ALL IS NATURAL

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream

As we head into Chapter 10, we will do well to keep this universally beloved classic rhyme in mind as we begin to explore Preston Harold’s approach to Jesus’ miracles which will occupy us through Chapter 15.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat presents us with an attitude toward life, a hint of how life works, and how best to possibly navigate it. It tells us we humans have a responsibility to participate and engage our wills (row your boat) while at the same time cooperating with the divine flow that is naturally transporting us through our years (gently down the stream). It tells us not to worry for the morrow, that God knows the count of hairs on our heads (merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily) and that through belief and trust, our minds have the power to make our dreams come true and make us co-creators with God (life is but a dream). 

The meaning of this chapter’s title, “All is Natural,” concerning the miracles of Jesus, is explained by Fredrick Marion:

What is beyond our present understanding we term supernatural, inferring that it is also beyond Nature. As soon as the onward march of Science has dissected and explained a certain matter, we calmly gather it into the realm of natural happenings. The whole of our existence and perception takes place in a realm governed by Nature. In consequence all is natural.

Preston Harold responds thus:

Fredrick Marion’s words serve to state the premise of this study. In its view, phenomena which appear to be supernatural are the product of power emanating from the unconscious bringing to bear on consciousness, perception, behavior, and flesh… But man must face the fact that extrasensory perception is operative, that hypnotic responses are miraculous, that the “stuff” of matter, or flesh, is mysterious as a ghost, as illusory as it is real. 

When considering Jesus’ miracles here on out, please keep in mind Harold’s statements, “power emanating from the unconscious bringing to bear on…flesh,” and “hypnotic responses are miraculous.” These two quotes most directly state his thesis on the workings of Jesus’ miracles. 

Painting by Oleg Shuplyak

Following our beloved rhymes’ line, “Life is but a dream,” Harold says that while there is no doubt that delusion is pathological, illusion, on the other hand, is not. He invokes the British mathemetician and parapsychologist, George Tyrell, who points to the most important aspect of man’s mysterious psychic power, which power is the root of his creative capacity. Tyrell says both illusion and hallucination have astonishing power of creation and that: “It is not commonly realized that an element of creation enters into ordinary, everyday perception, too. The view that external objects exist in space exactly as we see them is extremely difficult to maintain. We must provide a good deal of the environment which we commonly think of as simply there.”

In Harold’s view, “hallucination becomes delusion only when sensory stimuli are severely limited by diseased or deteriorated tissue, or by restricted environment, or when the nervous system is out of kilter as a result of strain, fatigue, trauma, starvation, drugs, or alcohol so that conscious or unconscious fear, hatred, memory, expectation, fantasy, and imagination become factors to be incorporated in the perception the psychic power must deduce from inadequate or distorted sense stimuli… Illusion shows the other side of this coin, incorporating faith and love rather than fear and hatred. Thus, illusion is not necessarily pathological because faith and love are not destructive in character.”

In our next installment we will begin to approach the Biblical miracles and how faith and love are the keys to unlocking our understanding of them. 

Until next time, peace.

The Symbolic Depths

“For all those lines and circles, to me a mystery,

Eve pull down the apple, and give a taste to me,

If she could it would be wonderful.”

–Cherry Tree; 10000 Maniacs

Human being are symbol-makers and symbol-interpreters. These lines and circles you are reading right now are nothing but symbols, created with a specific purpose for specific interpretation by our conscious minds. But what about our unconscious minds? How do they create and interpret symbols? How is this unconscious process brought to consciousness?

Jesus says, “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Thus, He refutes blind working in nature. The deeper one searches, the more difficult it is to believe that so much as one word or symbol is accidental in its use or in its composition. Only a certain form can shield and carry onward a certain truth, or be the “key” to unlock a certain secret that nature hides, which may or may not be known to consciousness, although it is know in the unconscious. For example, Jung says, “Fishes frequently occur as symbols of unconscious contents.” Jesus spoke of fishes in connection with the kingdom of God – the fish was the earliest symbol associated with Him. Is this accidental? Jesus might have left this clue to indicate that His message reveals the contents of the unconscious, His own unconscious giving rise to and dictating use of the fish as symbol. It is difficult to believe that symbols are any more a matter of choice than the letters or words man uses in writing or speaking.

Ah the ICHTHUS! The Greek word for fish which also served as an acronym for Jesus Christ, God’s Son – Savior. Early Christians were said to draw the fish as a code-marking of their faith. According to Preston Harold, this is the surface manifestation of a much deeper understanding. As followers of Jesus’ Way, it seems inevitable that this particular symbol would be the one early Christians would use; they really had no other choice in the matter.

Jesus also left the cross as symbol. Is it an accident that it appeared on the mathematical scene to denote the positive, the proton? Or that the form this symbol takes appeared also in an experiment which started the fusion of the hitherto separate disciplines of magnetism and electricity? In 1920, Hans Christian Oersted held a wire in which there was an electric current over a compass needle:

“…the needle rotated until it was at right angles to the wire…and when he reversed the direction of the current in the wire, the magnetic needle reversed its direction also, but again came to rest at right angles to the wire.”

The cross, thus drawn by needle and wire, gave rise to the branch of physics known as electromagnetism.

Could Jesus have known or realized anything about electromagnetic phenomena? His description of the opposing forces in the household, following His Equation of One, indicates that He understood like signs repel, opposites attract. Does He attempt to cast a clue also by posing the gifts of the Magi symbolically? This is to say, myrrh and frankincense are two amber substances; gold is a good conductor of electricity and in ground state there is one electron in the outermost energy level, a –1, and when this is removed the +1 ion results; the amber effect, as electrical phenomena was called, was known to exist before Jesus’ birth, but the attraction displayed by amber was long confused with the attraction that lodestones, natural magnets, show for iron, “a phenomenon that was known at least as early as the 6^th century B.C.” Realization of the cross-action between the two forces of electricity and magnetism may have dictated the form His symbol must take.

And that brings us to the end of chapter 9. Beginning with Chapter 10 we start looking into Jesus’ miracles and healing ministry. There is some challenging material ahead; put on your thinking caps.

Until then, peace.

Space and Time: Looking Deeper

Does time exist within space or does space exist within time? Plato identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies, and space as that in which things come to be. Aristotle defined time as the number of changes with respect to before and after, and the place of an object in space as the innermost motionless boundary of that which surrounds it. The Incas regarded space and time as a single concept and named it pacha. Preston Harold defines time as “heavens knows what” and describes it as veiling the eternal ‘now’ of the I AM.

Time may also allow for the expansion of the universe up to a point or “turning” which evokes a contraction, and this contraction is experienced in the now. The now, being “Absolutely Everywhere,” cannot be grasped by consciousness so that the turning point is hidden in time.

As for space, Harold explains:

Not what is in it, but space itself is the great mystery, as great a mystery as time. Eddington’s drawing shows twelve segments converging in the sphere of “here now” – or “I.” Thus, twelve “thrones” govern man in space-time, but there is room for many more segments, more “mansions” – and there must be many more space properties than man knows of today and some, like “Absolutely Elsewhere,” beyond that which consciousness can penetrate.

As for that in space which consciousness can observe, Jesus says, “Heaven and Earth will pass away…” As to how this passing will happen and when, man can know from Him only that the reign of God, the working of the law, is begun, that the Father knoweth the hour, that this passing away will not come as men expected it then. Today, as men observe the process of evolution, change, and decay that passes away the arrangement of celestial bodies and the matter which sustains life, they are committed to another concept of the end of things – but in saying that heaven and earth will pass away, Jesus also said that the creative force, the word, weak a force as it may seem, will not pass away. Thus, His cosmogony comes to rest upon the concept of constant creation or renewal, upon the precept that all things are made anew. His words allow for “becoming” within the universe, but not of the universe which now sustains life in many mansions, and is now operating under perfect and infallible law, in accord with one which is, mathematically speaking, self-sustaining.

Until next time, peace.

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

Definition of tithe

1: a tenth part of something paid as a voluntary contribution or as a tax especially for the support of a religious establishment

2: the obligation represented by individual tithes

3: tenth; broadly : a small part

4: a small tax or levy

Although the Mosaic law required the Israelites to pay a tithe to the Levitical priesthood in support of worship, the tradition of tithing has earlier biblical origins. The first mention of a tithe goes back to Abraham, who paid tithes to the mysterious Melchizedek, he without genealogy or end of days, made like a son of God and a perpetual priest. It is obvious from the Genesis text that Melchizedek is more of an angelic figure than human, and the writer of the Book of Hebrews makes this clear in his exposition of the subject in chapter 7. Melchizedek represents the eternal spirit within of which Jesus came to fully reveal. It is up to each of us to tithe our 10% to this aspect of ourselves. What does this mean?

While the numbers are constantly in flux, by fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition of universe as consisting of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and 5% normal matter. What if we upped that 5% to 10%, and called dark energy and dark matter “space?” This would fit nicely into Preston Harold’s assessment of Jacob’s tithe to the Lord at Peniel.

Jacob, later to become “Israel,” dreamed of a ladder set up on the earth, its top reaching to heaven, angels ascending and descending upon it. When he awoke, he took the stone used for a pillow, set it as a covenant, and made this vow: “of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.” Something in man, in life, demands tithing. If one meets the need of the day, he will see to a self-imposed taxing of his revenue. Tithing serves the Lord, thy God – one must band for himself a bit of all that comes his way. He must serve his body and its needs, seeing it as “temple,” even as Jesus did.

Apply tithing to the second law of thermodynamics, for tithing appears to be the meaning Jacob gave to his dream. “Angels” – the expressed energy of God – ascending and descending the ladder reaching from earth to heaven bespeak a changing arrangement, not of the system itself but of the energy within it; but if tithing is the meaning inherent in this, the dream would say that in universal sense nature’s law works so that through the motion of any system all power cannot be exerted or spent because its effect is diminished as a bit of the energy is “banked” to provide in space source energy for the future. If so, source energy cannot be entirely spent: the last act provides a reserve ad infinitum –  thus, the universe rests upon the last act’s creation of a reserve. If in each move that has ever been made nature has tithed a bit of energy, there is everywhere “banked” in space a reserve in God’s name: one, and it could be that energy, made unavailable at the time, is returned in time or now as available energy. Such energy made available now would not reverse time’s arrow or the direction of the transfer of energy from available to unavailable state because now is past before man can grasp it, and thus the arrow points always from past to future.

Jacob takes the experience (the need of the day) he has in the 10% of the universe known as the material world and offers it back to spirit for continued building of creation; a perpetual genesis of everlasting life and world without end.

Until next time, peace.

Tomorrow’s Problem

One of my favorite sayings is “Life is Plan B.” After spending almost 50 years on this planet I can attest to its utter and complete accuracy. Actually, sometimes life is Plan C or even Plan D. I think you get the point. We make plans and then constantly adjust or totally scrap them depending on our present day circumstances.

Jesus’ statement of taking no thought for the morrow may seem extreme but ultimately it seems to me maybe he was actually on to something, especially on a macro-level. Preston Harold expounds:

Planners for the morrow are ever bedeviled and bemused by the inertia of the masses who go on propagating and resist the change planned for their good. And planners for the morrow are befuddled by the creation of a new problem with the solving of an old one. Robert Heilbroner presents as “quintessential fact” that massive inertia which resists change is “responsible for more of ‘history’ than all the campaigns, the movements, the revolutions,” and he says that at the level of society which is visible only as personal and private encounters, the level at which life is lived, life remains much the same regardless of the new boundaries in which it is contained.

Harold goes on to ruminate that Jesus seems to have seen that mankind comes finally to think of tomorrow in terms that rob today of its pleasure and numb the will to tackle future problems in the only way they can be alleviated: by solving those that confront mankind today…

Jesus says, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow,” but He does not teach that man should live in a witless, indolent manner. In practical terms, “looking ahead,” investing, sowing, tending, reaping, preparing for the arrival of the future, are today’s job as described in His very down-to-earth parables. These command man to the day’s tasks that he may meet the morning with joy, considering the lilies of the field, hearing the song of the sparrows that surround him now, even in his cities. It was toward the level of actual existence that Jesus addressed His words in the Sermon on the Mount – that is to say, He spoke of the ability of the system in which life is contained to support it satisfactorily whatever the tomorrow men envision as the “look ahead.” How can this be, in the face of the second law of thermodynamics? The legend of Jacob presents a clue.

We will look at the story of Jacob and his ladder in our next entry. Until then, peace.

Gloria Patri

Robert Oppenheimer points out that “there are very weak forces which appear in radioactivity; we do not understand why some of these weak forces change properties that strong forces…do not change. To one such slow change…we owe most of the heat and light (from the sun) reaching the earth.” Loren Eisley considers another weak force that gave rise to a weak explosion: “In a sense it was the most terrible explosion in the world, because it forecast and contained all the rest. The coruscating heat of atomic fission, the red depths of the Hydrogen bomb – all were potentially contained in a little packet of gray matter that…quite suddenly appears to have begun to multiply itself in the thick-walled cranium of a ground-dwelling ape…Even the solar system has now felt the impact of that tiny, soundless explosion.”

Preston Harold says in time this explosion produced a bundle of gray matter through which was expressed two thousand years ago the strength of mildness, of weak forces:

Jesus’ cosmogony, expressed in the beginning verses of the Gospel of St. John, presents as the creative impetus a force as “weak” as a word or one measure of light. Other words He spoke, and the opening words of Genesis, point to a beginning of the universe in one act that brought forth light, and to a “becoming” of the universe as it operates under the Law He described in terms of the working of the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ description of the working of the kingdom, the idea of the “expansion” and “shuffling” of energy up to a given time is encompassed. But because Jesus speaks of the “unquenchable fire” (in which matter is involved), His cosmogony does not project “heat-death” for the universe. Can these words that once struck terror to the heart be words of comfort now to men in a universe scientists say faces “heat-death” when entropy’s role is played? According to Jesus, the “flame” cannot be quenched and the warmth of life will ever be.

Jesus says as much in his most famous teaching session, fortifying us with the certainty that entropy does not have the last word.

In the Sermon on the Mount, pointing to the lilies of the field, Jesus gave His answer to the future; in this passage there occurs the word arrayed (its synonym arrangement is the word so intimately involved with entropy). He concludes:

Take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient to the day is the evil therof.

If evil is pure matter, as this study postulates, then sufficient to the day is matter, the source of heat. This is true today and will be true every day, or always. Thus, Jesus says, in effect, take no thought for the morrow’s supply of fuel.

Life’s fuel is never-ending.

World without end. Amen, amen.

Until the next installment, peace.

Jesus Loves Statistics

In Weaver’s theory of communication, one part only receives source noise. The message is changed into a signal by the transmitter and the receiver is an inverse transmitter, changing the transmitted signal back into a message. Noise plays the role of good and evil, increasing uncertainty, but if uncertainty is increased, then information is increased. Weaver says, however, “Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the influence of noise, is undesirable uncertainty… Language must be designed (or developed) with a view to the totality of things that man may wish to say; but not being able to accomplish everything….it too should deal with its task statistically.”

Jesus understood this statistical strategy. Preston Harold tells us…

As Jesus describes the way He deals with the task of “telling us all things,” the term, “statistically,” comes to mind – that is, He scatters His words widely, knowing that some will fall on “stony soil,” but that some will fall on “good soil,” will take root and grow in the minds of men. This statistical dealing with words, which He also involves with the working of the “kingdom of God,” as well as His involving communication with a certain redundancy which man now knows to be necessary and to be involved with entropy, and His saying that the “kingdom of God” and its working grows into a “tree so large” that its reach is lost to physical measurement, that it harbors or involves the “bits” of sound that birds, poetically, represent, indicates that Jesus was indeed referring to the working of the second law of thermodynamics in His descriptions of the realm or reign of God.

Ah, back to the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy strikes again! The end of the universe – heat death – meaninglessness. Is there any way forward? What say you, Mr. Harold?

As far as the universe is concerned, there is desirable uncertainty in the postulations of scientists as to when its “heat-death” will occur. For twentieth-century man the hour appears comfortably distant, so distant the matter can be of no concern only to one who so loves life that the idea is dismaying. Nevertheless, he must face it, for the physicists tell him it appears quite certain that energy is constantly transferred from the available to the unavailable state, and transfer in the opposite direction never occurs in nature. This brings cosmology into the discussion and returns this study to the point in question – Jesus’ answer as to the real nature of entropic working and its meaning in universal terms.

The “real nature of entropic working?” Could there be some sort of “out” to this unassailable concept of the inevitable, ultimate outworking of entropy? We’ll see what The Shining Stranger has to say about this beginning in our next post. Until then, peace.

Jesus Loves Redundancy

To understand how and why Jesus counted on redundancy to communicate his message, we will let Warren Weaver speak technically;

“The ratio of the actual to the maximum entropy is called the relative entropy of the source. If the relative entropy of a certain source is, say, .8, this roughly means that this source is, in its choice of symbols to form a new message, about 80 percent as free as it could possibly be with these same symbols. One minus the relative entropy is called the redundancy. This is the fraction of the structure of the message which is determined not by the free choice of the sender, but rather by the accepted statistical rules governing the use of the symbols in question….the redundancy of English is just about 50 percent, so that about half the letters or words we choose in writing or speaking are under our free choice, and about half are really controlled by the statistical structure of language….it is interesting to note that a language must have at least 50 percent of real freedom (or relative entropy) in the choice of letters if one is to be able to construct satisfactory crossword puzzles.”

Is it not surprising that the Word incarnate would understand the free, statistical, and redundant aspects of language? Preston Harold exposits…

Cross(+)word? Did Jesus leave cross-word messages, wherein a key word or words serve to work both ways just as a letter or letters work both ways in a crossword puzzle? In giving His Law of Communication, Jesus indicated that 50 percent redundancy is ideal:

…let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay…

The second “yea” and the second “nay” give to the whole statement a 50 percent redundancy – as though to point out that in verbal expression, speaking in the ordinary sense of the word, too little redundancy is apt to render the meaning obscure, but too much redundancy is apt to give over the meaning to senselessness….Weaver says, “There is more ‘information’ if you select freely out of a set of fifty standard messages that if you select freely our of a set of twenty-five.” If the prophecies in Scriptures regarding the Christ are viewed as the number of “standard messages” from which Jesus could freely select, then the quantity in this one source provided the greatest opportunity for Him to state and show His truth through the use of them.

Jesus would “freely choose,” pick and choose the scriptures he best thought fit his mission. Without free choice there is no redundancy and vice versa.

Until next time, peace.

What Has Been Hidden

We now begin Chapter 9, “What Has Been Hidden.” One will recall Jesus’ saying, “Nothing has been hidden except to be revealed,” as the inspiration for this title. We begin the chapter with Preston Harold exploring Jesus’ understanding of entropy.

This study finds it most significant that Jesus gave evidence of understanding the relationship between entropy and communication – between “bits” of information, “fowl of the air,” and nature’s supreme law…

The word, entropy, from the Greek, trope, means: a turning, change, after energy. Jesus’ name for this changing arrangement of energy as energy runs its course is “realm of heaven” – He says it is:

…like a grain of mustard-seed, which a man takes and sows in his field….it becomes a tree, so large that wild birds come and roost in the branches of it…Jesus said all this…to fulfill what had been said by the prophet,

I will open my mouth in parables

I will speak out what has been hidden

since the foundation of the world.

To have more appreciation for Jesus’ statement above it will help us to explore the work of the scientists Warren Weaver and Claude E. Shannon, who through their studies found that communication was bound up with the phenomenon of entropy and published their findings in The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Quick spoiler: Anyone who has ever played the phone game knows how quickly entropy kicks in when trying to relay a simple message around a tight circle of humans. Nevertheless, Weaver says:

“That information be measured by entropy is, after all, natural when we remember that information, in communication theory, is associated with the amount of freedom of choice we have in constructing messages….One has the vague feeling that information and meaning may prove to be something like a pair of canonically conjugate variables in quantum theory, they being subject to some joint restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the other. Or perhaps meaning may be shown to be analogous to one of the quantities on which the entropy of a thermodynamic ensemble depends.”

Preston Harold goes on to interpret Weaver in light of this study:

The Christ was to “tell us of all things…” Communication was the heart of His problem. If Jesus grasped the significance of entropy in communication, He saw that He could use the Scriptures as His “source” of information on the Christ, and that the number of the descriptions of this One in the Scriptures would allow Him wide freedom of choice in selecting among them those required to construct His message in such a way that the ideal in redundancy might be achieved, enabling Him to convey the maximum of meaning within the limits of possibility.

In the redundancy lies the secret.

We’ll explore this secret in our next installment. Until then, peace.

 

Happy New Year!: Looking Ahead and a Quick Review

Apologies for going AWOL these past 7 months. As the saying goes, “life happens,” and I’ve been quite busy with taking care of other more pressing issues. All is well and I am looking forward to getting back on track a bit for 2018. For now, before we begin Chapter 9, I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick review of the thesis for “The Shining Stranger” according to Gerald Heard in his introduction to the book:

1. Jesus recognized the Messianic hope to be valid and universal, but misdirected when man looked beyond his individual being to find the Christ (Logos, God-Son) which Jesus saw to be incarnate in every person, revealed through humankind’s unique power of speech and expression of the Word, God, One, I.

2. Jesus realized that until the ancient Messianic doctrines were superseded by a valid, ethical concept of the Christ, of God, and of man, the individual and society would suffer the ravages of Messianic pretension, as well as the curse of Messianic delusion which Jesus suffered but from which he recovered before beginning his ministry, recognizing himself to be no more, no less, than any other human being.

3. Jesus was convinced that until man ceased to look for a Messiah to come and solve all problems, the development of human consciousness would be arrested because man would not seek his “inner kingdom” to find the Christ of himself, the Authority that governs his life and inevitably leads him to become responsible to and for himself as well as a responsible member of society in which truth alone actually governs and reigns, in time destroying whatever is false, spurious, and incompatible with man’s true nature and need.

4. Therefore, Jesus’ purpose was to complete and destroy the Judaic Messianic tradition together with any Messianic concept akin to it through a withering of this idea as the Messianic idea he espoused, the idea of the Christ in everyone, took root and flowered to overshadow prevailing Messianic expectation. He knew exactly what he was doing and was in no sense victimized.

5. Jesus’ mission was to destroy Messianic tradition creatively by making “Israel” and its history a symbol of human personality or consciousness, while making himself a symbol of the Christ in every person which insures his eternal life and the evolution of his consciousness through dealing with his own forces of good and evil which Jesus saw to be equally essential to life and satisfaction in it, but he saw also that each force was in process of regeneration; Jesus made himself a symbol of the Logos in humankind to establish the pattern of the operation of the Christ in Homo sapiens’ evolution from child to man free of destructive impulses by virtue of being fully conscious and completely empathetic, with dominion over himself, his flesh, and his life.

6. The Bible, one body of words encompassing the limits of human consciousness, truth bearer that can dwell always with men and which Jesus knew must be brought into being as a result of his works and his command to his disciples, is itself historical Judaic Messiah.

Now that we’ve had a quick review, we’re ready to move on to Chapter 9. I’m looking forward to you joining me there. Until then, peace.