I did not know what my relationship with the Divine was, until, quite innocuously, my father showed me this quote from Einstein, from a magazine he had picked up while we were in a Doctor's waiting room:
“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what that is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the most intelligent human toward God."
In an instant, I felt understood my relationship with God/Nature/the Divine.
I think we all have, at some point or another felt Nature's mysterious order, have been awed by it, and have felt connected to it. We will explore this feeling, and so much more in our relationship with the Divine in future posts.
This exploration will be rigorous and systematic. It will involve careful observation of our feelings and will be grounded in scientific knowledge. We will also look at findings of explorers who have gone before us.
I welcome you to join me in this journey, and value your input.
Love and well wishes,
- Jyotishmatee
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I find it amusing that "A rigorous exploration of the Divine uses Google Friend Connect". I'm sure the programmers were being cute on purpose, as they could have easily said "This Blog uses...". On a more serious note, you (we?) may want to first clarify the parameters and goals of this exploration. Is one goal to determine why we are here? I blog therefore I am. There, done. OK still not serious. Well then, Nature's Order is an interesting subject. I have seen two basic schools of thought: 1) that Nature has evolved via Pure Darwinian processes. The present forms we see today are all but the latest developments in the ongoing process of survival of the fittest. The beginnings of life were merely by chance as random chemicals interacted with electromagnetic energy. Not everything has been explained by this yet, but science goes farther every year. 2) that Nature was created in all it's splendor by a Divine intelligence. I looked up the word Divine and found the definition as follows:
ReplyDeleteEtymology: Middle English divin, from Anglo-French, from Latin divinus, from divus god — more at deity
Date: 14th century
1 a : of, relating to, or proceeding directly from God or a god (divine love) b : being a deity (the divine Savior) c : directed to a deity (divine worship)
2 a : supremely good : superb (the pie was divine) b : heavenly, godlike
Is the intent of this blog to exlore the meaning of God, or rather the meaning of all that we see around us? If one accepts the concept that God is everywhere and everything, then it can be used in the discussion 1) above. I think it is time to have some pie. That should make everything clear.
Ray, thank you for your thoughtful and humorous comment. This blog does not assume 2) (that there is a divine intelligence that created Nature). In fact, this blog strives to assume nothing.
ReplyDeleteScience does indeed go a long way in explaining everything around us, and in fact also goes a long way toward explaining why we feel as we do about everything around us. But, it is painfully slow. I feel, we have at our disposal methods other than careful research and analysis of the material world. For one, I think we can learn a lot by simply observing ourselves and our reactions and interactions – including our notions of the Divine/Natural order. I think an exploration of these notions will be very telling, and will provide insights that will take science a long time to arrive at. For example, the chemical and other processes that explain why we feel what we feel when we are at peace will take a very long time to understand. But, we might arrive at a faster understanding of the state of peace by careful observations of ourselves.
The intention of this blog is to explore using such methods, but also to corroborate findings with what we know from science.
I will try and describe this in the intro to the blog. But, I only get 500 characters to do so :)
Love and well wishes,
-Jyotishmatee