Spirituality-Religions
Spiritual Discovery
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When I commenced my investigations into spiritism, no desire for consolation attracted me to the study. For thirty years I had only lost one near relative, my father, and he had passed over nearly twelve years before, at a good old age. In this respect I have been unusually fortunate; but the most powerful incentive any man can have to delve into the occult was absent in my case. I wanted to know the truth. "If a man die, shall he live again?" - this was the problem to be solved.
The purpose of this book is to explore the ways and means that human beings have been persuaded to believe deceptions about who we are, what we are and where we came from. We are not the ne'er do wells we are continually told we are. Evil is not a natural human trait. We are blessed beings otherwise we would not have been chosen to be the guardians of Creation's most beautiful garden.
In more recent times, there has been a growing realization that on other worlds than ours, even in other universes, there are other living beings. The idea that earthbound man may someday journey into the heavens to discover other men and women, like or unlike himself, "grows by leaps and bounds. Within man's soul lies the truth--mortals exist on other spheres!
There have been many books written about the aura, mainly by clairvoyants who possess no scientific education. There have also been technical papers about the electro-photonic properties of cells written by physicists, biologists and doctors whose research is generally inaccessible or incomprehensible to the public.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
"Today, the first essential of brotherhood is freedom. Freedom to think,
freedom to believe, freedom to strive, freedom to develop, from highest
to lowest. And the employer who refuses this opportunity to the men who
work under him is no more truly a force of disintegration than the
laborer who refuses to cooperate with his employer and thus proves
himself unworthy of a place in the procession of progress...
Variously a parish helper to the London poor and a successful New Zealand sheep farmer, Samuel Butler did not treasure the attitudes of his time (the second half of the 19th century). His books were iconoclastic in their attitudes towards Victorian ideals and The Way of All Flesh is foremost among them. It is appropriate, then, that it was published after his death and Queen Victoria's, in 1903.
This groundbreaking book reveals to the world for the first time original new information about the emergence of the New Testament and its story of Jesus Christ. It provides historical evidence showing not only vital ancient manuscripts been hidden from the public domain but also other sensitive and associated Biblical material has been purposely withheld or suppressed from the general populace.
In this scenario the Church is the agent assigned to bring you to her master. Does she bring you to liberty or does she bring you to bondage? Does she brlng you to the good guy or does she bring you to the bad guy?
Suddenly you fit into the place where the thing you shaped will go with mathematical nicety. It is as though a lot of scattered things were dancing about; and Clap! they were all in a pattern. You call it fate, or luck, or destiny, but all the time it is just the preparation of your days on days..
If you want Justice, do you appeal to robed and ermined power in the State? If you seek Religion, do you adopt as final the magnificent mummeries and cabalistic ceremonies of the Established Church? If you seek consistency, do you take as its embodiment the man of civilization; only a tamed savage, with positive selfish instincts, and the profoundest intellectual disregard of others' rights and liberties?
Many able and cultured writers have delighted to expatiate on the beauties of Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and to linger with admiration over the lofty utterances expressed in his poem. Though conscious of his inability to do justice to the sublimest of poets and the noblest of sciences, the author has ventured to contribute to Miltonic literature a work which he hopes will prove to be of an interesting and instructive character.
Why should an astronomer write a commentary on the Bible Because commentators as a rule are not astronomers, and therefore either pass over the astronomical allusions of Scripture in silence, or else annotate them in a way which, from a scientific point of view, leaves much to be desired.