Larry the Lunatic

Once upon a time there lived a young man named Larry. He was like most people who wished that human beings would treat each other better in the world. But he was also different from most people in that he began to notice negative and ignoble inclinations within his own life.

This observation was both painful and perplexing. Larry had a hard time grasping why he was so vulnerable to bouts of bad behavior, especially when he knew better. He read about science, philosophy and even religion, but somehow his intelligence failed him. How could this be?

Larry became so concerned about this strange predicament that it finally made him sick. He could not endure one more failed relationship with friends, office workers or those he dated. So he stayed in bed all day, immobilized and feeling hopeless that his life would ever change. He even closed the curtains in his room. He could no longer handle any kind of influence coming from the outside world and wanted to shut it all out.

While lying motionless in bed, he became aware that his room was suddenly flooded by light—a light that also brought comforting and loving warmth with it. He lifted his head from the pillow and was amazed to see a beautiful angel in his room. The angel was the source of this light and warmth.

“Why are you here?” asked Larry in astonishment.

“The Lord God has sent me to show you why your education can’t help you with the things that really matter in life,” answered the caring and loving angel.

“I must be going loony,” said Larry reacting to the seeing and hearing of this illusionary creature—an obvious outcome of his tortured mind.

“Yes,” said the angel. “You are a lunatic but not because you see me or hear me. You are a lunatic because of the pathological way you treat valuable knowledge and information.”

“I have tried to use knowledge to better my life”’ said Larry.

“The purpose of knowledge and study is to find truth. The purpose of truth is to find love and goodness,” said the angel. “If your knowledge does not lead you to love and sincere helpfulness, then your knowledge is simply hovering around outside of you.”

“What do you mean? If knowledge is in my head then it must be inside me,” came Larry’s defense.

“Not so! Do you know where the term lunatic came from?” asked the creature sent from heaven.

“I suspect that it has its origins from the fact that people act weird during times of the full moon,” said Larry.

“The answer goes much deeper than that,” came the angel. “It involves some symbolism.”

“What kind of symbolism?’

“Pretend that the planet earth represents your individual life. The moon would then represent your cognitive memory,” explained the angel. “One’s memory is a mere satellite encircling one’s true being. In the same way that the moon reflects the sun’s light, a person’s memory lets us reflect on various ideas. But these ideas, no matter how profound, remain outside of our true inner being if they do not affect our hearts. A lunatic is one who listens to sermons, reads about God’s commandments or the Golden rule but keeps these ideas at a distance so that he or she does not have to face their own inner contradictions”

“Why do we humans do such things?” asked Larry.

“Because truth can be painful,” returned the beautiful angel. “Humans go to great lengths in order to nullify this pain, like using alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, money, power, celebrity and constantly fanaticizing about their own imagined self-importance. All such people have a basic knowledge and understand what it is to be good. But they keep this knowledge at a safe distance where it can be merely reflected upon and used for the purposes of deceit, cunning or self-gain rather than for personal transformation. Now you know why the world seems to be going crazy. It is full of lunatics—who see themselves as ordinary people.”

Larry was shocked to hear this but could resonate with the angel’s strong words. From that point on Larry made an oath to “clean house.” He was no longer fearful of finding what he kept hidden in the dark corners of his life.

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The Hadron Collider is back in the news!

Last September 2008 I wrote a post about the Large Hadron Collider, which was about to be turned on. Scientists all over the world were very excited since the 17-mile circular tunnel will hurl protons around in opposite directions (near the speed of light) then make them collide with each other.

For some reason the physicists involved believe they will be recreating the special conditions of the early universe during “Big Bang.” If everything goes right, they hope that during their experiments they will be able to discover the Higgs particle (boson). So far, the Higgs particle is only a theoretical particle but proving its existence is critical to current theories concerning the origin of mass in matter.

When they first turned the Hadron Collider on, there was a malfunction. A second malfunction occurred when a bird (they think) somehow dropped a piece of bread into the expensive ($4 billion) apparatus.

Well, the rumor is that the bugs have finally been worked out and the Hadron collider will be turned back on tonight. The actual “smashing” of the atomic particles will not take place until February 2010. They are proceeding cautiously.

Many scientists believe that if the experiment ultimately fails to deliver a Higgs particle they will have to return to the drawing table and re-evaluate their current assumptions about physics. So the stakes are high (financially and intellectually).

I predict that the experiment will fail to deliver the goods.

I have an alternate theory, which challenges the notion that the physical universe has its origins in a physical principle. I have even written a book, Proving God, to offer evidence that the physical universe has its origins in a spiritual principle.

It is beyond the scope of this blog post to convince you that science and God can be unified. Furthermore, it makes sense to see first what fruits (if any) the Hadron Collider presents to scientists. So I will simply wait patiently for the results this February (or whenever they are released) and get back to you with another post.

If the Hadron Collider is successful in February, you won’t have to concern yourself with my new book, which will be available a month later.

I hope you will keep following this unfolding drama. The question of the origin of the universe is an important one and has profound consequences for our belief systems.

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Three Kinds Of Delusion

Humankind is prone to three kinds of delusion. They are all based on not knowing what our true purpose in life is.

The first of the three delusions is from ignorance. Most people do not attempt to know more than they are told by others, or, what they can pick up from their five senses. From this ignorance (and unwillingness to probe reality deeper) they settle in and establish their subjective belief system. Such individuals are described in Scripture as the “poor.”

The second delusion originates from this same type of ignorance—when one becomes inventive and concocts new ways to make untruths seem like brilliant ideas to others. This foolhardiness is referred to in Scripture as “the blind leading the blind.”

The third delusion is not a result of faulty understanding, but comes from a corrupt heart. Such individuals see reality and “truth” only as that which favors and confirms their imagined superiority. God’s Holy Word addresses this faulty human inclination through the symbolism of giants or threatening foreign armies.

The offspring of all these delusions are egoism, self-love, vanity, pride, self-conceit, credulity and suggestibility, to name a few.

Each of these three general delusions is also represented by a city in the Bible—Nineveh, Rehoboth and Calah. The narratives of Scripture contain a deeper symbolic language that has been forgotten, due to human delusions and level of reasoning which builds strongholds to protect its false beliefs. This deluded reasoning is described in Genesis 10:11 as going to Asshur to build the three cities just mentioned. “Asshur” (Assyria) represents a diminished quality of reasoning.

Inwardly, we build citadels and cities for our hearts and minds (spirit) to dwell in safety, from the ideas we embrace in our particular reasoning.

Battles over cities in Scripture are not just historical accounts, but on a deeper level deal with conflicts of the human heart and mind. (What else would be important to God?) When God is seen to favor one army over another in the Bible, it represents the force of divine truth challenging various human delusions and lifestyles that are difficult to give up and thus fight back (our self-esteem is often tied up in the delusions we cling to).

The stories of Scripture contain the deepest knowledge concerning our personal relationship with God and how to escape from our delusions. Only then can we grasp what our true purpose in life is all about.

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Nick The Neuron Discovers A New World

Once upon a time there lived a lonely neuron named Nick. In spite of being surrounded by billions of other neurons, Nick felt alienated from the rest. He believed there was more to life than what was being shown to him by the five senses.

Nick was getting tired of the allurements and vanities of the world. He did not want to be caught up in the trappings of physical life like most of his neighboring neurons. How did this happen? He began to have these feelings of separation one day as the optic nerve he was connected to brought in some new information from a book called the Holy Bible.

The information seemed to tell a sad story about how the original humans once lived in a garden paradise, but were removed from this garden after making a bad decision. These original humans ignored God’s warning about eating fruit from a tree other than the Tree of Life. Humans and their neurons have been suffering ever since.

Nick had noticed that many of the other neurons he was connected to mocked this story and even convinced other neurons in the motor cortex to close the Bible and put it back on the shelf. Poor Nick had argued with those in the motor cortex to keep on reading the Bible. But he was overruled by the majority of his neighbors.

Nick surmised that the horrible mistake made by the original humans came from a bad decision in the brain—from neurons convinced that they did not need God’s guidance. He wondered if he could reverse this decision and convince his fellow neurons of their mistake. So he decided to make new synapses with fellow neurons in the motor cortex to see how to get the brain to change its actions.

The neurons in this region of the brain told Nick that if he wanted to change the thinking of his neighbors, he would first have to change their feelings.

“How do I do that?” asked Nick.

“You must seek out the neurons that live in the Limbic system,” came their unanimous response.

So Nick concentrated hard and sent out extra axons and dentritic spines to make new synapses with the limbic system. Once the proper connections were made, he asked the neurons in this region of the brain how one could influence the brain’s emotions.

“What kind of emotions do you seek?” asked the neurons of the Limbic region.

“I wish we could all share the same spiritual feelings,” said Nick with great passion. “I want us all to find our way back to God’s Tree of Life.” The neurons of the Limbic system sensed that Nick was a very special neuron and began to examine his synaptic connections more closely.

“We have determined that you actually are a part of some pathways that transcend normal emotional behavior. You have allowed yourself to regain some access to the Tree of Life.”

“How can that be? I don’t even know where the Tree of Life is,” exclaimed Nick.

“The Tree of Life is located in the part of the brain that is unconscious—the cerebellum. You do not have to look for it. It will find you,” said the Limbic neurons.

Suddenly Nick began to feel a more complex emotional influence that could only be described by the words “heavenly love.” Now the voices of completely new neurons began to communicate with Nick.

“We are from the cerebellum,” came their startling introduction. “We are responsible for the new feelings you are now experiencing.”

Nick now remembered from studying an anatomical book that the cerebellum’s three lobes and stems were shaped like a tree. “How is it that you neurons are associated with the Tree of Life and the cerebral neurons like me are not?”

“The neurons that you live among are mostly influenced by the physical world of the five senses,” came their answer. “We, however, are influenced by God and heavenly order. If it were not so, the biological processes of the human body would fall apart in a minute. We also coordinate muscular movement with a precision that matches one’s intentions. We are also the gateway through which God begins to stir up feelings for spiritual renewal.”

“Gee, does the Bible verify what you are saying?” questioned the reasoning neuron.

“God’s moving in the void and darkness, the face of the deep and over the face of the waters in Genesis, is a metaphor for the process of spiritual growth beginning in the human unconscious mind. We neurons, who partake of the Tree of Life, have a special affinity towards God’s symbolic and heavenly language.”

“Why have you connected with me?’” asked Nick.

“Because you are willing to be guided by the Lord God. That is why you did not want your buddies in motor cortex to put the Bible back on the shelf,” pointed out the neurons from the cerebellum. “The more that you become influenced by us, the more you can influence your neighbors in the cerebrum to adopt a similar life of heavenly cooperation. This, in turn, will allow one brain to influence many other brains so that life in the physical world can begin to express the mutual love of God’s spiritual world. For kingdoms to change, neurons must change.”

“I’m ready!” said Nick.

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Love precedes Faith

This is a most important topic because when love is seen as the first principle of faith then religious disagreements can begin to fall by the wayside.

Faith deals with the “truth” of doctrine but love determines the actual quality of religious doctrine. We can argue with each other about truth and faith but we all can understand what love is. Everyone can agree to the precepts of the Golden Rule (which is also expressed in Matthew 7:12). I am not aware of any religion that claims otherwise than that all love, mercy and peace have their source in God.

According to scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, all true faith and doctrine must be expressions of God’s love. This is why Jesus said that all the Law and Prophets hang on two commandments – loving God and loving the neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40). True faith and doctrine must therefore represent qualities of love. Faith (or religious truth) separated from sincere love is religion devoid of its essential life and purpose.

To put this religious topic into scientific language, love acts like force from which kinetic action is generated. The action itself displays the quality of the force that preceded it (force given form). Similarly, true faith should be the form, law and outcome that best express God’s love (divine kinetic action). Faith is predicated of love.

According to Swedenborg this dynamic order has been reversed by some religious traditions, which make faith more essential (especially to salvation) than love.  As far as Christianity goes, he attributed this predicament to a misunderstanding of the biblical passage in Paul to the Romans (3:28), which reads:

“For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”

Swedenborg maintained that the misunderstanding of this passage was that Paul was referring to the specific laws of Jewish custom—like circumcision and the law of the “red heifer”—not the Lord’s Commandments given to Moses. Swedenborg provides evidence that Paul did not throw out God’s Commandments (Law) with these passages:

“For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law.” (Romans 2:13)

“God in the day of wrath and of just judgment will render to every man according to his works.” (Romans 2:5)

“Love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Charity worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore charity is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8,9,10)

And finally these words from Paul, which stress the preeminence of love over faith:

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

When one’s doctrine of faith strays from real love, religion goes in negative directions. True religion wants us to be good, not prove who is right!

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Catching up to God

In a previous post titled “Spiritual Gravity” I talked about the well-known law of physics that states that once something is set into motion it seeks out its equilibrium—the condition whereby it finds stability.

Since the universe exists as a dynamical process, everything finds its stability in motion.  Planets “fall” towards the sun while the sun is itself falling towards its equilibrium within a galaxy of stars—also seeking their common equilibrium through space.  So as one cosmic concentration falls, others have to constantly try to keep up.

God is the prime mover.

So ultimately, everything in the created world must try to “catch up” and find stability in God’s Holy activity. But the physical universe tries to catch up with God’s perpetual influence not only by being constantly on the move, but through finding stability within new units of complexity and self-organization.

If there were no Creator-God, all things would simply fall to the “bottom” (entropy). But since everything is being moved by God and is trying to keep up with God, the so-called “bottom” must keep rising to a higher plane of order and thermodynamics. This creates new orders of organization in the universe (reverse entropy).

The evolution of bio-complexity on earth is the continued endeavor of things in dynamical process to catch up and more perfectly mirror God’s Holy qualities. These qualities become more apparent as nature brings forth higher-levels of organic structure. For instance, the higher the degree of complexity we see in evolving living structure the more we see a perfection of reciprocal cooperation. Every cell lives for the welfare of the entire body and the compound body lives for the welfare of all its cells.

How is the evolution of bio-structure representative of Nature’s incessant striving to catch up to God? God is Infinite Love. The essence of love is to unite and share. Increased organic complexity is the result of increased unified sharing. Nothing new comes together without perfecting reciprocation. In this way evolution attempts to catch up to God by perfecting an image and likeness of LOVE.

This physical analog of love becomes even more God-like as it evolves into the psychical realm—that is, through the evolution of increased intelligence and consciousness. Human subjective experience allows creation to find its equilibrium in acts of kindness and goodness. Reverse entropy now moves from increased thermodynamics to its equivalent psycho-spiritual dynamics.

Religion is God’s strategy to offer guidance for the human heart and mind to find stability in spiritual love. This will allow the human spirit to ultimately find its proper equilibrium in God’s eternal kingdom of mutual love, called heaven.

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The Holy Word and pre-geometry

As someone who is deeply interested in unifying science and theology I am quite amused that some very serious physicists are attempting to formulate how spacetime and matter emerged from a pre-geometric realm. This involves coming up with a theory of causal processes that would describe the structure of reality before action and form reach the spatio-temporal arena. This “pregeometric” approach to discovering fundamental principles and first causes was started by the famous physicist, John Wheeler.

Scripture makes the very same claim—about the created world and ITSELF! In John 1:1-3, we read that before the world of spacetime was created there existed God’s Holy Word. Furthermore, we read that all things created were made from the Word. So Scripture backs up the attempt by physicists to look for the primal dynamics and laws ruling the universe on the fundamental level in a pre-physical realm.

But this also begs the question of how the Holy Word could exist in the absence of time or space. And, if all things in the universe were created from the Holy Word, then where the heck are the universal causal processes and patterning principles addressed within the narratives of Scripture?

Do the historical and prophetical stories in Scripture contain a “higher-level” structure that describes events and relationships abstracted from local and earthly concepts? Can Holy Scripture be a multidimensional document containing the top-down patterning principles and causal links between the non-physical (spiritual) and physical realms?

Could God’s Holy Word contain elements of relativity theory, quantum theory or multidimensional string theory? In my upcoming book Proving God (available March 2010) I provide evidence that it does! For instance, Chapter Seven is titled “Did Noah’s Ark Travel Across Possibility Waves?”

Surprised by this? Don’t be.

There are some pioneering physicists today who believe that science’s current view of reality is due for a grand shake-up. And there are theologians who believe that current religious views are due for a grand shake up as well. I believe both shake-ups will happen at the same time because the next paradigm change will unify both science and theology.

By the way, these “earthquakes” which will rattle the very foundations of our current institutions are referred to in Scripture as the Second Coming.

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A God Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, even before there was any time or any space, there lived someone with Infinite Love and Infinite Wisdom. This wonderful Person was called God.

In spite of all this inexhaustible love and wisdom God was alone.  God’s love and wisdom were like the rays of a sun that had no world or planets to shine on. God then decided to create a physical world—because real love needs something outside of itself, and not itself, to love.

To accomplish this God had to turn infinite qualities into finite things. This first involved a concentrated effort to distinguish different values of Infinite Love into finite forms or parcels, called Truth.

These various forms of love became spiritual substances and constantly changed to reflect all of God’s innumerable thoughts and divine plans. But even this effort did not create time, space or matter. The measurements and durations of these holy actions and forms were not yet physical. They were like ideas that changed into new ideas expressing a standard of measurement (metrics) according to different values.

God began to combine these quantities and qualities (measures) of love into more complex forms according to affinity, then concentrated them into points of pure endeavor. These points or units of effort no longer simply changed from one value or state to another but could change their placement and move out from themselves. Not only could they displace their position, they could do so in a way that turned the values and relationships between God’s love and truth into their proper physical equivalents—that is, to corresponding measurements, proportions and scales within the constraints of spacetime.

These points of pure effort created time, space and fundamental matter by self-organizing themselves and their trajectories into entities that described real centers, peripheries, diameters and poles. The beginning of physical creation was the process by which potentialities and tendencies gained coherence and stability through the subordination and coordination of motion (kinetic energy).

These newly-created physical units and entities continued to reflect and respond to God’s perpetual influence of love and continued to form new relationships, aggregations and complexities. This incessant drive to form new levels of order is a derivative of love, which is a living influence that constantly seeks to unite all diverse things. This is why the universe is unified and its laws are bio-friendly.

This process of self-organization and generation of more complex structure continues with the emergence and evolution of life. Organic life is simply form and structure capable of more perfectly receiving God’s living force. As nature evolves, it strives to become a more perfect mirror image of God. But God’s love is not a one-way street. Real spiritual love is reciprocal. For love to find its fullness in time and space, a special creature must evolve with a brain and mind (subjective experience) that could not only recognize a Divine Being, but could become a creature that would ultimately have the ability to love God in return.

This mutual love and special conjunction (called God’s covenant) allows an Infinite God to flow into and “eternalize” the finite human acts of sincere love—so that a heaven could be created from the human race. God’s great wish for creation is that we can all live happily ever after.

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In honor of Veterans of Spiritual Wars

Today is Veterans Day. On this important day, Americans pay particular tribute to those special individuals who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend their country with their life.

I would also like to remind you that God has asked us to lay down our lives as well. But God wants us to fight a different kind of war and make an even deeper sacrifice. This war is not fought against others or on foreign soil. This war takes place even closer to us than our homeland. It is waged on the battlefield of our very own personal turf—within our hearts and minds.

This important turf is that upon which our spirit dwells. This spiritual ground consists of the principles we inwardly stand for and defend. It is a battle between choosing God’s tenets of spiritual love for others or favoring our own selfish motives.

When one belief system is victorious, the other dies away. This death happens before physical death. In the Bible, this process is referred to as the death that needs to take place before the “second death.”

When false principles and a life that opposes God’s wisdom is rejected during our terrestrial existence we will have nothing to fear when the physical body dies. Our life choices determine the quality of our spirit and therefore the quality of our eternal abode. This is the true meaning behind the Christian concept of being “reborn.” In order to obtain heaven, one must first be reborn. And in order to be reborn, something must die.

But victory does not happen overnight (as some Christians suggest). We must ask for God’s help and bravely battle our negative inclinations throughout our entire lives (otherwise our convictions would not be genuine).

So today I would also like to honor those who, throughout human history and from many different faith systems, have fought the greatest battle of all and sacrificed their old ways for a new spiritual way of living. These good-hearted people often go unnoticed.

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What if you had infinite power?

There is a well-known saying that “Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So, what would you do if you had infinite power? Would you act wisely?

If your answer to this question involves a pledge that you would get rid of all the evil in the world, you would most likely be interfering with God’s wise plan. When Jesus lived among us in the world he had all the power of heaven, yet—except for a handful of miracles—He kept His infinite powers under wraps. He even submitted Himself to the power and laws of finite men and was humiliated on the Cross.

Should the Lord have done more with His unlimited powers?

Traditional Christian doctrine correctly links the Lord’s life and final death on the cross with the salvation of man. But much of current theology incorrectly understands just what it was that the Lord actually sacrificed by dying on the cross.

The Lord sacrificed the handing over of infinite power to human nature. Coming into the world and taking on a physical body Jesus represented a confrontational mixture of human nature with divine infinite power. We are given glimpses of the Lord’s human nature (and the weakness of the flesh) in the Scriptural accounts of His being tempted by Satan, plus describing His real fear at Gethsemane and His feeling profoundly abandoned on the cross.

What is not generally known is that if the Lord had used His absolute power to change the world, He would have succumbed to human nature and the desire to rule the world by force from a principle of self-importance and self-righteousness. By resisting this and other human temptations throughout His life He brought His human nature into perfect compliance with His inner divine nature—to serve all of humanity with unconditional love.  In other words, He put His infinite powers behind the task of resisting all human nature (and the challenges from the forces of hell.) Thus, Jesus made his human nature equally holy to His divine nature through humility. This act of humility is the reason why the Lord stated that “the meek shall inherit the earth” and that “he who is greatest will serve others.” Human power mocks such ideas.

This inner battle of unifying His Human with the Divine was the lawful process by which He glorified the Father (from His body) and the Father gloried the Son (from His heavenly essence). This process of perfect top-down unification is why the Lord was able to ascend into heaven with his body and leave the tomb empty.

Because the Lord conquered all evil (by sacrificing all human inclinations and negative compulsions) He seeks to do the same for us—if we approach Him with humility and sincerity. I have only scratched the surface in dealing with the many mysteries of faith that are now being opened up to human comprehension.

Any thoughts? Questions? Or complaints?

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