“What’s it all about, Alfie?” This is the first line of the title song from the 1966 movie: Alfie. What a wonderfully stated question! To me, it encompasses several other important questions. Like: Why are we all here on this earth just at this time? Is there a purpose to creation? Where did everything come from and is there a goal that it is all designed to accomplish?
The second line in the song is another wonderful and evocative question: “Is it just for the moment we live?” Further important questions are implied here. Like: Is there something beyond this physical universe where we find ourselves at the moment? And: When our body dies, will the essence of who we are, our consciousness, live on in some other form?
I believe these concerns have captivated our imaginations since we, as a species, started asking our first questions. Cave paintings from over thirty thousand years ago depict symbolically rendered scenes and animals in a way that suggests a spiritual view of the world. Anthropologists have uncovered even more ancient human burials with the corpses in ritualistic postures and often accompanied by symbolic artifacts that suggest a belief in an afterlife. Once early civilizations developed writing, we have clear evidence from the dialogues and philosophies of the great minds of the time. Their writings explored these questions extensively.
Over these millennia, the myriad of answers to these questions have produced the huge variety of religious beliefs, philosophies and even scientific theories we have today. Why so many, though? If there is just one truth, shouldn’t we all have a similar system of beliefs? Could it be that the explanation is that we have lacked any definitive way to decide what is true and what isn’t true in answering these abstract questions? If you take a broad, objective view of the world’s populations, you will find that most of us believe pretty much what we were taught by our parents and teachers in childhood. Our beliefs are predominantly shaped by the societies into which we were born.
This circumstance arises because we have lacked compelling means to mutually verify any of these kinds of beliefs. I am not referring, of course, to beliefs about physical events in themselves. These are easily verified and form the basis for the enormous power of our present sciences. It is the belief in realm of spirit and non-physical action where this problem becomes acute, since most of our religions and philosophies and systems of belief postulate such a realm in addition to the physical. Of necessity, our great teachers have arrived at their understanding through the private, individual experience of revelation, the only way such a realm has appeared to be accessible. This has resulted in our present great proliferation of human systems of belief.
For perhaps the first time in our history, we are developing a way out of this uncertainty. We are learning to use out physical tools to probe questions that involve a non-physical reality. Probably the clearest example of this new technology involves the revolutionary changes in the science of physics over the last century, particularly the physics of sub-atomic particles. The data produced in our physics labs have led to the theories of quantum mechanics. On the one hand, these theories have been abundantly verified to be reliable and accurate, on the other hand, they show that there must be non-physical connections and relationships that dramatically transcend the previous limits we believed governed the actions of matter and energy. By and large, our scientists have been at a loss to explain what their experiments show and the theories successfully predict. However, we have now discovered that physical interactions can be used in certain ways as a window into the non-physical.
This same situation has also developed in other areas of science such as engineering, psychology and even research into healing methods. These research studies have uncovered anomalies that also violate some of the most important and fundamental assumptions of accepted science. Because they have violated accepted assumptions the research reports have generally just sat on library shelves and gathered dust. But if you take them out and shake them off and compare them to one another, they show powerful and remarkable similarities. This is reliable evidence of their accuracy, since if these anomalies were erroneous reports, you would expect them to be chaotically different from each other, not remarkably similar. They are also remarkably reproducible, yet another indication of their reliability.
If we keep finding the same patterns over and over in the physics lab and the “anomalies” of different scientific fields, why do we have such a hard time accepting them? I think the difficulty involves the inability to visualize the mechanisms involved. There just are not any physical mechanisms that can explain these findings. We are so used to interpreting everything within a materialistic framework that we get badly hung up when we need to interpret data that do not fit this framework. The physical metaphors that have been so helpful in the development of our physical sciences do not provide useful insights, in fact, they are usually very misleading.
What I have described for you so far, is basically the outline of a book I am writing. I have seven chapters in rough draft form that present the scientific findings which will form the heart of the book. I have yet to write the drafts of the first few chapters, discussed above, that will lead up to the presentation of these research findings. The final section of the book will be chapters that interpret these findings and show how they are relevant to our individual lives.
The book will have certain clear conclusions. It will present evidence of a hidden structure that lies beneath the physical world and impacts its actions. It will also describe the existence of connections that tie together every particle of physical reality with every other particle, connections that ignore the time and distance of the interactions. And it will provide strong evidence for the existence of an over-riding purpose that guides all of this and which also remains hidden from our view. The end result of all this is a picture of human consciousness as much more powerful, and a universe designed much more in support of our needs, than we ever imagined.
When you see these messages in their entirety, I think you will see that they are profoundly optimistic and encouraging. Even more important, the data that support them are remarkably consistent and produced by some of our best trained and most successful scientists.
I am very interested in the input of interested readers as I develop this book. I have considered placing the rough draft of each chapter on this blog for input as it is completed. Also, I am not sure how much of my available free time to devote to this book project and how much to allocate to this blog. I would be very interested in the opinion of readers concerning this decision.
Thanks for taking the time to consider these ideas,
Chuck
Science and Spirit 
Dear Chuck,
I would have liked to hit the “like” button but was asked to create an account first. So here’s my
☒ Like
I can only add to the pile of questions though. Well you probably know me enough to expect just that.
What if there is nothing at all? Where would energy and matter (and space and time) come from? Science (and common sense so-called) says, We don’t know, we only know they ARE there. Well, are they? In a dream of the night, things appear to be as real as they get. But as you realize when you wake up, there’s nothing really there, not the people, not the things, not the location and the space it seems to take up in the dream. In a dream, there is nothing but imagined images, and they aren’t even somewhere. It’s the same out here in what we call waking reality. For where would real time, space and physicalness come from? What would they be fashioned or, for that matter, created from? And what for when images are quite real enough? Think of a rock. Or a tumor. Of pain. What a truly fantastic imagination we have.
The nice difference between a rrreal world and an imagined one is that the latter is infinitely moldable, its moldability only restricted by belief. Everything, no exception, is there to the degree we believe it has to be there. If we can let go of beliefs, if we can return to innocence as Heavenletters have it, everything becomes possible, absolutely everything. Why? Because there is nothing there anyway. Paraphrasing a Heavenletter I remember: Why not enjoy the loveliest Illusion there is?
In a way, I feel today’s Heavenletter #3890, “You Are the Waves of God’s Ocean”, is one response to what you have explained so well above.
I will quote a little if I may. I would like to entitle this part
AT THE WELL
“You are the waves of My Ocean, and the tides are strong.” I always try to avoid interpretation. We and God is just this: Ocean, waves, strong tides – fleeting shapes of what is the same everywhere.
“We are together. It matters not where. There is no there. No space to occupy, no time to occupy it in anyway.” I don’t know how to comment this. I only feel it is literally so. Yet still to be realized.
“You remember what it is to be Oneness. You remember what it is to be the Nothingness of Everythingness. You remember before you were born to Earth, and you remember well. You remember the Stillness of Everythingness.”
“We traverse the imagined Universe. There is nowhere to traverse. There is only to remember what has always been. There is nothing else to remember.”
“You can empty your mind of all those facts and figures. How can you, who deeply knows everything, be caught in details?”
Yes, how? Trying to really take in what is being said here, I cannot help thinking that our “future” is not about more or better facts.
But now for what is the most stunning passage of this Heavenletter for me:
“We know each other well. We have met often at the well, and yet your memory of Our love has faded. You fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. I was whispering something to you. I was whispering of My love which is also your love. I kiss your closed eyes.”
Why does God choose this most intimate human image of meeting your beloved at the well, stealing a glance, perhaps greeting, heart racing? Well, so we can f e e l what it is he is talking about. And then something happened, exactly as described: “You fell asleep in the middle of a sentence.” Very hard for me to comment on this. But yes, I do remember there once was, at the well, a love as deep as this and then forgotten as if in the middle of a sentence.
And that’s the whole story of our complicated searchings and gropings. Love forgotten.
“You will wake up, and I will continue My words.”
Jochen, my friend,
Of course, it is fine if you quote from any source you would like to. I mean for this forum to be very open for any and all comments. (With very few restrictions)
You make comments that are quite evocative and interesting. It would take many pages to do them justice, but I will cull out a couple that particularly strike me, for further reflection here.
You ask: “What if there is nothing at all? Where would energy and matter (and space and time) come from?” I think this is a fundamentally important philosophical question. All I can muster in response, though, is my opinion and what makes sense to me. My first response, in agreement with Descartes, is that because I experience something at this precise moment, something, of some sort, must exist. Next, I ask what is real and what is illusory. That something exists implies that a reality exists that is somehow the base of experience, but I quickly add that not everything we experience is necessarily real. In alignment with many mystical sources, I am persuaded that what is truly real is only that which is absolutely constant and unchanging. This seems to completely eliminate all physical sources of experience, since they are all in a constant state of flux. Then, since by this analysis, the physical cannot be real, something non-physical must exist as the true base of everything. Of necessity, then, a constant, non-physical reality must be the source of the ephemeral physical.
In a similar vein, you ask: “For where would real time, space and physicalness come from? What would they be fashioned or, for that matter, created from?” I have only one candidate for the source of time space and matter; I think they must be fashioned out of consciousness. So this would put all of everything non-physical to be consciousness. Consciousness would create and guide the flow and change of our physical universe.
I will ask one more question in regards to your statement about how imagination must be malleable. Could it be that the only difference between the “real” world and an imagined one is the power and rigidity and the consistently shared nature of the beliefs that support both these realms?
The Heavenletter you cite is a quite lovely statement. I think it makes an argument in support of the idea that we have somehow forgotten who we are when we allowed our consciousness to conceive of a life separated from our Creator. This leaves an interesting question, if all this is accurate: Can we learn to live within the illusion while still remembering our intimate connection to our Creator?
For the convenience of those not familiar with Heavenletters here is a link to the one Jochen has quoted for us: http://www.heavenletters.org/you-are-the-waves-of-god-s-ocean.html
Also, my July 9, 2011 article, If an omnipotent Creator exists, and He chose to speak to us today, how might we know it was Him speaking? , discusses the nature of Heavenletters in detail.
Thank you, Jochen, for your stimulating ideas,
Chuck
Thanks for your response, Chuck.
You said, “All I can muster in response, though, is my opinion and what makes sense to me.” That’s lovely, I like the openness of it, for that is what we can only ever do – telling what makes sense to us.Telling what makes sense to you, you are not welcome everywhere, but knowing Chuck, I’m sure this is a place for people to say what makes sense to them. The signs are very clear the world over that i n c l u s i o n is the new direction of time, and more people seem to see that every day.
If my questions were “philosophical questions”, I would not ask them. Heavenletters are guiding me “back” to remembering what it is like at the well, and there is nothing philosophical about it. Of course, the picture is still fuzzy and what I say has to be taken with a grain of salt. However, it’s not philosophical in nature but experiential. Sometimes the whole panorama opens out into the sparkling, beautiful nothingness of everything where you are all of it and nothing. But it doesn’t really make that much sense to speak about it.
Love,
Jochen
Jochen,
I have to agree that it is best that we always take our ideas and opinions with a grain of salt. When I look back at the changes in my ideas and view of the world over my life, I see a pattern of pretty constant change. I also remember holding many of these ideas and attitudes pretty firmly and defending them vigorously. I think I have learned to be less convinced about anything now. It seems it is a mistake to become overly committed to anyone’s ideas, even our own.
I think we are all just catching glimpses of truth as we go about our lives. If I hear you right, you are saying that our deepest truth will always be experiential. We agree completely. As such it will be difficult or impossible to adequately express this truth in inherently clumsy human words.
Thanks again for sharing your views of my article and comments.
Love………..Chuck
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