The Map of Heaven : How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife by Alexander Eben; Tompkins Ptolemy (CON)

Author:Alexander, Eben; Tompkins, Ptolemy (CON) [Alexander, Eben; Tompkins, Ptolemy (CON)]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

—WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Needless to say, that is what today’s religions should be doing as well. But the sad but fascinating fact is that a child in an Amazonian rain forest tribe six hundred years ago got the tools he or she needed to navigate the material world and stay connected to the spiritual one, while our children often don’t. This is not to denigrate Christianity or the other modern faith traditions in any way. But it is to say that those faiths need to join with each other and with science to create a new vision: one that encompasses science and religion, and that will teach our children real ways to stay in touch with the spiritual world at all times. We need to become a culture that, like so many that existed in the past, shows all its members how to hold on to the golden thread, all through their lives.XI

Thomas Traherne, a seventeenth-century clergyman whose writings were only discovered by chance in the late nineteenth century, wrote that “you never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”

Heirs: the perfect word. From a material perspective, as we noted earlier, we are cosmic beings. The ocean literally flows in our veins, because blood is virtually identical to the salt water from which our animal bodies developed. Likewise, the calcium atoms that compose our bones and the carbon atoms that make up 18 percent of our bodies were forged billions of years ago in the hearts of ancient stars—stars that, when they collapsed into white dwarfs and re-exploded as supernovas, blasted those atoms out into the universe, where eventually they cohered with other complex elements to form planets like this one, as well as the physical bodies of all the living beings that now live and move upon our planet. But we are also spiritual beings: the heirs of heaven. Our material heritage and our spiritual heritage aren’t separate but twine together, again like those twin snakes making their way up the caduceus. From an “outside,” Aristotelian perspective, we are “made” from earth. But from an inner, Platonic/initiatory perspective, we are made from celestial clay—from what the mystics of twelfth-century Persia called “the earth of heaven.” We belong to both worlds.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.