Tuesday, 14 August 2018

Spiritual signs. How can we, personally, know that this is a purposive and meaningful world?

It is an error to look for 'evidence' of God's activity in this world - this is a mind set that leads to a life trapped in end-less, open-ended 'research' - one will become a seeker, never a finder.

But, if you instead begin with acknowledgement that it is possible that this world was created by a personal God, who loves us as individuals; then there are plenty of events in your life which are consistent-with such an assumption.

Yesterday I mentioned personal-miracles. For example, you pray for something and it happens in such a way that you, privately - by your own standards and nobody else's, regard it as a miracle.

This granted-prayer may be absolutely 'trivial' both in terms of the world at large and your own life-span - but that is not the point. The point is that such miracles are consistent with the vision of this world as purposive and meaning-full.

Another example is synchronicity - phenomena that are oxymoronically described as meaningful-coincidences. Typically these events are also trivial; but the point of them is that synchronicity is exactly what would be expected in a world of divine Providence; a world in which God was 'behind the scenes' and organising things.

Peak experiences are another instance - brief times of transcendent happiness that come (apparently) out of the blue; and in which we powerfully feel life to be meaningful, coherent, purposive, benign.  

I think it is usually an error to try and understand the implications of the content of these spiritual gifts such as miracles, synchronicities, peak experiences. Not all are pregnant with guidance; some really are quite 'trivial'.

Such spiritual gifts are mostly 'signs' of the kind of world we live in. And they are also signs of us living well, living in a proper mode of consciousness - and such spiritual signs will apparently increase when we are in a Good frame of mind; and may well be utterly absent from a life wrongly-lived.

Spiritual signs might be absent from a materialist life that assumed there was no meaning or purpose, that the world was determined and/ or random (not created) - and if such phenomena do happen to occur, they will be regarded as insignificant, lacking importance, merely a species of delusion.

In sum - spiritual gifts are best understood as signs, consistent with the nature of reality; and we need not get too concerned by what the specific-content of each specific-sign specifically-implies for our own specific-life, or beyond...