Precedents
A really neat thing about embracing the life beyond time and space, is that you are humbled to appreciate that there is both what is new and what has always been. Newness is your responsibility to create, but everything you can create will have had its precedent too. In our physically fixated world, we find that cutting-edge engineering is increasingly biomimetic, where learning from nature includes making hopping robot insects and barnacle glues. Fractal mathematics can at last satisfy our perceptions for a world that we knew all along was not rectilinear. And physicists are going back to divinity schools when they can't take it anymore, all the coincidences between their equations and what the ancients have to say. Einstein's relativity is both hard and soft science now, but his friend Kurt Gödel's derivation for how time might be circular and causes be their own effects remains in the realm of mystics. I'm just skimming a surface, of course; my ears pick up on such things, my mind spins.
My High School biology teacher was fond of saying, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This catchy phrase means that the development of the individual can review the development of the species. Biologists use it to suggest that the stages of the fetus preserve stages of creature evolution. But the idea applies to consciousness as well, in ways that are profound and comforting. Only a fragile blustering ego would want to be the first, best, and only in the joys of creating an existence.
Here I will collect some of my views on the precedents we have for an astrally competent way of life.
- Lectures at the Cambridge Swedenborg Chapel
- The Cosmic Implications of Gratitude
- How to be Happy in Heaven or Hell, and why Heaven is Better
- Swedenborg and The Dream
