"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Most of us have heard that one, and we can throw it around or at each other as we please. What is a little knowledge? When do we know enough to act responsibly? Recently, we have heard a lot about Hiroshima and the hotly debated question: did it save lives? Was it immoral and racist? Was it only the opening salvo to eventual world destruction? And, most relevant here: was it too much technological knowledge for a species with too little moral knowledge?
As with many things, only time will tell. But what of spiritual knowledge? Do we or anyone have enough to judge anyone else?
As I continue (sometimes reluctantly) with a program of Catholic learning, this last constantly comes up. I happen to have a fairly large knowledge about religions both past and present which continually dogs me. I know enough to question the reality of each, yet not enough to fully believe in any. One might say I have too much of too little for my own good. My assessments of two phenomena bring this to mind.
One: I have nearly finished another book by Brian Weiss, Messages from the Masters, which I bought because I am familiar with his work and wanted another positive high - which he again delivered. Weiss is an Ivy- educated psychiatrist who became fascinated, and then transformed, by revelations of past lives through patients who he was treating with hypnosis. The links between past lives as remembered and their current problems were so precise that the correlation was beyond doubt. While these might have been merely transference of real problems to the symbolic (the past lives), not so with other information he received, which told of real villages and real people from other times, and also gave information which only those "other lives" could have known. The phenomena was and is very real.
And more: Weiss began to get messages about and also directly from those helpful beings on another plane who were often called by his patients "the masters." They dropped in very precise information about what life is and is about. It is about perfection through trial and error through many lives, as many as we need to get the idea that Love is the Answer - and of course, to determine exactly what love is. We further learn that the whole of reality is run on love, and that we are, as souls, immortal. We are told to live courageously for the right, for we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We are told that "you can't take it with you," that is, that success and fame and money and all that are not transportable - only relationships are, and in that, love should always be the goal. We are told that the Masters serve us in love, and that we are helped to choose our next lives with them to work out our problems. We are told that nothing is an accident; that although we have free will, the overall directions of our lives are pre-determined (that is, what situations we will encounter) , as well as the people we will meet, who are there to either help us or give us an opportunity to change our ways for the better.
Most of this I want to believe; moreover, I can confirm through my own experiences that a higher intelligence does interact with us and makes its presence conscious at times. Unfortunately, it all sounds too good to be true. What about the Greek belief in that sorry, fading land of the dead? And what about the hell that awaits many people of Christian belief, as well as many others from current and former spiritual beliefs (such as Tibetan Buddhists or the Vikings of the past). Is this only or largely wish-fulfillment? Or do I have too much of too little knowledge to make a judgement?
Two: In our Catholic workshop, we filled out a questionnaire which asked questions about our first experiences of God, and of times we could see God working in our lives. I had a head start on this, having written many essays about this before, but still, some questions revealed a lot. Who had helped along the way? I had thought few, but then realized my mother had had tremendous influence.
In any case, we ALL were able to realize that God (or angels or what have you) has indeed come into our lives to help change our destinies for the better, although we seldom knew it at the time (try it, using whatever name you have for The Force, and you will probably discover the same). In this, God comes forth in the same role as the masters - as a loving force guiding us towards our greatest ends - if we allow it. Suffering is explained as well, in the same way; and hell - that is now seen as the persistent denial of God's love rather than an eternal and external punishment, thus completing the circle: Weiss and the pope, in the long run, have much more in common that not.
Still, I have too much of too little. What of that awful end that the Vikings believed? And the near eternal reincarnation of the Buddhists, equivalent to the old Christian concept of hell?
Worse, as a Christian, my doubts about Jesus as Christ have continued. A few blogs ago, I found I had no love of Jesus. He was, to me, a caring philosopher of the past who MIGHT have been the special creation of God - I have no desire to doubt it - but still, where was the love?
Oddly, in last nights meeting, a glimmer of knowledge came to me, not as a revelation, but as just that, a glimmer. What began to dawn on me was that I was thinking of Jesus all wrong. We are told that he was the link of Man to God - that God was too beyond us for all but the greatest of saints to grasp - but that Jesus was that hand of God that we could hold. Could it be then that Jesus is the love which one feels in times of revelation? Could it be that what I think of as God - or as Masters - was also Jesus, the spirit of God brought to Man? Could it be that I have loved Jesus all along, but did not know it?
It seems that we can be too clever to be smart. It seems that I have been missing the point all along. This might be the same with knowledge as well: that there is never "too much" or "too little" knowledge. Rather, there is either a lot of noise which poses for knowledge, or real knowledge, which takes no great studies to find at all. Real knowledge - the kind that is just enough - is like finding of the pot of gold. Clues may run wild, but don't mistake the clues for the actual gold, which is all there in that one pot. One may call it what one wishes, but it amounts to the same. We know it when we find that, instead of being left with more clues, we are able to stay in one place and build on what we found. That is the cornerstone, what is strong enough to build on. The pot of gold, that cornerstone to begin with, has long been known, from Jesus to Brian Weiss: it is love itself, and that is where the greatest inquiry begins. FK
As with many things, only time will tell. But what of spiritual knowledge? Do we or anyone have enough to judge anyone else?
As I continue (sometimes reluctantly) with a program of Catholic learning, this last constantly comes up. I happen to have a fairly large knowledge about religions both past and present which continually dogs me. I know enough to question the reality of each, yet not enough to fully believe in any. One might say I have too much of too little for my own good. My assessments of two phenomena bring this to mind.
One: I have nearly finished another book by Brian Weiss, Messages from the Masters, which I bought because I am familiar with his work and wanted another positive high - which he again delivered. Weiss is an Ivy- educated psychiatrist who became fascinated, and then transformed, by revelations of past lives through patients who he was treating with hypnosis. The links between past lives as remembered and their current problems were so precise that the correlation was beyond doubt. While these might have been merely transference of real problems to the symbolic (the past lives), not so with other information he received, which told of real villages and real people from other times, and also gave information which only those "other lives" could have known. The phenomena was and is very real.
And more: Weiss began to get messages about and also directly from those helpful beings on another plane who were often called by his patients "the masters." They dropped in very precise information about what life is and is about. It is about perfection through trial and error through many lives, as many as we need to get the idea that Love is the Answer - and of course, to determine exactly what love is. We further learn that the whole of reality is run on love, and that we are, as souls, immortal. We are told to live courageously for the right, for we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We are told that "you can't take it with you," that is, that success and fame and money and all that are not transportable - only relationships are, and in that, love should always be the goal. We are told that the Masters serve us in love, and that we are helped to choose our next lives with them to work out our problems. We are told that nothing is an accident; that although we have free will, the overall directions of our lives are pre-determined (that is, what situations we will encounter) , as well as the people we will meet, who are there to either help us or give us an opportunity to change our ways for the better.
Most of this I want to believe; moreover, I can confirm through my own experiences that a higher intelligence does interact with us and makes its presence conscious at times. Unfortunately, it all sounds too good to be true. What about the Greek belief in that sorry, fading land of the dead? And what about the hell that awaits many people of Christian belief, as well as many others from current and former spiritual beliefs (such as Tibetan Buddhists or the Vikings of the past). Is this only or largely wish-fulfillment? Or do I have too much of too little knowledge to make a judgement?
Two: In our Catholic workshop, we filled out a questionnaire which asked questions about our first experiences of God, and of times we could see God working in our lives. I had a head start on this, having written many essays about this before, but still, some questions revealed a lot. Who had helped along the way? I had thought few, but then realized my mother had had tremendous influence.
In any case, we ALL were able to realize that God (or angels or what have you) has indeed come into our lives to help change our destinies for the better, although we seldom knew it at the time (try it, using whatever name you have for The Force, and you will probably discover the same). In this, God comes forth in the same role as the masters - as a loving force guiding us towards our greatest ends - if we allow it. Suffering is explained as well, in the same way; and hell - that is now seen as the persistent denial of God's love rather than an eternal and external punishment, thus completing the circle: Weiss and the pope, in the long run, have much more in common that not.
Still, I have too much of too little. What of that awful end that the Vikings believed? And the near eternal reincarnation of the Buddhists, equivalent to the old Christian concept of hell?
Worse, as a Christian, my doubts about Jesus as Christ have continued. A few blogs ago, I found I had no love of Jesus. He was, to me, a caring philosopher of the past who MIGHT have been the special creation of God - I have no desire to doubt it - but still, where was the love?
Oddly, in last nights meeting, a glimmer of knowledge came to me, not as a revelation, but as just that, a glimmer. What began to dawn on me was that I was thinking of Jesus all wrong. We are told that he was the link of Man to God - that God was too beyond us for all but the greatest of saints to grasp - but that Jesus was that hand of God that we could hold. Could it be then that Jesus is the love which one feels in times of revelation? Could it be that what I think of as God - or as Masters - was also Jesus, the spirit of God brought to Man? Could it be that I have loved Jesus all along, but did not know it?
It seems that we can be too clever to be smart. It seems that I have been missing the point all along. This might be the same with knowledge as well: that there is never "too much" or "too little" knowledge. Rather, there is either a lot of noise which poses for knowledge, or real knowledge, which takes no great studies to find at all. Real knowledge - the kind that is just enough - is like finding of the pot of gold. Clues may run wild, but don't mistake the clues for the actual gold, which is all there in that one pot. One may call it what one wishes, but it amounts to the same. We know it when we find that, instead of being left with more clues, we are able to stay in one place and build on what we found. That is the cornerstone, what is strong enough to build on. The pot of gold, that cornerstone to begin with, has long been known, from Jesus to Brian Weiss: it is love itself, and that is where the greatest inquiry begins. FK
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