Friday, June 10, 2011

Journey work




This morning I received an SMS from a friend of mine. He has been struggling for a long time now trying to find a steady source of income for himself and his family. A number of months ago, his Rabbi encouraged him to put more effort into the spiritual side of his life. By this, the Rabbi meant attend services more often, say your prayers twice a day, and lay the 'tefillin' every morning. He did lay tefillin for a little while, but soon tired of that.
Since then, he began to see me to do some inner journey work. It is a form of journey work called the "Merkava Descent" that has been handed down to me from ancient Hebraic traditions. We spent a number of session descending into his inner spaces and working in there, rearranging, investigating, shedding some light on what is often regarded as the shadow, the unknown, unconscious aspect of our existence.
Recently we have begun to meet in a group to practise a similar technique. And as group prayer is know to be more effective than praying alone, so this journeying held withing the safety and support of the group - similar to voodoo rituals - is know to be more efficacious.
So in conclusion,.

Inner work produces results in the outer. The only problem is, because of the non-linearity of the relationship, the relationship cannot be scientifically (by the present methods of science, anyway) proven. Science cannot say whether there is any "factual connection".

I ask, what if science had to make an effort to prove this connection. I mean a "real" effort. Just as from the belief in Democritus' concept of the atom, we have produced this wonderful, and useful, edifice to modern physics, some of it of practical use and a lot of it very speculative. What if we truly believed there was a connection between the inner and the outer, and we used the same type of mathematics (or something similar) that we have been using to describe the inner world of the atom to describe this essential non-linear, chaotic and unpredictable relationship.

Julian

3 comments:

Hugh Laue said...

Check out Wilber's Integral Methodological Pluralism to be found described in Integral Spirituality. There he describes the eight different perspectives through which one can view the world, each having its own truth validation approach via the same basic methodology as used by the physical sciences - experiment, hypothesis and validation/falsification. eg. hermenutics, phenomenology, etc.

Unknown said...

Hello Hugh :) Thanks for this, yes, I am glad to see the integrations with Spirit and science that we have today. There was such a split in the Renaissance.

JewelsofThought said...

We can propose all sorts of system to validate non-material, or rather unmeasurable effects. However, the acceptance of one over the other will in the end be extremely biased towards a faith based decision.

Perusing some of the topics you mention in your comment, it is interesting to me the modern take on these subjects that have been discussed by humankind for millenia. The Kabbalah has talked for centuries about these things, but just using different language to describe these ideas. Though often it is just because of the accumulation of knowledge and experience over time that causes such expressions of the infinite to improve.

Thanks for the nudge, reminding me of the vast and interesting arena that has been discovered by Wilber's Integral approach.