling a belief that works, but it still does work for the devotees. I'm not suggesting that the Christian religion has gone too far in the other direction, nevertheless, in many churches religious ritual no longer builds a sufficient level of belief in the minds of its members, a belief that needs to be metaphysical and almost mystical in character, as well as conscious – operating at all levels of consciousness. The Christian's God, consequently, in most situations, is no longer able to respond and act on their behalf because no proper channel has been created through which It can act. It may be one reason why native churches seem to be more successful than western churches – these days.             

I am not suggesting that Christians turn to a form of agnosticism – although perhaps many have already done that - but rather return to a real belief: a different belief, and one that spurns the falsehoods of Fundamentalism and Creationism, and does not exclude the results of modern scholarship. Learning to use the power of belief; belief in a Cause of which we are just one effect – albeit a sentient one; belief in a Supreme Source and Its 'Oneness' – therefore in sharing, compassion, and goodness; treating our ‘neighbours’ as though they really were ourselves because of our subconscious bonding and underlying oneness – this level of belief and action would transform and empower any religion – not exclusively the Christian religion. The Church must rid itself of its anthropomorphic-based and falsely exclusive dogmas. It must see these dogmas and creeds not as truths to be foisted onto others, but merely as a symbolism, which can be interpreted by each individual, by you and me in our own personal way, so as to point us to a deeper spirituality, even a mystical experience of reality, alongside the physical experience. Perhaps Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche Communities, and a Canadian Roman Catholic priest, was near the mark when he suggested that religion – any religion – was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and should lead one first to spirituality and then to mysticism. By doing so it would open our eyes to the divinity in every person.             

There is growing scientific evidence that our remarkable and mysterious universe is the product of a strange power; immanent and pervasive. It is not surprising that some physicists at the forefront of theoretical and cosmological research have joined the ranks of the mystics. Most agnostics, and so-called atheists, are more out of harmony with a traditional Christian-type God, than with no God at all. When they say 'God is dead’, they really mean that the traditional anthropomorphic way of thinking about and interpreting God is dead. 

 If the Christian Church is to fulfil a role in the world of the future then it must, in its own terminology, 'repent' - which means turn around. It must find and follow a new paradigm, a new creed, for the twenty first century.  

This may be very difficult, if not impossible, for the many individuals who have steeped their lives in traditional Christian (or Islamic) dogma, and have sworn not to recognize or accept any other interpretation of reality. In terms of their personal kaleidoscope (another essay), they find it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to see anyone else’s point of view – they have locked themselves into their own mental prison, one which they have built around themselves. They will find it highly traumatic and emotionally disturbing having to 'repent' their particular way of believing. To step outside and abandon their prison will be a great personal loss, and require an extensive period of grieving and adjustment. If they decide not to 'repent', such rigidity will severely limit their personal spiritual evolution and growth in wisdom and understanding, but it need not necessarily limit the power of their faith, which will still utilize the natural law of belief. They can retain their ideology, despite its falsehoods and limitations, without diminishing the power of their belief. The danger is, that as a result, they will continue to insist, as the Church always has, that they must be right and everyone else wrong, and that mankind should follow their way of believing and no other. Evangelising and proselytising in this traditional way of the Church is unwarranted and counterproductive; it needs to teach a new paradigm of One Source, and One Power, but with many names; a Source and a Power accessible to everyone, Christian or not, in proportion to their belief, exactly as Jesus taught and demonstrated. As an example of this problem we can cite seemingly successful charismatic churches, such as Riverview in Perth, and Hillsong in Sydney – featured in Australian Story on the ABC, 1/8/05. 

This interpretation of God has two profound implications. Firstly, no matter what your religion, your race, your opinion – you may be a believer, an agnostic, or an atheist – you can never escape or sever your ties to this God. Secondly, it imposes on every individual an awesome responsibility – we are co-creators within the evolution of the cosmos, be it material, artistic, intellectual, or spiritual. Everything we create is recorded and stored in the Mind or Consciousness of all that is. Again, in the words of the late Professor David Bohm,  ‘Through us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort – parallel to our own – to decipher its own being. This, as I reflect on it, is awesome. It assigns a role to man that was once reserved for the gods’. 

If you are interested in the study of religion you’ll be aware this is close to what is called Panentheism: ‘all in God, and God in all’. This is different to pantheism, in which a different god exists in each separate thing – each having its own spirit. 

It is perfectly understandable that many people crave the security of a personal God. This is what they have been taught to believe.  A God they can identify with like a person. Someone who listens and answers and acts in their best interests. This image of God is a natural outcome of the security they feel as members of a family. And most of Jesus’ imagery was based on the family concept; God the 'Father', and we 'His' children. It was the basis of some of his parables – for instance, the story of the Prodigal Son. This sort of God works for many because for them it calls into play the law of belief. Others envisage God in the form of “Mother”. 

It is still difficult to imagine in this immense cosmos, its Source being a personal God in the traditional orthodox sense. But we can make it so by means of the Law of Belief. Being the product of, and sharing that Consciousness, which creates, evolves, records, and underpins the cosmos with Its laws, we can open a channel for more of Its energy or power to flow through us. Many years ago I heard this analogy: everyone standing on a beach, even continents apart, watching the moon rise over the ocean, sees the reflection of the moon in the water beaming its light personally to them – the one moon is a personal source of light for each watcher, no matter where. By focussing the Power of our Source through our shared consciousness, to the extent of our belief, God becomes personal. Perhaps it is not surprising that many early religions worshipped the sun as God – their observed source of power and life. It is belief – a particular personal attitude or way of thinking and acting – which unblocks or enlarges the channel for metaphysical power. Like the lighthouse prism collects, focuses, and amplifies the rays from a small lamp into many thousands of candlepower, your mind, or the consciousness which you share with the Source of the cosmos, uses the law of belief to collect, focus, and amplify the energy of the Source, to create what may seem, to our untutored minds, to be miracles. ‘Miracles’, such as healing for instance, or maybe even weeping statues, attributed to God, or to other deities, are surely the products of our own consciousness, using it’s inbuilt and shared power to create what we hope for, wish for, and expect. As Professor David Bohm pointed out, the hidden Implicate Order appears as the physical and visible Explicate Order.   The effect of a placebo, and of suggestion under hypnosis, also confirm the power of belief which is dormant within the individual. 

But does this make It a personal God in the traditional sense? Perhaps Jesus' analogy of the family is near the mark; although not exclusive, a parent is still 'personal' for each of its children. Maybe we experience God this way, and It becomes personal because of our interaction, and therefore a Truth for us –  knowing, but without words or symbols. Does it matter then whether we acknowledge and believe in a God which we call Father, or Mother, or Jehovah, or Jesus, or Allah, or Great Spirit, or Krishna, or Brahman, or an intelligent Power, a Mind or Consciousness that pervades Its own creation?  The name means nothing, just a semantic peg on which to hang the same central Reality wearing a different disguise. It is only the personal experience that counts.  

Dr Alfred Cantor M.D., wrote, ‘It is then that you see whether or not there is a God, for it is only then that you will be freed from the dogma of the past and capable of experiencing the present directly. Then you will know, without words, without symbols, without images, without labels. This is direct knowing.’  This is the way of the mystic. 

The great medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, said something similar, ‘The most beautiful thing a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from a wisdom of inner wealth.’ 

Such an experience will almost always be mystical, even transcendental. God does not 'speak ' to us in words through the encounter, although we may intuitively gather wisdom and knowledge of God's nature and laws from the experience. And, like intuitive insights, we will interpret that intuition through our own background - the painter through painting, the composer though music, the poet through poetry, the scientist through scientific discoveries and theories, the theologian through theological insights. I believe, because of the role of evolution, that all Knowledge is stored in the Collective Mind, or Universal Consciousness, which permeates and surrounds us, and, like most other invisible forms of energy, fills our space. It is unseen and undetected – except intuitively – and encompasses the experience and thoughts of everyone and everything past and present, including the very intellectually and creatively gifted, as well as spiritually advanced individuals.  

So what can we say about this God, using our limited, physically-based, language?  It is not a he or a she – sitting on a throne in some remote heaven detached from creation. I believe that this God cannot be separated from Its creation, not just our physical universe but from all things – physical and metaphysical. In other words, God is the totality of everything – that is the only logical definition, and is very different from the traditional image we have inherited as an adopted truth. This may be hard to understand and describe when we are talking about something that seems not to be physical, while we are physical beings living in a physical universe – or are we? The physical universe and the physical body are not as solid as we may imagine – they are very tenuous energy systems (consciousness systems, according to some) in space. The divide between the physical and metaphysical is growing less and less as modern physics uncovers more and more about this strange universe. Thinking about God as All That Is rather changes our concept of God, and of religion, and our relationship to the Source of all things – ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being’ takes on new meaning – a lot more than Paul realised when, supposedly, he uttered those words.  

Most of us are familiar these days with the principle of networking when applied to computers - linked together and providing access to information stored in their various individual hard disks, or memories. In the same way, through the fundamental law of resonance, we network minds, or memories using resonance tuning. We have potential intuitive access to all minds, with their wisdom and knowledge, through a related evolution and a common Consciousness, at the non-physical level. Little by little we can learn intuitively from them, share their wisdom and knowledge, and evolve – building our own edifice of knowledge and wisdom, and our own unique creative contribution to All That Is.  

But beware: In the same way that pornography and violence and ways to make bombs and other destructive devices are stored on the Internet for all to read, what we might refer to as negative knowledge is also stored in Universal Consciousness for anyone who wants access to information which others might consider 'evil', or  'satanic' – knowledge which separates and divides, and is therefore the antithesis of the wisdom which leads to 'Oneness'. In a sense this fulfils the principle of the positive and negative, the Yin & Yang, the opposing potentials of the harmonic waves of the energy from which the cosmos evolved. What we label good and evil represents a broken symmetry, without which there could be no progress, no creativity, and no evolution. If everything were perfect what would be the point in choices, or in evolution; you would make no creative contribution to Consciousness, and the on-going evolution of the cosmos, and of All That Is. 

So where does all this lead in our search for a new paradigm, a new creed or faith based on Belief? It alerts us to the fact that today's religion, particularly the Christian religion, is teleological in drive; that is, it focuses too much on the end and ignores the means, and through ignorance doesn't make effective use of the law of  belief, which is operational in the here-and-now. It focuses on heaven as a reward for belief, or hell as a punishment for failure to believe in its particular interpretation of God. Except for some Fundamentalists it may not use this particular terminology these days, but the implication is the same. Because it has banished the Source from Its Own creation, much of today’s religion fails to recognize that the Source is more than the Alpha & Omega of creation, the beginning and the end, It is, at the same time, the immanent Means. The Church speaks and prays as though God has to be invoked from some other place, and God only knows where seeing that heaven is no longer 'up there'.  

So the Church continues to concentrate on its traditional liturgies and creeds, its organizational programmes and activities, thus hoping to 'please and attract God', and more adherents, by carrying out self-imposed Christian tasks, worthy though they may be, and hence gain the power and success it believes it should have, but doesn't. Many devoted Christians dedicate their lives to a service based on their traditional belief – one which works for them as individuals.  If the Church understood that the power it seeks is already resident, not in the Church, but in each individual, and is available only through a special attitude –  or way of thinking – and its accompanying spontaneous action, called faith or belief, then it would concentrate its attention first on building that belief, and removing any blocks to its power. This would release the power and provide the solutions it so desperately desires. The Church needs to think seriously and long about how it intends to build such a belief, and what it intends to build such a belief about, and how it intends to use that power, taking into consideration how it ought to perceive God in the twenty-first century. Maybe ignorance is bliss, because knowing how to release that power could put too much of it into the hands of those who have not evolved enough, yet, to use it responsibly. Remember what Lord Acton said – power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

From what has been said, can anything be gleaned about ‘worshipping’ this God? Is worship in the ecclesiastical sense required or necessary? If you are attached to some church or religion, then worship is probably already part of an acknowledgment of your Source, or of some religious icon. A new or changed understanding about the nature, meaning and significance of this Source need not necessarily disturb your worship. Some worship rituals can be very beautiful and uplifting, and don’t need to be changed or discarded. Although perhaps we should take a close look at many of the hymns we sing – like modern advertising jingles, their tunes may be beguiling, but their words lead us down the wrong path, with a strong advocacy for Fundamentalism. In your worship you should now, not just ‘look’, but ‘see’ this God through ‘inner eyes’, rather than through a misleading anthropomorphic tradition. Your attitude to and interpretation of worship may have to change if you are to keep faith with a new vision, and a deeper knowledge and wisdom.  

If you have not been accustomed to worship, perhaps you need to think about what it means. It doesn’t have to mean the regular and often elaborate and formal rituals of established religions. We talk about worshipping a person we love or admire, worshipping money, worshipping success, etc. An object of worship is anything that your thoughts are drawn to incessantly by an emotional resonance, an attachment you desire more than anything else. Jesus spoke about worshipping in Spirit and in Truth; nothing about ritual – something that was established later to dazzle worshippers, and try and bolster their belief, and to control. Thomas Carlyle said, ‘Worship is transcendent wonder.’ 

The giants of human genius, like a Plato, a Beethoven, a Newton, an Einstein; yes, and  a Jesus; flicker like pale candles in the brilliance of their Source; whose Power blazes brighter than a billion billion suns; and whose constancy holds you for eternity above the void of extinction, as It shares with you Its Life, Its Wisdom, and Its Abundance. Is such a Being or Source worthy of your awe and worship, of transcendent wonder? 

The Church needs to beware, or physics and cosmology may usurp its role in the 21^st  century, because it is already getting closer to the core of Truth & Reality, as far as that is possible. Somewhere I recall seeing the title of a book, which read something like, ‘The University, the Church of Tomorrow’. Albert Einstein is recorded as having said, ‘The whole purpose of science and art is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling.’  Perhaps it is no wonder that the ordinary man and woman tends to put more faith in science than religion, and acts on that belief in preference to acting on a belief in a God which the Church has made human in the wrong way.  

Some years ago the wife of a clergyman expressed to my wife the belief that perhaps the Church must die, if we are to make progress. That was a great insight, and admission, coming from someone in her position. But it is true. Maybe what she should have said was, religion, as we know and practice it today, must die if we are to evolve mentally and spiritually to a level of knowledge, and wisdom, that contains the solution to humanity’s divisions and problems.  

We do not need to rid ourselves of religion in its truest and deepest meaning – a binding back to the Source. What we need to dispense with are the dogmas and creeds, the formulas, the myths and the legends, and the ecclesiastical forms which separate people into categories – different denominations and sects, different religions – all based on a past which is dead to us, and much of it irrelevant to the future, and much of it untrue. Religion, as we experience and practice it today, is largely overlaid and polluted by the human egos, personal desires, imagined and adopted truths, and ‘untruths’, and the misguided interpretations of many of its most vehement protagonists and propagators.  

 Any religion that is steeped in tradition and dogma, looks backwards, is buried in the past, and puts the brakes on evolution. It tries to persuade, or even coerce and force people into its own special mould to maintain the status quo. It is unlikely that any evolutionary breakthrough will come from such a static source, or, for that matter, from any organization that is committed to thinking backwards. It is a principle of life that when evolution is blocked tension builds up until there arises a mutation that catapults the species onto a new plane, or, alternatively, replaces it altogether. Looking at today’s world, there is no doubt about the tension – it is rampant and ubiquitous. So an evolutionary breakthrough is due. As  Dr Barbara Brown – psychiatrist and psychologist –  points out, as the result of her research, ‘There can be no question that the next phase of man’s evolution, a phase in progress, can be the evolution of a super-mentality’. Those who are more intuitively sensitive to this growing tension, and willing to let the past die and accept the heavy responsibility for change, may become the ones who will be the channels for a new paradigm, a new creed or faith, for the twenty first century. We may not see a sudden abandonment of traditional and orthodox religion – it is too deeply embedded in the human psyche – it will take generations for a new paradigm to take hold, but an accelerating change that supersedes established orthodoxy will emerge. There will be many battles fought on the field of ideology; hopefully they won’t be bloody ones like we see in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Israel, Iraq, and many other places – traditional orthodox religions have a lot to answer for. 

Endnote:                                                          Good & Evil

The conflict between what we see and understand as good and evil is a perennial one. As I indicated above, the conflict between G & E is one of the drivers of evolution, and creativity, therefore a necessary part of reality; of All That Is, whether we like it or not.   It is also a subjective judgement, but there needs to be a balance. What is one man’s trash is another mans’ treasure – using a metaphor.  If Consciousness is infinite, then that infinity must be capable of embracing all things, both G & E. It is interesting to quote from Seth here: ‘Good and evil effects are basically illusions. In your terms all acts, regardless of their seeming nature, are a part of a greater good [acts of creation and evolution]. I am not saying that a good end justifies what you would consider an evil action. While you still accept the effects of good and evil, then you had better choose the good.

How to tolerate and maintain the necessary balance between G & E in society is a difficult question to answer. The problem is, we are all driven by ignorance of the true nature of reality – yet a reality that we create and for which we are responsible – something we can’t claim is an Act of God, or blame someone else, because in the greater sense we are all God and God’s agents. 

PS:  Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? I believe there is, and that is to learn that reality is not simple like the biblical story, but is far greater and more complex than we give it credit for, and that we really know and understand very little. We need to exercise caution lest we lock ourselves into a creed, or a dogmatic prison of our own making, either scientific or religious – as past generations have tended to do, and which many still do today. Let’s keep our minds and imaginations, our intuition, open to challenge and change. We can learn from the wisdom of these three wise men: 

Dr David Peat:. (apply this physics to theology) The universe is far more complex than we give it credit for. At every level, it is endlessly complex and its subtlety can never be explained fully by any theory or system of scientific investigation 

Sir Isaac Newton: ‘I don’t know what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then by finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. 

Albert Einstein: (Substitute the words theology or religion for science in this scenario; maybe this was what Jesus was on about.) Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crisis in the old theory, through an endeavour to find a way out of the difficulties created…It is imaginable that another set of suppositions, a theory of entirely different character, would work just as well and give all the required explanations.