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Look out for Howard's most recent articles in:
Kindred Spirit, Spring 2008 - A World Without Music.
Healing Today (NFSH magazine), Issue 112, May-July 2008 - Why Healing Isn't Superstition.
Network Review (Scientific & Medical Network journal), Issue 96, Spring 2008 - The God Confusion. (The publication of this article coincided with a lecture Howard gave at The University of Wales in Lampeter on 28 May 2008).
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Written by Howard Jones
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Monday, 31 March 2008 16:14 |
If we were to ask someone the question: What unique feature makes us distinctively human?, most people would answer that it is our ability to reason and to express our thoughts through language. Yet the world is torn apart today by those who act only through emotion – a lust for power or belief in a man-made social structure we call religion.
If we are to find harmony amongst humankind, the time has come to put religion and the scripture on which it is based on a rational footing, and to cultivate a sense of our global connectedness spiritually as well as commercially. Some scripture represents a body of myths, traditions and rituals handed down through many generations. Other texts are the edited versions of the inspired insights of one man as to how we may best live a fulfilling life as individuals in social harmony. All scripture was created for a particular group of people at a particular time and place in social history.
What scripture does not represent is a unilateral and unequivocal version of truth that must be accepted by all people worldwide throughout all human history. What we regard as ‘faith’ is an emotional attachment to a particular set of principles. We have no reason to reject anyone else’s chosen path to fulfillment, unless it infringes on our freedom.
Humankind, since the dawn of our species as far as we are aware, has had a vision of a spiritual realm beyond that accessible to us through our five senses. They saw gods amongst the awesome power of the elements of Nature. They built temples and huge stone monuments like Stonehenge to these gods in the hope that they may look upon them favourably and make their lives less arduous. Sometimes the rocks and rivers themselves were deemed to have a mystic power, like Ayers Rock in Western Australia or the rock formations of Sedona in the American state of Arizona.
Mountains reached up to these sky-gods, so there was physical and spiritual closeness to deity to be found on the mountain tops. Thus in western scripture we are told that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai; Jesus went up into Mt. Hermon for his transfiguration; and Muhammad went up into the hills above Mecca to receive the words of Archangel Gabriel that became the Koran. Such high ground is a symbol of humankind’s belief that there is a ‘higher’ spiritual domain that exists above and beyond the earthly material existence of which our five senses are aware.
The spiritual messengers were often described as angels though, today, scientists and lay people alike tend to regard talk of ‘angels’ with extreme scepticism and regard such visions as fantastic nonsense.
Many of our religions of East and West, however, have a similar spiritual imagery as the focus of their faith. We have the Holy Spirit in Christianity, the Schechinah in the mystical belief system of Judaism; and in the East, Atman is the Hindu vision of the spiritual breath of Brahman, and the Universal Mind carries over the karma of one incarnation to the next for Buddhists. What is ‘soul’ but a tiny part of this cosmic spirituality within each of us? We express the feelings of our soul in religious devotion, in our altruistic concern for the welfare of others, and in the aesthetic part of our being through our enjoyment of music, literature or the beauty of Nature.
Shunning any notion of divine revelation, the rationalist philosophers through two millennia have envisaged this same spiritual domain in their own contexts. Thus, Plato thought that there were Ideas or Forms that provided the templates from which we derived our earthly notions. The English philosopher John Locke thought that there was a ‘real essence’ inaccessible to our senses that lay behind the ‘nominal essence’ of objects. The nominal essence was the collection of the properties we observed with our senses that allowed us to give names to things.
This concept of spirituality is not restricted in application just to individual people or things. German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel thought that there was a spirituality characteristic of every society that he called Geist. This caused people to act in unison at certain times to a much greater extent than would be expected from the statistically diverse range of human opinions and feelings. We have seen this in Britain in the huge political swings of the electorate in the 1979 and 1997 elections. We saw it in the outpouring of grief at the tragic death of Princess Diana.
The twentieth century psychologist Carl Jung thought that there was a ‘collective unconscious’ that caused people to act in this way. Jung described two or more events occurring at the same time without causal connection (in the scientific sense) as synchronicity. Thoughts and feelings were transmitted through this spiritual domain from one individual to another. This communal empathy was described by the spiritual writer Peter Russell as synergy, and James Redfield, in his Celestine books, borrowed Jung’s term synchronicity to describe it.
In the wake of the revolution in physics in the early part of the twentieth century there is now even amongst a range of scientists a gradual realization that the foundations for a rational scientific explanation for psychic and spiritual phenomena may now lie within our grasp.
For several decades past, Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been investigating psychic phenomena and explaining some of his experimental results in terms of what he calls ‘morphic fields’ – essentially, a domain of spiritual energy to which we all have access for telepathic or empathic communication.
This is the realm with which psychics and mystics commune. It is the realm of individual souls of the living and the earthly departed, and of the Communal Soul of the collective unconscious. It is indistinguishable from the spiritual domain of the philosophers, psychologists – and theologians!
Here surely is the basis for dialogue between warring ideologies. Many have this vision of a universal spirituality. All we need is the will to live in peace and not pursue the belief that force of arms can change others with a different world-view and compel them to submit. If we are to achieve world peace, reason and dialogue must prevail!
Published in the Western Mail, Cardiff, Wales, UK, Wednesday 24th January 2007
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