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.