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Re (3): New Age, Visulization, etc
IP: 146.7.16.46
Posted on November 18, 2004 at 09:41:00 PM by Eric
Hello again,
I don't think we should be too hard on the church for condemning Galileo; the larger portion of the scientific community condemned him as well. His idea was radically different from that of the common conception of his day; we all have our "orbs of believability." There are certain subjects, and certain degrees of discussion on subjects, we have little ability to seriously entertain. For example, in working with a friend who believed strongly in aliens, it was always difficult for me to get my mind in gear to even treat those claims seriously. It is not that aliens could not exist or even that their existence is logically preposterous: there is ample room in the skies for them. It is simply that they are so foreign to my concept of the world that to entertain the notion seriously for any length of time is a mere intellectual exercise, not the natural course of my thought life. One other thing I would say about the church from the offset as well is that it isn't such a bad thing to be a bit cautious and conservative when it comes to matters of ethics and morality upon which one finds himself unsure. What is more, if it not been for theology, we would not have had the sciences as we do today. Stephen M. Barr writes in Retelling the Story of Science:
It is true that the Bible is overwhelmingly supernatural in its outlook and literary atmosphere. However, what is critically important is that the Bible's supernaturalism is concentrated in a God who is outside of Nature, and radically distinguished from the world He has made. Therefore the world of nature is no longer seen as populated by capricious supernatural beings, by fates and furies, dryads and naiads, gods of war or goddesses of sex and fertility. The natural world has been "disenchanted." But whereas many give credit to science for this, the distinction belongs in the first instance to the monotheism of the Bible, which by depersonalizing and desacralizing the natural world helped clear the ground for the eventual emergence of modern science.
The Bible taught, then, that whatever reverence it is proper to have for the sun, or the forces of nature, or living things is due not to any divinity or spirituality that they possess, but to the fact that they are the masterworks of God. The universe thus came to be seen as a great work of engineering. We observe this in the Book of Proverbs, where the divine Wisdom is portrayed as a master craftsman directing the work of creation. And according to the rabbis of old the divine craftsman worked from a plan that was none other than the Torah itself. As they put it, "the Holy One, blessed be He, consulted the Torah when He created the world." The Torah, then, was not merely a Law written in a perishable book, or part of a covenant with the people of Israel. It was an eternal Law in the mind of God which He imposed on the cosmos itself. The Lord says through the prophet Jeremiah: "When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David." Psalm 148 tells of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heavens obeying a divinely given "law, that will not pass away." This emphasis on the lawfulness of the cosmos is found also in the earliest Christian writings. ... (Barr para. 8, 9)
The Bible taught, then, that whatever reverence it is proper to have for the sun, or the forces of nature, or living things is due not to any divinity or spirituality that they possess, but to the fact that they are the masterworks of God. The universe thus came to be seen as a great work of engineering. We observe this in the Book of Proverbs, where the divine Wisdom is portrayed as a master craftsman directing the work of creation. And according to the rabbis of old the divine craftsman worked from a plan that was none other than the Torah itself. As they put it, "the Holy One, blessed be He, consulted the Torah when He created the world." The Torah, then, was not merely a Law written in a perishable book, or part of a covenant with the people of Israel. It was an eternal Law in the mind of God which He imposed on the cosmos itself. The Lord says through the prophet Jeremiah: "When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David." Psalm 148 tells of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heavens obeying a divinely given "law, that will not pass away." This emphasis on the lawfulness of the cosmos is found also in the earliest Christian writings. ... (Barr para. 8, 9)
In a world in which God stood as "Other" to His creation, an objective outlook could be fostered. For that matter, the ideas of visualization itself simply shows another aspect of creation all the more clearly; the imago Dei stamped within every human being, for God is Creator and certain ones of us in particular manifest this aspect of His character most clearly. It is also clear that we are creatures of faith and that what we believe about our world we tend to find there. Rather than pointing away from the Scriptural record, I see this factor as pointing to it; we walk by faith and not by sight. It would seem that human beings in general are creatures of faith and we are quite capable of shaping our own worlds for good or for ill. Whatever it is that saturates our mind will work itself out in our actions, becoming its own reality and influencing others, one reason we should be careful in what we do feast our minds upon. On the idea of creating our own reality, you might be interested in reading my September 18, 2002, newsletter Staking Claims and Naming Names.
I will also say that a central moral determinate for any of our actions—visualization or otherwise—is a consideration of our own motives. Why do we seek to visualize what we do? That was Underhill's tenet: mysticism (as she defines it) seeks union with the Absolute, magic seeks to prostitute reality to its own wishes. The spiritual plane through which both pass is the same but the motivation is different. Only ourselves and God alone know the motivation behind why we do what we do and if we are uncertain concerning what we are doing, then we might do well to pray about the matter and ask God to reveal His will to us. It has often been the case in my own life that something that was merely good had to give way for that which was truly best. The big thing that I could see that might be problematic about seeing yourself with a new car, for example, is not the visualization, but the motivation behind the visualization and the place of priority the car (or whatever) has within your life. It seems to me that we can easily fall into a subtle trap of thinking that these things will make us happy when in fact in themselves they are hollow.
So then, it has been my experience that we often develop interests in such things because we are seeking satisfaction in places that won't fulfill: we think the new car will make us happy and fill that void. It seems to me that if we are using our visualization merely toward acquiring new things, we might better simply ask God for such things, asking Him that if they are not in His will and are not in our best interest, that we would rather follow Him. We will never be happy anywhere else, though I, like everyone else, tend to run away in real life more times than I care to admit; as I wrote recently: "a thousand lesser lovers vie for my attention and if I am not careful, I crane my neck too far after every adulteress that walks across my path." But each time, I keep coming back to God and He is always gracious to me; each time I learn the lesson on an increasingly deep level that my satisfaction will only be found in Him.
However, you bring out a good point about using visualization to draw or play music. And there are other positive applications for visualization itself—like any form of awareness or knowledge, it is neither good nor bad in itself: it depends on the ends for which it is used. In fact, visualization can well help us in our worship of God and could have something to do with the reason we were created with the capacity. Neil Postman addresses an idea something like this in his (secular) book Amusing Ourselves to Death:
...In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations. (Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death—emphasis in original)
It would seem that there is something to this idea that God is best worshipped through the eyes of faith and imagination and not through rigid depiction: that He is lowered in the process of trying to capture Him in the merely temporal. It is something perhaps like watching the movie before you've read the book, or reading the book again after you've watched the movie: suddenly the actor's faces are superimposed over your mind's eye and have become rigid and fixed. You now see what the director wanted you to see, not what you once did when your imagination was allowed to construct its own conceptions. There are several newsletters on this topic in particular you might be interested in reading if you haven't already. The most immediately relevant one to visualization is entitled The "Sense Organ" of the Soul and examines role of the imagination and the creative use of visualization as a form of prayer and worship. There is also a relatively short piece I am particularly proud of, flaws and all, entitled The Whisper of Eternity Wafts on the Gentle Breeze. Last, there is a three-part series of newsletters concerning my interest in the creative world of possibility as a literature major, the last of which contained these words that might serve to whet your palate:
"Is reality what we make it?" And the answer can only be, "It depends on what we mean." But I suspect, if I may wager a bet, that reality is often far more than we make it. Or perhaps we make too much of it. In either case, I am saying the same thing.
If these sound interesting to you, they comprise a sort of trio that can read apart or together: When Words Rear Up and Roar in Your Face, Chiasmi of the Khristos: WORD Above All Words, and What is Reality? It All Depends.
In any case, that ought to give you a bit to stew on for a while. As for me, I need to get back to my neglected bioethics reading. I have to have a topic picked out for a term paper due Monday in that class and time is wasting.... See, that's what happens when you ask me questions related to theological matters; I don't get any homework done. I mean, it's not like I never think about theology or anything. :)
God bless,
Eric