Friday, August 7, 2009

A Glimpse of God




To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
—Arnold Bennett


Oh my God this post has taken forever to complete lol I started it about three weeks ago but got side-tracked and have not looked at it since - I hate leaving things unfinished so I am determined to post this today.

My next few posts are the direct result of some really fascinating discussions taking place on Sara's blog : Schizotypal and Obsessive Compulsive disorders to the evolution of religious practice and String's blog : Alchemy - Super Receivers :)

Over the past decade the battle lines have been sharply drawn as atheists confront believers - evolutionists challenge creationists and our academic institutions continue to place intellect above creativity ( the arts ). As it stands there is a huge precipice that divides one dimension of thought from another - subconscious versus conscious mind - right brain versus left and the only way to bridge that divide is through the elimination of ignorant biased and outdated belief systems that exist within the substructure of our academic and spiritual institutions.

"The cosmic man must be restored, the whole man who is made in the image and likeness of the arch-force, which you may call God. This man thinks with his heart and not with party dogma. As I've explained before, there is an order in the universe – a cosmic order – and humans have the possibility of understanding these laws."

"The truly religious man has no fear of life and no fear of death—and certainly no blind faith: his faith must be in his conscience. Then he will have the intuition to observe and judge what happens around him. Then, he can acknowledge that everything unfolds true to strict natural law, sometimes with tremendous speed."

Einstein




From time to time everyone will use the expression 'it suddenly hit me like a tone of bricks 'or 'it just dawned on me' - we have all brushed up against that sudden flash of insight or innate sense of " Knowing " and " Awareness " which in many respects is Alchemy in it's purest and most potent form.

Archimedes discovered how to test for the purity of a golden crown while he was in his bath. Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene through a dream in which he saw an ouroboros, or a snake biting its tail, and Coleridge woke up from a nap with the entire poem of Kubla Khan mapped out before him in his head, in its entirety. When anyone asked the mathematician Ramanujan where he got his near-miraculous mathematical proofs from, he said he was given the answers by the gods.

I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!
—Henry Miller


All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stand almost complete and finished in my mind, so I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. . . For this reason, the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.
—Mozart




There are literally thousands of accounts similar to this - descriptions pertaining to the creative process throughout the course of human history, to the point there has almost been mythology built up around it. Inspiration is often attributed to divine sources in these accounts, for example, some creative processes are even described in ways that make them seem magical. Writers - artists - inventors and scientists have all described their moments of " Insight " as an uplifting or god-like feeling of inspiration. In the wise old words of Carl Jung " I cannot say I believe. I know. I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something people call God. "

Gut feelings don't make obvious sense. Take Barbara McClintock for example, who received a Nobel Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the cornfields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce sterile pollen, but less than a third of it actually had. The difference was significant and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit down alone and think.

Half an hour later, she jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of the field (everyone else was down at the bottom ) I shouted " Eureka, I have it, I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is." Her colleagues naturally said " Prove it " Then she found she had no idea how to explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, " When you suddenly see the problem, something happens and you have the answer - before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I'm so absolutely sure, I don't talk about it, I don't have to tell anybody about it, I'm just sure this is it. "

This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his aphorism.

" The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know."


The great nineteenth-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss admitted that intuition often led him to ideas he could not immediately prove. " I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."

Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology, wrote that everything purposeful in scientific thinking began with feeling. " Feeling alone ," he wrote, " guides the mind."

Quote - Singer/songwriter Thom Yorke on where he gets his musical ideas from, on the German TV show VIVA on July 10th, 2003

Yeah, I - you know, I get beamed at. I mean my bits are beamed, to me. They aren’t anything to do with me. I’m, you know - tuned into a certain frequency some days and… and receive the information I need. It’s got nothing to do with me, I tell you
.

Skeptics would probably view the comment above as a somewhat paranoid or delusional interpretation of ones creative process but I too have viewed / sensed various thought processes in a spatial context . For example when I was six I had an epiphany whilst cheering on teammates at a school swimming carnival - " TIME " seemed to slow right down - I was absolutely and unequivocally transfixed in the " NOW "



I sensed myself looking down on the world from some distant vantage point in space - and for the briefest moment in time felt such a deep connection " A Oneness " with all life on the planet - Unus mundus. Unus Mundus or " one world " is a concept in which elements are both separate and at the same time united. In this world there is no disharmony. The inner world of fantasy, imagination and dreams crosses over into outer events. Fragments can be seen as both part of a whole (microcosms) and as the whole itself (macrocosms). I was so overwhelmed by the experience I ended up crying and laughing all at the same time. One of the nuns came over and asked if I was okay but how do you explain something like that ? lol Well you just can't can you ? I have also experienced the sensation of " thought " originating from outside my mind - moving towards me from a distant point in space - this experience did honestly feel like a message from God but it was something I " sensed " rather than " heard " or " saw ". I was travelling on the southbound lane of the Monaro highway and on approaching the crest of a high mountain found my attention stray for a brief moment - as my thoughts wandered - I looked down on the breathtaking views of the valley below - my gaze began to drift a little further afield toward the beautiful Brindabella mountains that were kind of glowing with a blue hue until finally my eyes came to rest on a very remote distant point in the sky. Once again I felt at " One with the World " I found myself in a total state of bliss - way off in the distance I sensed something moving towards me at breakneck speed and I knew without a doubt that my destiny and the destiny of another would soon become entwined and yes this vision " sense " did materialize in the most amazing and profound way.

In the famous words of Oogway in Kung Fu Panda - " There is no such thing as an accident " :)

Why are " Sensing " and " Seeing " thoughts in a spatial context so difficult for people to comprehend ? At no time did I delude myself into believing these experiences were anymore than a " perspective " " sensation " or " thought " ? For many years people who experienced OBE's and had the courage to talk about them were ridiculed by the general populace but recent medical research by Olaf Blanke in Switzerland found that it is possible to reliably elicit experiences somewhat similar to the OBE by stimulating regions of the brain called the right temporal-parietal junction (TPJ; a region where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe of the brain come together). Blanke and his collaborators in Switzerland have explored the neural basis of OBEs by showing that they are reliably associated with lesions in the right TPJ region and that they can be reliably elicited with electrical stimulation of this region in a patient with epilepsy. These elicited experiences may include perceptions of transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses).

Blanke and colleagues thus propose that the right temporal-parietal junction is important for the sense of spatial location of the self, and that when these normal processes go awry, an OBE arises. In August 2007 Blanke's lab published research in Science demonstrating that conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality could disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. During multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. This indicates that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and is based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.




Inspiration is a fragile thing... just a breeze, touching the green foliage of a city park, just a whisper from the soul of a friend. Just a line of verse clipped from some book. Inspiration... who can say where it is born, and why it leaves us? Who can tell the reasons for its being or not being? Only this... I can think. Inspiration comes from the Heart of Heaven to give the lift of wings, and the breath of divine music to those of us who are earthbound.
—Margaret Sangster



Now I want to finish with a message to all those who have inspired me over the years - to those of you who I know deep down will continue to voice your opinions in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to a very fragile and unenlightened world - Thank you for staying true to yourself even in the face of selfishness and in some instances ridicule and criticism - Thank you for allowing your inner voice a platform to be seen and heard - All thoughts - designs and innovations are IMAGINED during their earliest stage of conception - mankind would be nothing without imagination and our gift to each other is to continue to express it ?

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sagan


You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw



and from the video - Elizabeth Gilbert

Allah Allah Allah - Ole Ole Ole

2 comments:

  1. This is a lovely blog Destiny I am going to post it to my FBook...x

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  2. And I really loved your blog on myspace - uncanny how in sync we are at the moment - wouldn't you agree lol

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