David Goyder entered the Civil Service immediately before the war, in which he served with the R.A.F.

mainly in the Western Desert and in Greece. In later years he resigned from the Civil Service in order to do something practical. Buying a piece of land in a remote corner of Suffolk, he set to work to build, on his own, a rather large house, learning each trade as he went along often with the help of library books. A life-long Anglican with a lively interest in theology, he planned this book during the solitary months spent in brick-laying.

FACING UP TO REALITY

by
DAVID GOYDER

CHURCHMAN PUBLISHING 1989

Facing up to Reality by David Goyder was first published in 1989 by Churchman Publishing Limited 117 Broomfield Avenue Worthing, West Sussex BN14 7SF Publisher: Peter Smith Copyright David Goyder 1989 Represented in Dublin; Sydney; Wellington; Kingston, Ontario and Wilton, Connecticut Distributed to the book trade by Bailey Distribution Limited (a division of the Bailey and Swinfen Holdings Group) The Book Distribution Centre, Learoyd Road Mountfield Industrial Estate, New Romney, Kent TN28 8XU All rights reserved ISBN 1 85093 171 2

Printed and Typeset in Great Britain by Bourne Press Limited, Bournemouth.

Acknowledgement
/ would like to thank my wife for her patient typing and re-typing of the draft of this book and for her encouragement without which this book might never have been written.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER Foreword 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Introduction Our Five Senses Science Intuition The Whole Man What Real Reality is Really Like Christianity The Christian Church Conclusion

PAGE

1 5 15 25 37 49 61 73 87

vii

FOREWORD

FOREWORD

I once asked a friend of mine who was always talking about the 'real world' and 'facing reality', what he meant by those expressions. He answered "the world about you" and then, after a little thought, "No, it goes deeper than that". If we accept, as I think we must accept, that Truth is perceived when the mind coincides with Reality, then it follows that our idea of what is true will depend on our idea of what is real. But Reality is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as 'that which underlies the appearances'. This short book follows a road which is sign-posted by these two definitions and leads to the concept of what real reality must really be like and, consequently, on to what must be the nature of Truth. It is a short book because I have ignored those turnings away from the road which I perceive would be likely to lead into cul-de-sacs and also those by-roads which lead to the same conclusion by a very much more complicated and indirect route. The fact that this road seems to lead directly into the heart of the Christian Faith may be because as a Christian, my mind is a Christian Mind; it may also be because the heart of the Christian Faith, stripped of its emotional overtones, does represent for human beings the nearest that we can get to Truth. The reader will want to judge this for himself. Many people in England today hold to no religious belief; they may have vague ideas which have not risen to the

IX

FACING UP TO REALITY surface of their minds, but on the whole they have no knowledge at all of the fundamentals of the Christian, or any other, religion. This is in spite of the fact that the Church of England is the Established Church of the Realm. Or is it, perhaps, because the Church of England is the Established Church of the Realm? When the intelligent man-in-the-street meets the Vicar, usually quite casually at a Fete or somewhere, the natural respect which is still felt for the Clergy inhibits him from raising any doubts he may feel about the Christian Faith; the occasion is inappropriate for serious discussion. As this will probably be their only contact, the gulf which exists between them is bridged merely by polite conversation. No such reservations apply to laymen such as myself. Questions are rammed home to us and no holds are barred when non-Christians question the faith of believers. This has certainly happened to me from school-days onward. In the chapter on Christianity and the one on the Christian Church, although I have touched only on those points which are relevant to the theme of this book, I have mentioned much which was a cause of dispute and dissent from nonbelievers with whom I have come into contact. This book puts forward some of the basic reasons for belief in Christianity which the man-in-the-street can at least appreciate, even if he does not, in the end, accept them. He will, in any event, be exercising the greatest gift that has been given us - that of individual choice.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

What am I? Biologists tell me that I am an intelligent animal but on questioning they do not appear to have a very clear idea of what they mean by intelligent. Some theologians tell me I have an immortal soul but they do not agree on what they mean by a soul. Descartes tells me I am a ghost in a machine but that, although fairly clear, doesn't tell me very much. Many people, these days, tell me I am a psycho-somatic entity which I understand to be a ghostly machine rather than a ghost in a machine. Psyche, however, is the Greek word for soul and soma means body - I am back with a soulful body. Why should I worry about what I am? Surely life is for living and I am far too busy living my life to have time to spare for reflecting on what I am? I sleep for a third of my life, I work for a third of my life and the remaining third is taken up with eating and relaxation which I need as a diversion from this routine. Yet what I am is the deciding factor in what I do and what I do has an effect on what I am; there is a feedback mechanism at work here and what I am takes on a new importance. How am I to know what I am? How am I to know anything at all? Here is a case for going back to first principles, a sugges-

FACING UP TO REALITY tion that usually brings forth cries of anguish. That is because we all make assumptions which we would rather not have questioned; it might require us to think those assumptions out all over again and that is hard work, quite apart from the fact that rethinking our assumptions is always in some ways a painful process. Of course, first principles are themselves assumptions, but at least they are basic assumptions which makes them easier to handle than the rather ornate and complicated assumptions we have lived with and built up during our thinking lives. I maintain that we have three and only three sources of knowledge; that all our knowledge is derived from these sources, in combination or separately. These three sources are:1. Inherited knowledge i.e. instincts 2. Knowledge through our five senses 3. Intuition If this assumption is correct, then every bit of knowledge I have must fall into one of these categories. Let us examine them fairly briefly and in later chapters in far more detail. The first is almost self-evident. We are born as human beings, not as dogs or bees and we have inherited human brains which work as human brains not as animal brains or the brains of creatures from outer space. By human brains I mean brains which are genetically programmed to work in a certain manner and produce certain instincts which are not learnt. Can we call an instinct a source of knowledge? I think we can; a baby knows how to suck which, when one comes to think about it, is a very complicated process. A spider knows how to weave a web; it has inherited a genetic programme designed for that purpose. We share instincts as a form of knowledge with the animals, although our instincts are fewer in number and get less and less intense as we get older. The second source of knowledge - through our five senses - is most complicated and misleading and far from selfevident. The more we examine how the senses work, the

INTRODUCTION more complicated the problem becomes. Because we share senses with the animals we tend to take them for granted, but the things of the five senses (called sense data) are not what most people expect them to be and many, very many people, are surprised and even horrified at the conclusions we are forced to draw from even a cursory analysis of this source of knowledge. We build up our concept of the external world from our five senses and when it turns out to be other than we expected we tend to be outraged. For centuries philosophers have struggled to find an acceptable answer to the question of what we sense and how we sense it. In fact, over the last three or four hundred years many suggestions have been made and abandoned in an attempt to solve this most intriguing and puzzling of problems - we will discuss it in the next chapter. The third source of knowledge, I most firmly believe, is unique on this planet to the human race and is not shared by the animals. I hope to show in a later chapter that consciousness and intuition derive from the same source and to explain why attempts to evaluate them are so difficult and elusive. My basic assumption that there are only three sources of knowledge available to us falls down if the reader can think of something he learned that falls outside them. If my assumption is correct then we have made one short step in answering the question at the beginning of this chapter. I find that I am a being with three separate faculties - I am a three-fold being.

CHAPTER 2

OUR FIVE SENSES

It would seem that all creatures have one sense that is dominant, which means that the other senses are subjugated to that one sense. In man, that dominant sense is sight, in dogs it is smell. Watch a baby playing in its cot with its fingers and toes or anything else it can get hold of. It tests each object for taste and smell - for at that stage taste and smell trigger off its sucking instinct. It has first seen them - although it may clutch at things it has not seen. But a noise will startle it and make it open its eyes even wider. What it is doing is subjugating its senses into a descending scale of importance. When it is first born, the order is possibly smell, taste, touch, sound and sight; then as it grows up the order changes into sight, touch, sound, taste, smell. As adults we could almost do without the sense of smell - we like to deodorise unpleasant smells or at least mask them with more acceptable scents. Packaged food does not do much for taste and, except for gourmets, that sense too is beginning to fade. We are left with the three, for us, most important ones. Notice also how we subordinate those other two senses to that of sight by producing instruments to measure them, with dials or scales so that we can see the readings. A thermometer is an example. Dogs, on the other hand, have a very different scale of priorities, where smell is the dominant sense. How would

FACING UP TO REALITY you arrange a dog's priorities, smell, sound, sight, taste, touch? When we smell a kipper, we are not absolutely sure it is a kipper until we have seen it; when a dog sees a cat it is not very sure it is a cat until the dog has smelled it. Dogs, it would seem, live in a world of smells, whilst our world is made up of sights. What a world of smells looks like is as meaningless as asking what a world of sight smells like. As sight is our dominant sense let us try to find out how it works. We see the world in three-dimensional pictures - all humans seem to do that. But these pictures do not occur in our minds only when we are looking at something. We see similar pictures when we dream; we can conjure up a picture in our mind's eye by memory or by will; some people have the ability to conjure up entire constructions, often in the minutest detail and to alter or modify such pictures long before they commit anything to paper. One is tempted to think that seeing an object in one's mind's eye is not the same as seeing an object. Let us, then, examine the way we can see an object. We are told that light is reflected from the object, is focused by a lens in our eye or glasses if we need them - on to the retina at the back of our eye. From there the optic nerve carries impulses to our brain in which neurones 'fire' in a complicated pattern, giving a 'fizz' in parts of the brain. And then? Then, we are told, we see a picture of the object. But where does the picture come from? We have come upon a gap in the line of reasoning which we were expected to take in our stride. How do we get from a 'fizz' to a picture? We cannot believe that the 'fizz' is reconstructed into a picture as a television set reconstructs the impulses it receives because that would require another eye in the brain with another brain behind that and so on and on - an infinite regress. We reject that. Yet we do have a picture in our mind's eye when we look at an object. We also have the same picture in our mind when we think of that object. The conclusion we are forced to reach is that the pictures in our mind's eye are identical with the pictures which appear when we say we see an object. What seems to happen is that the light reflected from an

OUR FIVE SENSES object triggers off a picture in our mind; notice it is a picture - not the picture of the object which we were told it was. Before we consider all the objections which at once come to us from this interpretation of sight, let us answer the question we asked - where does the picture come from? The answer can only be that we are born with it. The pictures are instinctive. It is not suggested that we are born with a complete repertoire of pictures. It is only necessary that we are born with three dimensional forms which, by combining and superimposing one on another, present us with a great variety of pictures, a repertoire, but not an unlimited repertoire. It is not unlimited because there are some things that we can't visualise, that we can't picture. Try to visualise a being from Outer Space that is not just a combination of pictures from your own repertoire. You will be unable to do so. Now for the objections. The first objection is that I can feel and touch the object of which I have a picture and the object feels and touches just like my picture of it. I never, in my experience produce a picture from my repertoire which does not conform with my sense of touch with it. Then we remember that as babies we carried out the exercise of subordinating our other senses to that of sight. We associated a certain touch and feel with a certain picture so that when we feel an object in the dark we associate it with the proper picture from our repertoire and, of course, vice versa. We are lucky in being able, always, to co-ordinate our sight and touch senses. A whole group of people called spastics have great difficulty in doing so. The second objection, it would appear, is an overwhelming one. If we each have our own repertoire of pictures and they are genetically based, they will be different from other people's pictures because we are each of us genetically unique and, just as our own finger prints are unique, so will be our pictures. This is undoubtedly true, so how can we communicate with each other when each of us pictures in a different way, say, that plate on the table? The answer is that we are only

FACING UP TO REALITY able to discuss the different picture each of us has of that plate by means of a language. My mother told me that the object I saw on the table was called a plate and so, no matter how I picture it, I will always call that picture a plate. She also told me its shape was round; so even if I see it as square, I will call that shape round. She told me the colour of that plate was green; so whatever sensation I receive from looking at that plate I will call it 'colour' and 'green'. There is simply no other way of discussing an object than by the use of language and we learn to associate that language with our own pictures. The third objection arises partly from the second. How about measurement? We can measure that plate in a variety of ways but we always agree on those measurements, so surely the pictures I and my mother have, must be the same? But this is not so. Draw a straight horizontal line on a piece of paper; by using a ruler we find that the line is five inches long. My mother's brain may have magnified horizontal lengths and if so, when she placed the ruler along the line she would still find the length was five inches because her brain would also magnify the ruler. She would see a longer line than I saw, but we would both agree it measured five inches. What is the real length of that line? You never see a line; you only see a picture of a line. I may see that line as a curved line and not straight at all, but as I put the ruler against it the ruler will also appear to be curved; I will, however, call it straight because my mother told me a ruler was straight; I will always call my curved line a straight line and there is no way that I or anyone else can find me out. There is no way we can communicate what we see to others except by language or drawing and both of these ways fail to effect any comparison. Needless to say we have used a simple ruler for measurement, but more sophisticated instruments would give the same results. If we apply the same experiment to a vertical line the result will be the same; it applies to all the three dimensions. There is no way of knowing whether I picture a vertical line to the same degree of magnification as I picture a horizontal line. Thus a square might be an oblong to me, with curved or wriggly lines or even a circle with breaks or wiggles at the

OUR FIVE SENSES corners or, in fact, any shape at all - but I would still call that shape a square when it appeared from my repertoire, simply because I had been told it was a square. Because our brains behave in a consistent manner, they always produce the same picture for a particular trigger - a particular 'fizz' pattern - and one can have great fun in attempts to fool one's brain. That is the object of creating optical illusions. The marks on a paper are designed to produce two almost identical 'fizz' patterns and this triggers off alternative pictures - a young girl or an old woman, stairs seen from above or below. One can switch from one picture to another almost at will. Excessive alcohol can, amongst other drugs, upset the 'fizz pattern' and pictures of pink rats and snakes appear to drunkards to be just as 'real' as chairs or tables. Of course they do - the pictures come from the same source. We find that the objections turn out not to be objections at all; in fact they uphold the concept. When it was said earlier that a television set reconstructs the impulses it receives, it did not mean that the set reconstructs them into pictures. All that is necessary is that the set should reconstruct the triggers - the triggers which set off the picture in our brains. There is no picture on a television screen, just the necessary trigger. Nor is there one on a photo; all that is needed is some signal to start the 'fizz' in our brain that produces the appropriate picture. This raises interesting questions about the 'pictures' animals see, for animals have a very different genetic make-up from human beings. As a diversion from the main theme of this chapter let us examine the way in which animals may 'see' things. If you look at a photograph of a cat, a picture which you call 'cat' is triggered off in your mind. Looking at that same photograph will have a different picture triggered off in my mind but I will still call it 'cat'. A cat-hating dog, however, will take no notice at all of the photograph - the trigger on the photograph has no effect on the dog at all. Yet that trigger is the same for human or animal. If you show a young dog a mirror for the first time it will approach the mirror with interest; it will 'nose' it but there is no smell; it

FACING UP TO REALITY may then investigate the back of the mirror, but smelling no dog there, it evinces no further interest. Nevertheless the reflected light did trigger off some activity in its brain. There is some evidence that television sets when working do trigger off some reaction in animals. How are we to explain the difference between photographic triggers and mirror or television triggers? I think the difference is that television triggers and mirror reflections are moving whilst photographs are not. Movement is life or death to an animal food for the predator, death for its prey. It is movement that is important to animals and I am suggesting that animals do not see the images which we see of living creatures but, instead, see a sort of pulsating ghost. The photograph of a cat was of no interest to the dog because it did not pulsate. Domestic pets are often credited with being highly sensitive to 'atmosphere' and there are many examples which bear this theory out. Can this 'atmosphere' be due to different pulsations appearing in human beings according to their moods? Do I pulsate differently when I am worried, fearful, angry, sad or glad? Does the tension which we feel in moments of stress alter the pulsations with which our pet animals identify us? Certainly this would explain the actions of the 'Arithmetical Horse.' For those who have not come across the case, the owner of the horse claimed that it could count. If he or anyone else asked what was 2 + 5 the horse would tap out a series of taps with its foot until it reached 7, then it would stop. It could do any small sum and if asked to count up to 8 or 9 would do so. No one could detect any signal being given by its owner; the whole thing was a great mystery. However, it would only perform when its owner was present and this fact gave the clue. Without the owner being in the least aware of it, the horse began 'counting' and stopped 'counting' according to some change which only the horse could detect in its owner. A lie-detector works on the basis of conflicting tensions in a human being which manifest themselves in various physical alterations from the norm. All that I am suggesting is that these alterations may form the 'image' that animals have of living creatures. Does an animal which 'freezes' on the approach of a predator also reduce its pulsation rate?
10

OUR FIVE SENSES Can we consider this pulsation rate as the field force that can be detected in all living things according to the findings of Dr. H.S. Burr?1 To return to the theme of this chapter, is there any evidence that we have pictures in our minds before our eyes are open, before we are born? There is some, arising from Rapid Eye Movement (R.E.M.) experiments. When we are dreaming our eyeballs move in a unique manner and if woken up when these movements are made, we confirm that we have been dreaming. The reputed experiment of decanting a chicken's egg into a transparent shell and watching the development of that chick indicated that it had R.E.M. before its eyes were open. If such an experiment could be performed on a human baby and it had R.E.M. before its eyes were open, it would indicate that the child was dreaming, that it had pictures in its mind before it was born. Quite by the way, I have used the words brain and mind almost indiscriminately. We talk about pictures in our mind's eye, not in our brain's eye and I suppose when we talk about the brain we mean the picture of what we see inside the head; when we talk about mind we mean where the picture originates. Should we differentiate in this way? It is common practice. To some people all that has been written so far is well known, but to very many it will come as something entirely new and so I make no apology for a few more paragraphs about it. If you are one of those who have difficulty in believing that the objects we see about us do not exist as we see them, indeed that we all see them in different ways, then consider the difficulties that arise if we take the popular view, the view that we all have the same pictures in our minds and that these pictures are identical with the object we are looking at. We can detect differences such as short-sightedness, colour-blindness and physical abnormalities in the trigger mechanism which produces the 'fizz' in our brains but these
'Evidence for the existence of an Electro-dynamic Field in Living Organisms.

11

FACING UP TO REALITY are all on the other side of the problem of how I convert a 'fizz' into a picture; I can make no direct comparison between the pictures I see and the pictures you see and consequently we have no means of correcting the difference between them, for differences there will always be. Neither can we compare the picture in our head with the object we are looking at. Nor is any of these corrections necessary because we get on very well, as we have seen, with different pictures. People who believe that our pictures of objects are true pictures of the external world are called by philosophers naive realists or crude realists and I cannot resist quoting the rather terse statement by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell:" Naive realism leads to physics and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false."1 However, why should it matter to us how we picture the world? All that is written in this chapter may be very true but does it matter at all? We go on quite happily in our naive way and we appear to have no difficulties which could be solved by accepting a different view of things. The answer would seem to be that the concept set out in this chapter should at least give us a different view of life and the world we live in. It should, for instance, give us a different view about people, because what applies to objects applies to people as well. We never see people as they really are, only as we picture them; they of course, picture us in a very different way from that in which we picture ourselves when looking in a mirror. In fact, if it were possible for us to jump into another person's skin and see the world as that person sees it, we just would not recognise ourselves or the world about us, because my world is made up of my pictures and your world is made up of your pictures and, as I have argued, these pictures are not the same. If the pictures we have of the world around us are geneti1

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.

12

OUR FIVE SENSES cally based, then it is to be expected that those people who are genetically close will picture the world in a similar, though not in an identical way. Now consider how very different the world must appear to those who are genetically remote from us, for instance West Indians. Consider how difficult it must be for immigrants who come to this country to conform to our way of life when we both have very different pictures of that life, living to all intents and purposes in different worlds. Perhaps, if this was more generally realised we would look with more sympathy on people from different races and indeed on our European neighbours whose gene pool is different from ours. We are an island race and we intermarry with those with whom we come in contact. As has so often been stated, if such a lot of intermarriage had not take place, it would have needed 1,000,000,000 people in this island in 1066 A.D. to provide us all with different ancestors. So by intermarriage we have come closer together genetically and thus closer together in the way we picture the world about us; that is what we mean by the British view of life. Our deplorable segregation on class grounds can also be explained along similar lines because, on the whole, we marry within our class. Men and women are genetically very different and misunderstandings between them lead to such expressions as "I don't understand women" or the more pathetic "My wife doesn't understand me" or, "well, that's men." The obvious genetic difference between men and women lies in the difference in their cell structures. The female has a balanced structure of XX chromosomes, the male an unbalanced structure of XY chromosomes. The Y chromosome is shorter in the human race than the X chromosome. Whilst I would not dare to go so far as to suggest that the male might be considered as an unbalanced female, there is no doubt that this genetic difference is sufficient in itself to explain the very different ways in which the two sexes picture the world about them. Men and women live in very different worlds; in arguments we never seem to see the other person's point of view but it is the view that is different, not the point. That is
13

FACING UP TO REALITY what makes life, or should make life, such fun and makes one's fellow men and women so interesting. In the foreword to this book I proposed to define truth as being perceived when the mind coincided with reality, and reality as that which underlies the appearance of things. I have tried to show in this chapter that the pictures of the external world vary from person to person in accordance with that person's genetic make-up. None of these pictures, being unique to each individual, can be considered as pictures of the real world and in the search for reality we must delve much deeper. Let us examine in the next chapter how modern science bears upon this problem.

14

CHAPTER 3

SCIENCE

The word 'science' is derived from the Latin word for knowledge and modern science is concerned with knowledge of a special kind. The discipline that science has applied to itself restricts its knowledge to the things of the five senses; any other source of knowledge is outside its ambit. As our prime sense is that of sight, science concerns itself with the pictures presented to us by that sense. The whole world and everything in it, including ourselves, is presented to us in the form of pictures. An inspired guess, a postulation, a mathematical abstraction remains a theory, a hypothesis, until it has been verified and that verification is itself presented to us in the form of a picture. To give an example, when Einstein calculated that light would be affected by the pull of gravity, that concept was verified by the ingenious method of a picture of a star altering its position when the light-ray from it was bent by the proximity of the sun bending that light-ray - a picture that was possible only when the sun was in total eclipse. Science, then, restricts itself to the things of the senses both in exercising its discipline and in verifying its results. It is no wonder, therefore, that the many benefits that flow from its activity are confined to our senses, giving us an entirely sense-based view of our existence. This sense-based view is an anthropomorphic view, a view unique to human

15

FACING UP TO REALITY beings which would be quite unintelligible to intelligent life on another planet, if such exists. One can imagine, in the realm of science-fiction, a race of beings possessing pure intelligence without having any form of material structure, rather like our idea of ghosts. They could invade us and we them without either being aware of the other or having any effect on the other. Such a concept would not make good science-fiction because no confrontation would be possible, but I include the thought because it does emphasise how anthropomorphic modern science has become. If, in our search for reality, we ask what underlies a particular picture of something, science replies by presenting us with yet another picture. Let us take, as an example, a piece of meat. I see a piece of meat; it is pink and striated. This is a useful picture for the housewife who can select the type of meat and the cut from her picture of it. If I look more closely at the meat (through a microscope) I see that the picture has changed; I now see (picture it) as a series of cells each contained in its transparent envelope. This is a useful picture for the biologist. If I look closer still I see that the picture has changed again; now it is a knot of molecules, a useful picture for the biochemist. After careful examination I perceive (I do not see) that the picture I had of molecules has changed into a mental picture of strings of atoms, a useful picture for the physicist. How can we explain this? Remembering that this was as far as early 19th century science had progressed, the explanation given us then was that the meat was not really striated, not really cells, not really molecules, it was really atoms. The word atom comes from the Greek word atomos which means indivisible. At last, it was thought, we had reached the end of the road; here, finally, was Reality. Reality, to be real at all, must consist of itself and not be conjured up by another thing - and here it was. Enthusiastic supporters of a materialistic world viewpoint seized upon it with joy. Marx produced his political concept of a materialistic world and Darwin his concept of evolution through natural selection. Matter was composed of atoms
16

SCIENCE and atoms were the fundamental particles which could be used to explain, often in ingenious and easily understood ways, the whole mysterious universe. That was the popular concept, although the scientists themselves had their reservations. How, then, were we to think of the piece of meat which we took as our example? The answer given was that we must think of it and the cells and molecules as analogies; one might picture a piece of meat or a plate or a table in a variety of ways but each of these ways was simply an analogical way of considering the object, a parallel way of looking at what really existed and what really existed was groups of atoms. The media of those days, newspapers and public debates popularised and, of course, superficialised the issues. It seems incredible to us these days that a debate on Darwin's natural selection theory could have revolved around a question from a bishop as to whether Huxley was descended on his mother's or father's side from an ape and Huxley's answer that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop. Nevertheless, it was good stuff for the media. But you can see what had happened. We come up against a gap which we are expected, once again, to take in our stride. If we are to think of all objects, apart from the atom, as analogies, as being parallel to what actually exists, then why not also consider the atom as an analogy? Why, at some point along the parallel lines do we jump the gap and call the atom fundamental and real? No such question seems to have posed itself to the popular mind and if it did it was rapidly thrust under the carpet by the media of the day. Those enthusiastic supporters of science glimpsed in materialism the saving of the human race from ignorance and superstition. Here, they thought, was Truth and Reality and the scientist was its High Priest to whom Truth was his very life. I do not think that I am exaggerating here; J. Addington Symon could write:"These things shall be! A loftier race Than e'er the world hath known, shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls And light of science in their eyes."
17

FACING UP TO REALITY

Indeed, the optimism seemed justified as that handmaid of science, technology, produced more and still more artifacts to please, help and increase the material welfare of mankind. Pictures, all of them, but distractions both useful and entertaining. What of Reality? There is a force that drives mankind ever onwards to seek and find the very source of our existence, the source that is Real and, therefore, fundamental and that force drives scientists who are, after all, human beings, along the same road. The atom was split and with a sigh it was realised that having apparently reached one horizon we beheld another in the distance. Nowadays we wonder whether such horizons are not an infinite regress of pictures which can never be solved by scientific methods, but that is to anticipate. The atom had been split; it was not fundamental. Worse was to follow. Einstein in 1905 produced his Special Relativity Theory with the ominous concept that matter and energy are interchangeable. As he describes it himself, matter and energy are two manifestations of the same unknown phenomenon! expressed in the formula E=MC2 where C is the speed of light. The old classical physics of Newton had been superseded by an entirely new concept; we can no longer think of matter as a solid thing, composed of uncountable numbers of tiny little lumps called atoms. We must now think of it in terms of some sort of energy complex, some sort of field force. This new picture is verified by an exploding atom bomb and a further picture of damaged body cells. We picture radio activity as destructive energy pouring down on us rather like rain. The atom, considered as a combination of nucleus and electrons, positively and negatively charged, presents enormous difficulties because its bits and pieces do not appear to behave in a logical manner. Particles seem to behave at will, disappearing and reappearing in a different position without having moved into that position. They do not seem to conform to any pattern and they can only be dealt with statistically. Pure research has become the ground for highly sophisticated mathematics.
18

SCIENCE What has been the effect of all this on the populace? To judge from the media, radio and television, we get a curious dichotomy. The ordinary citizen, no matter how high his office, is treated with a certain jocularity. In some cases he will be treated with a dreadful familiarity and his Christian name will be used as if he were an old friend. That, I suppose, is in the interest of 'togetherness.' Bring in, however, a scientist and the attitude is altogether different. He is announced by his full title and treated with all deference. His opinion will be sought on subjects quite outside his expertise and listened to with grave attention. On a programme on television various astronomers were interviewed and their expertise on the stars was accepted with only perfunctory interest. Then came the crunch question to each one of them. "Do you believe in God?" One could not help joining in their laughter at the naivety of the question which was put to each one with great solemnity. Is it fair to take the media as a measure of popular opinion? Probably not, because it is a debatable point whether they lead or follow. But there is little doubt that the man in the street is completely at sea when he comes to the mathematics which describe modern physics. He has lived with the concept of classical physics all his life and drawing from his environment and the environment of his parents and grandparents, and indeed from the rather outdated textbooks he read at school, he still retains a little of the euphoria that gripped the Victorians, but he is not happy with it; he lives in the age of the 'light of science in his eyes' and it has not produced a 'loftier race' as far as he can see. He is happy enough with the benefits of technology, he makes great use of them, but science has for him taken the wrong turning. There is too much technology, some of it frightening, and not enough enlightenment. He was bidden to put his faith in science and great wonders would be beheld; but the wonders, such as putting a man on the moon, are more wonderful in anticipation than in retrospect. Science has not answered the question asked at the beginning of this book "What am I?" Experiments on embryos are unlikely to answer it either and could lead to as great a horror as the splitting of the atom that gave us the atom bomb.
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FACING UP TO REALITY I think that the man in the street is wrong to think in this way. He is wrong because he has been taught, no, he has been conditioned, to expect too much of science. He has been taught to abandon all else and, trustingly, put his hand into the hand of science and let it lead him into all truth. But science is not like that at all. It is simply a useful way of looking at the things of the five senses, at pictures, and producing new pictures to fascinate us and for our use. It might be thought that modern science has abandoned its dependence on pictures and moved over to mathematics. That is not so; a complicated formula to a mathematician is just as much a picture to him as is a working drawing to an engineer. He sees in it the same symmetry, even the same beauty, as the painter sees in his painting of a tree or of a landscape. He finds in it the same need for discipline, the same inexorable logic. For the mathematician it is a picture but a picture which needs verification. Mathematicians used to question whether mathematics was invented or discovered. They instanced the way in which mathematics so perfectly fitted pure physics and also perfectly fitted astronomy, two quite different disciplines. "God" they said, "must be a mathematician." But the same brain that studies stars also studies the behaviour of particles and pictures things in mathematical terms. The common factor is the human brain which will picture all things in a human way The mathematical picture, however, is not one that we can all appreciate, so let us ask the physicist to explain it to us in non-mathematical terms. He will tell us, perhaps, that he no longer talks about Laws of Nature. Instead, he thinks of it in statistical terms. What used to be called a Law of Nature is now thought of as a 'Statistical Norm.' The external world he would describe as a 'statistical abnormality in a uniform field,' or, in even more esoteric terms, 'a wrinkle or pucker in the space-time continuum.' At that, we lesser mortals creep away, shaking our heads, completely at sea. But it is to the sea that we can, perhaps, turn for an analogy, be it ever so inadequate. Imagine the sea after a storm, a mass of waves and froth. Those waves, spume and froth represent the external world
20

SCIENCE as we picture it. The sea underneath is still - that is the uniform field. Slowly, ever so slowly, the waves and spume die down and settle back into the sea from which they came, leaving eventually just a flat, still ocean. That is the picture of the end of the universe, an illustration of the second law of thermodynamics, the principle of maximum entropy, when, scientists tell us, the energy will all have evened out and there will be no more energy in one place than in another. The universe will be dead. That may be the end but what was the beginning? What started that storm in the first place? We turn to the astronomers for the answer to that question. When we look at a star, any star, they tell us, we find that there is a shift to the red side of the spectrum in the light we receive from that star - an indication that the star is moving away from us. As this happens to every star we look at, we conclude that the universe is expanding. (Place two marks on a balloon, blow it up and the marks will move away from each other because the balloon is expanding; the skin is moving away from its centre). That is what is happening now and so, we deduce, if we go back in time, there must have been a beginning when all those stars, all the matter in the universe, was compressed into one undifferentiated lump of we know not what, which, for some reason that we can't explain, suddenly exploded forming the universe we know today. We call that explosion the 'big bang.' We, the universe and everything in it, began with an undifferentiated lump of we know not what; it will end in an undifferentiated mass of we know not what; we are living in the period in between. That is the picture presented to us by our senses. But is it true, we ask? It would be true if the pictures presented to us by our senses were themselves true pictures of the external world, were themselves true pictures of reality; this, however, we doubt and some of the reasons for this doubt were discussed in the previous chapter. Science, then, gives us a true picture of what our senses present us with, but what our senses present us with is not, and cannot be, a true picture of what actually is. Nor must it be thought that science ever presents us with a
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FACING UP TO REALITY final picture of the sense-based world. It presents us with a picture based on the evidence of our senses which is available at this moment and that picture will change as new evidence becomes available. It is of the essence of science that any particular theory is altered and modified as more evidence is produced and this goes on until it becomes ungainly and top heavy. It is then abandoned and a new theory substituted for it. We have a good example of a changing theory in Darwinian evolution. The idea of evolution is very ancient. It was postulated in a Greek school of thought and is inherent in Genesis where a changing world is envisaged as coming into being over a period of time. There is nothing new in the idea; the difficulty arises in postulating how it is brought about. Darwin's theory, popularly described as 'the survival of the fittest' was received with enthusiasm in the 19th century and one cannot altogether rid oneself of the thought that it was highly acceptable to the Victorians who thought themselves as the nation best fitted for survival and the industrial leaders more fitted for survival than their employees. Be that as it may, Thomas Huxley, its great supporter, admitted that it was a highly unsatisfactory theory but he could envisage no alternative. Darwin's book 'The Origin of Species' dealt with variations within a species but did little to settle the problem of how a new species arrived in the first case. As more evidence became available, the modifications to Darwin's original theory of how evolution came about has changed the theory so radically that Darwin, perhaps, would not recognize the modern concept as arising from his original postulation. Perhaps, the evidence that evolution took place in a series of jumps rather than slowly over a period of time may lead to an entirely different theory. The mystery of why a cell divides itself into two and repeats that process again and again, yet still forms hearts, lungs, stomachs, brains, out of those same cells, in different forms, in different organisms, is with us still. What organises that organism? Of course, those cells, those forms, are only pictures and we can be quite sure that they do not exist as we
22

SCIENCE picture them. There would seem to be much work here for the biologist to do, resulting perhaps, in a revolution in biology as great as that brought about in the world of physics. So far we have referred to the external world as the world we picture through our senses. More and more scientists in the field of pure research are realising the difficulty of isolating from their work the working of the human brain. Are they investigating the external world or are they investigating the way the human brain works? How, to put it simply, can you melt lead in a lead spoon?
********************

Now it is possible that you do not agree with my contention that as human beings we have three sources of knowledge, only one of which is that of our senses. Perhaps you are convinced that it is our senses which provide us with our only source of knowledge. If that is so, consider the position of the solipsist who takes that contention to its logical conclusion. For the solipsist there is no such thing as an external world. He argues that at night he dreams a dream but he is not aware that it is a dream until he wakes up. He experiences the same pictures in his dream about the same things and people that he does when he is awake but when he dreams, there is no suggestion that the dream requires an external world to support it. Why then, shouldn't his waking life be also a dream, a dream from which he may one day wake up, perhaps at death? He maintains that the external world is projected by his senses into space and that space is part of his mind. He, in fact, is the only human being in existence and he challenges us to produce any evidence, any evidence at all, to the contrary. He is talking, of course, of scientific evidence, the evidence of our senses. We may ask him, for instance, how he was born and he will answer (he is talking to himself, of course) that as far as he can remember, life began with him and will end with him. All the information he has comes from his own brain, from his own senses. When we point out to him that the dream he has during the day has a certain persistence about it - the blot on his copybook is still there the
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FACING UP TO REALITY next day and that doesn't happen in his dream at night - he will reply that we are talking about time and that is the only difference he can detect between sleeping dreams and waking dreams. It is useless for his wife to tell him that she is sitting in a chair opposite him and is experiencing the same dream that he is. He will simply reply that is just the sort of remark he would expect from his dream wife who plays such a big part in his dream, but he wishes she wouldn't go on about it. His arguments cannot be refuted; we can find no evidence, no scientific evidence, that can refute him. His statement that all the information he receives comes from his five senses (that means from his brain) completely rules out any possibility of confronting him with any argument or evidence because all such evidence can only reach him through his own five senses, that is, from himself. He has made his case. But, we object, we know that there are other people like us in the world. We know that there is an external world, no matter how we picture it. But how do we know that? It can only be through another form of knowledge, quite apart from our senses. That other form of knowledge is intuition, which we will examine in the next chapter. It was the solipsist position which inspired the following verse which appeared on the notice board of an Oxford college :The young man said that God Must find it exceedingly odd That the juniper tree Just ceases to be When no one's about in the quad. An answer, attributed to Ronald Knox;Dear Sir, it is not at all odd I am always about in the quad So the juniper tree Never ceases to be Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

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CHAPTER 4

INTUITION

Intuition is defined as 'the immediate apprehension by a mind without reasoning.'1 It is the word 'immediate' which catches our attention; clearly it is concerned with time. We can measure time in a variety of ways but it is not always appreciated what it is that we are measuring. The most useful definition of time is that it is 'the sequence of events' and it is clear that events, if they are to be considered as events at all, must occur in an individual's mind. There may be millions of happenings occurring all over the world, all over the universe, but they will not be events until they have entered the mind. We arrange such events in a sequence, i.e. an historical event of which we have recently become aware is slotted into our sequence in its proper position and as more and more events crowd into our minds we get a longer and longer sequence. This seems to be what we call memory. When we are waiting for our wives at the station perhaps, there are not many other events of which we care to take notice and we say that time goes slowly. Our wives, who are late, perhaps, had many things to do before they met us and they will tell us that the time has flown; time, or the sequence of events, is subjective. We spend much energy and frustration in trying to keep up with a purely arbitrary time, universally accepted for
1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

25

FACING UP TO REALITY reasons of convenience, which is given us from a clock; the first question we ask when we wake up is "what's the time?" and for the rest of the day we keep referring to it in a rather senseless attempt to conform to it; that is, if many events are entering our minds, events which we feel are important enough to enter our minds. It is clear that to form a sequence there must be more than one event; there cannot be a sequence of one. That is why, in the astronomer's picture of the start of the universe where matter was compressed into one undifferentiated lump, they tell us that it was outside time or before time which began when the lump exploded into many pieces which could be related the one to the other, to form a sequence of events and time began. This concept can be simplified by thinking of one particle in space. There can be no time in that case, because there can be no sequence of events; we cannot say that the particle was first here, then there, because there is nothing to which it can be related. Add another particle and time begins; we can relate the position of one particle to the other and get a sequence of events. Similarly, the physicist's picture of the end of the world when entropy is complete and there is undifferentiated matter, will also be outside time. The definition of intuition that it is 'immediate' means that there is no sequence leading up to it, that it is outside time. Let us clarify what we mean when we say that something is 'within time' or 'outside time.' It is not always realised that when we talk about past, present and future events we are talking in very loose terms. By a past event we mean an event that has already entered our own sequence of events. All events that are within time are therefore past. By future events we mean events that may 'come to pass' - events that we anticipate will enter our sequence and become past events. But in our sense-based world there is no such thing as the present because there is always a time-lag between the occurrence of an event and our perception of it - the event is past when it has entered into our sequence. When we say a star is a hundred light years away, we mean that we are seeing that star as it was 100 years ago; it may have blown up during the time the light has taken to reach us. There is
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INTUITION always a time-lag in perception, even if that time-lag is very short. And so, when we use the expression 'within time' we mean that the event is past - that it is part of the sequence of events. This holds true of the grammatical expression, the continuous present, because when I say "I am sitting in this chair" or "I am seeing the light from that star," what I am describing is already the continuing past. When we say that an event is 'outside time' we mean a state that is neither past nor future. It is timeless, it is eternally present. Because the eternally present does not occur in our sense based world we find it extremely difficult to comprehend. Such timelessness is the basis of intuition. It seems convenient to consider intuition in three rather different aspects and we can call them self-consciousness, clairvoyance and veridical or mystical experience. When I say I am conscious of my own existence or that I am self-conscious, I mean that I can consider myself from outside myself; I can, at will, jump backwards or forwards in time; I can consider objectively my subjectivity. I have great difficulty in explaining what I mean by being self-conscious but I have only to hint at it for everyone to know what I mean. We take it for granted, yet it is a most mysterious thing. A surprising number of people seem to think that self-consciousness arises quite fortuitously from a state of great complexity; the more complex a machine becomes the nearer it will come to self-consciousness. When the required degree of complexity is reached, hey presto, it becomes self-conscious. This explanation does not seem to fit the facts of the case because a machine of any kind is within time; it works on the basis of the sequence of events and the more complex the machine, the more complex the sequence. Self-consciousness does not seem to be like that at all. When my brain is working at top speed on some mental task, I do not seem to be more conscious than when I relax in a chair; the opposite seems to be true. Once self-consciousness is associated with the intuitive faculty, when we think of self-consciousness as being outside time, no such difficulties arise. Sir Alister Hardy in a recent book 1 holds that self1

Darwin and the Spirit of Man.

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FACING UP TO REALITY consciousness is evolved in the human race through the higher animals and that therefore, the higher animals must have a degree of self-consciousness. He admits, however, that he holds this view because he is a dedicated neoDarwinian and not because he can adduce any evidence for it. It seems a difficult view point to uphold because of the nature of self-consciousness. If one tries to grade it from nil self-consciousness to full self-consciousness does it, in its intermediate state, come in fits and starts or is it a question of near self-consciousness whatever that state may mean? The opposite would seem to be the case, that selfconsciousness is a 'will-go, won't go' situation; one either has it or one has not. Another way of putting it would be to ask whether the higher animals have a mind. But how do I know that other human beings have a mind and are self-conscious as I am self-conscious? To refute the solipsist in the previous chapter we stated that we knew intuitively; that was our only way out of his dilemma. We cannot now say that we know other people are conscious because of our pictures of them; the solipsist has removed that possibility. We can only say that we know intuitively that there is, as it were, an immediate apprehension of a meeting of minds which we do not experience with animals. The gap between the higher animals and isolated tribes in the jungle may not appear very great at first glance but we immediately differentiate between them; there is no doubt or hesitation when we say "this is a man" or "that is an animal." This meeting of minds brings us to the aspect of intuition which we call telepathy and clairvoyance. Telepathy is thought of as the ability to communicate with another person without using the five senses and clairvoyance as being able to predict a future event. Experiments seem to show that telepathy could be explained as a form of clairvoyance and if this is accepted, telepathy or mind-reading need not be postulated. Let us consider an imaginary example. A client whose husband has died goes to a medium who claims that she can contact the spirits of the dead. After going into a trance, the medium says: "I hear the words
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INTUITION brandy and stairs, under the stairs, perhaps?" The client may then say: "My husband always kept a bottle of brandy under the stairs but only we knew about it." Now the medium knows. If we reverse the order of the statements we get the client saying "My husband always kept a bottle of brandy under the stairs but only we knew about it" and the medium saying "I hear the words brandy and stairs, under the stairs perhaps?" There is nothing in the reversed order that surprises us except, perhaps, that the medium would appear to be a little deaf. That is because the two statements form a proper sequence. The first example does surprise us, however, because it is out of sequence, that is, it is outside time. There is no need, of course, to invoke the spirits of the dead. All the ingredients are there in both cases. The conclusion we reach is that the medium is highly intuitive and her trance is a mental exercise in which she eliminates all sense data from her mind and concentrates on her intuitive capacity. When she has achieved this state she has the ability for 'immediate apprehension,' the definition of intuition. All the ingredients are in the mind of the client and it would appear that the medium has access to the client's mind. It should be noted, however, in the example given, that all the ingredients are also in the mind of the medium after the seance. Is the medium, therefore, foretelling events occurring in her own mind rather than reading her client's mind? If this is so, then we can rule out telepathy and substitute clairvoyance. By using the word 'clairvoyance' we are describing a state where past and future events are all present events in the mind of the medium. In her trance she has eliminated the sequence of events and entered into the state of the eternally present. It was in an attempt to solve some of the many problems arising that Dr. Rhine carried out his now famous Extra Sensory Perception experiments.' Extra does not mean an additional sense, or sixth sense, but means outside, other
1 The Reach of the Mind.

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FACING UP TO REALITY than, the five senses. He used a special pack of cards with five different symbols and asked people to predict the order in which the symbols would turn up after the pack had been shuffled. After the results had been noted, he would compare the results predicted with 'pure chance' results and could then measure the ability of different people to predict which cards would turn up. The carrying out of the experiments and the results throw some light on intuition and some on human nature. It was actually stated that if E.S.P. could be verified "it would drive a coach and horses through science." One can only suspect that a statement like that could be made by someone with little knowledge of what science is all about. Others suggested that Dr. Rhine was inadvertently cheating or that there were defects in his methods. He was able to repeat his experiments with better safeguards and others were able to verify some of his results. Rhine made the point that certain subjects performed very much better than others and deduced that these people had a higher E.S.P. faculty, that they were more intuitive. But he failed to notice one fact that might be important. After each experiment the subjects were shown the results and were able to deduce what they should have predicted. When this was not done, when the subjects were not shown the results, then their predictions sank to mere chance levels. Rhine put this down to boredom or lack of enthusiasm. I am suggesting that, unlike the example of the medium, the chance results came about because the ingredients were not all there; they never knew what they should have predicted. The actual sequence of the shuffled pack was never shown to the subjects - the actual sequence never entered their minds and consequently was absent in the intuitive state of the eternally present. It would seem that one can only have intuitive knowledge of future events that do eventually enter the mind; If an 'event' does not ever enter the mind then it is not, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, an event at all. It would have been easy for Rhine to have run a control on this aspect, but he does not appear to have picked it up. I am not suggesting that it throws great light on the problem, only that it might throw some light. I am drawing
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INTUITION an analogy from the R.E.M. experiments where it was found that although we dream quite a lot at night, we only recall the dream we had when we are woken up from it. It would seem that this particular dream forms the first event in that day's sequence and is thus drawn into the time scale; the other dreams do not form part of the sequence and cannot be remembered. We remember something only when it is associated with something else, when it forms part of the sequence of events. Can the after-knowledge of which cards did turn up form the link for predicting which cards would turn up? We now turn to the third aspect of intuition, that of veridical experience or mystical experience. We can describe it as a sudden explosion of consciousness which happens, apparently, to more people than we suspect. When we ask these people to describe their experience, they simply explain that there are no words to describe it. They are, I think, telling us that they cannot describe such experiences which are outside time in terms which are within time. They seem reluctant to talk about it at all, but if we press them they refer to it as a private experience or revelation; it seems to range from a peaceful detachment from the world of their senses to one where they are completely detached from their bodies, even in some cases looking at their own bodies from a point outside them. In many cases they report that they are made suddenly aware of what IS and what IS NOT. That is all they can or will tell us. Typical statements seem to be "I was sitting under a tree and musing about the nature of the universe when suddenly..." or "I was thinking of nothing in particular when suddenly..." or "I was praying desperately and suddenly..." It was Aldous Huxley 1 who experimented with Mescalin to see whether he could produce a similar state with the use of this drug which in its crude form is used by some natives of South America. The use of L.S.D., more common these days,
1 The Doors of Perception.

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FACING UP TO REALITY seems to produce a sense of dissociation with the things of the five senses and often ends in its user leaping out of a window. If he does not kill himself or end up in a mental institution he will describe his experience as akin to flying. What can we deduce from the effects of such drugs? The essence of prayer, we are told, is the disciplining of our minds to eliminate the things of the five senses and concentrate our consciousness on reaching out to God or whatever we may conceive as the source of everything. What seems to happen with the use of L.S.D. is that the five senses are inhibited but that the consciousness or intuitive faculty is not concentrated in any particular direction; it is simply diffused in the person. There is a feeling of detachment from the world, from the five senses, but no corresponding explosion of consciousness. The drug seems to inhibit the senses but does not enhance intuition. That would seem to be the impression one gets from the accounts of the drug users. Those who have had a mystical experience, however, talk in terms of a reaching out of consciousness and often of being reached by an external consciousness. The circumstances of the experiences differ, but we cannot easily explain them except in terms of our intuitive faculty. I will give just one example of a mystical experience by a person whose integrity I can vouch for. The subject was in the habit of saying his morning prayers in a tube train on the way to his place of work. In his own words "I was concerned about Truth and suddenly between Green Park station and Piccadilly Circus station I found myself outside and above my own body. I was surprised to find myself looking down on the back of my head, my body leaning forward with my forearms on my knees and my head bowed. I was vaguely aware that I needed a hair-cut. I was also surprised to realise that I was in a position higher than the roof of the carriage, but clearly able to see my own body on the seat. I was then filled to overflowing, though never overflowed, with what I can only describe as complete and absolute Truth. I felt, - no, I was told - I must return to my
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INTUITION body and pleaded to remain in my present state for just a little, only a little, longer. This was not to be and suddenly I found myself back in my body. I looked surreptitiously at my fellow passengers but all was normal; the man next to me was still reading his paper, the strap-hanger still gazing into the distance. Everything was perfectly normal, including myself." When asked to explain the nature of this Truth, he said there were no words to describe it but that now he himself knew. Similar experiences in an entirely different context are described by Dr. Raymond Moody in his book 'Life after Life.' He records the accounts given by some of his patients who were declared clinically dead but were resuscitated by some of the methods now available. 1 He gives many examples in the subjects' own words and sums up these experiences in the form of a typical composite experience. "A man is dying" writes Dr. Moody "and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor after this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment and sees his own body from a distance, as though he were a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval he finds that he must go back to earth he resists, for by now he is taken up (sic) with his experiences in the after life and does not want to return he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives. Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so he can find no human words to describe these unearthly episodes." During their out-of-body experience many subjects noted the actions of the resuscitation team and heard their remarks which were subsequently confirmed by the team. These facts preclude any possibility of the 'out of body' experience being accounted for by hallucinatory explanations. The similarity of the mystical experience and the out-of'"Life after Life" pp.21-23. The foreword is by Dr. Kubler-Ross who confirms that the contents are in accordance with her own researches on this subject.

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FACING UP TO REALITY body experiences are too obvious for comment. Both are evidence for the intuitive or eternally present factor in human beings and emphasise the mystery that we call consciousness. Before ending this chapter on intuition it seems proper to discuss the question of choice or free will. In the last century, there was a body of opinion which maintained that all our actions are determined by the activity of the atoms of which we are composed. They maintained that there could, therefore, be no question of free will or choice. Calling themselves Determinists, this body sought to maintain that as atoms behave in accordance with the laws of nature, the human body, in all its aspects, must behave in accordance with the activity of the atoms and that all our actions must therefore be predetermined by that activity. This provided many interesting and even furious debates. There was really no answer to the assertion that the behaviour of animals was brought about by the interplay of their instinct and senses. By balancing one against the other, the whole pattern of animal behaviour could be explained. The Determinists argued that the same condition applied to human beings and it proved difficult to refute them, given the contention that the world was really composed of matter and matter was composed of atoms. I might argue, for instance, that I could choose a red book from the bookcase or a blue book; either was open to my choice. The Determinist would reply that my choice of the red book was brought about by a sequence of events in my nervous system. If I then changed my mind and chose the blue book, that was brought about by a slight change in the sequence of events in my nervous system; if I then decided that I would not choose any book at all, that also was determined by a change in the sequence. All these changes in the sequence occurred before the urge to choose one book or the other and consequently, the urge or choice was determined by the sequence. After the atom had been split, the picture of individual particles behaving in an irrational or indeterminate manner was accepted; it was found impossible to determine the behaviour of a particular particle. That indeterminacy
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INTUITION appeared to be the loophole through which free will or choice could operate. Perhaps, it was thought, the principle of indeterminacy detected in individual particles meant that the whole system had a degree of randomness about it which would allow free will to operate as a sort of balancing factor. I think that the statistical method of taking, as it were, lumps of particles and finding the statistical norm which operated through the lump eliminated any such theory. The solution lies, it would seem, in the time factor, the sequence of events. As determinacy depends on a sequence, it is clear that intuition which is outside any sequence must be the means by which choice , or free will, prevails. Choice depends on intuition, on self-consciousness which simply short-circuits or ignores the sequence of events in the predetermined system and substitutes choice for it; and this substitution is itself susceptible to choice, so that we as human beings can choose our actions or allow them to be determined by events. To give an example; we cannot conceive of a computer, no matter how complex its system may become, being subject to choice. A computer can't choose, it can only determine; nor can we imagine the most complex of machines being selfconscious. Machines capable of choice would be of no use to us because the reason we construct them is to make a machine that is absolutely deterministic and can be relied on to be deterministic, unlike a human being who, all unwittingly may smuggle choice into the solution of a problem. When the biologists tell me that I am an intelligent animal, do they mean that I am an intuitive animal? This might be so were it not for the fact that biologists are scientists and must strictly adhere to the scientific discipline. Intuition is outside time and distinct from the senses, and is, therefore, outside the boundaries that science has set itself.

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CHAPTER 5

THE WHOLE MAN

I have attempted in the preceding chapters to establish a basis for my contention that, as human beings, we have three, and only three sources of knowledge, namely instinct, senses and intuition. Instinct and senses we hold in common with the animals and we can, therefore, conclude that these two faculties form what can be considered as our animal nature. Indeed, I would maintain that without our third faculty, that of intuition, we would merely be a species of animal, living the lives of animals. It is our intuitive faculty, our extra space-time faculty, that enables us consciously to stand apart from ourselves, to examine ourselves and that has given us the ability to make judgements, all of which have been encapsulated into the word 'intellect.' If I have argued rightly, then we are hybrid creatures, part animal and part intuitive. Our ability to surpass the animal world so greatly, cannot be due to better or more developed senses for each of our senses is individually surpassed by other creatures; it can be due only to our intuitive faculty. It is by means of this faculty that we human beings have been able to examine the things of our senses, to analyse them and build them into the magnificent discipline we call modern science. It is by intuition that we have been able to make those jumps in inductive thought that are at the heart of all inventions. In all art forms it is intuition that enables us to perceive so much more than the mere look or sound of the thing. And can we not say that our sense of humour,
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FACING UP TO REALITY unique to human beings in their ability to laugh, is itself due to intuition? We laugh when we are puzzled, when we are embarrassed, when we are happy, when we find a solution to a problem, at other people's dilemmas or misfortunes, even as we laugh at ourselves. It is this ability to laugh at ourselves that is at the base of our humour. But why should we laugh at ourselves? Is it that we realise that this sense-based world that we take so seriously is not real, is but the product of our senses, that there is a quite different world which underlies it, which we apprehend intuitively and this apprehension sends a shiver through our nervous system which we call laughter?
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Within the context of our three sources of knowledge, thinking can be described as assembling our instinctive reactions to a set of circumstances, modifying them through the experience gained through our senses and viewing them intuitively. If the result is self-determining, as is always the case in the animal world where intuition is lacking, we let it pass through the intuitive filter. If it requires modification, we modify it by choosing to ignore certain aspects or by giving more weight to others. The word 'conscience' is made up of 'con' which means coming together and 'science' from the Latin word for knowledge; it is descriptive of the meeting point of our three sources of knowledge, the end result of our thinking process. So why has the word conscience fallen out of everyday use? I think it is because the word has been confused with conditioning. To say that some action is 'against my conscience' is taken to mean that one has been conditioned not to perform that act; yet to be conscientious bears no such stigma of conditioning. The idea of conditioning, or being conditioned was brought into popular view by the publicity given to the conditioning of Pavlov's dogs and the attempt to condition human beings was a natural outcome. The crudest form of conditioning was, according to reports, practised by Maoists on American prisoners during
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THE WHOLE MAN the Korean war. It ranged from beating up Christian priests, every blow of which was accompanied by the word God, in an endeavour to associate God with pain, to intensive propaganda inflicted on the prisoners from morning to night and sometimes from night to morning. If we can accept the reports as true, then what came out of them was that those prisoners who were most sense oriented in their attitude to life were the most susceptible and the 'simple souls' were the least affected. If by 'simple souls' was meant those who were intuition oriented, then that is the sort of result we should expect, since choice is based on intuition. It is a fact that conditioning can only be carried out through the senses; we cannot condition instinct unless we resort to genetic engineering and we would not begin to know how to condition intuition. The conditioning or training of animals is a very different proposition from that of conditioning human beings. Where animals are concerned, we have only two sources of knowledge to contend with. A degree of conditioning of instinct is carried out by breeding which is a form of genetic engineering. The conditioning or training factor is usually in the form of food as a reward which is reinforced by the instinct to eat. Sheepdogs have an instinct for their work and training is the reinforcement of that instinct. When we were young, the family environment, presented to us through our senses, was the medium by which we were conditioned to conform to the way of life determined by our parents. Later when we left home, we found a different environment, with possibly different standards. Choices had to be made and choice, as we have seen, is a matter for our intuition. This is where human beings have such a great advantage over animals, for human beings can make a choice and animals cannot. This is exemplified in the way animals become entirely dependent on their environment. Pet animals become dependent on their owners and dogs have been known to die when their masters have died; we are told not to feed wild birds throughout the year because when we go on holiday the young birds, dependent on the food provided by us, just die. When we talk about family standards of behaviour, which
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FACING UP TO REALITY now seem to be called 'value judgements' we find that they differ between races and classes. We should not be surprised at this difference because value judgements depend on the way each of us pictures the world and these pictures depend on our genetic make up as discussed in an earlier chapter. There would seem to be sound reasons for supposing that the value judgements enforced in early childhood will prevail over those encountered in later life, but there is a more subtle and insidious form of conditioning to which we in this country have been subjected for the last forty years. We live, we are told, in a scientific age. That means we live in an age where everything is thought of in the form of pictures. We are obsessed with the things of our senses and television, that new opium of the people, is picture-based and can only present the world to us in picture form. To continue to attract our attention it must be forever producing new sensations of sight for our entertainment and the volume of its output must tax its producers to their uttermost. No wonder they fall back on violence and sex; no wonder the output always departs from normality into fantasy; it has no other choice. Any serious talk on television, if it is to avoid 'talking heads,' has to revert to pictures of places and things and the content of the talk degenerates into a mere commentary on the pictures. Advertising reinforces the emphasis on pictures, luxuries we are tempted to possess, so that we may call them our own and indulge our senses in their possession. Politically, a just and happy world is presented as one in which not just a few, but everyone should possess all these things and more and more of them, as they become available. Am I exaggerating here? Is it not true that the 'good life' or a 'full life' consists for many people in the ability to indulge their senses to the full and that for many this is their sole reason for living, the only form of life they know? The countryman's statement "Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits," essential activities for a human being, are today rare indeed. They are rare because television has entered the homes of almost everyone and, despite the denials of the programme makers, television must have a profound effect on the outlook of the viewers. Children, in
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THE WHOLE MAN some homes, spend a disproportionate amount of time watching television and, perhaps it is the programmes that provide them with the value judgements which would otherwise be obtained from their parents. There is no participation in television viewing - no possibility of disputing or refuting a point of view smuggled into a programme as part of a theme, scene or play. For the compulsive viewer surely this stream of picture information will affect his attitude to life? Is there not, even at the subconscious level, a conditioning factor which tells him that this is what people are like, that this is how they act? No need to exert one's critical faculty, no need to grasp intuitively the meaning of the written word - it is all there in picture form as it might occur in the 'Beano' comic. Television is very different from the cinema of the 1930's. In those days, on leaving the warm cinema to go home, one met bright sunshine, icy winds or rain which soon blew away the effects of the film one had seen. But in the home there is no such rude awakening. Television is a powerful conditioning agent. What is the result of all this conditioning? Surely, it must swing the balance of our conscience away from intuition, away from self-consciousness, towards the private world of our senses. It will be remembered that we could only refute solipsism by reference to our intuition. Can it be that we are gradually becoming more solipsist in our attitude to life and that means, of course, in our attitude to other people? When we hear of the bestial acts that some people carry out, beating up old people for the few pounds they possess, or rape and murder, violence for the sake of pure greed, what do we say about such people? We excuse them by saying that they cannot help it, that they are mentally sick or even that they are the victims of a society which has conditioned them to perform such acts. We may add that they behaved like animals, but like animals without an animal's saving instincts. All these excuses are just another way of saying that such people are not conscious of what they are doing. Surely that must mean that such people have entered a solipsist state, a state where they consider other people as objects of their senses and lack the intuitive
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FACING UP TO REALITY capacity which, as we have seen, is the only antidote to such a condition. Let me give an example of what I mean. A man takes a little girl of three years old; he rapes her, ties her hands behind her back and throws her into a river to drown. We all say that such a man is 'sick,' but what do we mean by sick? Not that he is mentally irrational for his actions are perfectly rational given that he thinks of that little girl as an object of his senses. As we have seen, we can only refute the solipsist by intuition and what seems to have happened to that man is that he has conditioned himself, or allowed himself to become conditioned, to treat his senses as paramount, with the consequence that the impact of intuition on his activities has atrophied. He is a human being and intuition is still an element in his make-up but he has succeeded in suppressing its every prompting until his senses alone govern his actions. That man's conscience is non-effective because he has suppressed the only counterweight to the pull of his senses. Another example of the solipsist attitude occurs just where we would expect not to find it. Married couples and their off-spring form, if anything forms, a group which should be tightly knit together in their outlook and their relationship. One would expect, in such a relationship an intuitive understanding within that group. The original sexual attraction which brought the couple together should have been transformed into a relationship of affectionate intuitive understanding in which the minds of the couple should be as close as two minds can possibly be. Alas, one in three of such relationships now breaks down, or more likely, has never been formed. When we hear such expressions as "I have my own life to live" or "It's my life," we do not have to look very far for a solipsist attitude. The partner is considered as an object, a picture which once pleasured the solipsist and now no longer does so, or does not so to the same extent. Another indication of the drift away from an independent conscience-based approach to personal responsibility was the 'permissive society' of the sixties. Society in this sense is never the whole population of a country; it is always the particular group with which one happens to become
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THE WHOLE MAN associated. The 'permissive society' simply meant that any activity that is acceptable to the group must be considered as acceptable to an individual member of that group. One can joke about mugging being acceptable to muggers, rape to rapists, stealing to thieves, but it is sad to think that conformity to one's peer group, understandable in the case of young children who are very unsure of themselves, should be extended into later life. People who use the expression "Everyone does it" as a justification for an act which they themselves have some doubt about, are surrendering their individuality to a herd instinct. A herd, or mob, is often seized by a sort of frenzy and jointly carries out acts which, as individuals, would never be contemplated. One might be tempted to think that at least a herd cannot be thought of as solipsist, until it is realised that the herd or gang is thought of as my herd, my gang, by every member in it. I am not suggesting that the media approve of this solipsist attitude; they simply report it as something that is happening, but that itself is supportive conditioning. One can have some sympathy with the need to capture the largest possible audiences even if that means pandering to the lowest common intelligence quotient, but long gone are the days when broadcasting aspired to raise the standards of the populace! At this point let us consider what we mean by an individual and what we mean by personal identity. All living things are coherent entities by which we mean that they are self-contained organisms that sustain their existence by feeding off their environment. What organises the organism is a great mystery. We do not know how each cell knows how to form fingernails in one part of the body, brain cells in the head and secrete bones from the calcium it ingests and lay it down in a specific pattern which is common to each species. If we did know the organising system we would have gone a long way towards solving the problem of cancer which consists of rogue cells which refuse to be organised. In some primitive organisms, if we cut off a part of that organism, the remaining cells will split and reform the missing part. When we cut ourselves, the cells set to work
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FACING UP TO REALITY and repair the cut. The cells and the organisms are just our pictures of course, and we can be quite sure, as we have discussed earlier, that they do not actually exist as we picture them. We are faced not just with the problem of what organises the organism, but what the living thing actually is that presents itself to our senses as an organism. The whole question is a very ancient problem which has puzzled philosophers for a very long time. In the 4th century B.C., Plato conceived the idea of 'souls' with the soul as a sort of insert into the body from which we get the phrase 'Body and Soul' to describe the whole human being. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, expanded the concept of soul in an attempt to explain what organises the organism. All living things, according to Aristotle, consist of form and matter. A tree, to take an example, has a certain form which we recognise as a tree; it is composed of matter. (This goes no farther, of course, than recognizing that living things can be categorised into groups according to their form). Aristotle went on to categorise all living things into three forms: vegetable, animal and human. Vegetable forms have no senses, so he called that form 'insentient'; animals have senses, so he called that form 'sentient' and human beings have senses and some other factor which animals do not possess, so he called the human form 'intellectual.' There are different kinds of vegetable and animal forms, so he used the word 'soul' to distinguish them. A soul then, for Aristotle, is the form of the body. A cabbage is an insentient cabbage soul; a tree an insentient tree soul; a dog, a sentient dog soul; a human being an intellectual soul. This concept, that a soul is the form of the body, is why we use the expressions 'poor little soul'; 'he is a simple soul'; 'that valient soul...' When someone says "I do not believe I have a soul" he must be using the word in its Platonic sense, for he cannot mean that he is formless. All living things are changing their form throughout their lives. They grow to a certain size, remain at that size and then begin to deteriorate or age, then die. If we accept Aristotle's concept of soul, or something very
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THE WHOLE MAN like it, then we cannot escape the conclusion that the form of the body, its growth and death which we picture through our senses, are just analogies for changes in the soul. Our actions, our outlook even the direction of our thoughts can affect our souls, our forms, and mould us into the people we are. We can choose to become a Hitler or a St. Francis of Assisi, a Stalin or a Mother Teresa, and the nature of an individual soul triggers off the picture presented to others. "He has a depraved look about him," "a shifty look." This is not, however, always so. A confidence trickster moulds his soul to present to our senses a deceptive picture and it is only through intuition that we can unmask him. The very word 'unmask' is descriptive because 'personality' is derived from the Latin word 'persona' which means a mask. When we talk about 'personality' or 'attitude of mind,' Aristotle would remind us that what we are talking about is 'soul,' the form of the body. It is a pity that Plato and Aristotle used the same word 'soul' for such different concepts and the continued use of that word adds to the confusion. Let us at least make sure when we use the word 'soul' that it is used and understood in the sense intended. Once it was realised that we have an element in our make-up that is outside time, the question of life after death had to be considered. Death is very much part of the sequence of events, even if it is the last item in that sequence. Intuition, being outside time is outside any sequence and cannot be 'caught up' in death. For Plato this element was the soul which simply left the body at death, for Descartes the ghost which abandoned its machine, for Aquinas who based his philosophy on Aristotle, a change of form such as we see when a chrysalis changes into a butterfly. Today we have great difficulty defining what we mean by death. Does the heart stop beating because we are dead or are we dead because the heart has stopped beating? Life support machines supplying oxygen to the organism can prolong 'life' almost indefinitely but eventually that 'life' must be pronounced 'dead' as a matter of nice judgement.
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FACING UP TO REALITY

What, then, constitutes a whole man? Rather we should ask what makes a man whole. We can only conclude that wholeness consists in a proper balance between instinct, senses and intuition, surely with a preponderance of emphasis on intuition, the element which distinguishes us from the animals. These days, our obsession with the things of the senses, with the pleasures, the comforts, the many and varied benefits we enjoy through our senses would seem to promote an unhealthy balance in the human being. We are in danger of becoming dependent on those benefits, even if we have not already become dependent on them. The rapidity with which the individual modern man resorts to acts of violence when his expectations are disappointed contrasts unfavourably with the self-discipline which was everywhere apparent during the terrible hardships of the nineteen thirties. Modern man has dispensed with any idea of 'going without' this, that or the other. Instead, he expects his desires to be instantly met and his attitude to the things of the senses becomes obsessive. Is he in danger of losing, by default, the very faculty that constitutes his humanity, that differentiates him from the animals? Animals can have no knowledge of good or evil, of right or wrong, for their behaviour is determined by instinct and senses and they have no means of looking objectively at their behaviour in the light of some transcendent Absolute. It is, I think, altogether understandable that a human being, whose intuition has atrophied and who is at the mercy of instinct and senses, will have no awareness of good and evil, of right and wrong in the ordinary meaning of such words. Acts which are profitable to him or satisfy his desires will be considered 'good' and acts which result in his being found out will be considered 'bad'; acts which advantage him will be 'good', acts which disadvantage him will be 'bad'. One can make all sorts of rules such as 'Do as you would be done by' or 'Such behaviour is unacceptable' or 'Do nothing that will adversely affect other people.' Such pleadings are seen as mere bleating designed to deflect the subject from his desires and the word 'sin' is totally meaningless.
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THE WHOLE MAN How, then, is the intuitive faculty, the ability to look objectively at our subjectivity to be nourished? How is it to be stretched and developed? If the things of the senses are the proper concern of science, then intuition is the concern of religion. It is only through intuition that we can grasp the Reality that underlies our existence and through that Reality, come to an awareness of what we mean by Truth.

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CHAPTER 6

WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE

When we talk about the 'Real World' or 'Facing up to Reality' - what do we mean? Unless we are thoroughgoing naive realists we adhere to the dictionary1 definition of reality as 'that which underlies the appearance' of things. By Reality we mean the ultimate something that is behind all our perceptions of the external world and, indeed, of ourselves. And so we can think of Reality as existing of itself and not being conjured up by another thing. Reality is the one thing that IS. We say 'one thing' because if there were two or more things then we could postulate a 'one thing' which underlies those 'two things.' But we cannot go beyond one thing for that would be nothing, and we instinctively reject the idea that something can come from nothing - one, as it were, is as far as we can get. In astronomy the ultimate something is thought to be the dense lump that existed before the 'big bang' and that is as far as astronomy can get. As we have seen, when there is only one thing, that thing must be outside time and that is the limit to which science has restricted itself. In an earlier chapter it was remarked that scientific investigation is always striving to discover that one source

1 Concise Oxford Dictionary.

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FACING UP TO REALITY which would explain the many unconnected relationships which we deduce through our senses. That is the end and ultimate goal of pure science - a formula from which all other formulae describing disparate functions could be deduced. Its discovery would mean that instead of having different disciplines, such as biology and physics, there would be one discipline which would embrace them all. This source would account for everything that we see about us. Einstein, after completing his General Relativity Theory, set to work in an attempt to take one more step on the road to unification. The so-called 'inverse square law' expressed in the formula F = Kab/d2 describes the field force of gravity, electric charges and magnetism. All three are quite different forces, yet all three present the same mathematical picture. Because the picture is the same, it is thought that there must be some link between the forces - that gravity, electric charges and magnetism are just three manifestations of some other, unknown force. He did not, however, succeed in his quest. An example of two separate disciplines maintaining views that are on the surface contradictory, is found in the biological view that evolution is a process in which matter is progressively becoming more and more complex - an animal is more complex than a plant, a human being is more complex than an animal; at every stage some factor has been added. This process of increasing complexity is the basis on which evolution rests. Physicists, however, maintain that the principle of entropy is progressive and that decreasing, not increasing complexity will continue until entropy is complete - we referred to this problem very briefly in Chapter 3. The compromise solution is that increasing complexity takes place in some areas such as living things and entropy in the other areas and we have, perhaps, reached the maximum complexity possible in the form of a human being. From now on, however, entropy will universally prevail. In other words, we have reached the top of the hill where evolution is concerned and we must now expect to go downhill all the way to oblivion in the form of maximum entropy. Clearly, a single unifying force which could explain both evolution - how increasing complexity is brought about 50

WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE and at the same time account for decreasing complexity, would be a great advance for science and would be a merger between biology and physics. The search for a single unifying source which will explain everything we see about us, will continue although money is short and people prefer to spend it on technology which produces things, rather than expend it on research. What sort of a source does science expect to discover if, in fact it ever achieves that end? It would be an entity, perhaps expressed in the form of a mathematical formula from which every thing in the universe and every activity could be deduced. Such unification is the aim and driving force of modern science. It might be termed reality, probably with a capital R. It would, however, fall short of the definition that 'reality exists of itself and is not conjured up by another thing' because it would have been conjured up by human senses. We now move to a different viewpoint of what reality really is. The Jews are a highly intelligent and intuitive race and they have maintained their racial characteristics throughout nearly three thousand years by insisting on strict marriage laws which prohibit inter-marriage with other races. Three thousand years ago, one particular Jew named Moses predated the scientists in his realisation that there must be one source to explain the universe, but his realisation came through his intuition and not through his senses. If you have a Bible handy, preferably a modern translation, and you look at the first part called The Old Testament, you will find that it is a rather muddled collection of folk memories, genealogical lists, prophecies, laws and the history of that extraordinary nation. If you turn to Exodus, Chapter 3, you will find an account of how Moses came to the realisation that there must be one source for an explanation of the world around us. Let us look at it, remembering that Hebrews frequently use the conversational style to express themselves. Verses 2 to 5 record what we would describe as a mystical experience which he pictures as
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FACING UP TO REALITY a flaming bush which is not itself the source of the flame. In verse 6 he recognizes the importance of his experience to the Jewish race. In verses 7 to 10 he realizes that he must lead the Jews into new ways and to do that he must change their environment. In verses 11 and 12 he doubts his ability for the task but accepts that he must do it. In verse 13 he wonders how he can explain this burst of consciousness to his fellow Jews. What shall he call it? (In Jewish tradition you could not grapple intellectually with something that you could not name; to name something gave you some control over it). In verse 14 we come up against the difficulty of translating into English the Hebrew 'EHYEH ASHER EHYEH,' possibly 'I am that I am' although the meaning of this text is uncertain. However, Moses is clearly getting somewhere in his soliloquy. In verse 15 he finally arrives at 'Yahweh'1 which, if we take the usual translation as the third person singular of the verb 'to be', we arrive at 'He, she or it that is' or 'that which is', to avoid the difficulty of the pronouns and assuage the wrath of the sexists. There you have it, 'that which is' - the definition of Reality. Again, in the first verse of Genesis we find the statement that the ultimate source of the universe is Yahweh - thought of as one, eternally living or, in the words we would use, outside time. A remarkable grasp of the concept of Reality coming, as it does, before the eruption of Greek thought and long before science came to the same conclusion. The scientific concept falls short of the definition because it is anthropomorphic and analogical; the intuitive definition falls short because it has to be expressed in human words. The veridical experience, because it is 'given', avoids anthropomorphism but in the description or communication to others, anthropomorphism cannot be avoided. Nevertheless, this how gives us a better understanding of what real reality must really be like, although we cannot grasp it completely.

1 Note the use of the first person singular of this controversial Hebrew verb in John 8-58.

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WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE Through our senses we picture it as the source of our existence, though something which is much lower in complexity and consequently something that we look down on. The source is an 'it', an abstraction; we, on the other hand, are persons, we have minds. The intuitive concept - by no means unique to Moses - is that of pure Mind. That Mind we must look up to, for pure Mind is not cluttered up by instincts and the things of the five senses as human minds must be, being just a pale reflection of pure Mind. Why Mind? Because mind is the highest faculty we possess; beyond that, like the astronomers, we cannot go. Mind, as we have seen, is outside the ambit which science has set itself; if all verification must be sense based, we can hardly expect it to retain mind in any conclusion that it may reach, although mind is necessary to reach that conclusion. Mind, as far as science is concerned, is deliberately filtered out of the end result because mind is outside the ambit of science. In the same way, we find that the things of the five senses are filtered out in the intuitive approach. It is all very well for those who have received a veridical or mystical experience to be quite convinced by their experience that the source of all existence is pure Mind; they may very well be right, but for those who have not, such a revelation is entirely outside anything they have experienced - such an approach is difficult to understand and, possibly, to accept. It will be useful, therefore, to consider what the two approaches have in common. Both are considered as Reality - a single entity which exists of itself and is not conjured up by another thing. In both cases, by definition, only one of such a thing can exist; it cannot form part of a sequence of events and must be outside time. If we ask the question "What came before Reality?" the word 'before' must mean 'in time' and the question is meaningless. In both approaches the source can be considered 'good' in the sense of being 'good for you'. If you depart very greatly from the limits set by this Source you will court disaster. For instance, you must breathe, you must eat, you must conform to all the strictures that make life possible, for to depart from
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FACING UP TO REALITY them will end in disaster. This very Source is what makes life at all possible and that source we call God. And so, at long last, we arrive at the conclusion that the existence of Reality, or what we call God, is not in dispute; where we differ is the nature of Reality, although we all agree it must be outside time and is good for us. Let us, at this stage, rid ourselves of a fallacy which could only survive in a climate which encourages the belief that all reality and truth reside in the pictures presented to us by our senses and designated the scientific age - I refer to the fallacy of the 'God of the gaps.' In this, all knowledge is thought of as a gigantic jig-saw puzzle and scientists as filling in the pieces. God consists of the gaps in this puzzle and as more pieces are filled in, there is less and less room for God. When the puzzle has been completed, there will be no room and therefore no need for God. As we have seen, however, there are two jig-saw puzzles, the one concerned with our senses and the other with our intuition. In the one being filled in by the scientists, the puzzle will not be complete until all the pieces are fitted together and then, and only then, the picture will emerge of the source of our existence as seen through our human senses and this, by its nature, will be an analogy. The other puzzle, being filled in by the theologians, if ever completed, will be a picture of the source of our existence as seen through our intuition and this will be anthropomorphic. Neither, for the reasons we have discussed, will be a true picture, because we cannot avoid anthropomorphism or analogies. Yet, as we have seen, there are points on which both pictures agree and the disagreements are concerned with the nature of that source rather than its existence. When someone says "I do not believe in God" he does not usually mean he does not believe in the source we have discussed, that is, in Reality. He usually means that he does not believe in the picture that he has come to associate with the word God. He does not believe that God is a person, or, more especially, he does not believe that God is an old man with a white beard who sheds tears over our follies and sins. He may, these days, not believe in 'sin' at all, because, as the most complex and therefore the highest known beings in the
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WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE universe, we humans cannot 'sin' - there is nothing higher for us to 'sin' against, except, perhaps, one another. When the man in the street thinks in such terms we must not blame him; all blame attaches to those theologians who have dressed up the picture of God in such anthropomorphic clothes. But when we say we can blame the theologians, are we being entirely fair? How many people in England today have read many books written by theologians? How many people have read even one book written by a theologian who would be considered orthodox by his fellow theologians? I am suggesting that the man in the street has gained any knowledge he may have of the concept 'God' either from his parents at a young age or, possibly, from Sunday School which he ceased to attend at the age of 11 years old and that his knowledge is that appropriate to an 11 year old. Nor, often, are his parents in any better case. It used to be considered that politics and religion should not be discussed in polite society; religion is the sole survivor of that stricture and one cannot help but think that the reason must be the embarrassment any discussion of the subject would cause when so many people are entirely ignorant of its fundamentals. The difficulty of defining what we mean by 'God' is that when you define anything, you limit it. If I define a ball as being round, that definition limits it to roundness; it cannot be square. As we can put no limits on God - how could we? we cannot define God; we can only attribute qualities. God is outside time, pure Mind, a transcendent entity that is the source of existence. We use the pronoun 'He' in sentences about God only because we have no other suitable pronoun; what would you suggest? 'It' refers to less complex creatures than human beings; we look down on them as inferior, but we look up to God. I suppose the measure of ignorance of the nature of God has reached its lowest point in the suggestion that God should be referred to as 'She'. God is not a person, has never been attributed personality at any stage of our understanding of 'his' being. (What other pronoun could I use? The translators of the Old Testament had the same problem although the Jews did think of a male as the superior being. Man, in Jewish thought, produced the seed
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FACING UP TO REALITY for procreation and woman the seed-bed.) May I use the pronoun 'He' in the future, on the clear understanding that although inappropriate, I can think of no other? To emphasise this, I will use a capital 'H' throughout. To the question "How can you prove that God exists?" the answer is that you cannot even prove that you exist; as we have seen, the solipsist has removed that possibility. Strictly speaking, the word 'prove' can only be used in mathematics where every item has been carefully defined - in Euclid for instance, where a point is defined as 'having position but no magnitude' and a line as a 'series of points' and so on. In law, we do not prove the guilt of a person; we 'find' him guilty on the evidence. But statements about the nature of God presuppose His existence because He cannot have a nature at all if He does not exist. St. Anselm, in the 12th century suggested that God should be thought of as 'something than which nothing greater can be thought.' The difficulty here is that 'greater' has so many different meanings. This is known as the ontological approach. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century produced his famous 'five ways' of considering the nature of God. In a short book such as this, it is impossible to do justice to their intellectual content. This is known as the cosmological approach. As we have seen, most important questions are not subject to a determinist solution. We can produce evidence; for instance a mystical experience which is entirely satisfactory for the recipient but does not produce certainty in the mind of others. We can quote authorities but these are only the opinions of learned people who differ amongst themselves. It is, in fact, a question of choice; one must use one's intuition but where that has been blunted by excessive dependance on the things of the five senses, choice becomes increasingly difficult. An atheist who has taken the trouble to inform himself about the question will often conclude that there is an existent entity to account for the universe but he will not admit that such an entity is Mind; he agrees in principle that God exists but disputes the nature that has been attributed
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WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE to Him, or rather, he would say, the nature that has commonly been attributed to the word God which, he believes, is an IT, not a HIM. He may even admit to a Deity who has set in motion the universe and has then abandoned it to work all by itself - that is Deism, but he is an a-theist. Theism is the concept that God is a Mind who continually upholds the universe by that Mind; if He relinquishes it, nothing would exist. The agnostic, on the other hand, according to the meaning of the word, is one who 'does not know.' He prides himself that he never makes up his mind until he is sure, and on this question, the existence of God, he is not sure. I think his attitude can be described in terms of awaiting more evidence, which is a process which goes on and on. He is usually a person who makes all sorts of decisions on far less important matters every day of the week, whether he is sure of the answer or not, but on this question he is an agnostic. Actually, he has made his choice, he has chosen not to choose. Why is the existence or otherwise of God an important matter? We saw earlier that the source of our existence, whatever it may be, is 'good for us.' The nature of that source must therefore play a vital part in what is good for us. We can choose to go along with it or to rebel against it; that is our privilege as human beings because we have been given choice. A closer understanding of God's nature brings us closer to the source of our existence and the closer to the source of our existence that we come, the more aware we shall be of what is good for us and what is not good for us. A closer relationship with God as Mind, should enable us to share, perhaps only a little, in the glory of conscious existence, limited by the extent to which we allow our minds to conform with that transcendent Mind.
**************

Returning now to the Old Testament, we find that Yahweh seems to have been in constant touch with the prophets and the writers of that collection of books. It would seem that
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FACING UP TO REALITY mystical experiences proliferate throughout the history of the Jewish race but I do not think we can accept that every reference to God speaking to the prophets can be attributed to a mystical experience by that prophet; the temptation to attribute every good idea (or what seemed to be a good idea) to Yahweh, would be very great indeed. How then, can we discriminate between genuine mystical experiences and pseudo experiences? I think the answer lies in the nature of the experience. If the experience transcends the natural pattern of the intellectual experience of the writers, then we can accept it as veridical; if it does not, then we must doubt it. "And God said Smite the Amalekites..." far too natural a human reaction to require a mystical experience to explain it! Again, we should not be led astray by the literal use of words in their modern meaning. When in the account of the flood, the narrator states that the whole earth was flooded, we should not, as many do, take the word 'earth' as meaning the whole globe. As far as the narrator is concerned, his world probably consisted of the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates where a great flood deposited six feet of silt. The animals in his world were few in number. I dare say he had never heard of an elephant, a tiger or a giraffe, any more than he had heard of Australia or America. No doubt many creatures found a refuge in the Ark before the flood and many who could swim or fly would treat it as a haven when the waters rose - quite enough, I am sure, to justify the narrator's remark that "...every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth..." and "every bird of every sort" went into the Ark. In the same way 'forty days and forty nights' always means 'a long time' rather than a specific length of time. There certainly was a great flood in that area; it is also recorded in Sumerian writings. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the prophets were frequently remarkable foretellers of events to come which one must expect from a highly intuitive race. It is therefore all the more surprising that the Jews had no concept of life after death - that idea came very late in their history and can be accounted for by the spread of Greek thought. The Greeks had grasped the concept of death being part of the
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WHAT REAL REALITY IS REALLY LIKE sequence of events, of time, and that consciousness and intuition are altogether outside them. The Jews, however, considered that adherence to the pattern of life which was laid down by Yahweh would enable them to flourish in this life and for their guidance Moses set down ten commandments 'on tablets of stone' i.e. they were meant to be permanent, and constitute to this day the guideline for civilised societies. The whole of the Jewish belief in the one God who was the source of their existence, and about whom they must learn if they were to conform to the pattern of life that was ordained by Yahweh, resulted in the formation of the unique culture that was both religious and practical in its outlook. The insistence that Yahweh must not be depicted in stone or metal, that no picture must be made of Yahweh, is unique because such a commandment ensures that Yahweh is not to be thought of in terms of the five senses - Yahweh is outside time and space. A remarkable culture, a remarkable people. When times were hard, they felt it was because they themselves had deviated from the pattern laid down by Yahweh - what the Victorians would call the Laws of Nature - and to do so brought inevitable hardship. Yet always present was the prediction, often in a confused form, that one day a Messiah would come who would lead them into becoming the first amongst the nations and who would be recognized as the greatest of all men. Can we not say that the Jews in the period we are discussing had achieved a balance between their senses and their intuition which resulted in a moral or ethical stance which is the basis of all civilisation? It is true that the balance between the two swung backwards and forwards with succeeding generations but on the whole a fairly equitable state was achieved. Their claim that they alone amongst the nations had recognized that the source of existence - Reality - was one, outside time and space and had to be obeyed if one would prosper in the long run is not a concept that needs to be defended. One may dispute the nature of Reality, but one cannot deny its existence, for all men recognize it in one form or another. Before we attempt to answer the question about the nature
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FACING UP TO REALITY of Reality, or God, should we not first answer the question posed at the beginning of this book - what am I? I have tried to show in earlier chapters that I possess two faculties in common with the animals: instinct and senses. To that extent I am an animal but what distinguishes me from the animals is that third faculty called intuition which is outside time and space. The word supernatural simply means 'over and above nature' and 'nature' refers to the things of the senses. That third faculty in my make-up is supernatural and I can therefore describe myself as a supernatural animal. It is because I am a supernatural animal that I have the ability to choose and it is as a supernatural animal that I must answer the question as to the nature of the source of my existence. Let us clarify that choice we must make, for it is an important choice if we are to conform to that which is 'good for us.' The difficulty for the atheist is that he must acknowledge that the source of our existence has at least the potential for the supernatural or he must explain away the supernatural altogether and that presents him with major difficulties. The theist, on the other hand, believes in a source, a Mind, which is itself supernatural and transmits to us, His most favoured creatures, an 'image or likeness' of Himself. That is the choice which faces each one of us. Not the existence of God but the nature of God as the source of our existence.

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CHAPTER 7

CHRISTIANITY

The second part of the Bible, called the New Testament, is concerned with the founder of Christianity, Jesus the Christ. The first four books, called the Gospels, are about what Jesus said and did; the next book, the Acts of the Apostles, who were his chosen confidants, describes how they put his teachings into practice. Then we have a series of letters written to various groups of his followers and, finally, the Book of Revelation is put into the New Testament right at the end. Let us, in this chapter, confine ourselves to the teaching of Jesus as set out in the four Gospels and leave for a later chapter the question of whether these books constitute a valid account of what really happened. First, however, it must be noted that Christianity is unique amongst the world religions in that it has no culture and no ethics or morals of its own. This statement may come as a surprise to those who are always talking about Christian culture and Christian morals or ethics; it is why studies comparing various religions break down when they come to consider Christianity, for comparative religious studies are mostly about culture and ethics. If, for instance, we examine Hinduism, we find that the cultural and religious beliefs are so intermingled that it is impossible to disentangle one strand from the other. For Jews and Moslems the same intertwining of culture and religion is present. Washing before a meal, not eating pork and, for Moslems, the
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FACING UP TO REALITY prohibition of alcohol, would appear to be cultural yet they are inextricably bound up with the religious practice. Christianity has no such cultural basis. It is practised all over the world with such different cultural backgrounds as a South Sea Island, the Lebanon, Russia, Ethiopia, India and China, as well as Europe. Christianity overlays the culture of the places it has reached but each of those cultures remains separate and distinct. In England, that most pagan of countries, we celebrate Christmas with Yule logs and wassailing as did the non-Christian Saxons, Easter with eggs and young chicks, as the harbingers of spring and fertility. The culture is there - look at the secular Christmas card and messages - but the Christian religion is not part of it, not woven into it, not inseparable from it. This has been so from the very beginning of Christianity and the obvious example of this is the Jewish requirement of circumcision, resisted as a cultural rather than a religious requirement. There are no specific Christian ethics. Jesus accepted the Jewish morals as sufficient for his purpose after pointing out the accretions and elaborations which successive generations of Jews had woven into them. Search as you will, you will find no ethic or moral teaching of Jesus that is not already part of the Jewish tradition. "Love your neighbour as yourself," sometimes quoted as the essence of the Christian faith, you will find in Leviticus 19-18. Jesus was asked which were the greatest of the Jewish commandments; his answer was to quote Deuteronomy 6-5 as the greatest (love God unconditionally) and Leviticus 19-18 as secondary to that (love your neighbour to the same extent that you love yourself). Even the teaching that Christian, as opposed to secular marriage is indissoluble is not given as a new teaching but is referred back to a time before Moses.1 What then, is Christianity all about if there is no Christian culture and no specific Christian ethics? The general feeling, in England at least, is that it is 'all about being kind to one another.' This feeling, if it is as widely shared as one suspects, would seem to indicate that Leviticus 19-18 has
1 Matt.19-8.

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CHRISTIANITY had more impact on 20th Century man than the whole of the New Testament and 2000 years of the teaching of the Christian Church! Yet even a cursory reading of the four Gospels cannot fail to draw the reader's attention to the fact that Jesus is always, very clearly and very deliberately, teaching the recognition of a new concept, a new human emphasis which he calls the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. What then, is this Kingdom, of what does it consist? We are told it is like this, like that, like a pearl of great worth, which if found is worth all our other possessions.1 We are told it is 'within you';2 that it is not of the world of Pilate and politics and powers;3 we are told that little children are of this kingdom,4 that we cannot enter it except as a little child ;5 we are told to pray 'Thy kingdom come... on earth as it is in heaven ;6 we are told that entry into his kingdom will give us eternal life. What have these statements got in common with one another? What are they all about? What is it that we possess and the animals do not, our most precious possession? What is within us, a part of our make-up that is not concerned with politics or power in this world? What do little children possess which we as adults have swamped with the things of the senses? What is pertaining to God and Heaven, that is outside time and, therefore, outside death? The answer surely is obvious. The Kingdom of Heaven, of God, cannot be other than the intuitive faculty. Do we really need to be told by Jesus that 'to them that have much, more shall be given, to those that have little even that which they have shall be taken away,'7 when the atrophy of consciousness, of intuitive understanding as we perceived in an earlier chapter, is all too obvious in our modern society? The clear Christian message is that man must subsume his
'Matt. 13-36. Lk. 17-21 3 Jhn. 18-36 4 Lk. 18-16 5 Lk. 18-17 6 Matt. 6-10 7 Matt. 13-12
2

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FACING UP TO REALITY senses and his instincts into his intuition and only when he has done this, if he has done this, if he can do this, will he enter the Kingdom. Most people are unhappy about quotations from the New Testament that are divorced from their context and it would appear that I have done just that; in a short book like this, I have no alternative, so I would ask the reader to read the four Gospels for himself, or, if he has not the time, then at least Mark's Gospel which is the shortest. When we turn to the person of Jesus, we find a man who could enter into the very minds of the individuals around him, who understood them better than they understood themselves, who knew what they wanted even before they themselves knew, who performed miracles and, after execution, rose from the dead to continue his teaching to those he had gathered around him. His life and works are so well known that all I will attempt to do is to comment on some salient points and attempt to correct some misconceptions and this I do with some temerity and no little humility. The first point I would emphasize is that Jesus is consciousness personified. At every stage we find that his instincts and senses are wholly subjugated to his intuition and that his intuition far surpasses anything human beings possess. Let us look at the miracles he performed - a stumbling block for many. Jesus performed none of those miracles which are attributed to the mythical gods; in fact his acts are those things which we ourselves do. We turn water into wine, we cure the sick; we cannot, at present, cure schizophrenics split personalities - which he frequently did, although we may be able to do so in the future. To a small extent we are able to alleviate, if not cure, some mental disorders; he cured them. We can feed 5,000 and frequently do. We can bring people who have died back from the dead but we have to be quick about it. Why, then, do we call his acts miracles? The answer seems to be that where we have to perform a series of actions to bring about the results, Jesus did them instantly. We perform these acts within time, by a sequence of actions; Jesus did them immediately, that is, outside time. It is the 'out of sequence' nature of the miracles which
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CHRISTIANITY puzzles us. In an earlier chapter we referred to the absence of the eternal present in our sense based world. It is the eternal present that Jesus is always drawing to our attention. What puzzles us about the miracles is not the acts themselves but the fact that they do not conform to the sequence of events to which we have become conditioned through our senses. How, we say, can food for thousands come out of a few loaves and fishes? How, after it has been consumed can there remain a far greater amount than was originally there? That is, I suggest, the way we view that particular act of Jesus. Our time-based conditioning would want to reverse the process - baskets of food first, then a few loaves and fishes left over. Jesus is demonstrating to us, as human beings, that there is no sequence of events in the Kingdom of Heaven - all is eternally present. We may vaguely grasp the concept but it is so foreign to the experience of our senses that we have difficulty in understanding its consequences. The 'eternally present' is fundamental to the Christian faith and can be found, to some extent, in all religions. At the very beginning of his ministry Jesus had told his twelve Apostles, his chosen confidential followers, that he was not going to conform to the Jewish idea of how a Messiah should act, however tempting that picture might be to a Jew brought up in the Rabbinic tradition. You can read about that statement in Matthew 4.1 to 10 or Luke 4.1 to 13 which affirm that he will not use his powers to achieve any of the three attributes which, at that time, the Jews had come to expect of a Messiah. What the Jews had been certain they had been promised was a powerful figure whom everyone would have no choice but to obey. Jesus specifically repudiated the concept. He would not use his powers in such a manner; individual human beings must be free to exercise their God-given choice, must be free to choose, which, as we have seen, can only be exercised through our intuition, our extra-space-time faculty which we possess as individuals. Jesus is not concerned with mankind in general, with the good of the community as a whole; his sole concern is with the individual who alone can decide whether he wishes to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but is quite free to choose otherwise. What then, of hell-fire and eternal damnation?
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FACING UP TO REALITY Choice becomes a farce if we are to be punished for choosing wrongly, reminiscent of Henry Ford's dictum that "you can have any colour of car you like, so long as it is black." If you read the four Gospels carefully, you will find that there is no teaching that man has an immortal soul, that all men have life after death. When the Greeks recognized that human beings have a faculty that is outside time, they assumed that this faculty was dominant and could not atrophy. This concept gave rise to the idea of inevitable human immortality, but that is not the Christian concept. The teaching of Jesus is rather in the opposite direction, that it is potential, rather than inevitable; that it is impossible, humanly speaking, for man to achieve eternal life without help from God through Jesus. I will give just the one example of that teaching and that because it is so well known. "Whoever believes in him (Jesus) shall not perish but have eternal life."1 It is implicit in this statement that those who do not believe in his teaching do perish and do not have eternal life and if one does not have eternal life one cannot suffer eternal hellfire; one can only suffer damnation in this world, the world of our senses and that is certainly not eternal. The story of Dives the rich man and Lazarus2 in no way contradicts this teaching. Faced with the blinding light of Heaven, it is inevitable that faithful Christians will have to undergo a painful assimilation to their new situation. The whole point of the story is found in the sentence "Send Lazarus..." Clearly, Dives has not yet adapted to the changed circumstances; he is undergoing a sort of purgation. You will find that every reference to the Kingdom and to eternal life in the Gospels is conditional on belief in the teaching of Jesus. The entry of eternal damnation into the Christian religion is obscure in origin and one cannot help thinking that Dante has much to answer for. There is no doubt that much was
2

'Jhn3-15, 16 Lk. 16-13/31

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CHRISTIANITY made of it in the late middle ages and many a Reformer based his reputation for a stirring sermon on the horrors of hell. Perhaps it arose from a misreading of a passage in Mark. 1 The word 'Hell' is used to translate both the Hebrew words 'Sheol' and 'Gehenna.' Sheol means underground and Gehenna was a rubbish tip outside Jerusalem. Now, a rubbish tip, particularly near a city, is often a place of continuous fires and is everlastingly inhabited by worms and maggots. That is what happens to the whole person who dies (unless he has achieved eternal life) when he is cremated or buried and in this passage Jesus is pointing out that it is better to enter the Kingdom of Heaven maimed than just to die and end up being cremated or eaten by worms. You will find the same expression in Isaiah 66-24. The message that Jesus brings to us is not that we should love one another, be kind to one another, look after one another; all of that was already part and parcel of the Jewish Faith - it needed no special messenger to spell it out afresh. Indeed, if that had been his message he would have gone unremarked in history. He was not put to death because he taught what was already part of the Jewish law; he was put to death because he claimed divine authority for his teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven.2 When Pilate, in effect, asked Jesus what he was about, he answered3 "To this end was I born and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the Truth." When Pilate asked "What is truth?" Jesus made no answer and I cannot help thinking that was because he was hard put to keep a straight face, for here was a pragmatic Roman aping a Greek philosopher to a member of the Jewish race which had decided that question a long time ago. To bear witness' means to demonstrate to us through our senses the truth of his message. That message was that entry into the Kingdom, resulting from a closer relationship with God, would result in eternal life - the state of the eternally present. This truth was demonstrated to our senses by means of parables or word pictures, miracles
'Mk. 9-48 Matt. 26-63/66 3 Jhn. 18-37,38
2

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FACING UP TO REALITY which transcended our concept of time and finally by a demonstration that it is possible for human beings to survive death - that the supernatural element in our make-up can overcome the dominance which our senses attribute to matter. This last point is driven home with stunning effect. All our previous convictions about the nature of matter are, it would appear, deliberately contradicted. The tomb is empty; the resurrected Jesus is not immediately recognizable; he eats food. None of these things are expected, yet they are demonstrated to his disciples. "We saw him, we touched him" they tell us. St. Paul, who came rather late on the scene but questioned the eye-witnesses, states categorically that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then our Christian faith is in vain. We cannot but agree with him, for as we have seen, there are no Christian ethics, no morals or culture to fall back upon. The urge to provide all people with a more comfortable life, to banish poverty, to remove disease and pain, all are highly desirable objects in themselves. But they have little to do with entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. The palliative nature of a comfortable life is illustrated in the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man 1 whose possessions were such a source of distraction to him. Jesus remarks that it was humanly impossible for such a man to enter the Kingdom, even though he had always led a religious life. The Apostles, in despair, ask who then can enter the Kingdom. Jesus tells them that through God all things are possible. Christianity does not turn out to be some sort of comforting religion with rewards all along the way, more like labouring all one's life at an impossible task, climbing up a hill, only to slip back down again! Indeed, Jesus tells us that unless we are baptised by water and the Spirit we cannot enter the Kingdom at all.2 Again, he tells us,3unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood there is no life in us - no life that is, in his Kingdom. That really shocked his followers and they left him in
'Matt. 19-16/26 Jhn. 3-5 3 Jhn. 6-53
2

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CHRISTIANITY droves. Even his chosen Apostles only stayed with him because, as they told him "We have nowhere else to go."1 It was not until the last possible moment that he told them "This is my body - this is my blood"2and they vaguely understood his meaning. All this seems very strange and hard to believe. "Through God, all things are possible". Consciousness is a mystery, enhanced consciousness a greater mystery.
**************

In one chapter I can only pick out those points of the teaching of Jesus which are relevant to the theme of this book. But there is one additional point which seems to require discussion. I refer to the teaching of Jesus that God is a loving God and is yet Almighty. That teaching raises the point that a loving God would not allow the suffering in the world which is so apparent to us all. If He were a loving God, He would not allow it; if He cannot prevent it, He is not Almighty, - a loving God who is powerless or an Almighty God who does not care, the one or the other, but not both. We can take the fact that God is Almighty for granted; it is inherent in His nature. It is the loving God that appears to be the problem. As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures in the universe who have been given the gift of choice. We do not have to believe that God is Mind, we do not have to believe in Jesus; we have choice in our belief in these matters. Once it is accepted that the world is a playpen in which we are to exercise that choice, many difficulties vanish. Here on earth, if we offend, each of us is held responsible for his choice of actions, in our Courts of Law and there can be little doubt that it is the choices we make which-determine the sort of people we become. I maintain that it is the result of the exercise of that choice which produces suffering. The statement that the sins - or choices - of the fathers are visited on the sons even to the seventh generation is genetically sound. When you choose
2

'Jhn. 6-68 Matt. 26-26/28

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FACING UP TO REALITY your spouse, you are laying down the seeds of possible genetic disorders in your descendants. Do not plead that you do not know what will result; if you did know (perhaps through a genetic scan) that the union would produce, or might produce the possibility of genetic disorders in, say, the fourth generation, you could still choose to go ahead with that union. AIDS is the result of perverted or promiscuous sex which has been condemned by every prophet and moral teacher as being not 'good for us.' We were warned, but we chose otherwise. The inhabitants of Pompeii had warning of a volcanic eruption a year before the final end; they chose to return. People choose to live in San Francisco, choose to travel by train, by plane, by car. Every bit of suffering we experience, I maintain, can be traced to human choice, somewhere, at some time, by others or by ourselves. But surely, it is said, a loving God could have so arranged things that we couldn't suffer, even if that meant that we were deprived of choice, sometimes or very often. Of course that would be possible for God, although choice that is curtailed is no choice at all. God could have created a world for us to live in that was another heaven - no suffering, no death, just pure unending joy. But what would be the object of such a world? Why not be born straight into Heaven? We begin to perceive, even if faintly, the reason for our existence on this earth. We are not wanted in Heaven if we ourselves do not wish to enter there. We can choose, in this playpen, our world, either Heaven or oblivion, a free choice that a loving God has given us. For those who choose oblivion, then, even then, in the words of Jesus "They have their reward" - three score years and ten in a not altogether unpleasant world. A loving God. What do we mean by the phrase? It is well worth discussing, because the word 'love' in English has so many quite different meanings. We talk about 'being in love,' 'brotherly love,' 'making love,' a 'love of fair play,' a 'labour of love'. The same word with such different meanings changes in the context in which it is used. The Greek of the New Testament has a very limited vocabulary and the word frequently used there which we translate into the word 'love' is AGAPE. Why modern translators use such
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CHRISTIANITY a loose word as 'love' for 'agape' which confuses rather than clarifies the meaning, is hard to understand, but let us take two examples where the root word 'AGAPE' occurs: 'God is love' and 'love your enemies'. We can approach the meaning of AGAPE by eliminating any use of the word 'love' when it is clearly inapplicable and the first elimination we can make is that of any erotic1 meaning which clearly would not apply in the examples we have taken. The next step is to eliminate all emotional overtones to the use of the word, for emotion is defined 2 as 'agitation of mind' and we cannot conceive of God having an agitation of mind, which is a purely human condition. Having eliminated sex and emotion, how then can we translate AGAPE? 'Warm affection?' 'Generous concern for?' I think it goes deeper than that. The meaning which seems to satisfy all uses of the word is 'affectionate intuitive understanding'. The use of the original word AGAPE eliminates the tearful eye, the quivering lip, the choked voice which the word 'love' so often conjures up. From the Gospels you would never describe Jesus as an emotional figure and the description of God which he gives us, that of a Father would not, to Jewish ears, be the doting parent that some represent Him to be today. To Jewish ears the word Father would conjure up the picture of an all-powerful, just, yet truly compassionate figure; a merciful God, whose affectionate understanding cuts right through the pretensions and excuses with which we cocoon our actions, yet recognizes our handicaps and inadequacies. God's compassion for us appears to be matched to our awareness of our own sinfulness and Jesus tells us that there is 'Joy in Heaven over the repentance of even one sinner'.3 The word repentance is very much in evidence in his teaching and although God's compassion for sinners is stressed, a necessary condition seems to be an abhorrence of the sin in question. Compassion would seem to be conditional on repentance. The idea that one can do as one likes and a loving God will
'Derived from the Greek word 'Eros' Concise Oxford Dictionary 3 Luke 15-7
2

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FACING UP TO REALITY welcome one with open arms is not the teaching of Jesus. A God that is merciful to those who turn to Him and grants merciful oblivion to those who choose otherwise is, I think, the picture which we get from the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels.

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CHAPTER 8

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

In one chapter it is impossible to do more than comment on those aspects of the Church which are relevant to the theme of this book. To recapitulate, we have accepted as axiomatic that Truth is perceived when the human mind coincides with Reality and that Reality underlies the appearances of things. We have discussed the three sources of knowledge available to human beings which we have called instinct, senses and intuition. Instinct and senses we share with animals, but what differentiates man from the animals is the possession of a faculty we have called intuition. I have avoided using the word 'spiritual' because like the word 'love' it has so many different meanings that its use, particularly by translators of the Gospels and some theologians, produces confusion rather than clarity. We found that our senses presented us with a series of pictures which science indicates appear to regress to a single factor - itself an analogical picture of the source of our existence. Our examination of intuition revealed a faculty outside time which consists of a state called the 'eternal present' which Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven. The eternal present, as we have seen, is entirely absent from our senses because all sense data are past when they are perceived. To return now to the subject of this chapter, the word Church is derived from the Greek word 'Ekklesia' which means a group of people. The Christian Church simply means that group of people who accept and practise the
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FACING UP TO REALITY teaching of Christ and who aspire to the Kingdom of Heaven. They are expected to be the leaven in the lump, the salt in the stew of the generality of mankind. This concept is very much in line with the Jewish idea of the Chosen Race with the difference that the Christian group or church is open to all who are called to enter it. The Church, then, comprises those Apostles chosen by Jesus now greatly increased in numbers and called Bishops, those crowds of people who listened to him, now greatly increased in numbers and called Faithful Christians, some living, some dead. All are one in the Kingdom of Heaven because although you join the Church at Baptism you do not, if faithful, leave it at death. This ever increasing body of Faithful Christians is called the Mystical Body of Christ. It is pictured as a living Body, each individual forming one cell in that Body with Christ as its Head. Each cell carries out its individual function in that Body, some a lowly function, some a more important function but all a necessary function because that Body is a living Body. We get this concept of the Body of Christ from the statement by Jesus "That which you do to the least of these, my brothers, you do to me".1 That which you do to one Christian, you do to all. The word 'brother' always denotes a special relationship. The unity of the Church does not lie in any human organisation; it consists in the one-ness of the eternally present. It is, in fact, one through Jesus in God. We will now confine this chapter to those activities and beliefs of the Church which relate directly to the theme of this book and which are the fundamental beliefs of all faithful Christians. Those beliefs are: (a) That we can form a relationship with God through prayer. That belief Christians hold in common with all monotheistic believers. That the New Testament gives an accurate and reliable account of the events it relates.

(b)

'Matt. 25-40

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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

(c) The divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity. (d) The necessity of Baptism and Communion because they are both commands of Jesus prefaced by the word "unless," although some denominations may interpret them in different ways. (e) It is expected that faithful Christians will meet in corporate worship at regular intervals. Let us examine these beliefs in some detail. (a) With prayer we begin, as Jesus taught us, to use words to form that relationship with God. Then, as we progress, the words become subsumed into an intuitive relationship, the words of no importance except, perhaps, to ourselves. Prayer is the intuitive reaching out of an individual mind to THE MIND. That is how the relationship is formed and that is how it progresses. What we try for, aim for, in our prayerlife is a relationship with God which is continuous and unceasing at the intuitive level, even though our senses may be otherwise engaged. Prayer is always answered although we may not, at first, recognize the response for what it is. Yet what do we mean when we say prayer is always answered? Let us take an extreme case, the case of those who were sent to concentration camps in the last war, were tortured, starved, and finally put to death in gas chambers. Let us assume that those people - mostly, but not all, Jews - prayed to God for deliverance from that horror. How, we may ask, were their prayers answered? They were incarcerated, we have to remember, by those in authority who chose to incarcerate them. That gift of choice will not be revoked by God however much it is abused. As in similar cases, God gives release, not from death, but from the horror and suffering connected with it. God may even inculcate a degree of intuitive understanding or 'agape' in the victim. This was apparent in the recent case of a father watching the death of his daughter killed by the I.R.A. who yet found it possible to forgive those who killed her. God may put
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FACING UP TO REALITY thoughts into human minds, produce circumstances where those thoughts apply, but the gift of choice is never withdrawn. Other aspects of prayer which are often misunderstood are the prayers which many offer for the Faithful Departed. How, some ask, can those prayers be answered when the person is already dead? As there is no past or future in the Kingdom of Heaven, those prayers, like all prayers, are outside time. To use an analogy, one can say that God takes into consideration all the prayers that have been said or will ever be said in all eternity. In the same way some Christians ask those long dead saints, relatives or friends, to pray for them. It all seems quite foolish in the context of our timeconditioned world, but we are discussing the Kingdom of Heaven. (b) To ensure that the teaching of Jesus did not become distorted, the early Church produced a written account of what he said and did, which we call the New Testament. Let us examine how it came into existence. It has been calculated that the teachings of Jesus that we get in the Gospels could not have taken up more than six months including travelling time; yet, as far as we can calculate, he spent three years on that teaching. There must, therefore, have been a considerable amount of repetition and the Apostles would come to know most of the parables and sayings by heart - one can almost see John nudging James and whispering "Here comes the one about..." much, I am sure, to the amusement of Jesus. The more outrageous of his announcements would also be remembered, just because they were so outrageous - not just to Jewish ears and these are the very statements we get in the Gospels. After the Ascension, when the resurrected Jesus ceased to be subject to our senses, the Apostles split up and spread over the civilised world, teaching as they travelled. But written accounts would be demanded for fuller circulation and notes would have been made by the Apostles' disciples, reflecting the needs and interests of each community. Briefly, Matthew's account seems to be directed at orthodox
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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Jews, Mark reflects the teaching of Peter; Luke, influenced by Paul, is directed to Gentiles and John to the Greeks. Very early on, the Church 'called in' these accounts by people who had questioned or been taught by eye-witnesses. That the Church made a good job of its selections you can see for yourself by reading some of the accounts which were rejected, called the New Testament Apocryphal writings. When you buy a Bible you get the Old Testament as well as the New. The two testaments are quite different in character; the Old Testament, as we have seen, is a collection of all sorts of material arranged in no particular order and comes in two versions, the Hebrew and the Septuagint.1 The New Testament purports to be an historical account of what happened and if it is to be fully understood, requires a knowledge of Jewish beliefs and customs described in the Old Testament. Some Bibles give a comprehensive crossreference by means of notes which the reader will find a help to greater understanding. It must not be thought, however, that this account of how the New Testament has come into existence has not been challenged or that alternatives have not be postulated. In the 19th Century, when the euphoria for science was in full swing, the Tubingen School of Church History in Germany began a study of the New Testament called 'source criticism' which attempted to discover a 'scientific way' in which the New Testament might have come about. As it was to be a scientific study it had to concern itself exclusively with sense data and that meant that everything that could not be accounted for by the senses must be eliminated. What was to be done about this great mass of material relating to the eternal present? True, the Apostles have given adequate testimony that they had seen, touched and heard the resurrected Jesus - all sense-data evidence - but this was not thought to be in accordance with the then greatly accepted
'Septuagint = LXX. Seventy is the Hebrew symbol for the Gentiles and is why the Greek version of the Old Testament is so-called. Luke, who was a Gentile, seems to be unaware of this symbol and makes the best he can of it in Luke 10-1. Perhaps the notes he was working from read in Hebrew "He sent them out two by two to LXX."

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FACING UP TO REALITY notions of how science works; unique events, for instance, must always be eliminated. It was assumed, therefore, that there must be another explanation and the theory that all such evidence could be considered as 'myth' (taken as pure invention and added at a later date) was postulated. Now, if you are going to add a pure invention to an account of an event which happened at a specified time, at a specified place and which caused considerable local interest, then you have to make sure that the pure invention is added after the eye-witnesses, who would refute it, are all dead. The original source, perhaps one account, can then be embellished and other accounts produced, based on that one embellished account, and so on. What is vital to this theory is the dating of the original documents, but these original documents we do not possess; we only have copies of them. That, the critics decided was how the New Testament came into being and, accordingly, they dated St. John's Gospel as the latest because it is the most detailed and assumed it to be written in A.D. 160. But 'source criticism' failed to explain many things, not least the very early spread of Christianity throughout the civilised world and when a fragment of a copy of John's Gospel turned up (it is in the John Rylands Museum in Manchester) which is dated at around A.D. 130, source criticism had entered a cul-de-sac. 'Form Criticism' then took over, based on the same assumptions but dating John's Gospel at A.D. 90. In 1947, however, we had the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated around the time of Jesus which used such 'in' expressions as 'Sons of Thunder' and the juxtaposition of 'light and darkness,' the very expressions used in John's Gospel. Coupled with this were the archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem, destroyed in A.D. 70, which confirmed many points in John's Gospel. Taken together, this meant that a very much earlier date had to be assigned to that Gospel. Another cul-de-sac, and the redactic approach has now taken over from 'Form Criticism.' As far as I can understand it, this consists in editing out all that is purely Jewish in the Gospels and then editing out all that the Church said about them. The residue, if any, will then produce, it is thought, 'the historical Jesus,' although
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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH whether whatever this tells us will be of any importance is another matter. It is, I think, quite useful and necessary that such academic exercises should be carried out, even if they do run into cul-de-sacs of their own making. Like all scientific theories they have to be modified or abandoned as new evidence appears and this has been very obvious in the 'myth' theories, where the dating of the Gospels was quite arbitrarily adjusted to suit the theory. What is astonishing and deplorable is that so many people have taken these speculative assumptions as fact. Perhaps this is because the very word 'scientific' has triggered off a conditioned reaction - like Pavlov's dogs! A different reaction, however, seems to be setting in and John Robinson (whose biblical scholarship, at least, no one doubts) has, in his last two books 'Redating the New Testament' and The Priority of John' assembled all the biblical evidence for dating. He finds that John's Gospel is as early as the others and that the whole of the New Testament was written within 40 years, or less than that, after the crucifixion - less than the timespan between the second world war and his date of writing. We have spent more time in discussing 'source' and 'form criticism' than is justified in a short book, but this has been done because so much mistaken emphasis has been accorded to them by the man in the street. (c) To avoid the distortions (called heresies) which began to accumulate, the early Church held Councils at which representatives from Christian communities could argue, frequently at great length, for or against a particular doctrine. The whole field of heresies was covered early on and one can readily state that there are no new heresies under the sun. All the heresies we hear of today are just the old ones which have been resuscitated. The two main Councils of the early Church were concerned with questions about the relationship of what Jesus called the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to God and the relationship of Jesus to God. The first question was considered at Nicaea and the second at Chalcedon. Let us
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FACING UP TO REALITY consider the second one first of all, because it is inherent in the first question. We could approach the relationship of Jesus to God from many directions but let us here take just one. When Philip asked Jesus to 'Show us the Father,'1 the answer given by Jesus has tended to overshadow the question that was asked. Just what is Philip asking? It is 'reveal to our senses a picture of the Father.' This is not a new request, for man has always wanted a vision of God. Philip is asking for a sense data picture of Creative Mind. If Philip had asked for a picture of the intuitive faculty, one would have had to reply that such a faculty can be deduced only from a picture of a person who possesses such a faculty. But Philip is not asking for a picture of the intuitive faculty; he is asking for a picture of the Father, the Creative Mind. And so, when Jesus answers "When you have seen me you have seen the Father" we can only conclude that the Creative Mind - the Father resides in the person of Jesus and this was the conclusion arrived at by the Council - that Jesus was both God and Man. This means that Jesus must have two natures in his one person, the nature of God and the nature of a man. He was a man because he possessed the three essential elements that make up a man - instinct, senses and the supernatural element we call intuition. In place of our limited, finite intuition he possessed the unlimited infinite supernatural Mind which we call God. Some people seem to be very puzzled as to how one person can have two natures; they have only to consider themselves. Each one of us has two natures - an animal nature in the form of instinct and senses and an extra-time nature, or supernatural nature which we have called intuition. This does not normally cause us any difficulty, we get along very well with both; I say 'normally' because a very few do suffer from schizophrenia - split personality or, more correctly, I suppose, split natures - but those people are exceptions to the general rule. The question of the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity and this

'Jhn. 14-8

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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH doctrine seems to have caused more confusion than clarification. Possibly this is because the English word 'person' is a poor translation of the Latin word 'persona' and 'persona' is a poor translation of the Greek word 'hypostasis'; that is the trouble with languages, one always loses something in translation. Let us try and throw a little light on the doctrine. One cannot limit God's activity in any way, the limitation is always ours. As we have seen, we have only three ways of knowing, only three windows through which knowledge can come. Through our instincts we realise that there can only be one source of our existence, that is the way our brains have been genetically programmed and that is the way we see God as Creator, a Father. It is through our senses and our senses alone that we know anything about Jesus and it is through that window that we perceive God as the Word. It is through intuition and intuition alone that we can communicate with God and it is through that window that we perceive that emanation of God that we call the Holy Spirit. A diagram may make this clearer.

Viewed from left to right this diagram represents three manifestations of God to Man. Viewed from right to left we perceive a Triune God, with all the mystery that this entails. Other manifestations of God are beyond our comprehension; we have only three 'windows' through which knowledge can come to us.

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**************

(d) Baptism and the Eucharist or Lord's Supper have been performed and celebrated in the Christian Church from its very beginning. The Eucharist is an act we were directed by Jesus to make for his 'anamnesis' to use the Greek word which means so much more than a mere commemoration. Both these acts are called Sacraments in the Western Churches and Mysteries in the Eastern Churches. Baptism denotes the drowning of the old man in water and his rebirth as a new man in the Body of Christ. The Eucharist is the means through which he is sustained in that Body. It is not, as so often has been pointed out, just an act performed by different people at different times and in different places. The acts are, to all appearances, performed in different places throughout the Christian ages, but the reality which underlies these acts takes place in the Kingdom of Heaven which, as we have seen, is the eternally present. When we take part in the Eucharist we are really taking part in that same Last Supper in that same upper room with Jesus. Here again, we are brought face to face with the problem of timelessness.1 (e) Why do faithful Christians go to Church? I think most would say that they go to Church as a form of sacrifice - a form of giving; they go to Church to give. At the Eucharist, the greatest of the Church Services because it was instituted by Jesus, they give at the Offertory a fraction of their wealth and a fraction of that is expended on bread and wine. They then pray that this miserable sacrifice may be acceptable to God as part of that much greater sacrifice made by Jesus for the human race. They give of their time in attending Church to bear witness to their fellow Christians that they are, with them, cells in the Mystical Body. They give voice in joint prayers to strengthen and encourage the

'For a far more detailed account of the problem of timelessness or what I have called 'the eternal present' see 'Corpus Christi' by Dr. E. Mascall and 'The Openness of Being' by the same author.

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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH private prayer life of individual Christians. Church-going is all giving and it is through this giving that they find they receive more than they give. What we have been describing is the Invisible Church - the Church as experienced by the 'insider' who is a member of that Church. To the 'outsider' a very different picture presents itself. The outsider sees only the Visible Church of human organisation where there appear to be hundreds of different Churches, each proclaiming its own particular version of Christianity, at loggerheads with each other and who have in the past even burnt each other at the stake. This picture is a source of comfort to non-Christians and I have heard agnostics say "Let them sort out the differences between themselves before they approach me." Let us examine how this division between Christians has come about. All authority for Christianity derives from the person of Jesus. He delegated that authority in no uncertain terms' to his Church, which was to be One and is called the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This Church was the only Christian Church for the first one thousand years. Then, as so often happens when human beings try to work together, there was a quarrel. The Church split into two; the Eastern half called Orthodox and the Western half centred in Rome refused to have anything to do with each other; they would not sit together in a Council and resolve their difficulties. The Western half then quarrelled within itself and further splits occurred and still go on occurring. All of this highly delighted the politicians, for politics can only operate when there are divisions between people. The splits were exploited and used by political powers for their own ends, whipping up support from this denomination or that, disguising political bids for power under the cloak of religious differences and, of course, exacerbating those differences at the same time. The tragedy for Christians is that they have allowed themselves to be used in such a manner.
'Matt 16-18,19

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FACING UP TO REALITY There is now a strong movement afoot for Christian Unity and the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be applauded for his suggestion for a summit meeting of the Heads of Churches. This would constitute a Council of the whole Church and could be used to resolve the differences between Churches differences often arising from misunderstanding or from medieval accretions accepted and quarrelled over originally by both sides, but no longer held by either. As an Anglican myself, I would willingly see the demise of the Anglican Church in a return to the One Church of the first 1,000 years. All divisions between Christians are anti-Christ and in the main derive from the different world pictures that each possesses. The exercise of 'agape', of intuitional understanding of another Christians's viewpoint - coupled with a comprehensive discussion of the points in question - is the only hope the divided Church has of once again becoming united. All this may be relevant to the Christian we are told, but what about the majority of people in this country? Many people do not believe in God and the majority, in any case, live their lives without any relationship with Him at all and are content that it should be so. Some do not wish to have eternal life and think it is undesirable in their case. How, then, is the Church relevant to society in this day and age? The answer is that the Church never was relevant to any society in any day or age. It is not concerned with society or communities or deprived groups because Jesus was not concerned with society or communities or deprived groups, such as slaves. Jesus was concerned with John and Mary, Peter and Martha. And so the Church, however tempting it may be to dabble in community politics and however difficult it may be to resist that temptation, should concern itself with Tom and Jane, Harry and Susan. They are individuals with special individual needs; the very thing that benefits Tom may be the downfall of Jane; what helps Harry may hinder Susan. That is what the Church is for - caring for the individual needs of individual people, always in relation to what is paramount - that person's relationship with God, because that is what Jesus taught. No doubt I will now be accused of avoiding the question
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THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH which was, if you remember, the relationship of the Christian Church, an Established Church in this country, to the majority of people who have and want nothing to do with God or Jesus or any religion, Christian or otherwise. The majority of people, remember that. Such people are perfectly free to make that choice, a God-given choice, for try as one may, one cannot altogether avoid God's gifts. All we can do is to refer the question to what Jesus did in similar circumstances. No fire from heaven will be called down on such people;1 Jesus and the Church just shake the dust of such people from their feet.2 But what happens? When people are filled with the love of God, filled to overflowing, then that same love overflows on to people around them, whether they be Christians or not; whether they want it or not. With a saintly person like Mother Teresa of Calcutta the overspill is great indeed; we others who are rather mediocre Christians at best, still have some overspill which tends to spill out on to others. That saying of Jesus about the crumbs falling from the table,3 who knows what they may bring forth? But this is just a peripheral fallout; for people who do not want a relationship with God, the Christian Church has no relevance at all. In this and the preceding chapter we have discussed, very briefly, the way in which Christianity relates directly to intuition. The extra-time element in human nature has always produced a religious awareness, even in the most primitive races of mankind. It was always there, intuitively, and Jesus, through his person, brought it into the range of our senses and thus into our total knowledge. "Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect."4 Impossible to achieve, but a target on which to set one's sights; an Absolute to which we can relate; a Standard of Perfection to which we can aim; a Datum for the measurement of human activity.

'Lk. 9-54,55 M a t t . l 0 - 1 4 ; L k . l 0 - l l ; Acts 13-51. 3 Matt. 15-27. 4Matt. 5-48; Leviticus 19-2.
2

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CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSION

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Mk. 8-36) There is all the difference in the world between 'needs' and 'wants'. The purely animal needs of a human being are satisfied with food, shelter and warmth and in the developed countries these basic needs are provided by the state. In Britain, the Welfare State proudly tells us that it 'looks after you from the cradle to the grave' but, ominously, not before you reach the cradle; if, before you reach the cradle you should happen to be inconvenient, then that same state will quite ruthlessly kill you off. However, having reached the cradle, money is provided to satisfy our really essential needs until we die, even if we never work or earn a living for ourselves. The poorest person in Britain is, therefore, rich in comparison with his fellow human beings in those parts of the world where millions of people die of starvation, disease or neglect. Far from being satisfied with the care and attention we receive, we clamour for more and still more; our needs having been met, we now make known our 'wants' and 'wants' can never, ever, be satisfied. We compare our lot not with the starving of Africa but with those who are even richer than ourselves that we see about us in our own country. Human beings are not just animals and that element in our nature which we call intuition and which enables us to look objectively at our subjectivity, gives rise to a feeling that we
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FACING UP TO REALITY call self-respect. Every human being has some factor in his make-up by which he judges his worth and the exercise of that factor becomes for him the means by which he expresses that self-respect. It may take the form of ability to support a family, be on equal terms with members of his own community, to excel with skills of hand or brain or even the ability to use his physical strength to advantage; there is no limit to the variety of activities by which self-respect can be established. I have described the activities of a male because the female need for self-respect is far more complicated; a male is always more simple and direct in his aspirations than the far more subtle and complicated female. The importance for a human being of this deep-felt need for self-respect is paramount, yet it will differ from person to person as will the activity in which it is expressed, for each human being is completely unique, as unique as his finger-prints and therein lies his individuality. But the fact of that uniqueness raises many problems and not the least that of making us very difficult to govern. What form of education can best cope with such diversity? How can one be fair to many without, at the same time, being unfair to others? We have anti-discriminatory laws; no discrimination on grounds of sex, race or religion; but such laws are negative and probably counter-productive and can lead to witchhunts by extremists. As we saw in an earlier chapter, we all picture the world about us in different ways; we all live in different looking worlds. Pity, then, our politicians. With the best will in the world, they can only effect what they perceive as the best possible compromise for the majority, with the minority interest groups vociferous in protest. No wonder that they function by supporting one group at the expense of another; they have no real alternative apart from absolute dictatorship which enforces an unacceptable conformity quite foreign to human nature. In this country, however, we are sufficiently sophisticated to take their well-meaning promises with a degree of cynicism, for we have long realised that it is impossible to satisfy all of the people's wants as opposed to

CONCLUSION their needs, or even some of their wants without disadvantaging others; this is true even if those wants were not themselves constantly changing. We do not, in this country, take politicians very seriously and, except for a few extremists, we support the party of our choice rather in the manner in which we support a football team, with cheers or groans. This can readily be seen in programmes on the radio or television which put questions to teams of politicians in front of an audience, scoring points to applause or derision. In this modern world, any government soon finds itself in the position of a canoeist shooting the rapids; all it can do is to give a push with its paddle here and a drag there at what appears to be the appropriate moment. Nowadays it is external forces which rule us, despite the best endeavours of our politicians. Our standard of living, however, depends not so much on political decisions as on technological advance. The advances in health-care and our comfortable way of life can all be attributed to technology. Where would we be without modern drugs and anaesthetics, without labour-saving devices? It is technology that has raised the standard of living for everyone to heights which would not have been dreamed about a generation ago. Organic weaknesses can be mitigated, if not eliminated, by transplants and the population as a whole lives a healthier and longer life. It is to technology that we turn to eliminate the unpleasant consequences of our own actions, confident that given time and money, solutions to all the problems which limit our enjoyment will be found. Because technology is concerned with the pictures presented to us by our senses, it is natural that we become more and more sense-orientated in our outlook. What effect does this have on self-respect? What factors constitute 'self-respect' for the majority of people these days? We receive 'personalised letters' which contain the sentence "Think what your neighbours will say when they see a new car parked outside..." with one's name and address added in the appropriate places. I presume that this form of approach has been adequately researched; I am sure it would not be used if it did not reflect the attitude of a majority of the people in this country. Should this be the
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FACING UP TO REALITY general attitude, it would seem that 'self-respect' resides in the ability to satisfy the desires of the senses and, particularly, the possession of money to satisfy those desires. If such possessions raise envy in the minds of one's neighbours, that is all to the good because it raises one's 'status'. Status, it would seem, is related to 'spending-power'. I have even heard the remark "Well, what else is there in life?" Not for such people the concept that self-respect is concerned with behaviour, with maintaining a personal standard not in the least concerned with what is socially acceptable but very much concerned with what is acceptable to the individual himself in the light of his intuitive perception of an Absolute Standard. And there we meet the nub of the modern dilemma: in a secularised society there is no absolute standard to which the individual can relate, for 'wants' and 'status' are purely relative. It is because they are relative - that they relate to the person himself- that we get the sheer selfishness, the solipsism which is so apparent in our society today. It can, I think, be traced back to the 19th century, a century of great optimism, when a group of people calling themselves Scientific Humanists maintained that human beings, if stripped of the burden of real poverty, would rise naturally above themselves. This was in direct opposition to the concept of Original Sin which equally maintained that, no matter in what conditions mankind found itself, each individual had to struggle greatly if he was not to sink to the depths. Along with the inception of the Welfare State we flattered ourselves that we had produced a caring and compassionate society and with the abolition of real poverty, we could proceed with the down-grading of punishment for crimes which, in conformity with Humanist views, would naturally diminish. To that end we abolished capital punishment and greatly reduced the penalty for crime. But, despite increasingly prosperous times, we have seen, since the last war, a steadily increasing volume of crime. Crime has spread down the age groups and it is now commonplace to see children committing violent crimes, even committing murder. Far worse than the sheer volume of crime is the increasing viciousness with which it is carried
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CONCLUSION out. Cruelty to children is commonplace, the willingness to commit murder in the pursuit of selfish aims an everyday event. When the powers of the police are widened, we find not support for them as the natural protectors in a civilised society, but objections that the rights of individuals may be threatened - the right to riot, loot, maim and murder, perhaps? The break-down in marriage, nearly always caused by the selfishness of one party or another, disregards the damage that is caused to the children. Co-habiting without marriage which indicates a fear of total commitment often results in one-parent families. Investigation indicates that criminal behaviour amongst children is more often found in those children who come from broken homes or from homes where the commitment to life-long marriage has been abandoned. Why do we see in modern society this fear of commitment, this need to "keep all my options open?" Perhaps it is an acute awareness of the superficiality of sense-oriented existence; perhaps an innate fear that the technology that has brought modern society into existence will, more swiftly, bring it to an end. Possibly it is because we intuitively realise the aimlessness of an existence based on total indulgence in the things of our senses; that the quest for happiness is not satisfied by even an enormous increase in material benefits. Perhaps we are searching for something of substance. What we find in a society that has, to an overwhelming extent, abolished the poverty that existed in the thirties and raised the living standards of the vast majority, is not a rise in the standard of behaviour of the individual but an appreciable degeneration. We no longer utterly condemn the behaviour of rapists, of violent criminals; we attempt to excuse it. As a species we no longer walk proudly on the earth; we huddle together, ashamed of the mess we have made of the world we live in, frightened of the future and hiding behind others of our kind. The optimistic assertions of the Humanists have proved false. I am not wholly in sympathy with those who assert that the world we live in is God's world and as such we should respect it. God gave this world to us, a free and it would seem undeserved gift, as a place in which we could, both
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FACING UP TO REALITY separately and collectively, exercise our choice and if we make a mess of it, even destroy it, that would have been anticipated from the beginning. That it produced a few holy people, a few faithful Christians, would more than justify its existence. The point I would make, the point I have endeavoured to argue in this book, is that human beings are not just animals, content with their instincts and delighting in the pleasure of their senses, no matter how enhanced that pleasure may become by the exercise of technological knowledge. The essence of a human being is the possession, the blessed possession, of a supernatural faculty whose potential far exceeds the capability of the senses. A faculty we may lose, a faculty we can lose, if we ignore its presence and atrophy its effect. However beneficial technology is, and has been, in satisfying our needs and many of our wants, it has done so at the expense of our individual self-respect and the very basis of our humanity. It began by satisfying our needs and our senses demanded more. It began to satisfy our wants and our senses responded accordingly. It has now become an aim in itself rather than a tool and our senses have reacted as they do to any drug, a drug which creates for us the delusion of a spurious reality whose long-term effects may have a lethal effect on future generations. By a lethal effect, I am not referring only to an atomic holocaust; that will probably never happen, for if we are to kill ourselves off it is far more likely that we shall do so by some biological mistake, a thousand times more widespread and unstoppable than AIDS appears at present to be. I am referring to the spread of a purely sense-based civilisation spreading over the whole globe. At first, beneficial to the well-being of the poorer nations and then creating in them the same drug-like effects it has produced in the developed countries. As it grows and grows, humanity will become more and more sense-based and intuition more and more atrophied in its impact on our actions. Those intuitive 'jumps', not to be explained by extrapolation, that we make in science and in our inventions, the intuitive appreciation of something which transcends the mere look of a thing which we meet in the visual arts, all will
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CONCLUSION gradually fade away. Instead of choice, our actions will be determined by computers. We shall become like cattle, indistinguishable the one from the other, an equal society, easy to govern and content with its lot. But we shall have lost our humanity; the human race will have ceased to exist. I do not think this will happen, even as I hope it will not happen. It was H.G. Wells in The Time Machine' who envisaged a man from one age being transported into another; that man was unable to understand the outlook of the age into which he had been transported, unable to comprehend its attitude and its thought-processes. H.G. Wells was anticipating the school of Historical Relativism which maintains that history is conditioned by the attitude of mind of its writers, an attitude that changes from age to age. One of the ways in which we decide whether ancient bones are animal or human is whether any religious significance can be found in the way those bones have been laid out. You will always find, from earliest times, that man had a religious side to his nature - a supernatural side to his nature. There will always be pockets in civilisation where that element still survives and one day, please God, mankind as a whole will recognize the importance of that element in the make-up of a human being, exercise its choice and look back with incredulous amazement at the 19th, 20th and even 21st century as the second Dark Age - the age of Secular Man.

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THE AUTHOR WRITES:

I once asked a friend of mine who was always talking about the 'real world' and 'facing reality', what he meant by those expressions. He answered "the world about you" and then, after a little thought, "No, it goes deeper than that". If we accept, as I think we must accept, that Truth is perceived when the mind coincides with Reality, then it follows that our idea of what is true will depend on our idea of what is real. But Reality is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as 'that which underlies the appearances'. This short book follows a road which is signposted by those two definitions and leads to the concept of what real reality must really be like and. consequently, on to what must be the nature of Truth. It is a short book because I have ignored those turnings away from the road which I perceive would be likely to lead into cul-de-sacs and also those by-roads which lead to the same conclusion by a very much more complicated and indirect route. The fact that this road seems to lead directly into the heart of the Christian Faith may be because as a Christian, my mind is a Christian Mind; it may also be because the heart of the Christian Faith, stripped of its emotional overtones, does represent for human beings the nearest that we can get to Truth. The reader will want to judge this for himself. Many people in England to-day hold to no religious belief; they may have vague ideas which have not risen to the surface of their minds, but on the whole they have no knowledge at all of the fundamentals of the Christian, or any other, religion. This is in spite of the fact that the Church of England is the Established Church of the Realm. Or is it, perhaps, because the Church of England is the Established Church of the Realm? When the intelligent man-in-the-street meets the Vicar, usually quite casually at a Fete or somewhere, the natural respect which is still felt for the Clergy inhibits him from raising any doubts he may feel about the Christian Faith; the occasion is inappropriate for serious discussion. As this will probably be their only contact, the gulf which exists between them is bridged merely by polite conversation. No such reservations apply to laymen such as myself. Questions are rammed home to us and no holds are barred when non-Christians question the faith of believers. This has certainly happened to me from school-days onward. In the chapter on Christianity and the one on the Christian Church, although I have touched only on those points which are relevant to the theme of this book, I have mentioned much which was a cause of dispute and dissent from non-believers with whom I have come into contact. This book puts forward some of the basic reasons for belief in Christianity which the man-in-the-street can at least appreciate, even if he does not, in the end, accept them. He will, in any event, be exercising the greatest gift that has been given us that of individual choice.

CHURCHMAN PUBLISHING LIMITED I17 BROOMFIELD AVENUE, WORTHING, WEST SUSSEX

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