Jack Coulter wrote in: "Peter, some time ago I came across an article of yours on Logic - I believe it had linked this to a metaphysical context. In spite of its compelling reasoning, I recall that I was unable (or unwilling) at that time to deal with the intended implications. I am now going through an intense period of questioning several of my seemingly outworn assumptions and I would like to know if it were possible for you to run that article again ? - Perhaps other readers may appreciate it as well". - Glad to oblige, Jack - some minor line shifts may be inevitable as this article would be retrieved from another system:


Logic - Our Ultimate Saviour

Some comments, for the support of only those who are desirous and willing (but may be untrained or unprepared), and who may wish to investigate more deeply the essential "Question of Existence". *



Has not everyone, at one time or another, pondered the questions “Who am I?” and “Why am I?”, as well as many other basic questions? In fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a book on this subject with the underlying question “Why is there Something, rather than Nothing?”

If you are a happy-go-lucky person who has fortunately not experienced much pain in his or her life, this question is probably not something that will be of interest to you. If you are a religious person you might say and believe, “God created me, together with the universe, and I therefore have no need of investigating anything else,” and so you will fall into that category of those who believe they have inherited the answers. If this should apply to you and regardless of how you may think of yourself in this connection, you would nonetheless be fostering what modern psychology refers to as “Avoidance”, a form of psychological escapism which can be shrouded in pseudo-intellectual aphorisms, sounding superficially impressive, but in the final analysis somewhat devoid of Logic, and consequently lacking in Wisdom.

In fact, it will not be of interest to you even if you are in great pain, unless - and this is the key to the whole matter - you are ready to take another look at life and yourself and are prepared – at least intellectually to start with - to “walk to the tune of a different drummer”. In other words, only when you are psychologically pre-disposed will you find relevance in these thoughts. If so, then this could indeed be of great help and may lead you to a speedier transition through an initial phase toward spiritual well-being.

In order to answer those earlier basic questions satisfactorily we need to be assured that all our conclusions are able to stand the test of Logic.

So, Let’s Begin….

As a forethought I should like to mention that in essence there can be no Beginning and no Ending – only an eternal coming and going, an eternal interweaving of manifestations – simply the grand Beingness of all there is (and is not). So the following commentary refers to an individual process in time and space (e.g. as our Universe, etc)

1 – First we ought to let thoughts come to us respecting the situation before a Beginning (a it were) - the Void - Darkness - Nothingness - Boundless - Infinity - Parabrahman/Mulaprakriti. Next we have to consider our world as we experience it; in other words, Existence. Rational thinking tells us that even this must be subordinated to “Cause and Effect”. Thus, Existence must have a cause, and this cause cannot be in Nothingness, which, by definition, is total absence of matter. Out of nothing comes only nothing. Instead, it would better be referred to as a “No-Thingness”.

2 – So now we have a causeless Cause – which nevertheless can only have emanated from the Boundless. It is this Cause which most civilizations call "Life", "Essence", the "Force", "God", "Allah", "Brahma", the "Father", the "Positive", the "First Logos", and other descriptive names. It too, without being dual, has an automatic cooperative counterpart, the "Negative", the "Second Logos", the "Mother", "Maya", "Substance", "Vishnu", "Holy Spirit", and other names.

3 – Out of this comes “Manifestation”, “Creation”, “Light”, “Emergence”, “Existence”, "Phenomena", "Love", the "Son", the "Christ", "Shiva", Duality, the Relative, the Many, Time, Precision, Ratio. - "In the Beginning ... was the Word" - Logos - from which the word Logic is derived.

Leaving “chance” aside, as it explains nothing and is only another escape, we must further use our Logic on the road to synthesis to try to determine the most likely assumptions. It is always better to start with something rather than nothing, and even if this something leads to error, then we will learn from this error – so it is logically a better alternative.

One may therefore assume that anything which is relatively precise, such as the movements of the planets or the positioning of crystals within a rock as well as their own precision, must have an intelligent design as its origin, binding it to the unknown Boundless, which in turn has engendered the Creative Force – the “One About Whom Naught Can Be Said”, and about which any speculation is fruitless. Thus, Logic points the way to the proposition that there must be some transition from the Boundless/Infinity to the Absolute and to the Relative – some Force or Energy which had Intelligence to work with precision – and it is this Force which is commonly and very generally referred to as God, Allah, Jehovah, the Demiurgos, the One, et al.

While we cannot presuppose any characteristics about this Force we are logically, albeit tentatively, drawn to assume that it has superior intelligence, so that it could commence Manifestation with absolute precision, and, judging from its fruits and eternal persistence, that it is a form of essential Love, using this term in its broadest sense and avoiding any narrow personalization such as “God loves me”.


In the Relative

Under any circumstance, a superior intelligence cannot allow chance or accident to enter into its formula of precision, while it busies itself creating fundamental laws of nature. It therefore stands to reason that anything in existence is in Essence precise and purposeful, and that, of course, includes all human beings, at least in their spiritual (mind) matrix, which some refer to as “Soul”.

By this manner of thinking, once the Spirit - newly reborn as the Soul (although not exclusive to human beings) - leaves the Essence, Aether, Ether, “Paradise” (which has become, by this philosophy, a sort of holding tank) and commences its existence in the “Relative”, much may go astray in its earthly trajectory. It may temporarily even lose its path during immersion into “Matter”, ending up against a wall of “Materialism”, or imperfection. When it can no longer become more compact, at the nadir of its orbit, meaning more imperfect, the turn-around commences, which is its saving grace, as “Evolution” out of “Matter” begins and all is drawn back on the upward path to the Essence, often called “Nirvana”. This road back provides for an alignment of the essential ingredients of perfection, and is constituted over an almost infinite length of time through a practically endless series of material re-birth and re-death cycles.

It is noteworthy to mention that in the foregoing process Evolution should apply to everything in the Cosmos – from stars and planets to mineral, vegetable, and animal matter – as well as to the human kingdom and beyond – in accordance with the law of “as above, so below”. This leads inevitable to the conclusion that in the final analysis we are God (of course in essence only – whilst being gods-in-the making in the Relative. This thought is by necessity very abstract and can only be intuited at best and it has been said that we exist in a “symbolic Universe” – “in Him, in whom we live and move and have our being” – this was not only part of Plato’s Logic, but also of Albert Einstein’s and many others).

Since polarity is characterized by opposites it stands to reason that we would have a vast array of differentiation, from the lowest or densest frequency, oscillation, vibration, to the highest precision or least material frequency. The highest frequency is habitually referred to as “good”, (perfect), and the lowest one as “evil” (imperfect). However, we must remember that they are in essence “One”, and that leads inevitably to the ongoing and quite endless debate as to whether there is a God and, if so, what His/Her/Its purpose is. Again, based on Logic we must choose the most likely conclusion that the Universe must have a loving, purposeful design and that our mission is to demystify it whilst abiding by the laws of nature.

All original religious scriptures are based on this assumption and have used the laws of nature to detail appropriate guidelines for human behavior, called “moral rectitude”. The differences between religious interpretations are either due to local cultural differences, or are simply a folly of mankind as it succumbs to its lower mental and emotional frequencies and allows unqualified or illogical expressions to corrupt the essential wisdom of its original leaders. This is what also causes the decay and subsequent reappearance of new, (old), spiritual teachings over stretches of thousands of years.


Our Individual Incarnations as seen from a Logical Perspective
(This section is excerpted from Sunrise Magazine – Aug./Sept. 98 issue)

“All this leads to the question “Where does our basic character come from?”

“Atheists and some agnostics would answer, from a purely materialistic standpoint, that character is determined by the genes we inherit from our parents. If asked why we have the parents we do have and what determines which genes are active and which are recessive, they would answer in a single word: chance. But this explains nothing; it implies in fact there is no explanation - things just happen to be the way they are. Efforts to reduce the wonders of life and mind to random physico-chemical interactions are grossly inadequate and unsatisfactory.

“A second possibility is that there is a God, a divine being, who creates a human soul for each newborn child. If God gives us our character and decides the circumstances of our birth, he would also bear a major responsibility for all the subsequent events of our lives. It would mean that people suffer because it’s God’s will that they should suffer. A being capable of such cruelty and injustice would surely be a senseless fiend rather than a “god”. An extreme version of this position (no longer dared to be publicly used) can be found in the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (3.6.016) which states: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death.” Hardly an inspiring doctrine!

“A third possibility, and the most logical, (reasonable), is reincarnation. According to this view, our essence, (souls, if you wish), as well as the essences of everything else, are reborn on earth again and again, and in each life we reap what we have sown in previous lives and sow seeds that we shall harvest in future lives, until such time when our evolution is completed and we function again, (this time consciously), as part of our Divine essence. There is no such thing as chance, but rather cause and effect, (or “karma” in South Asian terminology), whereby the consequences of all our thoughts and deeds ultimately rebound upon ourselves, either in this life or in a future life. When a Monad (Essence) returns to incarnation, it is drawn by affinity to the parents who can provide it with the body and environment best fitted to the tendencies it already possesses. So rather than inheriting our characteristics from our parents, we actually inherit them through our parents from ourselves – from our own past.”


Postulate for Living

While the general religions of the world in their present form can be (and no doubt are) a very decayed expression of their original teachings as well as a separative influence, it is nevertheless better to have a societal tool for the teaching of the young than nothing at all. The thrust of life itself will then make all reasonably intelligent individuals (and that does not necessarily signify higher IQ’s), find their own way between various pairs of opposites, (“Be ye therefore a lamp onto your own feet” as Buddha is said to have advised).

The followers of exaggerated or corrupt forms of religion often behave in a similar, if not worse, manner than people of no religion or no spiritual identification, i.e. they are equally on the lowest rung of polarity – Jacob’s ladder. If good and evil were not two sides of the same coin we would never be able to distinguish the difference between light and dark, day and night.

Shining a lamp onto your own feet means searching for the ancient wisdom which has once again been made available to the public, and is accessible in most libraries, as well through many philosophical organizations dedicated to the enhancement of all areas of our lives. Health, nutrition, exercise, and meditation are all part of that curriculum, and are presently facilitating the gradual replacement of worn-out religious, economic and political ideologies.


According to Victor Hugo,

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.

(End)

*Author's Note:
It may be of interest to the reader to know how I personally came to arrive at my present convictions (which are always on the road of construction and further evolution):
Having been born into the Catholic religion I was nevertheless fortunate to be spared from much definite indoctrination and more or less enjoyed my youthful church life as a pleasant cultural environment. As I arrived in North-America - and I use this larger geographic description very specifically - I gradually lost any religious adherence, and generally accepted myself to be an agnostic, as my speculations could no longer allow a continued imposition of some unrealistic dogma to hold sway over me with the priestly injunction that I simply had to have faith.
For that matter I could have had faith in any irrational command, (and as history has shown people do, from Nazism to Communism to any other "ism" of choice, often with the most dire of consequences) - atheism falling into the same category - so the only choice left as an escape was to live as an agnostic (which admittedly is vague and essentially open to change).
At around the age of 40, (supposedly the point of the famous mid-life crisis), I found myself dissatisfied with almost anything and everything - even though I was earning a very substantial income at the time - and I started to question the validity of everything and life itself - perhaps just short of a depression. When my dysfunctional marriage had finally run its course I gradually came into contact with many new individuals, some of which expressed a conviction in reincarnation, a concept which was new to me, at least as an essential personal ingredient.
I started to read on the subject and, while at first suspicious of just another religious invention, I became quickly aware of how much this doctrine is connected with Plato's essential Logic and all else in the universe - from Astrology, Palmistry, Iridology to the Ancient Wisdom Teachings. These foundations are still firmly rooted in the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and in the Hindu Advaita (as expressed in the teachings of the Indian sage Sankarachara), and were - as it turns out - also part of the ancient Egyptian teachings as well as those of Plato, Pythagoras and others.. They also formed part of the scholarship of the Master Jesus as transmitted to his disciples, carrying on to become part of the early Christian theology and ‘Gnosis’. Thereafter - after the first few 100 years – with the establishment of papal power, Christianity gradually deteriorated, as most religions do, and the theory of Reincarnation was finally eliminated during the last Council of Constantinople on the insistence of the emperor Justinian - the Pope not even having been present.

In modern times these teachings gradually started to resurface in Western culture, first during the 19th century with the transcendentalists - Emerson, Thoreau, etc – and they later gained greater perspective within the Theosophical Teachings (Helena Petrova Blavatsky or for short H.P.B.) and later Lucis Trust (Alice Bailey) which in the early 20th century culminated with the Liberal Catholic Church, Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), Edgar Cayce (A.R.E.), and the Unity movement with its Unity School of Christianity. (There are also many other worthwhile institutions, too numerous to mention in this context).



Suggested reading resources:

“The Golden Thread” by Natalie N. Bank,
published by Lucis Publishing Co., NY.

“Everyone is Right” by Roland Peterson
published by De Vorss & Co. CA

“The Science of Being and the Art of Living”
by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
published by MIU Press