Saturday, April 29, 2023

The science of the Body of Light in Tibetan, Sufi & Christianity


                         

IF one can go without a single negative thought for between 13-30 yrs, say the Tibetan's, one's body upon death will shrink, sometimes leaving only hair & teeth, and sometimes dissolve into pure light, achieving a "Rainbow Body".

The physical elements of the body are said to fully revert into what are called the five lights of jñāna, which is their original form.


Head of the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, the Karmapa shared the same status and importance as the Dalai Lama.

Dr. David Levy, his attending Doctor gave the following report upon his heart failure on the monitors. The medical team tried to revive Karmapa, but gave up after about 45 minutes. “We began to pull out the tubing, but I suddenly saw his blood pressure was 140 over 80. A nurse screamed, ‘he has a good pulse!’” Levy said.

Levy said, “it was clearly the greatest miracle I had ever seen.”

Levy reported that 48 hours after the time of death, Karmapa’s chest was still warm. “My hands were both warm, but his chest was warmer,” he said. “If I moved my hands towards the side of his chest, the body was cold, but the area around the heart stayed warm.” He also reported that there was no odor or decay, which typically set in quickly after death. “He stayed in deep meditation for three days, then it ended — he became cold and the process of death set in. The atmosphere changed as well,” Levy said.

In the 1970s, Karmapa traveled throughout the U.S. giving the public Black Crown Ceremony empowerment, an attendee snapped a picture. When the film was developed, the image of the Karmapa was transparent .


                                    

Material bodies dissolving into light is the subject of Rainbow Body and Resurrection by Father Francis V. Tiso, a priest of the Diocese of Isernia–Venafro who holds a PhD in Tibetan Buddhism. 


In 1984, when Tiso was meditating with his eyes open in a chapel in Italy, he, too, had an extraordinary vision. Jesus Christ, he says, appeared before him in the form of a violet light-body. At that time. Tiso was considering taking a teaching position in the United States, but in this vision Christ indicated he should stay in Italy. "It was important not to make a mistake at that point in my life," reflects Tiso. "I did stay in Italy, where I was eventually ordained, and I lived in a hermitage chapel for almost twelve years."



                                

Photograph of Lama Achuk

Francis Tiso remarks that one of his most intriguing interviews was with Lama A-chos. He told Tiso that when he died he too would manifest the rainbow body. "He showed us two photographs taken of him in the dark, and in these photographs his body radiated rays of light."



         




An individual who achieves a fully perfected Light Body or Rainbow Body in this very life is like a hologram, a gossamer web of photons, a powerful electromagnetic field that holds to human form until that allotted moment when it is time to leave the bubble of flesh behind.

While alive, it is said that the bodies of these beings do not cast a shadow in either lamplight or sunlight; at death, signs include their physical bodies dramatically shrinking in size, and their corpses exuding fragrances and perfumes rather than the odors of decomposition. A common Tibetan metric for the shrunken corpse of a body gone rainbow is the “length of a forearm.” In the case of Khenpo A Chц, as Father Tiso notes, the local Chinese press reported that his body “shrank to the size of a bean on the eighth day and disappeared on the tenth day. What remain are hair and nails.”

              

Lamo R. Tashi Lamo’s body after death, 60 cm


                         

60 cm rainbow body of Lama Thubsher

Tiso suggests that the rainbow body of Christ which blasted him out of the tomb becomes materialized for us in the consecrated bread; and so Eucharist is the Christian technique to achieving the rainbow body.

David Bentley Hart in Roland in Moonlight has Roland ask :

I mean, is there truly a gulf of difference between Buddhism’s sambhogakayaand St. Paul’s absolutely fleshless soma pneumatikon? Or between the transfigured, radiant body of the risen Christ, or at least the resplendent bodies of the hesychasts, and the radiant flesh of Swami Premananda walking through the marketplace in an ecstasy of love for God’s beauty? And who’s to say Swami Ramalingam didn’t in fact experience full bodily transfiguration and divinization in this life, growing constantly physically more luminous and translucent as his fleshly body changed first into the suddha deha, the pure body, and then into the pranava deha, the body of the primordial OM, and then into the jnana deha, the body of perfect divine grace, or that he didn’t finally vanish away one day in 1874 into pure, immaterial, spiritual corporeality, and didn’t thereafter appear to his disciples in this … resurrected form? (324–325)

Swami Premananda

Swami Ramalinga, or Ramalingam Swamigal (1823–1874) was a Tamil saint who, according to his hagiography, was assumed into a higher state of existence from within a locked room on January 30th, 1874, leaving behind no traces or evidence of escape.

Swami Ramalingam (Vallalar) himself says, “Life of eternal bliss is union with God. Those who have achieved this will have transmuted this impure carnal body into a pure golden body, and again have the pure body transformed into a super-sensitive, spiritual body”.

in his later years, his physical body had become tenuous and translucent. Disciples have recorded that it cast no distinct shadow. It has been reported that several attempts were made to photograph him, but since light passed through his body, no clear image could be obtained. What could be seen were only his clothing and a very misty vision of his face and limbs, and from such a translucent body made so by pure living, dematerialization was but a few steps away.


The physical elements of the body fully revert into what are called the five lights of jñāna, which is their original form.

The reason for this transformative possibility in the first place is that the Five Elements exist within us in a multi-layered context. We contain the five material elements, but also the five original, pure Wisdom Elements, the cosmic spark as it were. The Hindu tradition describes five koshas or levels of existence, from gross to subtle, from bioenergetic to pure consciousness. The Buddhist world speaks of three bodies or kaya in a similar spectrum. The Kabbalah describes five worlds in a descending chain of existence.

 Traditionally, the Buddhists perceive each of the Vajrayana chakras as the center of gravity of one of the elements—but containing an inner structure of five subelements. And so we have elements within elements waiting to be impregnated with divine radiance and to ascend to their true potential.

The Five Pure Lights is an essential teaching in the Dzogchen tradition of Bon and Tibetan Buddhism. For the deluded, matter seems to appear. This is due to non-recognition of the five lights. Matter includes the mahābhūta or classical elements, namely: space, air, water, fire, earth. Knowledge (rigpa) is the absence of delusion regarding the display of the five lights. This level of realization is called rainbow body.




                  


St John Maximovitch of San Fransisco 

After all Elijah as carried up to heaven by a chariot of light, and Moses who exuded divine light during his lifetime (as we read about in Exodus) and whose body eventually transformed fully into colorful light when he died, according to some legends. So when Peter, James, and John see two other mysterious men bathed in glorious light next to a wonderfully transfigured Jesus, they were wise to deduce their identities to be that of Moses and Elijah. 

                  



John the Evangelist uses the expression God is Light (1 Jn 1.5) In the Orthodox tradition presented in first-hand accounts in Symeon the New Theologian, Seraphim of Sarov, Archimandrite Sophrony, a this is an experience of the ‘Uncreated Light’, the divine energies, and is a foretaste of union with God, ‘deification’ or theosis.

Many believe this is how the Shroud of Turin was created.

Valuable research has been carried out by Paolo Di Lazzaro and others on the colouration of linen by ultra-violet radiation. In 2010 the researchers concluded that:

“Our results demonstrate that a short and intense burst of directional deep-UV radiation can provide a linen colouration having many peculiar features of the Turin Shroud image, including hue, colouration of only the outer-most fibres of the linen yarns and lack of fluorescence”

                          



In April 2019 a paper in Applied Optics described how femtosecond pulse laser processing in the infrared came close to reproducing a 2-dimensional image of the face on the Shroud.

It seems therefore that different radiation in different frequencies can produce some of the characteristics of the image, but to date there has been no successful attempt to produce the image in its entirety. This research has used radiation in frequencies close to that of visible light.
Dr. Silverman is a leading scientific expert on the so-called Shroud of Turin, which is the cloth traditionally said to be the burial shroud of Jesus and which holds an imprint of his face. 

In his book, A Burst of Conscious Light. Near-Death Experiences, the Shroud of Turin, and the Limitless Potential of Humanity, he presents with evidence that this imprint actually was produced by a blast of radiation which the author links to the light of consciousness itself. Similar phenomena have been observed in relation to Near-Death-Experiences and this leads us to reconsider the power of human consciousness and the laws of nature.

                             



When researcher Fritz-Albert Popp (b. 1938) first discovered that all living cells emit light—biophotons—he could not have anticipated the revolution this would create in the fields of both biology and physics.

Apparently biophotons are used by the cells of many living organisms to communicate, which facilitates energy/information transfer that is several orders of magnitude faster than chemical diffusion. According to a 2010 study, “Cell to cell communication by biophotons have been demonstrated in plants, bacteria, animal neutriophil granulocytes and kidney cells.” 

Researchers were able to demonstrate that “…different spectral light stimulation (infrared, red, yellow, blue, green and white) at one end of the spinal sensory or motor nerve roots resulted in a significant increase in the biophotonic activity at the other end.” Researchers interpreted their finding to suggest that “…light stimulation can generate biophotons that conduct along the neural fibers, probably as neural communication signals.”

Stored in cell DNA, these messengers are the main communication network of the body, connecting cell parts, tissues, and organs.

Already they have been shown to regulate the growth, differentiation, and regeneration of cells. Coherent biophoton fields could prove to be the basis of memory and even consciousness, as suggested many years ago by Karl Pribram, David Bohm, and others.

Channels of light

An equally remarkable development is the re-discovery of the primo vascular system (PVS), after being overlooked for 30 years. This system of microscopic channels, which differ from the lymph, blood, and nervous tissues, qualifies as the actual tsa, nadi, or psychic channels utilized within Vajrayana, yogic, and Daoist traditions of meditation. The microscopic PVS is everywhere, even following the course of nerves and the brain itself.

                       


Now, biophotons are photons, bits of light, that are generated spontaneously by most living cells. Research suggests that biophotons are created in the DNA that resides in the mitochondria in your cells. They are created in the 98% of each DNA molecule that is not used for genetic coding of behavior. The genome project referred to this as junk-DNA because they had no idea about its use.

Biophotons are important carriers of information in the brain, along with well-known electrochemical signals—neurotransmitters and nerve impulses (waves of ionic depolarization).

What this means is that each living cell is giving off, or resonating, a biophoton field of coherent energy. If each cell is emitting this field, then the whole living system is, in effect, a resonating field-a ubiquitous nonlocal field. And since biophotons are the entities through which the living system communicates, there is near-instantaneous intercommunication throughout. And this, claimed the original founder of biophotons Dr. Popp, is the basis for coherent biological organization — referred to as quantum coherence.


Well respected Biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho describes HERE how the living organism, including the human body, is coordinated throughout and is “coherent beyond our wildest dreams.”

 It appears that every part of our body is “in communication with every other part through a dynamic, tuneable, responsive, liquid crystalline medium that pervades the whole body, from organs and tissues to the interior of every cell.”

". . . the visible body just happens to be where the wave function of the organism is most dense. Invisible quantum waves are spreading out from each of us and permeating into all other organisms. At the same time, each of us has the waves of every other organism entangled within our own make-up. . . . We are participants in the creation drama that is constantly unfolding. We are constantly co-creating and re-creating ourselves and other organisms in the universe. . . "

There have been experiments that have studied the output of biophotons among people who are engaged in deep, contemplative practice, in heart-centered prayer in which one simply bathes in God’s love and light (like the prayer described in The Cloud of Unknowing). 

And the output of biophotons for people in deep prayer was extraordinary! Not just twice as much as the normal output, but hundreds of thousands of times more than the normal output. So, this suggests that when we are engaged in prayer and worship right here (when we are fulfilling our primary mission which is to glorify God), we are actually heightening a biological process that takes place in all of our cells. We are emitting biophotons of light from our bodies.

The knowledge that human DNA can be influenced and modulated by frequencies (sound, light, language, and thought) is likely to have been known to various spiritual traditions, mystics, and teachers over the ages. This is perhaps why a variety of exercises have existed that utilize thought focus (prayer), sounds (music, chanting, singing), light (both natural light and produced light, such as in stained glass), and language (specific recitations such as a mantra and zikr).

        
                                                       



This is very evident in Sufism, read HERE


The Dua Of Light; the Prophet (saws) often prayed in Sujood, “O Allah, place light in my heart, and on my tongue light, and in my ears light and in my sight light, and above me light, and below me light, and to my right light, and to my left light, and before me light and behind me light. Place in my soul light. Magnify for me light, and amplify for me light. Make for me light, and make me light. O Allaah, grant me light, and place light in my nerves, and in my body light and in my blood light and in my hair light and in my skin light.” (Bukhari)

One of the most treasured practices of the Sufi path is zikr, the remembrance of Allah. To be in unity with Allah is to be in a constant state of remembrance of the source of all creation.

The various names of Allah are repeated several, often hundreds of times in unison by a group in the exactas of adoration. Certain movements, such as swaying back and forth or turning from right to left, are incorporated into the activity during the intonations, and are likewise performed in unison. In some tariqas a prayerful rotation of the whole body, arms extended while pivoting on one foot, is traditional.


                          


And indeed, a study published found that Sufi's practicing Zakir, the Holy Names of God, emitted 100's of times more biophotons than normal, as Francis Tiso references in this interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-StGkzjVlM


Research at the University of Kassel in Witzenhausen, Germany, in 1997, showed that it is possible to produce visible light from the chest area under certain conditions. The first condition is that the meditation technique must be heart-centered, not transcendent. Secondly, a specific person with an actual need must be identified as a receiver of the transmitted light. Under these conditions, a sustained light emission of 100,000 photons per second was measured, where only the background count of 20 photons per second was observed without meditation.

That’s 100,000 biophotons vs 20 !

You can read the paper HERE or HERE “Visible Light Radiated from the Heart with Heart Rhythm Meditation” by P. Blair.

In full disclosure, this study has been controversial, with other scientists claiming this is impossible. It has not been replicated, however other studies of meditation has proven such practices induce increased Biophoton production, check out this paper HERE and on transcendental meditation HERE.
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INVOCATIONS OF DIVINE LIGHT

These are Sufi meditations that use chanting, out-loud and silently, to create vibrations that stimulate the heart and third eye. Specifically, the Arabic words Nur and Mu-now-win are spoken slowly, with emphasis on the vowels, placing the resonance of the sound in the throat and chest. They produce the sensation of having a miniature sun in the chest.

DIHKR

The repetition of the Arabic phrase, "La illaha illa 'llah Hu" is an ancient prescription for entering into the consciousness of the One and Only Being. It is performed with attention on the heart as the center of the experience and results in a feeling of profound heart-centeredness.

The great Sufi Scholar Henri Corban wrote in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism about the divine inner light, the “Sun of the heart,” the Sun of the mystery,” the “Sun of the Spirit,” the “initiatic light.”

For Suhrawardi, the quest culminated in the visio smaragdina, the outburst of emerald light heralding ‘the secret of the mystery of Mysteries.’ The emerald light is described in Revelation:

“round [God’s] throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald.” 

This re-ascent of light to light, the ascent of the ‘column of Light,’ this mystical experience fills a function of cosmic salvation. “To attain fully to this Illumination is salvation.”

Corbin emphasizes that “the terms light and darkness, clarity and obscurity, are neither metaphor nor comparisons. The mystic really and actually sees light and darkness, by a kind of vision that depends on an organ other than the physical organ of sight.”


                                                              




In any case, the “body of light” is well alive in religious traditions.

See also -

Yan Sun, Chao Wang, Jiapei Dai. Biophotons as neural communication signals demonstrated by in situ biophoton autography. Photochem Photobiol Sci. 2010 Mar ;9(3):315-22. Epub 2010 Jan 21. PMID: 20221457

F A Popp, W Nagl, K H Li, W Scholz, O Weingärtner, R Wolf. Biophoton emission. New evidence for coherence and DNA as source. Cell Biophys. 1984 Mar;6(1):33-52. PMID: 6204761









Monday, April 10, 2023

Schopenhauer or Christianity ?

                         

Schopenhauer’s philosophy has not fared well, his aesthetic insights are still worthy, and his basic idealism, however his idea of “will” - by which he really meant force - has been more or less dismissed.

Nevertheless, he paints a picture of reality, ravenous and hellish, that contemporary man feels all too accurate.

Here I compare Schopenhauer to Christianity, and find some major common ground.

Schopenhauer thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, from gravity to sexual impulse, nothing but blind idiot will. His proof ? Look inward, he says, you will find this unrelenting force in oneself.

Hence the only way out is freedom from this will.

Of course, the ancients had a different view, the truest freedom is to live as we were meant to live; to love the true, the good, and the beautiful because they’re worth loving; the right goal is not the annulment of our freedom, but its fulfillment.

First, recall Schopenhauer married his philosophy to Newtonian physics and its determinism, which we know to be false. 

Besides which, hard determinism is rather silly, for if it were true, one would not be able to come to that conclusion rationally, but be determined to believe it; hence destroying both rationality and truth.

Also, since Schopenhauer opened himself to Platonic metaphysics, we can note the Platonic mystics too looked inward, but found, beneath all the noise and chaos, something else. “A Platonic man,” George Mavrodes once wrote, “who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence.”

                                                                 

Drawing I myself did - Self & Soul

The power and unruliness of the sexual drive was, for him, the clearest manifestation of the will to live and the way it brings about unhappiness. It mercilessly pushes us into romantic illusions, irrational decisions, and the compulsive scratching of an itch that only ever reappears, all for the sake of bringing about new people who will in turn only suffer the way we do.

Schopenhauer’s chapter on “The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes” in The World as Will and Idea is worth quoting:

“This longing, which attaches the idea of endless happiness to the possession of a particular woman, and unutterable pain to the thought that this possession cannot be attained – this longing and this pain cannot obtain their material from the wants of an ephemeral individual; but they are the sighs of the spirit of the species… The species alone has infinite life, and therefore is capable of infinite desires, infinite satisfaction, and infinite pain. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal. No wonder, then, if such a breast seems like to burst, and can find no expression for the intimations of infinite rapture or infinite misery with which it is filled…”

Well, that’s perfectly reasonable. But then again, one can take the exact same facts and reach a very different conclusion, In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

 In his essay “On Suicide,” he notes that “Christianity carries in its innermost heart the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the true aim of life.” But Christianity nevertheless insists that “all things [are] very good,” so that suffering serves an “ascetic” purpose in properly orienting us toward the ultimate good that will redeem it. Schopenhauer shares Christianity’s view that suffering is central to human existence and ought to be faced ascetically, but he rejects the thesis that all things are very good. Hence whereas Christian asceticism is motivated by hope, Schopenhauer’s is motivated by despair.

Ed Feser, the Catholic philosopher remarks,

"From a Christian perspective, he is living a kind of hell because he denies that there is a real object for our infinite desires. There is no fulfillment of desires or infinite satisfaction as he says. No resting in God. This is the cornerstone of Christian self understanding - that our desires, our wills, our sexuality, our appetites, are all disordered because they are not directed or submitted to the one entity that can bring them to fulfillment. And this is God."

        

Schopenhauer, as I say, thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, offering examples like the following:

“The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds its nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins its web; the ant-lion has no notion of the ant for which it digs its cavity for the first time. The larva of the stag-beetle gnaws a hole in the wood, where it will undergo its metamorphosis, twice as large if it is to become a male beetle as if it is to become a female, in order in the former case to have room for the horns, though as yet it has no idea of these. In the actions of such animals the will is obviously at work as in the rest of their activities, but is in blind activity.”

Interestingly, such obviously goal-directed tendencies interwoven throughout nature don’t lead Schopenhauer to affirm teleology in the world, but to deny it. The will in question is characterized as “will without a subject.” . Examples of seemingly teleological instances of the world are an odd choice to drive home a point denying its reality.

Really, the existence of both stable natural laws and our ability epistemically to access them count evidentially more in favor of theism than atheism, a personal universe rather than an impersonal one.

That the universe is fine tuned is undeniable. There is order. And yet, there is obviously chaos.

What could explain this ?

Well, the Christian explanation avoids denying either. The story is that the Cosmos was made from nothing, and presently it is in a state of birth, groaning toward true existence when God will be all in all. A thing truly exists when it is filled with Logos, with True Life, with God, and therefore acts in an ordered way. Meanwhile, everything exists in a mix of nothingness and being, meaning breaks down, the Creation falls apart and tends toward chaos, it acts irrational, yet there is clearly a rationality there.

After all, St. Paul states that creation was made “subject to futility”

The Orthodox Theologian John Zizioulas asserts the following:

"Athanasios the Great wrote in his work “On Incarnation” that Creation has “nil” and “death” within its nature. Therefore, “death”, in the sense of “elimination of Creation” is something that is embedded in Creation.".

Or as the Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart put’\s it,

“...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primaeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.”

Or as the Orthodox Theologian John Behr says,

“…the world we inhabit as material beings is not created by God, it is made, or at least strictly conditioned by the choices of His creatures and regulated by his providence…

Creation is strictly only the unimpeded expression of God’s rational will…for something to be God's creation it must reflect His will…”

“This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death,” David Bentley Hart tells us.

Schopenhauer does see some truth in the Eden story, he writes,

“The myth of the Fall of man is the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysical, although only allegorical, truth: indeed it is this alone that reconciles me to the Old Testament. Thus our existence resembles nothing but the consequence of a false step and a guilty desire.”

In any case Ed Feser concludes,

“ The stripping away of teleology is also the stripping away of inherent goodness and purpose. Nature loses its character as an icon or a quasi sacrament that points to God. And so, we are not taught to properly appreciate our own nature and its various ends either. We are taught to see our nature as completely devoid of goodness in a Manichean flight into pure spirit. Or, in reaction to the flight to the spirit, is an opposing reaction which is a flight to naturalism. An excessive focus and naive belief that the limited natural ends of our human nature can bring us true happiness without reference to our ultimate good.”

                                                              

However, the most convincing thing about Schopenhauer, to me, is his vision of life, its absurd irrational horror.

However, Christians would never deny this.

Elder Nazarius tells us,

“Beguiling and deceptive is the life of the world, fruitless its labor, perilous its delight, poor its riches, delusive its honors, inconstant, insignificant; and woe to those who hope in its seeming goods: because of this many die without repentance. Blessed and most blessed are those who depart from the world and its desires.”

And in his “A complaint against the world,” St Ephraim the Syrian writes :

"No advantages do you offer those who love you, O world, you dwelling-place of sorrows.

All who draw near to you do you seduce with your treasures and with all your delights, but in the day of death both the fair countenance of the beautiful and the might of the strong will be cast down into the grave. Woe to him who loves you and is loved by you, for his joy will be transformed into cries.

O, if only I had never set foot in you, O world that deceives all who enter! those who love you enjoy no pleasures, and those who hate you weep not.

Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and righteous is thy judgement that condemns the world and those who love it!

I have become mired in filth; the waters of the world are drowning me, they do not let me break loose to catch my breath. May Thy Cross, O Lord, be my staff and my support on the path along which I walk.”

And check out this brutal opening of St Silouan’s biography by St Sophrony :

"Revelation concerning God declares, 'God is love,' God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.''

How difficult for us mortals to agree with this! Difficult, for both our own personal life and the life of the world around us would appear to testify to the contrary.

Indeed, where is this light of the Father's love if we all, approaching the end of our lives, in bitterness of heart can lament with Job, 'My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart . . . If I wait, the grave is mine house . .. Where is now my hope?' And that which from my youth my heart has sought secretly but fervently — 'Who shall see it?'"

Christ Himself attests that God is concerned for all creation, that He does not ignore a single small bird, that He clothes the grass of the field,"' and His concern for people is so incomparably great that 'the very hairs of our head are all numbered.

But where is this Providence that is attentive to the last detail?

We are all of us crushed by the spectacle of evil walking unrestrained up and down the world. Millions of lives that have often hardly begun — before they are even aware of living — are strangled with incredible ferocity.

So why ever is this absurd life given to us?"

Christians often point to the absurdity of existence, Seraphim Rose writes HERE,

“In the end we shall find that absurdism, quite against its will, offers its own testimony to this faith and this truth which are... Christian.

The absurd could not even be conceived except in relation to something considered not to be absurd; the fact that the world fails to make sense could occur only to men who have once believed, and have good reason to believe, that it does not make sense. Absurdism cannot be understood apart from its Christian origins.

Camus was quite right when he said, “We must choose between miracles and the absurd.” For in this respect Christianity and absurdism are equally opposed to Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, to the view that reality can be reduced to purely rational and human terms."
                          

Still, what of God’s providence ? It certainly doesn’t look like anyone is in control. Writing about the tsunami HERE David Hart writes,

"The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. 

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends.

 We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days."

After all Christianity does in fact make existential sense, Hart says,

"As for the Christian vision of reality in which the human person really is a center of spiritual gravity. The vision in which the God who is God is also the man who dies in utter abjection. That is the story I inhabit. The story that makes sense of all reality for me. And the story that has been confirmed--confirmed, not proven--by personal experiences and reflections on history."

                                  

Finally, Schopenhauer extols compassion, and indeed is a very moral philosopher.

However, the existence of a "true and pure love" attainable by philosophy and self-denial seems to be inconsistent with the premises of Schopenhauer's system. For how can there be a selfless love when all that exists is the selfish Will to live? Indeed, for Schopenhauer "existence, life, is itself a crime: it is our original sin. And it is inevitably expiated by suffering and death."

Since for Schopenhauer there is no paradisal innocence, but only original sin, there can be no escape from sin, and no return to paradise, but only the vain and self-contradictory attempt of existence to deny itself, of being not to be.

As Nietzsche clearly saw, if all the world is this ravenous will, whence compassion ? Nietzsche rightly notes that there is no room for his morality or goodness, and that Schopenhauer is borrowing from a Christian worldview. 

And indeed his own life bears this out. A proponent of compassion and moral philosopher he himself notoriously threw an old washer lady down the stairs for making too much noise !

Schopenhauer bases his view by looking within, and finding this ravenous will, yet mystics the world over, from all times and cultures, have likewise looked within, and indeed have found something like this terrible will - but also something else, something higher.

Schopenhauer's philosophy can neither be lived out , nor can it validate affect as pointing to something higher.

We all know there is a spirit, however drowned out by the chaos and bloody horror all about, of purity and goodness. What we make of it depends upon us, but to deny it utterly is surely foolish.

In any case, Christianity is a way of life, one trusts in it little by little, is shaped by liturgical living, and can discover in himself the truth of this reality. After all, faith is not optional, we are all walking toward one way or another. 

Of course, one cannot think oneself out of this predicament, or by mind alone verify one thesis over the other, one must CHOOSE what one wishes to believe, and then partake of those practices to experientially verify its truth.

Habits shape the mind, if one lives like an atheist, or liturgically, this will shape how one receives the world....

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."


- Francis Martin


As I write HERE, Christianity is a way, a direction, not an explanation...





Thursday, April 6, 2023

The Buddha's Fire Sermon, Plus Jack Kerouac & AI Art


                          


After the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest ever preached was perhaps the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, also known as the Adittapariyana Sutta.

Below I include my two favorite translations, followed by a more modern poem of Samsara by Jack Kerouac…Plus a bunch of cool AI artwork.

I ought to note that T.S. Eliot titled the third section of his great poem The Wasteland, “The Fire Sermon.”

The last five lines of “The Fire Sermon” read as follows:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning (307-11)

In his “Notes” to the poem, Eliot writes, “The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.”

The first, third, and fourth lines above are references to St. Augustine’s Confessions, while the second and fifth lines refer to Buddha’s Fire Sermon. 

St. Augustine speaks in a similar way to the Buddha's sermon :

TO CARTHAGE I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God…

For this cause my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense… For I was both beloved, and secretly arrived at the bond of enjoying; and was joyfully bound with troublesome ties, that I might be scourged with the burning iron rods of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and strife. (St. Augustine, Book III, Ch. 1 p. 1,)

How did I burn then, my God, how did I burn to re-mount from earthly things to Thee, nor knew I what Thou wouldst do with me? For with Thee is wisdom. But the love of wisdom is in Greek called “philosophy,” with which that book inflamed me. 

Some there be that seduce through philosophy, under a great, and smooth, and honourable name colouring and disguising their own errors… (St. Augustine, Book III, Ch. 4 p. 8, )

The first translation of Buddha's Fire Sermon is from Buddhism in Translations , by Henry Clarke Warren, which Eliot thought highly as poetic literature :

                                      

THE FIRE-SERMON.

Translated from the Maha-Vagga (i. 211)

Then The Blessed One, having dwelt in Uruvelā as long as he wished, proceeded on his wanderings in the direction of Gayā Head, accompanied by a great congregation of priests, a thousand in number, who had all of them aforetime been monks with matted hair. And there in Gayā, on Gayā Head, The Blessed One dwelt, together with the thousand priests.

And there The Blessed One addressed the priests:—

“All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?

“The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.

“And with what are these on fire?

“With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.

‘‘The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire; . . . the nose is on fire; odors are on fire; . . . the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire; . . . the body is on fire; things tangible are on fire; . . . the mind is on fire; ideas are on fire; . . . mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire.

“And with what are these on fire?

“With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.

                                    


“Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, for that also he conceives an aversion.

Conceives an aversion for the ear, conceives an aversion for sounds, . . . conceives an aversion for the nose, conceives an aversion for odors, . . . conceives an aversion for the tongue, conceives an aversion for tastes, . . . conceives an aversion for the body, conceives an aversion for things tangible, . . .

conceives an aversion for the mind, conceives an aversion for ideas, conceives an aversion for mind-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the mind; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, for this also he conceives an aversion.

And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.”

Now while this exposition was being delivered, the minds of the thousand priests became free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.

          


Here is In Nanamoli Thera‘s English translation :

Thus I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Gaya, at Gayasisa, together with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus.

“Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

“The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

“The ear is burning, sounds are burning…
“The nose is burning, odors are burning…
“The tongue is burning, flavors are burning…
“The body is burning, tangibles are burning…

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

                                       



“Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

“He finds estrangement in the ear… in sounds…
“He finds estrangement in the nose… in odors…
“He finds estrangement in the tongue… in flavors…
“He finds estrangement in the body… in tangibles…

“He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

“When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: ‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'”

That is what the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were glad, and they approved his words.

Now during his utterance, the hearts of those thousand bhikkhus were liberated from taints through clinging no more.

                                        

Finally, a modern poem of Samsara, by Jack Kerouac :

211th Chorus

The wheel of the quivering meat

conception

Turns in the void expelling human beings,

Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,

Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan

Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,

Horrible unnameable lice of vultures,

Murderous attacking dog-armies

Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the

jungle,

                                 



Vast boars and huge gigantic bull

Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,

Pones and Porcupines and Pills—

All the endless conception of living

beings


Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness

Throughout the ten directions of space

Occupying all the quarters in & out,

From supermicroscopic no-bug

To huge Galaxy Lightyear Powell

Illuminating the sky of one Mind—


Poor! I wish I was free

of that slaving meat wheel

and safe in heaven dead.

               












Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Could the Cosmos be a Person ?

      


“If the whole cosmos was created in the image of the invisible God, in the First-born of creation, by him and for him, and if this latter resides in the world through the Church of which he is the head, then the world is in the final analysis a ‘body’ of God, who represents and expresses himself in this body in virtue of a principle of union that is not pantheistic but hypostatic.”
- Hans Urs von Balthasar

Reality itself is personal, and only discloses its true nature to those that approach it as such, intending a loving relationship.


Rather than personhood being something attained at a certain level of evolution or development in the cosmos, Norris Clarke claims that existence itself is personal, and all things that are not persons — rocks, dirt, your old car — are not persons because they are constricted in their being.

It is as if some constraining device diminished the personal aspects of beings, so they only existed in some diminished form.

Norris Clarke tells us,

“…. the person is not something added on to being as a special delimitation; it is simply what being is when allowed to be at its fullest, freed from the constrictions of subintelligent matter.”

There’s also a way in which the cosmos being a person is quite literal, Stephen R.L. Clark in his God, Religion and Reality writes :

“A human person requires a cosmos to sustain it: of anyone it is literally true that the whole world is her body, since the light of the sun, and the respiration of algae, are essential to her bodily survival.

If there is a human person who is God, then the whole world, centered on that person, is God’s body.

As further elements of that one body become obedient to God, the world is healed: we may, bizarrely, speak as if God’s body is at present maimed by human or demonic rebellion. On this account, perhaps, God renews His involvement with the world of finite things by making them His body (as once, before His limbs rebelled, it was). 

Only because He is more than the cosmos can He heal the cosmos.

Incarnation gives us all that honest pantheists can really want: at present we are not God, but hope to join Him.”

St Maximos famously said that the Cosmos is fractured in five distinct ways.

We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.

Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.

To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.

We heal the Cosmos, Being itself, by letting God’s grace overcome these divisions within our own being

Andrew Louth writes that, 

“All the divisions of the cosmos are reflected in the human being, so the human being is a microcosm, a ‘little cosmos’ (a term Maximus does not use explicitly here, though he does elsewhere).

As microcosm, the human person is able to mediate between the extremes of the cosmos, he is a ‘natural bond’ (physikos syndesmos), and constitutes the ‘great mystery of the divine purpose’.

Christopher Alexander is a British-American architect and designer, in his monumental study called The Nature of Order he claims that “life” is a quality not just of organisms, but of space, and therefore in some sense universal. He says :

“There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, than the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death.

Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive. A man who is walking and talking can be alive; or he can be lifeless. Beethoven’s last quartets are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame; a tiger may be more alive, because more in tune with its own inner forces, than a man.”

So, perhaps there is a sliding scale of both “aliveness” and “personhood” potentially sleeping in all matter.

Peter Leithart writes about the Irish philosopher William Desmond’s project :

“Thinghood has been de-selved, objectified, reified in a homogeneous neutralization of thereness; selfhood has been abstracted from things in their concretenes and hovers mathematically over the quantitative homogeneity of exeternality, ready to impose the categories of its mathesis on that homogeneity.”

As an alternative, Desmond suggests that we have to learn to think “beyond univocity,” and recognize the “aesthetic presencing” of things that “present themselves” and are recognized as such “when the mind as other is in proper community with them, in proper rapport with things.”

This is similar to Norris Clarke’s vision, as if things disclosed themselves to us by way of signs and symbols — he says beings are self-symbolizers.

Basically, he says beings are dynamic, relational, and self-comunicative byway of action and “signs”.

Just as phenomenology points out consciousness is intentional, of something, so too beings intend, or point to, some knower as signs.

Clarke says :

“Hence every self-communication of one being to another through action of one on the other necessarily brings forth a self-imaging, a self-expression, one might say a self-symbolization, of the cause in the effect.

If every being, then, turns out to include a natural dynamism toward self-communication through action, we can say truly, in more than a metaphorical sense, that every being is naturally a self-symbolizer, an icon or image-maker, in some analogous way like an artist, expressing itself symbolically, whether consciously or unconsciously. “

The great Catholic theologian Stratford Caldecott, in his essay, Is Life a Transcendental? broaches this subject, he writes,

“A stone, in other words, possesses a kind of interior life of low degree, which is related to the fact that God creates it from within, not without. It has a nature, into which God breathes existence: it receives the power of self-gift in the measure of its own essence.

It plays a part in the whole, and it may be fashioned into a statue or a building whose form is given to it by another. Its degree of aliveness increases depending on the ways in which it receives and gives itself. A beautiful, harmonious pattern contains more self-gift than an ugly or broken one. An animal contains more kenosis than a stone, or even a statue.”

Caldecott goes even further though, noting,

“my own existence implies that of others, and my flesh is porous to the influences and elements of the environment around me. In fact it is only for that reason that I am able to live at all, since the war against entropy depends on my not being a closed system.

This means that the whole world, in a sense, can be seen as an extension of my own body. The fact that I am alive, and that other creatures are alive, is a function of our connectedness to the world, including the inorganic world.

The inorganic is necessary to the organic; one might even say that it is given a meaning or brought to fruition by the organic, just as the organic (a Christian philosopher might add) culminates in the personal and is given a meaning by man.

Which is to say, if I may complete this thought, that the word as a whole must be alive if we are alive, since all inorganic elements are parts, more or less remote but nevertheless essential parts, of an organic process. In themselves, of course, viewed in isolation, these elements lack an animating soul.

But this is only one way of viewing them. In reality they are part of something much greater, to which we also belong, and this greater whole is alive. We recall that Plato in the Timaeus (at 30b) describes the world formed by god as “a living being, endowed thanks to his providence with soul and intelligence.”

He then explains his particular Catholic vision, 

“An interior relationality binds the whole world together, and this is made explicit in the liturgy of the Church. It is by participating in man as priest of creation, and in his sacrifice perfected in the Eucharist, that all creatures, including the inanimate elements, achieve the fullness of their own being by giving themselves to God and thus sharing his eternal life.”

One can either think of this as the Person of God speaking through the Cosmos, or in a panentheistic way (NOT pantheism, the idea that the cosmos IS God) — that is, God and the world are inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world, which many have squared with St Maximus the Confessors philosophy.

This is certainly true upon more idealist philosophy’s, that matter, as many Quantum physicists say, arises from mind, as Rolland, David Bentley Hart’s dog, puts it,

‘If you believe that everything arises from an infinite act of mind — the rock over there no less than the intelligence in you — then you believe there’s a presence of a… of an infinite knowing logos within the discrete logos that constitutes each thing as what it is.

There’s a depth — even a personal depth, so to speak — in everything, an inner awareness that knows each reality from inside … or from deeper than inside — an act of knowing it’s *interior intimo suo*. There is *one* who knows what it’s like to be a rock.

And wouldn’t that infinite personal depth have to express itself, almost of necessity, in a finite and personal interiority of sorts? Surely the knowledge of what it is to be a rock is already the spirit of the rock *as* a rock — the rock knowing itself.

So isn’t that very knowledge of ‘what it’s like’ already the reality of a finite modality of personal knowledge, a kind of discrete spiritual self? A personal, reflective dimension as the necessarily contracted mode in which the uncontracted infinite act of mind is exemplified in that thing? 

….All part of an endlessly complex, infinitely divisible hierarchy of conscious perspectives, containing and contained, reflecting and inflecting in one another. And the subjectivity of persons, too, like me — and I suppose you too, in a manner of speaking — would be one mind of modal contraction within the total hierarchy of modes of mind, an ever more particular and ever more comprehensive subjectivity and autoaffection and intentionality.”

Stratford Caldecott ends his own reflections thus :

“Briefly put, even if the world as a whole cannot convincingly be said to be “alive” right now, it will be alive when it attains its end. 

It is not alive yet, because the cosmic Fall has introduced death into it. Life — the life of God, that is, Trinitarian life — has not yet been fully revealed.

Death has not yet been defeated, except in principle, by Christ. It is the eschaton that will reveal the true nature of the world that, right now, is still “groaning” to be born.

We might speak of a “personalized” cosmos, a world that through union with Christ becomes a kind of theological person — namely the Church in her cosmic extension. 

And if the world is, or is becoming, a person, it is also, or is becoming, alive. The Holy Spirit is coming to “renew the face of the earth,” by filling all things with the life of God — and “death shall be no more”.