Age New Spirituality - Inspirational Stories ( Part 75 )
As the human race struggles to comprehend this new age, new spiritual perspective and world view, since it is so different from what was always known. The information in this post is intended to help you find your way around the topics addressed herein.
In this article we speak with spiritual teachers who are exploring these topics and will share their thoughts with us. We also offer a few practical guidelines that may be helpful for anyone who is seeking a deeper understanding of life at this time in our world's history as well as in their own life.
In times of great change, confusion and upheaval, it can sometimes seem like there is nothing certain anymore except the inevitability of change.
But there are those, who through their own spiritual practice and learning, have already glimpsed this new world within the fabric of our everyday lives. In this post we will explore how spiritual teachers see how we got here and what is to come in the years ahead. For instance, just how will it be that technology will intersect with spirituality? What is the impact on spirituality of a growing communication network connecting people on such a global scale? If you would like to share responses from your own consciousness about these questions, please use the comments section below.
We were encouraged to do this interview with each other, as we are all in the same spiritual process of exploring and learning about the new world ahead. When we share what we know, we help each other to grow; to further our own spiritual understandings. The result is a golden energy exchange mechanism that connects us together who are seeking and striving for greater understanding.
Please feel free to submit your questions or comments about our perspectives for the world ahead by clicking on the Comments button below. We will be happy to share your thoughts with others as well as with ourselves, so that we can come together as a global community of understanding and support.
In the spirit of community, we hope you will read each other's perspectives and join us in deepening our evolving world view.
With Love and Light,
Age New Spirituality – Inspirational Stories ( Part 75 )
" We can enlist the support of physicists from all over the world to conduct experiments that constructively break new ground in the field of spirituality." ~ New Age author, Terence Caudill [1]
The High Frontier by Barry Commoner [2] indicates that there are around 200 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. This is a vast quantity of star systems where conditions may be suitable for intelligent life forms. Of course, there is no way of knowing for sure that such a life form would necessarily be intelligent. However, Commoner does not have the benefit of the insights into technology available now. His vision was based on what was then known about biology and the process of evolution , and much of his work has been superseded by further research and developments in this field over the last 30 years.
The author felt in 1970, after a decade of writing articles on the issue, that they were not being given adequate publicity. Here he makes an interesting point: "Any scientific study which fails to receive wide attention or leads to no significant results is deemed worthless. This is a logical inference based on the assumption that science is "the be all and end all of human learning." As many readers of this column know, I am not too sure that this is true.
Back in 1970, however, Commoner was writing with excellent credentials in the field – scientific research and teaching at the City College of New York for ten years and full professor at Cornell University for nearly a decade before that. He was Director of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) from 1969-73 and Chairman of the National Research Council's Biological Effects Committee from 1967-69. The Council was chaired by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling and was the main source of information for all federal agencies on matters related to science and technology, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation and the Office of Technology Assessment itself.
In this essay he brings attention to science's role in advancing spirituality. Of course, his intent is to bring awareness to an essential aspect in that process: public policy research.
Barry Commoner speaks very clearly about what can be done now with spiritual insight while considering all that has been accomplished in the last 400 years with scientific research. There is no comparison between what has been discovered with scientific inquiry and what can be done through spiritual insight.
But he also makes it clear that the future will be very different if the public remains unaware of these developments. According to him, "We can enlist the support of physicists from all over the world to conduct experiments that constructively break new ground in the field of spirituality." It is interesting that he sees this as an opportunity which we may well know what to do with as profound teachers and gurus. It was not possible when he was writing a decade prior, but we now have so many ways in which to communicate across time and space.
So what are we talking about? The first thing is to understand what science has already discovered about our world, our solar system and others in space. The more that we explore these other worlds, the better we will understand our own. By understanding how the world works, its natural ways of interacting and changing, we can then start to sift through what those changes might possibly mean.
"The more that we explore these other worlds, the better we will understand our own."
Barry Commoner – The High Frontier
Within the pages of this book you will find a very clear explanation of what science has learned about our solar system as well as other areas of space. Essentially what scientists are finding is that all planetary systems have cycles. It is said that everything goes through life and death processes which can be measured and predicted in a very discrete time frame. There are many methods which are used to follow the development of a planetary system, especially since the time of Galileo when telescopes became more sophisticated.
Although there are many oscillations that can be measured in our solar system and beyond, there is one basic cycle that is found over and over again. It happens with all planets, including Earth and the Sun. The cycles go back at least several billion years and show no signs at this point of coming to an end. In fact, it would be safe to say that we have some idea now about how long it will take for a planet or star to die out if nothing interrupts or disturbs an existing cycle.
What does this mean? It means that we have a time frame within which to know what life on Earth will be like, or any other planet or star for that matter. Using the research in this book, we can know exactly what interplanetary interactions are taking place at any given point in time. More importantly, we can predict how these interactions will affect our lives here on planet Earth and beyond.
"We can predict how these interactions will affect our lives."
The big difference is that we no longer need to rely on blind faith in some higher power which may or may not take care of us one day. We now have access to an ability to see the future and make it what we want it to be.
Conclusion
In this book, Barry Commoner shows the historical developments which have been made on the issues discussed in this paper. He describes how the scientists of today are using these things to make predictions about our future and how we can ensure that we will have one worth living for.
The inspiration for this essay came from a lecture given by Dr. Richard Feynman from 1961, although he references it as being written by Robert Hazen in 1971. We can thank him for giving us those insights more than 30 years previous.
Barry Commoner's The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1970) was a wake-up call to humanity, because it was a call to action.