The Harmony of Discord between Nature and the Supernatural

Image by Andres Ramos

 

Remember this: To get through a night that felt to long, to steady hands that wouldn't stop shaking, to remember which direction was home when they'd lost their way.

Have you ever read an argument on Nature and the Supernatural? No? Yes? Maybe?

Do I have someone you need to meet. He is deader than a doornail but he lives on in his words. The author uses Christianity as his deferment but lets not get that twisted and think you can not substitute your own version of religion or philosophy and see what you come out with. It might be interesting. Let us suspend disbelief and belief for a moment and see what we get out of this.

Get a snack and a beverage. I hope you like reading. 

Here is a passage:

"From the first moment or birth-time of modern science, if we could fix the moment, it has been clear that Christianity must ultimately come into a grand issue of life and death with it, or with the tendencies embodied in its progress. Not that Christianity has any conflict with the facts of science, or they with it. On the contrary, since both is and Nature have their common root and harmony in God, Christianity is the natural foster-mother of science, and science the certain handmaid of Christianity. And both together, when rightly conceived, must constitute one complete system of knowledge. But the difficulty is here; that we see things only in a partial manner, and that the two great modes of thought, or intellectual methods, that of Christianity in the supernatural department of God's plan, and that of science in the natural, are so different that a collision is inevitable and a struggle necessary to the final liquidation of the account between them; or, what is the same, necessary to a proper settlement of the conditions of harmony.

Thus, from the time of Galileo's and Newton's discoveries, down to the present moment of discovery and research in geological science, we have seen the Christian teachers stickling for the letter of the Christian documents and alarmed for their safety, and fighting, inch by inch and with solemn pertinacity, the plainest, most indisputable or even demonstrable facts. On the other side, the side of science, multitudes, especially of the mere dilettanti, have been boasting, almost every month, some discovery that was to make a fatal breach upon revealed religion.

And a much greater danger to religion is to be apprehended from science than this, viz., the danger that comes from what may be called a bondage under the method of science,--as if nothing could be true, save as it is proved by the scientific method. Whereas, the method of all the higher truths of religion is different, being the method of faith; a verification by the heart, and not by the notions of the head.

Busied in nature, and profoundly engrossed with her phenomena, confident of the uniformity of her laws, charmed with the opening wonders revealed in her process, armed with manifold powers contributed to the advancement of commerce and the arts by the discovery of her secrets, and pressing onward still in the inquest, with an eagerness stimulated by rivalry and the expectation of greater wonders yet to be revealed,--occupied in this manner, not only does the mind of scientific men but of the age itself become fastened to, and glued down upon, nature; conceiving that nature as a frame of physical order, is itself the system of God; unable to imagine any thing higher and more general to which it is subordinate. Imprisoned, in this manner, by the terms and the method of nature, the tendency is to find the whole system of God included under its laws; and then it is only a part of the same assumption that we are incredulous in regard to any modification, or seeming interruption of their activity, from causes included in the supernatural agency of person, or in those agencies of God himself that complete the unity and true system of his reign. And so it comes to pass that, while the physical order called nature is perhaps only a single and very subordinate term of that universal divine system, a mere pebble chafing in the ocean-bed of its eternity we refuse to believe that this pebble can be acted on at all from without, requiring all events and changes in it to take place under the laws of acting it has inwardly in itself. There is no incarnation therefore, no miracle, no redemptive grace, or experience; for God's system is nature, and it is incredible that the laws of nature should be interrupted; all which is certainly true, if there be no higher, more inclusive system under which it may take place systematically, as a result even of system itself. 

And exactly this must be the understanding of mankind, at some future time, when the account between Christianity and Nature shall have been fully liquidated. When that point is reached, it will be seen that the real system of God included two parts, a natural and a supernatural, and it will no more be incredible that one should act upon the other, than that one planet of particle in the department of Nature should act upon and modify the action of another. But we are not yet ready for a discovery so difficult to be made. 

Thus far the tendency if visible, on every side, to believe in nature simply, and in Christianity only so far as it conforms to Nature and finds shelter under its laws. And the mind of the Christian world is becoming, every day, more and more saturated with this propensity to naturalism; gravitating, as it were, by some fixed law, through imperceptibly or unconsciously, toward a virtual and real unbelief in Christianity itself; for the Christianity that is become a part only of nature, or is classified under Nature, is Christianity extinct. " (Bushnell 7-9)

How did that make you feel? Do you need to lay down on a couch, or pull up a chair? These young whippersnappers' heads are spinning.

That is gonna be one hell of a campfire talk.

And no, I haven't forgotten about the long lost and uncontrived Jungian post that is eluding me. 

~Courtesy of the AOFH~

Source Cited:

Bushnell, Horace. "Nature and the Supernatural".Charles Scribner's Sons, (1907), p. 7-9.

Just like Heaven: A Supernatural Accord

 Remember this: Past life memories transition into a supernatural accord.

Not to long ago, I am having a conversation with my partner-in-crime. This conversation is based around ruminations I am having that he is listening to. It is more like a conversation with myself and he is just present to hear. Out of nowhere he says to me, "I know why you love Nature so much."

I ask him, "What do you mean?"

He responds, "It reminds you of Heaven. Somehow you remember heaven, but you don't realize that is what it is."

I thought about it and decided maybe he is right. I sat with this thought. I am still sitting with this thought; then to realize you are aggressively protective of Nature, but simultaneously spiritual.

This is a can of worms.

This supernatural accord that comes from possible past life memories are exhibited when an individual's recollection of a previous existence links to a binding metaphysical pact, spiritual contract, or cosmic law that bridges past and present realities.

At this point, we could argue that over the years from simple cell to human, as DNA kind of falls off, some of us are left with those fragments of DNA that remember to protect and nurture, and there are those that don't.

The supporting argument is the running thought about this supernatural accord that is past down verbally, sacred text parabling the concept, entrenched in governmental considerations for its people, and undoubtedly an individualistic spark in the human soul. I am sure there are other ways this has trickled down through the centuries. 

Trauma is a great re-enforcement. The sandcastle theory is a good place to start. You have a child out on a beach. The child builds a beautiful sandcastle. On one hand the ocean waves come and over time keep beating down this child's effort. The other option is another individual comes along and out of spite, kicks it down. 

Its the ability to feel the intention from the acts and motives of the individual that makes all the difference. The ocean is the ocean. We accept what it will do.

Image by Md Habib

The kicking of the sandcastle is those select few humans that decide and carry through with the destruction of all things great and good that we were entrusted with to do stewardship towards; everything in our reality. 

This idea of stewardship should be one of cultivation and not exploitation of the Natural world.

Where is this indicated? The Bible, the Quran, Indigenous belief, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. 

You can't escape the supernatural accord. With that being said, you will not escape the consequences for not doing that one job the supernatural gave you. Stares.

Atheists even follow this supernatural accord and they worship no god.

These are some passages from Horace Bushnell you can talk about over the campfire with your buddies out in the bush.

"Instead of regarding the supernatural as that which acts on the chain of cause and effect in nature from without the chain, and adhering to that sense of the term, we use it, very commonly, in a kind of ghostly, marveling sense, as if relating to some apparition, or visional wonder, or it may be to some desultory, unsystematizable action, whether of angels or of God. Such uses of the word are permissible enough by dictionary laws, but they make the word an offense to all who are any way inclined to the rationalizing habit. On the other hand, there are many who claim to be acknowledged as adherents of a supernatural faith, with as little definite understanding. Believing in a God superior to nature, acting from behind and through her laws, they suppose that they are of course, to be classed as believers in a supernatural being and religion.(Bushnell 29-30)

"It is no longer necessary to go hunting after marvels, apparitions, suspensions of the laws of nature, to find the supernatural; it meets us in what is least transcendent and most familiar, even in ourselves. In ourselves we discover a tier of existences that are above nature and in all their most ordinary actions, are doing their will upon it. The very idea of our personality is that a being not under the law of cause and effect, a being supernatural." (Bushnell 31)

"Thus, nature, for example, never made a pistol, or gunpowder, or pulled a trigger; all which being done, or procured to be done, by the criminal, in his act of murder, his is hung for what is rightly called his unnatural deed. So of things not criminal; nature never built a house, or modeled a ship, or fitted a coat, or invented a steam-engine, or wrote a book, or framed a constitution.  These are all events that spring out of human liberty, acting in and upon the realm of cause and effect, to produce results and combinations, which mere cause and effect could not; and at some point of the process in each, we shall be found coming down upon nature, by an act of sovereignty just as peremptory and mysterious as that which is discovered in a miracle, only that a miracle is a similar coming down upon it from another, and higher being, and not from ourselves. (Bushnell 31-32)

When I reflect back on past lives, being reported a form of Heaven in church or elsewhere, and how Nature is considered science-based when it looks more and more like the human existence is way past supernatural, I wonder how humans have a problem just standing in this and appreciating it for what it is. Others would tell you we don't exist based on a scientific idea, but here we are; the scratch on the record of the universe.

Is it a past life?

Was my young mind implanted with an idea of Heaven?

Am I real?

Are you real?

Is this real?

Based off of the thought, which I question how is a thought happening, not a supernatural event that is dressed up in the cause and effect of a concept that we named science, is any of this real and happening?

Or are we galactic ghosts? A version of a whisper of a whisper, what was but might be once again? In a place, far far away?

Image by Oleg Gapeenko

I guess we have a supernatural accord then.....

Sources cited:

Bushnell, Horace. "Nature and the Supernatural". New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, (1907). p. 29-32.