By Stephen Russell-Lacy.
This is the first script of a series of 6 podcasts asking how we can link ourselves with love and light. One of the great questions of life. Is higher awareness a fallacy? I start by looking at a sense of awe and wonder.
Maybe you can vividly recall, with wistful longing, a wonderful place in your childhood. Perhaps one where there were times of peace and fleeting joy.
Or as an adult you may remember being in a beautiful setting. There might have been a sunset. Anyway, you felt calm and content and you were touched by a sense of awe as you took the whole scene in. People can hold special places as sacred. Perhaps there was one where you unaccountably felt as though you were part of the immense, living, creative Life. This is an experience that many can remember having at some time or other. Did you desire to be at one with nature and other human beings?
One view is to say these are experiences of the soul in harmony with Universal Spirit. How can we feel alone when we sense being part of a mysterious life force?
Transcendence seen only as fallacy
A very different understanding is based on a natural way of looking at things. Science teaches that knowledge only comes from information available to the senses, as interpreted using logic. Consequently, we are often told that the idea of any ultimate reality unseen by its measuring instruments is just fantasy.
Amongst other things, biology measures physiological processes, anatomical structures and genetic material. In other words, it studies how things appear. According to spiritual philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, space, time, and materiality cast a veil, masking an ultimate reality that lies beyond. At the same time different natural things mirror the reality of spiritual qualities. There is an order within nature that science unravels. Yet, I take the view that scientific research misses out on deeper awareness. It omits a human perception that penetrates beyond what the eye can see: one that can lift you out of yourself, and connect you with a living force. This awareness means that when we look at nature, we can get a sense of immense power and beauty. A sense of something you can’t physically see being expressed through what you do see.
Higher awareness of individual scientists
Even though science itself is blind to what it cannot observe with its technology, many individual scientists can’t help but marvel at the laws of nature. I’m thinking for example of the predictability of gravity that keep the planets in their orbits and the incredible structure of the human body which sustains life. Many scientists feel a sense of astonishment and fascination. These feelings drive a life time curiosity to discover more.
You can choose to think that the laws of the universe come by mere chance. Alternatively, you can question if they come through some sort of hidden intention and design, a universal spirit independent of time and space. In fact, one that lasts for ever, that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere.
Recognising higher awareness
When we manage to quieten our natural desires and anxieties, then we may find ourselves in touch with our higher self. This happens when we experience a sense of the oneness of all life. It is the perception that everything is somehow connected and part of something beyond us.
Throughout history people have reported this higher consciousness. Perennialists, like William James, Huston Smith and Aldous Huxley, regard mystical experience in various spiritual traditions as pointing to one imminent and transcendent reality called the ground of all being. Perennialism has its roots in the Renaissance interest in Neo-Platonism and its idea of the One, from which all existence emanates.
Some mystics speak of being at one with the All, with the Infinite, or with the Absolute. But what do they mean? They use adjectives that have no noun. The all of what, the infinite of what, the absolute of what?
Something more recognised by William James
William James was one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology”. William James’ father was an avid reader of Swedenborg’s spiritual philosophy. The son himself was concerned with the solitary experience of direct communion with the divine. He wrote of ‘something more’. In other words, there is a life of the spirit which is something more than sensory awareness. It is from beyond even the reflective experience of meditation.
He was impatient with every kind of dogmatism, yet even before writing his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, he suggested that at some time in your life you are faced with an inescapable choice. It is whether or not to accept the transcendent. He felt that not choosing itself becomes a choice. The idea of the transcendent can be genuinely embraced and the decision to do so he said would be momentous. He felt this attitude would provide a unique opportunity that will make a significant difference in your life.
In the second podcast in this series I will ask whether love and light indicate transcendence. Are they universal?
Copyright 2021 Stephen Russell-Lacy
Author of Heart, Head & Hands Swedenborg’s perspective on emotional problems
