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I am an electrical engineer who learned meditation 25 years ago and became interested in Eastern Philosophy. I then began to study the connections between Eastern ideas about the nature of reality, and those coming from modern physics. My gift, if any, is in making connections and in bringing a scientific rigour to modern spiritual thought. As you know the shelves of bookshops are groaning with the weight of so called spiritual books. In my view most of them are high on lofty ideas but low on content. I was brought up and educated in the Catholic faith. I greatly appreciate this education which gave me a very good moral foundation for life. But even from an early age I had questions which remained unanswered. As I grew up and married, I sought guidance on moral issues and found an unsympathetic ear. I remember, on one particular occasion, attending Mass and listening to the priest giving his sermon. His message was not to concern oneself with problems; just follow the Church’s teaching and everything would be OK. This stopped me in my tracks. Here was a priest telling me not to think, not to question, but to believe. I realized that, if this was faith, I did not have it. I asked myself what I should do. Should I settle for the apparent safety of trusting in what I had been told and not having to question further. Or should I listen to that little voice inside me that was telling me that I had to find the answers? I chose the latter and set out, in an unplanned sort of way, to satisfy my curiosity. I explored other religious beliefs, Eastern mysticism, philosophy and psychology and modern physics. My journey of enquiry has taken over twenty years and I have come to a number of interesting conclusions. I found that my religious education had been extremely narrow and had excluded me from some of the great truths known to other traditions. My investigations outside traditional Christian sources resulted in a much deeper understanding of the place of God in my life and my faith became stronger, not weaker. But it was a new faith, a more embracing faith which had room in it for all people, races and creeds - one which gave me a deeper understanding of the human condition and some ideas about how each of us should move forward in our own personal spiritual evolution. There is a revolution in spiritual thinking taking place but it is happening outside the traditional Christian churches. I believe that many Christians want to develop with the times but are afraid to branch out beyond traditional Church teachings. This is the Christian’s dilemma of my title, whether to investigate these new spiritual ideas or not. Many people have fears that they will lose their sense of direction. Such fear is generally based on a lack of knowledge or understanding. In my book I show that the spiritual ideas which are new to them are in fact timeless and are not contrary to the basic beliefs of the main Christian Churches. I think this all started in school. I began to have some questions and was not satisfied with the answers I received. I remember being told that babies who die shortly after birth go straight to Heaven while we, if we have been ‘very good’ might be lucky to make it into Heaven after some time in Purgatory. We had to brave all the trials and temptations of the world while these little babies did not have to pass any tests. This I felt was unfair and did not reflect the actions of a loving and merciful God. Later, after studying meditation and Eastern Philosophy, I found an answer that made sense – at least to me it did! I learned that this life is not the only life we lead. We reincarnate over and over again and many lives are lived before we become one with God in Heaven. This belief, I found, was not in conflict with the basic tenets of Christianity and, if modern historians are to be believed, it seems that an acceptance of reincarnation was common in the early Christian Church. However, in 553 A.D. the Council of Constantinople declared reincarnation to be a heresy although I have read that this was never ratified by the Pope. Historians now suggest that this decision was political rather than doctrinal as Church leaders may have felt that ordinary people would not strive for salvation if they knew they had many lives in which to reach it. Reincarnation means literally ‘to become flesh again’ and implies that once you die you will be reborn in another body. In the East, reincarnation is seen as part of the process of spiritual evolution whereby an individual soul perfects itself through many lives so that it becomes free of the cycle of death and rebirth in a body and joins with God for eternity. For Christians it is useful to think of reincarnation as being similar to the concept of purgatory. Now I have never read a detailed description of purgatory anywhere but I believe that it could be a place or state of purification or re-education, where a soul is purified or perfected so that it is worthy to join with God. Who is to say that this does not consist of experiencing other lives on Earth until one has evolved enough to enter Heaven? Many people have difficulty accepting the idea that they could have had a number of previous lives on this earth. However, there is now scientific research which indicates that reincarnation cannot be easily dismissed. This was carried out by Dr. Ian Stevenson, a physician and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. Dr Stevenson has looked into over 3,000 cases of children recalling previous lives. He has spent the last 40 years meticulously examining and verifying these cases from all over the world, and has published over twenty books and many more articles about his work in academic journals. However, these have been largely ignored by the academic establishment. He recounts thousands of cases where children have remembered where they lived in a previous life. They remembered the names of their previous husbands or wives and other relatives, and details of their family situations or even family secrets. These details have been verified by the living relatives. In many cases children have met their relatives and identified them by name. It is also clear that reincarnation was a common belief in Jesus’ time on Earth. In Luke we read that Jesus asked his disciples, ‘Who do the crowds say I am’? They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah; and still others say that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life’’ This appears in Luke: 9, in Matthew: 16, and in Mark: 8, and there are many other references in the Bible which point to such a belief. Acceptance of the concept of reincarnation leads to the belief that each one of us is on a karmic path of development during this lifetime or incarnation. Karma means action in Sanskrit and the Law of Karma presents us with the consequences of our wrong actions or decisions. We suffer only because we keep making the same mistake, or because we have chosen a life in which we need to experience suffering in order to learn some lesson. And because we each have our own karmic path to follow, we should not interfere in the free will of another person. If we see a person making a mistake, we should leave them to find their own truth, unless they ask us for help. Understanding the Law of Karma also helps us to deal with the fear of death. This life is not the only life we lead, so death is merely a transition from one state to the next and part of our overall progress towards unity with the Divine. The main Christian churches have a big problem in talking about what might happen at, and after the time of death. This is because we may have to start talking about spirits. Death and spirits are taboo. Don’t go there you are told, because you may be led astray and lose your faith. Many books have been written on contacts with ‘the other side’ and on near-death experiences. These give a very consistent picture of what happens when we die and, because it is so consistent, there must be some truth in what is reported. When you die you are freed from the prison of the body which forced you to experience everything in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Operating in a higher dimension, you find that you can travel to any place at will and create anything you want. You begin to realize that you are the Creator. There are lots of things in my book and I have only time to mention a few of them here. However I hope you get the general drift of my investigations. I have been trying to put some scientific rigour on an area where there are a lot of very loose and unsubstantiated claims. People often say things with great authority because they believe it themselves but they may not always be right. And we have seen the downfall of many charismatic leaders who asked us to take their word for it. In the limited time I have left, I want to talk about the nature of reality. We must start by asking the question “What is real?” The Eastern tradition in general, treats this world as illusion and the transcendent or spirit world as real. Modern physics, surprisingly, tends to confirm this view. Reality, as I will explain, is something we create ourselves. In the view of modern physics, everything is composed of energy. When we go beyond the most minute particles we reach a level where physical reality no longer makes sense. Matter ceases to exist in concrete form. Instead, it becomes just a form of energy. Everything is pure energy and the information which organizes that energy. When you look at these walls know they are solid. You can prove that by trying to walk through them! But physics tells us that they are merely a concentration of energy, and that matter and energy are essentially the same thing. Matter is convertible to energy by Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2. So these walls are just a collection of minute particles with vast spaces in between them. These particles are held together by strong electromagnetic forces and they reflect light. It would be more accurate to describe a wall as a force field which repels anything that tries to get through it. The developments in physics in the beginning of the 20th century, notably relativity and quantum theory have fundamentally changed our understanding of reality. Have you ever heard of ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’? Let me tell you about it. The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined a cat which is in a closed box. A radioactive source in the box can emit a particle which when detected by a radiation detector will cause a phial of cyanide gas to be crushed. There is a fifty-fifty chance that a particle will be detected and, if so, the cat will be killed. We cannot know if the cat is alive or dead until we open the box and observe the cat. Before we open the box the cat is in an indeterminate state of being potentially alive and dead at the same time. Opening the box and observing whether the cat is alive or dead forces the selection of one or other option. It is impossible to know the outcome until we open the box. Therefore both options must continue to exist simultaneously until the box is opened. The conclusion from this thought experiment is that something can exist in a state of potentiality where it could become any number of things, but once we look at it we force it to become one particular thing. John Gribbin in his book In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat says that nothing is real unless it is observed. We can’t say that anything exists if we are not looking at it. Modern physics holds that what we perceive as solid is in fact only formless energy and it is the observation of it by us that forces it from a state of all possibilities into the fixed possibility that we call our reality. Thus we create our own reality by being conscious. The world we live in is largely a consensus reality where most of us agree to create the same thing. In my view, much of the conflict in the world today results from a failure to accept the fact that different people may be working from different versions of reality. Each religion holds that it has the one true version of the truth but this is often in conflict with the beliefs of other religions. In their own version of reality each of them is right. In court, witnesses swear to tell the truth and then flatly contradict each other, often in good faith. Political parties spend most of their time promoting opposing versions of reality. If you accept the view that we create our own reality, a lot of things become easier to understand. Firstly, we can see why people may differ from us and we don’t feel the need to reconcile their views with ours. Things don’t have to be right or wrong so we don’t need to pass judgement or take up positions. Secondly there is the creative aspect. We are the Creator and we can create what we want if only we really believe it. We can thus change our world view from a negative to a positive one and the world changes to match. If more of us could be convinced of our ability to create a better version of reality, we could create a Godlike quality here on Earth. We could create a society where everybody is free to believe what they wish and nobody would try to force anyone else to change their beliefs. Understanding modern physics, each of us would see that we are connected to each other by our energy fields. Harming another would be seen as harming ourselves. What a wonderful world that would be. When I was preparing this talk I was reading Bill’s book “Enlightenment & Ice Cream”. In one of his sermons “Like trees Walking” he quotes Albert Einstein. I would like to finish by reminding you of Einstein’s words. “A human being is part of a whole called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Kieran Comerford
Kieran has very kindly brought some copies of his book to the church , they cost €10.00 each, of which half will go to the Restoration Project.
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