Liberation from the confessional shackles by no means implies abandonment of faith in a god as the moving principle behind all being.
No! 'Miraculous cures' are no proof of the authenticity of a vision. In order to throw light on the darkness surrounding the mystery of supposed miracles, we must try to get on the trail of the visionary phenomena that are supposed to cause them.
Chapter Four - Visions Do Exist - My Explanation
This they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
(Genesis 11:6)
Visions are real - they do exist.
Visions originate in intelligent brains.
Every intelligent brain has the prerequisites for creating visions.
The impulse for producing visions is of extraterrestrial origin.
Religious visions originate through an ideal that the visionary has within him and is suggested by his religious environment.
Do these theses of mine conceal a mass of contradictions? It might appear so at first sight. But in order to provide proofs for my theses, I must build on the basis of my theory.
Present-day astrophysics puts forward three theories of the origin of the universe [1]: the Big Bang theory, the Steady State theory and the Oscillation theory. None of these three (or other) theories on the origin of the world explains where the mysterious original matter of the whole universe comes from and what was present before it came into being. Nothing originates from nothing.
Just as it does not matter for my thesis which of these theories may ultimately turn out to be valid, it is also unimportant to me whether the origin of the universe dates back five, ten or twenty milliard years, or whether matter is finite or infinite, or whether it constantly renews itself. My question is: what did original matter originate from?
In public discussions I have made use of a graphic image to explain my views on this question in simple terms. I suggested that my hearers imagine a computer with a hundred milliard thought-units
(bits in computer jargon), a computer that can think, i.e. has a 'personal consciousness' (Professor Michie, Edinburgh University). This consciousness is attached to milliards of circuits: it would be destroyed if the computer exploded. Our computer is highly intelligent and capable of, ultra-rapid combinations. There is nothing it does not know.
In spite of its consciousness and omniscience the thinking computer is not 'happy', for in spite of its tremendous performance there is something it cannot think out, reckon out or work out, namely experience. But it wants to amass experience. As it has no rival of anything like the same calibre to obtain experience from, it decides to send the hundred milliard bits off its central body out to get information by exploding itself knowing perfectly well that it would definitely lose its personal consciousness by so doing ... if it had not in its insuperable cleverness programmed the future after its self-destruction long beforehand.
Before the bits are catapulted on their long journey to gain experience, the clever computer has programmed magnetic impulses inside them with the order to reassemble at x place at y time. When this hour strikes, the milliards of bits obediently return to the complicated machinery with its 'personal consciousness' and bring home experiences, like bees bringing honey to the hive.
From the moment of the explosion to the moment of the return no bit 'knew' that it was and would now be again a minute part of a larger consciousness. If a single bit with its minimal capacity for thought could ask the question: 'What is the purpose of my breakneck journey?' or 'Who created me, where do I come from?', there would be no answer. Thus the tremendous journey was the beginning and end of an act, a kind of 'creation' of consciousness multiplied by the factor EXPERIENCE.
This bold comparison from the arsenal of science-fiction is meant as an aid in tracking down the phenomenon which existed before original matter. Terrible simplificateur! I beg your pardon, but it gets us a little further.
All human traditions assure us that 'spirit' (or the comprehensive synonym 'God') was 'there' before any beginning, i.e. before the origin of matter. The (original) spirit then decided to become matter, to transform itself. (... and the word was made flesh ...) 'Spirit' is not tangible or measurable with instruments. How are we to imagine it? In a gaseous state? This is scarcely possible, gas molecules are already matter. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that 'spirit', that mysterious unknown IT, transformed itself into a gaseous aggregation during the first stage of its materialization.
This assumption no longer smacks of science-fiction, for every astrophysical theory of the origin of the universe begins with the gaseous state of the original matter - with gas molecules, which slowly and steadily combine to form lumps of matter. But if a gaseous state was the proven original state [2] of all matter and the original spirit, that simply means that all existing matter was permeated by the original spirit, a claim that is manifest in all theosophical and esoteric religions. Then, to put it crudely, matter would be crystallized sublimated spirit.
It makes no difference which kind of matter one thinks of -lava, rock, plants, animals or men - they ultimately all come from the same original state. It even makes no difference whether we postulate matter from our planet, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda Nebule. Matter is creation per se and itself the product of creation.
Matter has transversed a million fold paths of evolution. A stone, product of the same origin and the same original state, can ask itself no questions. But life clearly develops from 'dead' matter, there is no longer the slightest academic doubt about that. Living matter, say a cell, develops over millions of years into complicated organisms. Development and reactions by organisms are governed by brains with their grey mass of mil-hardfold cells: they produce 'personal consciousness' by chemical and electrical conversions of matter. Intelligence does not appear until after the existence of personal consciousness which can ask questions. (Descartes: 'Cogito, ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am.)
So according to the history of evolution, intelligence is superior to any matter below its state of consciousness. Matter is dominated by it. Intelligence is more closely related to the original spirit than dead matter - intelligence can communicate with one another, they can ask questions at a high leveclass="underline"
'Who created me? What is the purpose and meaning of existence?' Pursuing my explanatory image: with their brains bits seek contact with the original consciousness, without understanding that they themselves are components of the consciousness. They may seek for the 'spirit', for the IT, synonym for creator or god, but they do not 'realize' that what they seek is around them and in them.
A fanciful idea?
I leave it to the scientists to answer that question.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), English Astronomer and physicist, Director of the Cambridge Observatory, [3] discovered the pulsation theory of the Cephids. Eddington championed a 'selective subjectivism', of natural laws, in that he assumed that the basic physical laws are essentially determined by the structure of the process of knowledge and asserted that the matter of the world is the matter of the spirit.
The natural philosopher Bernhard Bavink (1879-1947), who strove to close the gap between natural science and religion, held the following view [4]: The material organization of the world appears to us today as perhaps the transient manifestation of an entirely spiritual concept.