Boat Across the River
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for Science
My Response to Him
Thank you so much for your very thoughtful response. I truly appreciate how much effort you put into this conversation – a conversation which I have always enjoyed! I could happily talk about religion (and science) forever. I would say I am committed to both and do try to bring the spirit of the scientific method to my experience of religion insomuch as I think observing the world around us today can tell us something about God, life, and death. P.S. Check out the book Afterlife Experiments and debunk that one for me!
As an “attender” of a Quaker meeting, I do believe in the concept of continuing revelation and just as God spoke to and through people of Biblical times, I am not opposed to the concept that He could speak through you, me, or any one of the people on that show. I think it takes a very deft touch to try to determine what whispers in the silence are the words of God…for instance, if I heard someone telling me to kill my child, (as in the case of Abraham), I would not assume that that was God talking to me. I use love as a measure for any holy words and if something goes contrary to loving kindness, I do not think it is true. I also think it is important to remember that human beings selected the canon and human beings transcribed its text through the centuries, and that humans are not infallible.
I would also ask you why you think Jesus never wrote anything down himself?
I do believe you are right that much of what dying people see during death can be attributed to a lack of oxygen to the brain. However, there are many folks who have had near death experiences (flatlined) who describe rising up out of their bodies and looking down upon their bodies in the hospital bed. These people are not doctors and have no training in medicine, and yet when they are revived they are able to describe in detail the complex medical procedures that doctors performed upon them. In one instance, in a book that I read, a person who was clinically dead was able to accurately describe people and events in other rooms of the hospital that he witnessed while dead. What would be your explanation of such ablities of people who have been revived from clinical death?
I Survived…Beyond and Back
http://www.biography.com/tv/i-survived-beyond-and-back/videos/dea-matt-anthony-full-episode-2140358587
St. Ives
I love these products — soaps and lotions. Paraben and phthalate free, affordable, and most notably no animal testing. I don’t know if PETA would agree or not — gotta’ check that out!
Vow
I vow to never
be so committed
to a system of thought –
be it religion,
science, or otherwise –
that it would prevent me
from recognizing
the truth.
Current Religious Obsessings…
Right now, I don’t believe there is ANY reason or any karma or any point to senseless suffering. I do believe in ”God,” whatever that word means! But I’ve come to believe that there is no religion that completely “captures” what God is. I don’t think that words can explain what God is. I think that people are afraid of saying they don’t know why something is how it is, so they cling desperately to doctrine and dogma. But for me, God shines through all this religion. For me, God and religion are oftentimes separate things.
I do not believe that we have to believe something to be with God when we die…I’m not trying to save you because I don’t believe people need “saving” in that religious sense of the word. For heaven’s sake! I think people are supposed to be responsible for each other. This is one of my grandfather’s “isms”. Surprisingly, he and I seem to share many ”religious” beliefs. I think that we can find God by being there for each other. My words are falling short, as they must in this regard, but I want you to know I deeply believe (after much research on death, dying, near death experiences, out of body experiences, and any other related books I have been able to get my hands on) that there is something more that happens after “death”. One of my favorite reads was a book by a former Harvard (Yale? I forget) prof. called The Afterlife Experiments. And also from this cumulative research I’ve come to think that people don’t have to believe a certain creed to be re-united with their loved ones after death…
I think, as my sometimes-wise grandfather says, that “I don’t know” is the best answer of all.
The Surface of the Waters
Currently, I am on vacation in Florida — the birds are everywhere in Cedar Key. The roof of our house appears to be some form of sea gull rookery…they fly right up to the top balcony and catch bread crusts that we throw out to them.
The wind was really blowing last night. We are right on the water, and as I rested in bed at night and in the dark, I could hear the wind and waves in constant motion outside the window. I keep thinking of the phrase from Genesis 1:2 that says, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” I picture the Holy Spirit, even with my belief in the Big Bang Theory and evolution, flying through the darkness over the smooth, almost endless, surface of the oceans.
I imagine the Spirit of God moving over the water like the wind. Or like the birds, flying low, as close to the water as they can get. But I imagine the Spirit moving over the surface of the waters as having been massive like the wind: roiling, boiling, the physical world materializing out of spirit as it moved.
I have not seen the ocean in two years, and have been having dreams about her weekly for the past few months. I don’t know if the ocean is so calming because its incessant motion and activity is a constant distraction from one’s thoughts, or if it’s because the sea is a reminder of the beginning of time on Earth. There is something soothing about remembering the water’s timelessness — its ancient, primal, nearly eternal rhythms of life.
Really?
Dr. Jeff Rediger is an Ivy League professor of psychiatry with a Master’s Degree in Divinity. He describes a “vision” he had while meditating, saying, “I saw in my mind’s eye some people with white light around them — it was very intense. I knew that things are okay, that it really is all love, things are all really connected. That happened in a matter of five minutes.” On the video, he then began to spontaneously bleed for no apparent reason, like Saints of old, and he said that he was “afraid” because he felt that he was “not in control”. He then said that:
My whole life has been turned upside down…I’m a different person in many ways. My interpretation of what happened to me is this: In short, we all matter, far more than we typically have a clue about, and love is what is real. We tend to believe in what we can see and touch, and believe that the world as it appears to be is the “real” world. On the basis of my experience, I have come to believe that reality is both revealed and concealed by the world we see with our eyes, and that none of us are who we appear to be.
Powerful words. Actually, his entire statement struck me as true, but I’ll focus on one point in particular. I sometimes hear from spiritual people that what we see around us isn’t really real. I’ve always been one to say that what we are experiencing on this “plane” does count for something. It’s just not everything. So Rediger’s comment that ”reality is both revealed and concealed” struck a chord with me.
The Paper Cup
Last night, J. suggested that we drive an hour south and eat dinner in a hilly and tree filled little town that gets really popular in the Fall for its nice colors. Up here, there are relatively few trees to look at thanks to urban sprawl and poor city planning. I have many pipe dreams about buying land somewhere down there and building a cabin that’s “off the grid” as a retreat from this god-forsaken, asphalt covered, murder capital of the world. Not really. But it’s pretty bad sometimes. So needless to say, I jumped at the invitation.
We rolled into town in time for dinner, having survived the rush hour, and chose to eat in a restaurant housed in a building established in 1900. There was even a picture on the wall of the building at that time. I love this kind of thing. At a local museum with my mom and daughter, sitting in an antique stagecoach, I asked Mom if she sometimes doesn’t wish we were living in a simpler time. I was reminded by her of the amount of hard labor and soaring mortality rates from that time, and decided that even with the pollution and strip malls, it’s nice to have a little free time once in awhile to think about something other than survival…
Anyway, we sat down to dinner and the server asked if I wanted my daugher’s drink in a “paper cup”. Paper! Usually they give us styrofoam and I neurotically carry it home with me to recycle. I jumped at the chance to be able to leave a cup on the table guilt free. Well, relatively guilt free. There will always be that part of me that wonders what hundred year old tree was hacked down for some cheap paper cup, but there is little that I can do without obsessing about some thing or another. So a paper cup sounded good to me as opposed to styrofoam. All I would have to worry about would be the plastic straws. I wonder how quickly all the straws passed out in restaurants in this state alone could fill up a landfill?
So the server delivered S.’s drink, and plopped down a styrofoam cup on the table. I stared at it, wondering why this woman had thought to describe styrofoam as paper…J. kept eyes averted, face expressionless, well trained in my neuroses and careful not to give me one thing to latch on to, careful to say nothing that might encourage any conversation on this topic. I stared angrily at a plastic straw. When we were finished eating, I decided to take my wriggling daughter outside while the bill was being paid, and asked J. to grab her cup for me so I could take it home. As J. walked down the sidewalk to me, I could see there was no cup in hand. You can imagine my dismay. Well, hopefully you can’t, because I hope you have less of an issue with this than I. I can’t eat out EVER without spending half of my time thinking about stuff like this. It really is exhuasting. I rationalize this monumental waste of my energy by telling myself that our thoughts affect each other, and maybe all this energy I spend thinking will somehow benefit a scientist who is feverishly working on a plastic eating bacteria that puts of oxygen as a by product of its plastic consumption. And these bacteria will be injected into every landfill everywhere within the next fifteen years. And I won’t have to keep thinking about how I will be walking on top of plastic with every step, or worse living some WALL-E type of existence.
It’s too bad that the thought of one styrofoam cup in a landfill sends me into a tailspin. Surely this experience was an opportunity for me to grow and to let go. I’m aware that I don’t control other people. Part of what bothers me is that so few of the people around me seem to be concerned about plastic piling up in landfills at best, and in the ocean at worst.
All I control is myself all I control is myself all I control is myself.
All I control is myself.
Quote of the Day
“The materialist-reductionist creed has had dramatic and catastrophic consequences not only for our own psycholgical and physical welfare, but for virtually every species of animals and plants and for the myriad eco-systems that sustain us all and without which life as we know it could not survive…Unless we can move away from this creed, then as a species we are very unlikely to be around much longer. The great tragedy is that in the process of destroying ourselves, we will also destroy…other forms of life, most of which have inhabited this planet for very much longer than we have, and which therefore, even by the logic of our own human laws, have a greater right to existence than we do.”
– David Fontana, Does Mind Survive Physical Death?
Titles
I started this blog about a year ago, for several reasons. The first reason was that I was losing my mind and wanted some way to keep track of said mind. The other reason was that I just love writing, and love coming up with titles for that writing! I don’t know why, but one of the best parts about posting pieces of writing on a blog is coming up with the titles. I like to write in the style of “stream of consciousness,” then read through it, figure out what it’s actually about, and then title it last. Only after it’s all written do I know what it’s about, and thus only then can I title it.
When I came up with the title for the blog itself, I was trying to make it through something, namely a tough time addressed in the previous post. The blog (writing) was my boat across that river. Thankfully, I did survive! Now, I wonder if I should re-name the blog…I like both of the following titles:
1) Landmarks of My Mind
– I like this one because the different categories I file things under are kind of…the things my mind comes back to over and over. Thus, they are landmarks for me to find my way around. Either that or “Landscape of My Mind.”
2) Entanglements
– I like this one because it seems like everything in the world is mixed up with everything else. I read a book recently called Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and the author had interviewed some (quantum) physicists. They speak of a concept called entanglement. In experiments, subatomic particles are connected with each other somehow, and when these particles are taken away from each other, they still act as if they are connected. They still react to each other as if they are connected. Thus, technically, they ARE still connected, even though they are nowhere near each other physically. There are obvious implications for us, as people, here. How do we affect each other, and other beings, without even knowing it? I was first interested in this concept after I saw the movie Waking Life when it came out on DVD. There’s a scene in the movie where a man and a woman are having a conversation about crossword puzzles. Incidentally, I am nowhere near patient enough to do crossword puzzles; they are just not my thing. Anyway, apparently there is science to say that if a group of people are given a puzzle to do, they will complete it much more quickly if the puzzle has previously been solved by other people. If people are given a brand new puzzle, never before solved, it takes longer to complete the puzzle. SO. I think that’s kind of entanglement, too. We are all connected, and all our collective knowledge is mixing around out there and filtering back down. We’re helping each other evolve. So I like the idea that everything we write on the Internet is mixing around in a giant pot and brewing into something else…entangled! Plus, I like filing every post under multiple categories — every category it could possibly be connected to, and in that way, too, things are entangled.
But I will probably just keep the blog title the same.
Onto the next river to be crossed!
