"God" plus "Consciousness and the Source of Reality"

I finished Reza Aslan's God: A Human History a few weeks ago, after hearing him present in Houston, TX. He was an excellent speaker, down to earth, witty, and certainly knew his stuff. Having come down from the cloudy stratosphere many years ago, I found his thesis of the gods being created in our human image very appealing.

His book is more entertaining than Karen Armstrong's "A History of God," but less comprehensive. Aslan's book itself is quite short, while the bibliography, notes and index are long, but very useful for scholars. What I liked best, as expressed in the book as well as in his lecture, was Aslan's pantheism. As he said, despite all his caveats, he is a believer. There is something about the "All" that creates a sense of the divine, even if merely a neurological phenomenon. As I have said elsewhere on my blog, I once sensed that feeling of being one with the All, accompanied by light phenomena, for about 15 seconds. It is indeed divine to feel coexistent with the "All," even for only a few seconds.

Furthermore, I believe in, have experienced, and continue to research paranormal phenomena that I and others have experienced. As pointed out in many of my blog posts, there is some power of perception beyond everyday cognition, if you are lucky enough to connect with it. 

Jahn and Dunne's Consciousness and the Source of Reality also has a lot to offer. As they say, "telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition et al., evidently entail information acquisition by anomalous means (p. 331).

Jahn and Dunne see light, in the form of very low intensity biophotons, as a means for the exchange of information. This definitely resonates with my own light experience and those of so many others.

The brilliant English poet, John Milton, who became completely blind, said ". . . Celestial light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thense Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight (quote p. 196)."

Similarly, Paracelsus said, "Man also possesses a power by which he may see his friends and the circumstances by which they are surrounded, although such persons may be a thousand miles away from him at the time (Ibid.)." Emanuel Swedenborg "testified to frequent experiences of clairvoyance (p. 197).

The PEAR Odyssey's project, then, became an experiment in discovering the powers of the non-local mind. What can be seen or known without being there? "Insight and inspiration usually cannot be forced, but tend to intrude uninvited into a variety of intense personalized contexts. These anomalous events are examples of Jung's 'acausal connecting principle (p. 336).'"

In fact, it was a dream message that brought me to Jung in the first place. As the voice said, "Freud only got it half right. Read the two Hyperion poems."

I invite anyone who has had anomalous access to information to tell their story here, whether it was a precognitive hunch, a warning in a dream, or an anomalous voice while awake. 

Please tell your story!!

Disentangling the Voice from the Mind(s) that Created It.

Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst and author, just published an excellent blog post on this subject. See www.michaelconfortiblog.com: “Sacred” Abuses in the Name of God, Self and Other – A Call for Clarity in Addressing Archetypal Truths. His prime example is Abraham binding his son, Isaac, preparing to kill him at God's command. Michael suggests that we question Abraham's own motives.

A friend of mine who recently went on a tour of sacred sites in Israel told me that, according to her guides, Abraham’s act was caught up in co-existing regional mythologies. In fact, children were routinely sacrificed in the pagan world, but many verses in the Bible defended against the practice. [Search "Moloch" on Wikipedia for some hair-raising accounts of how this was done.] Similarly, the stories of the Creation and the Flood were first recorded in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, serving as models for the accounts in the Bible.

Along with Julian Jaynes, who also cites Abraham's story, I believe that "divine" voices come from the right hemisphere where the visually and sensorially resonant language of poetry and the symbolic imagery of religion go hand in hand. The right hemisphere processes all of our senses and, whereas the left hemisphere is more responsible for encoding episodic memories, the right is more involved in retrieving them.

I maintain that anything that we have read, seen or heard in the past can be retrieved as fodder for the myth-making mill of the right hemisphere whose over-arching mission is to get the big picture, find solutions to difficult problems and make sense of everything. It seems logical that Abraham, at a stressful time, might have dissociatively adopted a rival's ritual practice, but for the staying hand of an “angel,” an agent of his better self.

The whole notion of mythic stories has long fascinated me. Mythmakers tell fabulous stories. Just like modern fiction, film, and nightly news reports, the ancient mythic stories rampantly portrayed sex and violence. Every culture seems to have needed these stories to explain the origins of the cosmos or of their land, to concretize and humanize their deities, to justify their rituals and to cultivate appropriate moral attitudes in the community. The gods and goddesses of myth are the play actors in eternal dramas, stretching back to the beginning of time and still recurring nightly in our dreams.

However, myths are neither eternal nor universal, only long lasting and widely diffused. Depending on the historical and geographic context, the language of myth can be constructed, reconstructed, or deconstructed to reflect newly emerging political, social and religious agenda. Karen Armstrong's A History of God traces the trajectory from the paleolithic Mother Goddesses, to the Babylonian gods and goddesses to the one God of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Each relied on the prior religion's stories, but expanded or revised them to create their distinct vision. Poetry and religion remain inextricably entwined from the beginning of time. Muslim accounts of Muhammad's ascent to heaven, for instance, inspired Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante's Divine Comedy and Yeats's A Vision inspired James Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.

"Divine" commands are still operative in the modern world. It is particularly dangerous when political leaders, who can be both psychologically grandiose and have actual power, suggest as much. Both male and female politicians have made these claims. However, a command to sacrifice a child seems like a masculine construct to me. In Ancient Greece, the man-killing Medusa and the child-killing Medea were most likely male-constructed stories about mythic women. On the other hand, in most cases where voices have instructed individual women to kill their children, like Andrea Yates who drowned her five children in a bathtub, they were experiencing psychotic commands.

The simple fact is that we all adopt myths to guide or justify our actions, when we are actually defending against inner chaos or exploiting our path in the external world. One can only imagine, in a tribute to John Lennon, what a better world it would be if, instead of following the mythic marching orders, we routinely questioned our personal motives, then proceeded to do the right thing, not just for ourselves, our family, our political party, or even our country, but for the larger good beyond self interest. The results could be genuinely cosmic. Imagine!!