“I of my own knowledge…”

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

9:30 AM.

Mr. Lincoln, a proud day. We owe it as much to you as to anyone.

You owe it to yourselves. The angels of your better nature — as I said in my first inaugural address.

It is America becoming ever more the symbol of the world, isn’t it? That’s how I see it, anyway.

A symbol, yes — but perhaps more than a symbol. Perhaps you might say in truth and not in metaphor that is a magical miniature, still, as it was to a lesser extent in my time and as it may become to an even larger extent in times beyond yours. It is the form into which energies may be concentrated and hardened into reality.

This was my column for September in The Meta Arts, an online magazine, which is to be found at http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”

I got involved in one of those arguments. You know the kind, where the two sides start from so far apart, believing “facts” that are diametrically opposite, that there is no real way to come to agreement. What’s more, she was a friend of a friend, and I wanted to be careful not to let an argument become a heated dispute.

But the “facts” she was quoting with such certainty were just not so. Missionaries, she said, were merely agents of imperialism, using their religion as a weapon to destroy native institutions. Like so many people – political liberals, mostly — she assumed that religious institutions are automatically corrupt, that missionaries are automatically bigots, and that efforts to convert natives of other cultures were mere manifestations of racism.

But in this she, as most people in our generation, was the victim of ignorance fostered by leftist ideology and propagated by lack of historical memory. For instance, she had never heard of the slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and when I quoted it, had no idea what it meant or why it was adopted.

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 Is there an afterlife? Do God and spirits exist? If so, do they concern themselves with human lives? Of these things, our societyteaches nothing because it knows nothing, and thinks that we can know nothing. So it dismisses the idea of telepathy, out-of-body experiences, ghosts, spirit possession, and any form of afterlife experience, including heaven and hell. It disregards the power of prayer and disbelieves the ability to heal by touch and at a distance.

But from work at The Monroe Institute and elsewhere, I learned how to obtain first-hand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. I learned how to extend my abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. My experience shed new light on the reality underlying this world that has been described repeatedly in the world’s scriptures.

From my own experience, I have become convinced that we are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. This life is not our only life. And although we see ourselves as separate from each other, we are all connected to one another by way of our intimate connection with a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted. This larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom, made available to us at times of its own choosing and/or upon our request. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication with it, by failing to remember that we are more than we appear to be.

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I woke up thinking about God and the problem of evil and suffering 

(Now, first off, I know that lots of people don’t use the word God for fear they will back themselves into superstition. But these same people will say “the universe” or “all that is” as a back-door way of saying the same thing.  “God” is just a word; what’s the sense in being scared of a word? We know you’re not talking about an image of an old man with a beard sitting on a cloud.)

People ask, why does God permit evil? Why does God permit suffering? Why does God permit this, that and the other?

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My recurring theme is that our culture, by turning its back on its spiritual roots, has lost contact with the reality of spiritual (that is, non-physical) life. In so doing, it has lost contact with reality, for how can you understand the meaning of things if you systematically disregard a significant portion of what exists? And how can you know who you yourself are, if you systematically discard millennia of tradition and scripture designed to teach that aspect of things?

In reaction to our culture’s downgrading of spiritual knowledge, some have turned to fundamentalism: blind belief. But this won’t do either. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and neither blind belief nor blind disbelief substitute for knowledge. And our culture is not teaching that knowledge, because it has forgotten where to find it.

In short, materialist civilization is lost, and those who are fated to live in it are lost too, no matter how intelligent, no matter how insightful, unless and until they free themselves from this delusion. As an example, I offer a long quotation from Hemingway’s posthumously published True at First Light, which was pieced together by his son Patrick.

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