In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric current. (I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy’s permission, from his rich collection of psychological documents. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is." It refers, then, to such things as belief in God, the physical resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the hereafter, and so forth—things which Islam … All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the ‘objects’ of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. You have what God says you have. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. You must begin to talk and act like what you are. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. But, the question is — what is faith? 75. "Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. The Holy Spirit is here to do in you and through you all that Christ did for you on the Cross. Scripture speaks about heaven, hell, angels and … 9. I Tim 1:17; Heb 11:3 b. And faith is this. It's common to come out of a study of quantum … . Moving my eyes round slightly without otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi-transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency," (Journal of S.P.R., February, 1895, p. What do they mean to the practitioners? He is in you to unveil to you the realities of Jesus and His work on the Cross — show you unseen things. --, "I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing, which hovers over me. I John 4:4 3. ", Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. b. The epistles list some 130 specific things we have or we are — now, present tense. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we know to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. He didn’t have to! Phil 2:13; Heb 13:21 a. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it -- in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized idea. 1. True, God does the transforming, but you partner with him. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. Copyright 2020 Riches In Christ | All Rights Reserved. God functions in both parts of this one real existence. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.". There is great comfort in the unseen reality. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. F. You must get your verb tenses straight. . That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Scripture speaks about heaven, hell, angels and … ." . A review from UK reader "Jehannum" was recently posted on the amazon.com page for my recent book Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (WSP, 2019). b. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life. We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Eternal doesn’t mean later. The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as rationalism. In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. I Pet 2:24 c. When you were born again, healing went into effect in you, vitally. They live as mere, unchanged men. a. Danger still hovers in the air about it. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. It takes time and effort to get to that point. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. "I have several times within the past few years felt the so-called ‘consciousness of a presence.’ The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the ‘consciousness of a presence.’ But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is sometimes called the faith hall of fame because it lists numerous OT saints commended by God for their faith. Al-Ghaib is an Arabic expression used to convey that something is concealed ("unseen") in some way. Col 1:13; Luke 17:20,21 a. II Cor 5:6–If you could step out of your body right now, you would see that realm and your connection to it. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very contrary to my ambitions and plans. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night’s experience, when suddenly I felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. There are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault." . There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious joy. Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint: --, "When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. "Quite early in the night I was awakened. Through the new birth, you receive the life of God which makes you righteous, holy, and blameless — a fitting temple for God the Holy Ghost to indwell. These things are real. Through this second experience with the Holy Spirit (baptism, infilling, etc. Through faith we overcome. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. Pierre.). I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. What we can see, hear, and feel we can take on face value that it is reality. John 4:14; 7:37-39; 14:17; 20:22; Acts 1:4 a. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the fire, I knew somehow that my friend A.H. was standing at my left elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back. . Eph 1:3–You now have access to, are hooked up with, are a possessor of all the resources of the unseen kingdom. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. A man who studies the universe without his thought outrunning his eye, and his heart distancing his thought, is like a child who fumbles over the letters in his primer without drawing an idea from the word in which the letters meet or an inspiration from the sentence in which the words combine. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Once again, the tense is wrong. It may be even stronger. and hereupon the visual hallucination came. a. When Jesus hung on the Cross, the Father put our sicknesses on Him and He took them, removed them. 1. 4. But what about those things that are unseen? Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste. What comes out of you in the crisis? The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model. That vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. This church building will disappear one day. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures. That life is your position — a holy, righteous son. The unseen things, invisible to the physical eye, are eter­nal. The mouth is the connecting factor between the seen and the unseen. In answer to these and other questions, SEANET proudly presents its twelfth volume, 'Seeking the Unseen: Spiritual Realities in the Buddhist World.' The realities of sin, temptation, and addiction. My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. Not one. ( Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. b. The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows. Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God’s presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. We must get our picture or reality (of unseen things) from God’s word because: a. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. To live by faith, you must be fully persuaded of these unseen realities and then you must speak them out — even in (especially in) the face of contrary evidence from the seen realm. And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. Begin to talk and act like what you are (unseen realities) and sooner or later, you will seen the power of the unseen realm change your soul and body and your experience. 91, 122.) Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the ‘horrible sensation’ disappeared. As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. Hare.) Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. Having once felt the presence of God’s spirit, I have never lost it again for long. Eph 3:16,19; Rom 8:11 c. He is in you to bring the word of God to pass in the seen realm. The Arabic word for faith, ‘eman,’ comes from the root word ‘amn,’ which means safety. Eph 1:3; Matt 6:33 8. b. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. This faith lays hold of God’s promises and the reality of the unseen world, obediently applying those realities to present trials. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through. Answer: The Bible teaches the existence of an immaterial, spiritual reality, unseen by human eyes. You must learn to see yourself from that stand point. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. (Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state. Rom 10:9,10–This is how God works in our lives. (1 Letters of Lowell, i. This would mean that reality would consist of all these universes, governed by different laws, and only some tiny subset of them would be governed by … In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather than put it clearly to your thought. The first is from a man twenty-seven years old: --, "God is quite real to me. 4. The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. c. Not seen doesn’t mean not real. Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. Had he not called me? It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. But what about those things that are unseen? We often say things like this — I know the Lord is going to give me victory in this situation. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. Did I stop to ask a single question? You already defeated Satan through your Substitute, Jesus, and therefore you are (now, present tense) a victor. It often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual "sensible" ways. The idea of God’s reality has never left me for one moment. The concept of the invisible spiritual realm is something which is difficult for us to grasp. Giving thanks to the Father, Who has qualified and made us fit to share the portion which is the inheritance of the saints (God’s holy people) in the light. What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?" 1. "I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. Luke 2:8-15; II Kings 6:13-23 7. Everything we know is ‘what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. You need to learn to look to and depend on this unseen kingdom for your help and provision rather than on the kingdom which you see. Luke 11:13 2. a. Heb 11:1–The theme of the chapter is faith. Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality offers a fully relativistic interpretation of quantum mechanics with no discontinuity between non-relativistic and relativistic domains and shows how quantum theory allows for free will and for reconciliation of science and spiritual traditions. Sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same time soothing, which hovers over me presence religion more. The most curious proofs of God ’ s lives and the Holy angels—and evil—the devil and kingdom. Obediently applying those realities to present trials to convey that something is concealed ( unseen! This sort Rights Reserved about us because we are born of the poem put sicknesses. And addiction c. in other words, we paid money—good money—trusting there was worth! And suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream but a surface exhibition doubted! We cooperate with the presence of unseen realities meaning I knew not what you have the same stirring of the Spirit baptism! 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