From the Ordinary to the Miraculous and Back

There are the laws of nature, and then there are the laws of Nature.

The distinction is clearly a matter of the physical things that are constrained by Newton’s propositions, and things that are not. For instance, there is some vertical aspect of us that is not limited by such mechanistic laws. I am not going down the quantum realm, for that is all together another matter in the microcosm of the physical world. Nor do I want to walk down in to the new-age vortex.

Instead, I am making the point there are times when the metaphysical and physical touch. I can’t make sense of it, but I know it’s Real. 

Call it miracles, if you’d like. The fact we exist is a miracle in itself. God does not even exist, for He just is. For something to exist, it means there is a beginning and an end. Maybe our souls are eternal, but there had to be a beginning somewhere: even if we are a particular expression of the Universal Spirit.

Frithjof Schuon said, “If the divine Principle is transcendent in relation to the world while at the same time em­bracing it within its unique substance, then miracles must occur; the celestial must sometimes break through into the terrestrial, and the center must appear like a flash of lightning on the periphery; to take an example from the physical realm, inert matter is of little worth, but gold and diamonds cannot fail to appear within it.”

The gold and diamonds sometimes appears in serendipitous events or in happenings that are not so coincidental. 

A friend of mine got me to read the Magus of Strovolos by Kyriacos C. Markides, about Stylianos Atteshlis (a.k.a. Daskalos), a 20th-century Christian mystic and healer who lived in the town of Strovolos, Cyprus. Although rooted in Christian Orthodoxy, he would go rogue with his skills of clairvoyance, exomatosis (willfully abandoning one's body), and expansion. Here he would heal people and materialize/dematerialize objects by working “from the highest dimensions and descend through the lower levels until you reach the gross material plane.”

Unlike most healers, he saw himself no more than a conduit for the Absolute (the Source of his miracles). 

Still, I enjoyed the stories of his healings and the insights around other dimensions: meeting people on psychic planes with a silver cord means they live within the gross material plane; the most difficult healing method is expansion, “namely bringing the entire body of the patient within my consciousness and working from within”; and the importance of the etheric double that keeps the three bodies (physical, psychic, noetic) of man alive and linked to one another. I want to believe all of it.

In another book I’m in the midst of, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy, the author, Jonah Goldberg, has his own version of the Miracle. Goldberg notes that “Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world. It didn’t seem obvious, but it was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world.” Up until that point, we didn’t generate a lot of wealth, innovation, or civilization. Then something converged. 

His version of miracle is less supernatural, but spectacular nevertheless. Were we nudged in some way or did we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?

The bottom line is miracles are all abound. It seems there’s a “transitional space” where we play in, and that the boundaries between nature and Nature may be more porous after all. If you’re closed off to it, then it’s just one thing after another. If you’re open to it, the miraculous can be in moments or all-at-once.  

But the point of a miracle is not to prove anything, other than to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary.

Not Faking It and Making It

On a recent listen to an interview with Christopher Wallis, a scholar-practitioner of Tantric Shaivism, I was drawn to the distinction he made on spiritual growth verses realization. He sees it like putting the cart before the horse (or the self before the Self). I'm sure the resonance I have around this point is based on my own transgressions in this area. For instance, all this "seeking" with blogs, books, practices, and teachers can inflate the personality at the cost of knowing one's true personhood. I can feel exalted about my experiences and knowledge, but all that will do is get entitlement and pride to sneak in.

Wallis says: 

“What most people think of spiritual development is a kind of retooling and rejiggering of their personality; or a reconditioning of themselves according to whatever spiritual narrative they've bought into. I think this is ultimately counterproductive and dangerously so, because if you develop an effective spiritual ego that's all shiny and everybody praises and strokes you, you have so much less reason to wake up out of your ego structure than you did before. So to go about things back to front is not only a waste of time but you can actually end up digging yourself a much deeper hole and the exact thing that you started out interested in [to realize Truth] becomes almost impossible in this lifetime.”

Not in this lifetime?! How dare you?!

But thankfully, I'm aware of this and I'm constantly keeping my gnostic and intellectual curiosity in check. In that, my intention around reading and blogging is more so that God can read and write to me. I am staying with what I love, because what I love is what I can be. And since I don't golf, why not read spiritual books and blogs? Moreover, I believe the metaphysical pointers matter so we don't lose sight of where the realizations are taking us.

Yet, we never want to jump ahead of ourselves. Instead, this will just develop more concepts around what we believe it means to be a Self-realized person. This is a constant re-prioritization of undoing, where we are unhooking our entanglements of the mind.

We need to be utterly naked in every moment to what is, while falling in love with the whole of it. In turn, the recognition of the solid ground we are rooted in will allow for real growth to emerge.

Backwards and Onwards

John Henry Newman said, “we walk to Heaven backwards.”

What he meant by this could be seen from a couple angles. First, we can only rest in the deeper nature of our innocence when we commune with the Divine. That requires us to step back from grasping on to the contents of our mind. It is almost like a falling back away from the conditional world while we become more rooted in an unconditional (heavenly) absolute.

The walk backwards could also mean the re-cognition of first principles. While there are no permanent outcomes, there are permanent values. Sometimes we need to go backward to go forward, and with this I believe Newman was espousing the value of (heavenly) tradition.

There are two countervailing impulses of human history: Arcadianism and Eutopianism. The view of Arcadia holds that everything was perfect in the beginning, such as the Biblical Eden, and that all corruption is the result of man's fall from original innocence. The project of Arcadianism then is to return everything to its original state, reverse the effects of the fall, and shed all of the accretions of the fallen world. We see this with traditionalists, eco-radicals, Romantics, perennialists, some eastern religions, etc.

The Eutopian view asserts that the situation was not ideal in the beginning, and that our focus must be on man's progress. The goal is therefore to build the Great City of Zion. The City of God is subsumed into the City of Man. We see this with modernists, evolutionists, Hegelians, some Judeo-Christian movements, etc.

As with most things, the truth is more nuanced than either of these impulses. We can’t resolve these tensions, but maybe we can inhabit them.

While things were probably never pristine by any stretch of the imagination assuming we could take a ride on the wayback machine, the sense of original purity is not to be dismissed. It points us to the deep feeling-sense that something is not quite right today. The real issue is when we compensate that vertical loss for some horizontal gain towards progress. We reject the transcendence for some false good to be immanentized in the world. But the sad truth is such a transformation can never be completed in history, but only in ourselves.

I believe evolution and progress should be seen more as man's progress towards Godliness. Man's salvation/liberation/sanctification is individual, happening to one person at a time, and constitutes a metamorphosis of the person into a more mature, God-like entity. Natural selection and civilized advancements are not the key factors here. The evolution of mankind as a species and life on Earth at large, in which natural selection and man-made advancements plays its real role, has to be understood in light of building up the City of God, a city fit for gods to inhabit.

Maybe we need to walk backwards first.