Troward's "Edinburgh Lectures"
are published in 1904. Continued.
The view from here. June Gloom except it's May.
Judge Troward starts off with a discussion of the distinction between Spirit and Matter. Between the Living and the Dead, the Eternal and Unlimited Realm of Thought versus the Limited, bounded Realm of Things. Because he's a judge, his argument proceeds in that dry, logical legal way that lawyers and judges use. There you have it, says Judge Troward; Heaven and Earth, God up there in the Eternal and Unlimited, Man down here in the World of Time and History and Limitation. And what does Man do? He prays from his small dead already-formed world to the unlimited realm of the eternal present. But if you really wanted something to happen or to come into being, wouldn't you want to turn it around? Wouldn't you be better off praying (imagining, seeking) from the Unlimited into the Limited? From the Eternal into the World of Form?
In other words, reverse your direction. Don't look around at what is and wish it would change; instead, put yourself in the realm of the unlimited (Thought, God, Spirit) and believe that what you want already exists. "It shall be done unto you as you believe."
And don't look at me like that, I'm just telling you what I've read. So far.
I'm also reading John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (published 1932) which I picked up at the B.H. Library on Saturday and am now thoroughly enjoying. It also deals in a wonderful (but not especially legal or lawyerly) way with the process of how the Realm of Spirit works on the World of Matter. In Powys, the Sun and the Moon and Mother Earth are terribly powerful and deeply affected by how mankind thinks and behaves. Here, for example, is what happens when two of the characters are longing to make love but can't:
"The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire. And the desire of these two at this moment, gathering electric force out of the atomic air and striving blindly towards each other in despite of the sundering flesh, was so caught up and so heightened by the frustrated desires of two thousand years, which in that valley had pulsed and jetted and spouted, that it did actually draw near to that Secret Thing. Thus the loves of these two people, both of them hostile to all these miraculous forces [in Glastonbury], both of them rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism, did...approach the invisible rim of that wind-blown mystery..."
I know -- I don't really understand it either, but I can hardly wait to find out what happens!
The view from here. June Gloom except it's May.
Judge Troward starts off with a discussion of the distinction between Spirit and Matter. Between the Living and the Dead, the Eternal and Unlimited Realm of Thought versus the Limited, bounded Realm of Things. Because he's a judge, his argument proceeds in that dry, logical legal way that lawyers and judges use. There you have it, says Judge Troward; Heaven and Earth, God up there in the Eternal and Unlimited, Man down here in the World of Time and History and Limitation. And what does Man do? He prays from his small dead already-formed world to the unlimited realm of the eternal present. But if you really wanted something to happen or to come into being, wouldn't you want to turn it around? Wouldn't you be better off praying (imagining, seeking) from the Unlimited into the Limited? From the Eternal into the World of Form?
In other words, reverse your direction. Don't look around at what is and wish it would change; instead, put yourself in the realm of the unlimited (Thought, God, Spirit) and believe that what you want already exists. "It shall be done unto you as you believe."
And don't look at me like that, I'm just telling you what I've read. So far.
I'm also reading John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (published 1932) which I picked up at the B.H. Library on Saturday and am now thoroughly enjoying. It also deals in a wonderful (but not especially legal or lawyerly) way with the process of how the Realm of Spirit works on the World of Matter. In Powys, the Sun and the Moon and Mother Earth are terribly powerful and deeply affected by how mankind thinks and behaves. Here, for example, is what happens when two of the characters are longing to make love but can't:
"The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire. And the desire of these two at this moment, gathering electric force out of the atomic air and striving blindly towards each other in despite of the sundering flesh, was so caught up and so heightened by the frustrated desires of two thousand years, which in that valley had pulsed and jetted and spouted, that it did actually draw near to that Secret Thing. Thus the loves of these two people, both of them hostile to all these miraculous forces [in Glastonbury], both of them rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism, did...approach the invisible rim of that wind-blown mystery..."
I know -- I don't really understand it either, but I can hardly wait to find out what happens!
The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.
A close second: wanting somebody to get up and go home after satisfied desire.
Judge Troward's argument is the ultimate ideal, is it not? However, he comes off rather like Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's masterpiece, "The Brothers Karamazov": "Consider for yourself: in the Scriptures it is said that if you have faith even as little as the smallest seed and then say unto this mountain that it should go down into the sea, it would go..." He ends with Troward's challenge, "Try telling this mountain to go down..."
I'm no Christian myself, but the flaw in Smerdyakov's argument against the existance of the Christian God and Troward's lecture on unlimited forces is that they are elements of faith. Faith is defined as a "belief" or "trust" and cannot be tested. Therefore, the unlimited forces promised to Christians of faith cannot be evidence for or against God and religion. This is perhaps a hasty generalization but it suggests that we are unlikely to understand 'the unlimited' and 'the eternal' in life. After all, its difficult enough to interpret and analyze, led alone experience and deal with, the emotions of the 'limited' realm - such as unsatisfied (or satisifed) desire.
Well put, sir! It is exactly this pesky issue of "faith" and "belief" which motivated Troward and those who followed him that led to the New Thought or Mental Science movement -- the idea was that the methods of science could be applied to the issues of faith so that you could then "scientifically" prove the "natural laws" by which faith and belief work, just as you would demonstrate any other law or system in science.
Troward was more Christian than some of those who followed him, but your point goes to the heart of the matter. The teachings of Science of Mind, Unity Church, the Church of Religious Science, to a lesser degree Christian Science, and some other groups* all derive from the idea that belief can be demonstrated in observable, measurable outcomes in the real world - the "scientific" part distinguishing this school/movement from Faith Healing or other religious doctrines which might be said to rely on more "subjective" proof.
*(but not including that special organization of Tom C's which has science in the name but about which we do not talk and which derives from another school of thinking entirely)
But you are also correct and insightful in pointing out that the real world -- and not even the MTV variety, but including it as well -- is rich and complicated enough to keep a man fully occupied and mystified and at turns both satisifed and unsatisfied for a very long time. As Woody Allen once said, "How should I know why God let there be Nazis in the world? I don't even know how scissors work." I would also say that Meatloaf's opus, "Bat Out of Hell" addresses some of these same issues. I refer to the song, "Til the End of Time," as but one example.