Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

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Syntagma wishes our regulars and all who chance by here, a very happy Easter break.

We’re off for a few days now for a little rest and recuperation before picking up the baton again on Tuesday.

See you then.