Miracles

[Anthony66]

How do the various streams of thought expressed in these parts deal with the topic of miracles? Let's take David Hume's definition of a miracle:

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.

[AshvinP]

How do the various streams of thought expressed in these parts deal with the topic of miracles? Let's take David Hume's definition of a miracle:

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.

Would Hume call it a "miracle" if he were to hear of someone's soul withdrawing from the physical body every night and reincarnating every morning? Probably so, from his perspective. That is the mind-container perspective. Whatever takes place beyond the normal consciousness of regularities within the sensory spectrum is considered practically non-existent and in need of "proof", cobbled together from the sensory spectrum. Yet the latter is the decohered final result of higher-order laws, of a more aesthetic and moral nature, weaving through our inner life. This is the only logical possibility under a consistent monist idealism, which of course Hume rejected. There is no sensory-conceptual proof of how exactly our inner activity unfolds - the concepts are the final results of that activity like cubes of ice from water - only the living experience of it. With that experience, we come to know how we are always summoning Ideas onto the physical plane, incarnating them.

These are Goethe's archetypal ideas - concretely perceived by the thinking faculty. They structure the perceptual world and our own conceptual life in that world. Every day the fruits of incarnation are extracted and returned to the supra-sensory as inner spiritual forces, where they are metamorphosed, and every new day the seed of those transfigured forces are reincarnated on the sensory plane to unfold as perceptual states of being, including aspects of our own physical body. As we always say, these things are near impossible to imagine in a living way until an 'inversion horizon' is crossed and our inner life of spiritual activity is really felt as more real, more substantial, a priori to the outer perceptual world and the life of mere concepts. In short, every waking moment of life is 'miraculous', filled with 'synchronicities' and 'magic' and such, only these miracles pass the sense-bound intellect by unnoticed.

[Federica]

I don’t know Hume and from my naive perspective, this seems a harmless definition of miracle, similar to the definition by the dictionary, based on etymology and common use. The 'mir-a’ part of the word is the same as in, for example, ‘ad-mir-e’ so a miracle is a phenomenon that evokes awe by its non submission to the standard laws of perception.
Ashvin, I do appreciate and necessarily agree with challenging the concept of miracle itself, for the dualism it implies, when the consequesces of idealism are taken to their logical end point. But there is also a common meaning of miracle that's used, and you have used as well, in conventional sense.

Apart from that, the type of reply this post evokes from me is, instead of following the arrow of reasoning along the suggested direction, exploring what a miracle is according to traditions or to self, I would reverse the arrow of reasoning. Arrows can be reversed much more seamlessly than it looks reasonable at first thought. The arrow of time is one example, so why not the arrow of reasoning. In this perspective I wonder, is there anything you can and want to tell, Anthony, about what made you reflect on the definition of miracle and its relevance in various traditions? Is there any experience, personal or reported, that evokes or has evoked the word ‘miracle’ for you and if yes, is there any transferable part of it that can be shared here?

[Anthony66]

Yet the latter is the decohered final result of higher-order laws, of a more aesthetic and moral nature, weaving through our inner life.

But the thing with miracles is that there is a perturbation in the sensory phenomenon from their lawful ways, presumably due to perturbations of the higher-order laws. Do the higher laws sometimes have rostered days off?

[AshvinP]

Yet the latter is the decohered final result of higher-order laws, of a more aesthetic and moral nature, weaving through our inner life.

But the thing with miracles is that there is a perturbation in the sensory phenomenon from their lawful ways, presumably due to perturbations of the higher-order laws. Do the higher laws sometimes have rostered days off?

Anthony,

We often mention that the higher worlds should not be understood as running parallel to the sensory world, indirectly influencing it in some way. What we perceive around us are the higher-order laws, aliased into the fixed objects of the sensory spectrum for normal waking consciousness. A simple way to deduce this is from the fact that secular science cannot actually explain most of what we experience around us. It cannot explain how our idea of 'going to work' is translated into movements which actually take us from home to work. It can't explain how life arises on the physical plane. If we investigate deeper, we will find it is radically lacking in explanation for things we normally take for granted, such as chemical and biological processes and human anatomy. This only stands to reason when 2/3 of man's bodily constitution (the subtle bodies) are not known to exist, and the Ego (WFT consciousness) is thought to be mostly irrelevant to physical processes. None of this is to say the findings of secular science are wrong, only they are radically incomplete, and the common 'explanations' have reified these radically incomplete observations into exhaustive understanding of the phenomena in question.

Discovering the higher-order laws allows us to start making sense of the objects and processes we normally perceive in the sensory spectrum, which heretofore are mostly incomprehensible to modern science. This is why I mentioned 'synchronicities' before - most people would say a coinciding between 'subjective' inner experience and outer manifestations is a "perturbation" in the lawful ways of the world. But actually it is simply us becoming more conscious of what is always happening. Synchronicities are not exceptions to the lawful order, but integral aspects of that order. The same thing applies to various other psy-phenomena like 'remote viewing', telekinesis, and such. That's not to say every claim of these things is a genuine occurrence, but that such phenomena are perfectly explainable within the framework of the higher-order laws in which the aliased laws of the sensory spectrum are embedded. But, as mentioned before, this is so unfamiliar to our modern thinking that it will be very difficult to imagine until we experience more of the inverted perspective. When I first read PoF and started taking spiritual science seriously, it took quite some time before I discerned just how lacking all conventional scientific theories, across the board, really are. They are mostly just restatements of how certain phenomena are correlated with other phenomena, with no explanation whatsoever of how the whole set of phenomena arise. This isn't just a metaphysical issue - it leads to erroneous methods of interacting with the phenomena with severe practical consequences, such as in medicine.

There are many more considerations which could be added here to then see how something like resurrection from the 'dead' also fits into the holistic order of spiritual evolution, of which physical evolution is the outer lawful manifestation. It should be noted that, in the most notable case of Christ Jesus, which is no doubt what people have in mind here, there is no mention of him reappearing to people in the same physical body which died. What we are dealing with here is indeed a rare occurrence because it prefigures something which has yet to evolve in the course of humanity. We certainly need more flexibility of thinking in terms of our common assumption of the linear arrow of time, as Federica mentioned. But we can still discern how what has yet to evolve, and was prefigured by Christ, lawfully fits into the current body-soul-spirit constitution of man and its inner dynamics. It is our logical thinking consciousness, actively willed and imbued with feeling, which allows us to discern, not only what is 'past', but what is still 'future' and always playing into the present.

[AshvinP]

I don’t know Hume and from my naive perspective, this seems a harmless definition of miracle, similar to the definition by the dictionary, based on etymology and common use. The 'mir-a’ part of the word is the same as in, for example, ‘ad-mir-e’ so a miracle is a phenomenon that evokes awe by its non submission to the standard laws of perception.
Ashvin, I do appreciate and necessarily agree with challenging the concept of miracle itself, for the dualism it implies, when the consequesces of idealism are taken to their logical end point. But there is also a common meaning of miracle that's used, and you have used as well, in conventional sense.

Apart from that, the type of reply this post evokes from me is, instead of following the arrow of reasoning along the suggested direction, exploring what a miracle is according to traditions or to self, I would reverse the arrow of reasoning. Arrows can be reversed much more seamlessly than it looks reasonable at first thought. The arrow of time is one example, so why not the arrow of reasoning. In this perspective I wonder, is there anything you can and want to tell, Anthony, about what made you reflect on the definition of miracle and its relevance in various traditions? Is there any experience, personal or reported, that evokes or has evoked the word ‘miracle’ for you and if yes, is there any transferable part of it that can be shared here?

Federica,

Right. As you say, a dualistic discontinuity is embedded in the common definition of "miracle". Then if we go from that definition to figure out the 'explanation' of "miracles", we are arguing about a reality which simply doesn't exist, except in our abstract thought.

I figured Anthony was more asking about how events and phenomena which people would usually label "miracles" can be encompassed by spiritual science. Hume famously coined the phrase, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. Embedded in that is the presupposition that the natural world has been built from the bottom-up through increasingly complex material organization and what humans, at the very top of that order, have so far discerned with intellectual thought is practically all-encompassing of the natural order. Then what feels to be an 'outlier' from our all-encompassing thought must be proven through external evidence. In every age of egoic intellectual thought, this same presupposition is made, only to be proven radically incorrect by paradigmatic shifts in our understanding a few decades, or even a few years, later. What was previously felt to be something requiring 'extraordinary evidence' then becomes 'common sense', where we ask, "how could we have been so silly to have missed how this phenomena is integral to the natural order??"

In terms of your question, yes I would say many aspects of normal waking life have felt more 'miraculous' and 'magical' to me, as I previously understood those terms and their connotations. I mentioned an example to Anthony - the very process by which my intents/ideas are continuously translated into physical-perceptual manifestations. These things began feeling more miraculous once we discern how little we understand about this process through which our entire lives unfold, yet how much more we can know about it through spiritual development. Knowing in the deep inward sense. It is the same exact archetypal process through which the entire physical creation constantly comes into Be-ing.

[Anthony66]

Yet the latter is the decohered final result of higher-order laws, of a more aesthetic and moral nature, weaving through our inner life.

But the thing with miracles is that there is a perturbation in the sensory phenomenon from their lawful ways, presumably due to perturbations of the higher-order laws. Do the higher laws sometimes have rostered days off?

Anthony,

We often mention that the higher worlds should not be understood as running parallel to the sensory world, indirectly influencing it in some way. What we perceive around us are the higher-order laws, aliased into the fixed objects of the sensory spectrum for normal waking consciousness. A simple way to deduce this is from the fact that secular science cannot actually explain most of what we experience around us. It cannot explain how our idea of 'going to work' is translated into movements which actually take us from home to work. It can't explain how life arises on the physical plane. If we investigate deeper, we will find it is radically lacking in explanation for things we normally take for granted, such as chemical and biological processes and human anatomy. This only stands to reason when 2/3 of man's bodily constitution (the subtle bodies) are not known to exist, and the Ego (WFT consciousness) is thought to be mostly irrelevant to physical processes. None of this is to say the findings of secular science are wrong, only they are radically incomplete, and the common 'explanations' have reified these radically incomplete observations into exhaustive understanding of the phenomena in question.

Discovering the higher-order laws allows us to start making sense of the objects and processes we normally perceive in the sensory spectrum, which heretofore are mostly incomprehensible to modern science. This is why I mentioned 'synchronicities' before - most people would say a coinciding between 'subjective' inner experience and outer manifestations is a "perturbation" in the lawful ways of the world. But actually it is simply us becoming more conscious of what is always happening. Synchronicities are not exceptions to the lawful order, but integral aspects of that order. The same thing applies to various other psy-phenomena like 'remote viewing', telekinesis, and such. That's not to say every claim of these things is a genuine occurrence, but that such phenomena are perfectly explainable within the framework of the higher-order laws in which the aliased laws of the sensory spectrum are embedded. But, as mentioned before, this is so unfamiliar to our modern thinking that it will be very difficult to imagine until we experience more of the inverted perspective. When I first read PoF and started taking spiritual science seriously, it took quite some time before I discerned just how lacking all conventional scientific theories, across the board, really are. They are mostly just restatements of how certain phenomena are correlated with other phenomena, with no explanation whatsoever of how the whole set of phenomena arise. This isn't just a metaphysical issue - it leads to erroneous methods of interacting with the phenomena with severe practical consequences, such as in medicine.

There are many more considerations which could be added here to then see how something like resurrection from the 'dead' also fits into the holistic order of spiritual evolution, of which physical evolution is the outer lawful manifestation. It should be noted that, in the most notable case of Christ Jesus, which is no doubt what people have in mind here, there is no mention of him reappearing to people in the same physical body which died. What we are dealing with here is indeed a rare occurrence because it prefigures something which has yet to evolve in the course of humanity. We certainly need more flexibility of thinking in terms of our common assumption of the linear arrow of time, as Federica mentioned. But we can still discern how what has yet to evolve, and was prefigured by Christ, lawfully fits into the current body-soul-spirit constitution of man and its inner dynamics. It is our logical thinking consciousness, actively willed and imbued with feeling, which allows us to discern, not only what is 'past', but what is still 'future' and always playing into the present.

Could I distill the above by saying the sense appearance of things unlawful/miraculous/anomolous have deeper lawful spiritual underpinnings?

[AshvinP]

But the thing with miracles is that there is a perturbation in the sensory phenomenon from their lawful ways, presumably due to perturbations of the higher-order laws. Do the higher laws sometimes have rostered days off?

Anthony,

We often mention that the higher worlds should not be understood as running parallel to the sensory world, indirectly influencing it in some way. What we perceive around us are the higher-order laws, aliased into the fixed objects of the sensory spectrum for normal waking consciousness. A simple way to deduce this is from the fact that secular science cannot actually explain most of what we experience around us. It cannot explain how our idea of 'going to work' is translated into movements which actually take us from home to work. It can't explain how life arises on the physical plane. If we investigate deeper, we will find it is radically lacking in explanation for things we normally take for granted, such as chemical and biological processes and human anatomy. This only stands to reason when 2/3 of man's bodily constitution (the subtle bodies) are not known to exist, and the Ego (WFT consciousness) is thought to be mostly irrelevant to physical processes. None of this is to say the findings of secular science are wrong, only they are radically incomplete, and the common 'explanations' have reified these radically incomplete observations into exhaustive understanding of the phenomena in question.

Discovering the higher-order laws allows us to start making sense of the objects and processes we normally perceive in the sensory spectrum, which heretofore are mostly incomprehensible to modern science. This is why I mentioned 'synchronicities' before - most people would say a coinciding between 'subjective' inner experience and outer manifestations is a "perturbation" in the lawful ways of the world. But actually it is simply us becoming more conscious of what is always happening. Synchronicities are not exceptions to the lawful order, but integral aspects of that order. The same thing applies to various other psy-phenomena like 'remote viewing', telekinesis, and such. That's not to say every claim of these things is a genuine occurrence, but that such phenomena are perfectly explainable within the framework of the higher-order laws in which the aliased laws of the sensory spectrum are embedded. But, as mentioned before, this is so unfamiliar to our modern thinking that it will be very difficult to imagine until we experience more of the inverted perspective. When I first read PoF and started taking spiritual science seriously, it took quite some time before I discerned just how lacking all conventional scientific theories, across the board, really are. They are mostly just restatements of how certain phenomena are correlated with other phenomena, with no explanation whatsoever of how the whole set of phenomena arise. This isn't just a metaphysical issue - it leads to erroneous methods of interacting with the phenomena with severe practical consequences, such as in medicine.

There are many more considerations which could be added here to then see how something like resurrection from the 'dead' also fits into the holistic order of spiritual evolution, of which physical evolution is the outer lawful manifestation. It should be noted that, in the most notable case of Christ Jesus, which is no doubt what people have in mind here, there is no mention of him reappearing to people in the same physical body which died. What we are dealing with here is indeed a rare occurrence because it prefigures something which has yet to evolve in the course of humanity. We certainly need more flexibility of thinking in terms of our common assumption of the linear arrow of time, as Federica mentioned. But we can still discern how what has yet to evolve, and was prefigured by Christ, lawfully fits into the current body-soul-spirit constitution of man and its inner dynamics. It is our logical thinking consciousness, actively willed and imbued with feeling, which allows us to discern, not only what is 'past', but what is still 'future' and always playing into the present.

Could I distill the above by saying the sense appearance of things unlawful/miraculous/anomolous have deeper lawful spiritual underpinnings?

Yes. The highest-order spiritual laws are of a moral character. Everything in the Cosmic evolution which has resulted in our current aliased consciousness of the sensory spectrum has proceeded, in its deepest foundations, from voluntary, intentional sacrifice i.e. Love. From the primal 'outpouring' of the Divine ideal substance into 'physical' manifestation, to our own evolution through the sacrifice of past habits, feelings, prejudices, theories, etc., it is all continuous gradient of moral activity which underpins the constant metamorphosis of our Reality into ever-higher stages of perfection and completion. And, if we reflect on this natural-moral nexus, we can discern how it is what modern thinkers, such as Hume, are most resistant to. In no case do they want to establish a concrete connection between the natural order and a deeper moral structure of ideal activity. I think the reasons for why are pretty obvious. But if we resist that basic prejudice, then we come to know the lawful, Divine sublimity which underlies the natural order we are always experiencing within and through our consciousness.