I was still hoping to avoid a discussion about my personal adherence to truth however I understood it, and so I pressed on:
"OK, I’ll concede that from that perspective I could learn some things about acceptance and flow, for instance, from the Tao while discarding its assertions about the nature of existence overall. But what about new age teachings? It seems that many often posit capabilities and attributes that seem to see man as intrinsically divine and almost unlimited in power. We can heal ourselves, know the future, create our own reality, travel out of our bodies. When I make myself that powerful, aren’t I replacing the idea of God with God as myself? In fact, don’t many teach that we are God’s undeveloped?" Sophie smiled.
"Well, first of all, much of what passes for 'new age' philosophy is just an old pig dressed up in new clothes, as my grandmother used to say. Things which were tried and discarded centuries ago. They didn’t work then, but have been resurrected under a new name. And much of what passes for new age philosophy is simply foolishness or chicanery. If you feel that you can step in front of a speeding truck because it is not part of your reality, be my guest. But you had better hope that the driver of that truck doesn’t consider you part of his reality, because one of you is about to be proven wrong.
On the other hand, there are some aspects to these philosophies which might be considered or at least understood. Things which have grown out of the vacuum left by the Western church concerning how we can understand our daily existence, how we can live more fully, with rest and acceptance. People are desperate for a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They are searching for some validation that this world makes sense, that they make sense, some degree of personal contact in an increasingly disjointed society. The new age message of reconciliation, of peace, of mutual care and concern and of unconditional acceptance has always been the message of God also, but has gotten lost and muddied over the years, so that when it is restated under another name, the people drink it like water in a dry place. I can’t fault that message, even though I cannot embrace the whole of the movement.
Now, there are elements to these teachings that seem to elevate man to God, so I should be clear about this with you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. As the highest order of creation you have potential and latent abilities we may never guess at let alone achieve. If an Einstein only used less than 5% of his brains capability, what would that mean to us if we could harness even 50%? We can dream and imagine and through force of will bring things into being through study and craft. Do you remember the words of Hamlet?
'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!'
We are magnificent, that is true, but we are not God. If you haven’t settled that in your thinking you should do it right away and save yourself much heartache. We are not even little demi-gods. We are creatures of God and that’s a distinction we should always keep in the fore of our thinking. No matter how evolved we become, we will never create something out of pure nothing. We can never claim to have been eternally pre-existent, fully self sustaining and autonomous. It is not us that holds the universe together or who hold the secret of life which is unlocked in the sperm and the egg. We cannot command the wind or will the sun to stand still. We are man, we are not God. I think that the new age has drawn some needed attention to our potential in an age of increasing despair, given us a reason to hope in our own abilities, but missed the boat in identifying those abilities as God traits, missing the incredible truth that they are precisely human, affirming our existence as highly treasured creatures , gifted with the best God had to give.
The church, on the other hand has often found an affirmation of our potential as a threat to the sovereignty of God, and rightly so given that conclusion is so often drawn by men when they begin to understand what they possess. And so we see a conflict set up, where one side overplays the gift, overdraws its conclusions, and the other side underplays. And it has gotten more pronounced in the present days because of the rapid pace of our knowledge growth. We are living in a generation in the midst of transition. Our knowledge, or at least our collective access to new information is expanding at a rate which has never been experienced before. In fact, it’s been calculated that in the last fifty years, our increase in knowledge was comparable to that of all history up to that point. That sets a pace which can create problems in our ability to deal with what we know, to draw conclusions as a global society based on the rapidly changing nature of the information at hand. On the other hand, one thing which has not changed is the consistent issues which seem to arise when new understandings conflict with old beliefs. There seems to always have been a conflict set up between truth and knowledge. Truth in my definition dealing with the understanding of God and our relation to him, knowledge dealing with man and our abilities while on earth. I know those aren’t very precise categories but they are useful to this discussion.
In fact, this conflict is at the heart of the question you raised. When does a new understanding conflict with spiritual truth and when is it simply a modification of a previous understanding about our physical world? Some of these new age understandings sound like physics brought to street level and deal with what could be natural abilities of humans. Since they are part of our understanding of man, they are subject to change. Unfortunately, our understandings of ourselves spiritually become threatened by these new understandings since they are so often packaged as religious concepts. Our understanding of ourselves as humans deals with how we are put together, how we fit into the universe, and what is and is not natural for us. Our understanding of ourselves spirituality, deals with ourselves from the perspective of our relation to the one who created us. They are related but separate. There is no intrinsic conflict between the understanding that mankind is spiritually dependent on the one who made it, and yet amazingly capable in our relationship to the created order. But the thought of the mind’s ability to heal or to experience precognition seems connected with magic and so is placed at odds with spirituality. Let me give you an example:
Some time ago I heard a man relate what he understood as an experience of precognition. He was hiking along a trail with a group when he suddenly felt very strongly that he should stop, that something was wrong. He had no clear vision in particular, just that they might be in some form of danger. After a minute or so, a huge boulder, which had come loose form the hillside above them, came tumbling down and into the path were they would have been crossing had they not stopped. Because of the boulders size, someone would very certainly have been hurt had they been in it’s way. This man’s explanation was that all matter is essentially energy. Rocks, plants, hillsides, the air around us, even people. At some point before actually breaking loose, that boulder or the ground around it must have begun vibrating, so slightly that it would not be noticeable. Those vibrations would have been transmitted from the ground, through the rock and into the air around the rock, moving outward in a similar manner as we see radio waves portrayed. In other words, those vibrations would be propagated outward and in turn affect the resonant vibrations, or energy of everything around them. For some reason, he was aware, on a subconscious level of that change in and around him and while unable to understand it’s exact meaning, that awareness had been experienced by his conscious as a sense of possible danger. The psychic equivalent of an animal sensing a change in its surroundings and pricking its ears up, sniffing the air to identify whether it is in danger or not. So he would say that he did experience an episode of precognition, but with an ultimately natural explanation.
Now here’s the thing, I’m not a physicist, and I have no idea whether that explanation is at all plausible. But I do know this, I can consider the possibility of it knowing that it could be true without doing any damage to my understanding of God or myself as a human. On the other hand, if his explanation was that he knew the rock would fall because he has awakened to become the universal mind and knows all things as an attribute of his spiritual evolution, I would have to say that if it were true it would do great damage to my understanding of man and God and I would be forced to choose. So there is much that, in my estimation, can be considered carefully then discarded, but also much which into which we can enter into the discussion, achieving a balance between our potential and our limitations.
This is no different than the experience of Galileo, who was threatened with excommunication by the church for supporting a different and new understanding of the earth’s relation to the sun. Only now the change in understanding deals directly with us, and so is more threatening to a mindset which insists on lumping the two fields together. Spiritual knowledge deals with that which is unchangeable. Knowledge of humans is extremely changeable, and the two should not be confused. "
By this time, the sun was beginning to drop behind the mountains and I was exhausted from listening. I had wanted a couple of nice neat answers and now had more questions that I started with and more things to work through. I said that I had to go, she had given me much to think about, but that it was getting late in the day and I had to get back.
"Wait a minute, don't you want to finish the discussion?
'Uh oh'.
"I said that there were two aspects to the question of truth, and you’ve done a pretty good job of keeping me away form the second. So tell me Sam, what is your truth? What do you believe and how well are you ordering your life against it?"
I started to answer but caught myself, re-gathered my thoughts and tried again, but again was unable to put together a coherent answer. I felt distracted and said that I really had to go, but by the look in her eye I could tell that she had guessed the truth . The fact was that while I had spent some time in working out at least a few core truths in my life, I had done a poor job of allowing them to shape me. They had pretty much been intellectual exercises and little more. She didn’t need to press the point, and true to form, she did not. Heading back to our cars, we walked the next ten minutes in silence, but as I opened my door to get in she placed her hand on my arm, stopping me. I stood between the door and the car body as if in a vise, feeling the squeeze of her question. She looked steadily at me for just a moment, then left me with these words:
"Pilate asked "what is truth"? But he betrayed himself when he washed his own hands. He asked what is truth, but failing to understand that it stood before him, he missed ultimate truth. He might have been excused for that, but he also failed to move within the confines of his personal truth. He did not act in consistence with what he did know. Whatever else he thought of Jesus, he knew that he was innocent. By washing his hands he hoped to change the reality of what he knew, but he couldn't do it. It wasn’t Jesus that he betrayed, it was himself. "
"Listen carefully Sam. You must think long and hard about what you will follow as the basic, core truths of your life, because that will inform every other choice, every act, and every thought you have. Take a long time if you have to, but when you decide, you must give your life to it. You must surrender to something
beyond you. There is no other rational response to be made. Truth is the final arbiter and high master of all.
But be very careful because if you do, one day you will find that it has been fastened to your leg with an iron shackle named responsibility. You may choose to carry that truth, finding its expression in every aspect of your life. If you do, the weight will make you strong. shackles will drop away , and you will be free despite the heaviness of it, which will decrease as your years increase. But if you lay it aside, you will drag it behind you and the weight of it will increase with time. Either way, you will never be free of it again."
I nodded a feeble understanding and drove home in silence, the vacuum in my understanding sucking into it all thought, all sound, all feeling like some psychic black hole.
