Hello Olly

"you are either a hard-headed rationalist scientist or someone who has funny irrational beliefs with no hard evidence."

There are many well researched studies evidencing energy systems beyond our current measurable capacities but they are ignored, I think because to accept them places an enormous stress on our mental processing. It's like loading the latest gaming software onto an old laptop; it just slows down or stops working completely. The same happens to my brain when confronted with mathematical equations.

As an EFT practitioner I sometimes experience the same reaction ... a client may have had a debilitating phobia for twenty years which is released in a few minutes and then they are in denial that the phobia (which restricted their lifestyle considerably) ever existed.

"The apophatic tradition tends to the view that Wittgenstein encapsulated in his saying “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. It can be seen perhaps as a middle road between agnosticism and a more mainstream theism. This apophatic belief system is found amongst Sufis, Quakers, Kabbalists, Vedantists and many others, all of whom use contemplative practices to find some form of communion with that which is beyond words."

Speaking as a Sufi, the attitude has, according to Hazrat Inayat Khan, the Sufi mystic, been as he says in “The Way of Illumination”, “one may ask why the awakened ones do not awaken people in the world from the sleep of confusion. The answer is that it is not to be advised that little children, whose only happiness is slumber, should be awakened. Their growth depends on their sleep. If they are kept up late, they become ill and so are not useful in the affairs of life as are grown-up people. Such is the nature of immature souls. They are children, however old their bodies may appear."

"Panentheism subtly differs from pantheism in that is gives God the same all-suffusing nature while retaining a notion of otherness too. It is a belief system which posits that God exists and interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond it as well."

This, I feel, is perhaps the closest to the Sufi concept of "God/The Infinite/The Eternal" as Attar writes in "The Conference of the Birds" ... "at last, in a state of contemplation, they realized that they were the Simurgh (God...) and that the Simurgh was the thirty birds. When they gazed at the Simurgh, they saw it was truly the Simurgh who was there, and when they turned their eyes towards themselves they saw that they themselves were the Simurgh. And perceiving both at once, themselves and Him, they realized that they and the Simurgh were one and the same being. No one in the world has ever heard of anything to equal it."

"Paul Davies also propounds a modern form of deism"..... if only the scientific community could be more open minded. His "The Goldilocks Enigma" displays a genuine curiosity and open-mindedness, presenting the issue in such a way as to invite discussion, not rigid authoritarianism.

I think the real problem is in our mental processing which has not learned, and may never learn, in our current style of rationalization, to be completely objective.

Aligned to this is that we still react from the base of primitive flight/fight response and our reasoning is still modulated by fear/anger.

Posted by Robert de Vos, 23/04/2009 10:27am (3 years ago)