One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. Imagine how it felt for those who stood out from the traditional values. Or, rather, imagine how it feels, because the discussion is still very much a part of our contemporary culture. ‘I just want to know who I am and why I am alive.’ It is the cry of people everywhere. Everything can seem so frustrating. Our intellectual understanding of creation, nature, life, and death, is so limited. What is the problem? The problem is actually not that our intellectual understanding is so limited. Anyone who cares to do so can read up on creation, nature, life and death, any day they please. And they will get a much fuller and better understanding than has ever been available before. Rather, the problem is that this modern scientific understanding neither entails—nor, in all honesty, can even be said to be consistent with—the future people yearn for. They will not find from science that the only real answer is to allow our spirits to rise beyond ourselves, to rise to God in faith, love and worship. We are all God’s children. However, for some, alternative answers are possible, this can only because they do not have sufficient information to make a better judgement. God rewards those who earnestly seek him, so we need to keep looking for him. Do not give us. Seek God with all your hearts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Sometimes it is not easy to develop faith in spiritual things while living in a physical World. In some circumstances too much depends on our making the correct prediction about what we are dealing with for it to be permissible to play fast and loose with truth. If anything goes, some things obviously go on more than others. And when it comes to discovering what does go and what does not go, the scientific method has repeatedly proved itself terribly convincing. If the physical Universe has been created by God, it would follow that there was a time when the quantity of matter was less than it is now, when it was in fact zero. However, physics proves or presupposes that the quantity of matter was always been the same. Notwithstanding the jibes of its detractors, science has in most areas made the World much less of a mystery than it was in the past, and its explanations are sometimes almost alarmingly straightforward. However, the doctrine of eternal return tells us that every event in the Universe, in all its details and in its whole cosmic context, will recur an infinite number of times in exactly the same way that it has already occurred an infinite number of times in the past. Eternity is the complete possession of eternal life all at once—a notion that becomes clearer from comparison with things temporal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

Whatever lies in times moves as something present from the past to the future, and there is nothing placed in time that can embrace the whole extent of its life at once. It does not yet grasp tomorrow, and it has already lost yesterday. And even in the life of today you do not live longer than in the transitory moment. That, then, which is subject to the condition of time, even if (as Aristotle thought of the World) it has no beginning or end and its life extends through endless time, is still not such as may be rightly judged from eternal. For though its life be endless, it does not grasp and embrace the extent of it all at once [totum simul] but has some parts still to come. And so, if, following Plato, we wish to give things their right names, let us say that God is eternal, but the World is ever lasting. Also, perhaps if we only pry a little bit further, we shall find new facts that science has yet to take on board—non—standard facts that may, with luck, still force a revision of the scientific picture? Indeed perhaps such facts have been knocking on the door for ages, only to be told by science to go away? Faith is a strong conviction about something we believe—a conviction so strong that it moves us to do things that we otherwise might not do. Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Forced rewriting of the rules does in fact happen every so often, even within conventional science. However, once physicists come up against certain peculiar phenomena at the atomic level, such as the photo-electric effect, they have no alternative. Only the complicated theory could now meet all the facts. Or consider an example of a more controversial kind. The conventional scientific theory of how human memory works assumes that people’s memories are stored as physical traces in their individual brains. Almost all the data are, of course, consistent with this. Nonetheless for some time there have been other, more outre theories doing the rounds. These suggest that memories are actually not stored in the physical brains at all but rather in non-physical fields outside the brain to which individuals tune in when occasion arises because before this life the human soul lived among timelessly existent forms and contemplated the directly as in this life it sees things belonging to the realm of becoming. The field theory (if someone were ever to spell out just how it works) would certainly be much more complicated than the brain theory. Since the facts as known at present do not demand it, most scientists would say there is no reason whatever to take it seriously. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

However, if and when we look in the right places in nature, we shall find new evidence (which same say has already been discovered) that completely undermines the brain theory: evidence, for example, of memories being transferred between different individuals who have had no form of physical contact. If it were really to be so, it would be right that the field theory would then be the only one left in contention. Scientific theories themselves undoubtedly do change and grow in response to new evidence and human insights. An accepted theory can be proved wrong and even turned on its head when more facts come to light. The World is much mysterious than we realize; in fact, I think it is dynamic than we can realize. There is always room for further change in the World outlook, and therefore—for those who do not like the current scientific picture—room for hope. All Universal principles are available to those who understand them, and they immediately respond to anyone who subjects oneself to the way which they work. For instance, water will reach its own level by its own weight—water will flow downhill. We obey this principle. We use it. We apply it, but we cannot go contrary to that principle and compel water to flow uphill. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

It is the same with electricity. The electrician can do anything he or she wishes to with his or her principle provided one realizes that it flows from a higher to lower potential, but one cannot make it act contrary to its own nature. Yet, brilliant minds do sometimes come up with revolutionary ideas before their time. It has often been said that the mark of genius is to be able to see the revolution coming, to sense that something is wrong with a received idea even while other people are still celebrating its rightness. Our great investigators in the field of experimental science have watched the operations of nature so often and closely that they are able to guess what course it is likely to take, to smell out, so to speak, methods that are still to be discovered, new experiments, unknown results. These scientific innovators posses l’esprit de divination. Divine necessity and the law of cause and effect teaches us to believe that we shall receive, and we shall have these things we desire. The law of cause and effect operates through human consciousness. This remarkable genius does not deny us the right to possess and use the entire gift of God, wholeness of life and its manifestation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

While scientists have, for sure, taken it on themselves to watch the operations of nature often and closely, the poets and mystics have arguably watched human nature more often and more closely than anyone. Maybe they could already legitimately claim to know something the scientists do not. Rather than ignoring or deriding science, the better way could be to try to beat science at its own game. We want a particular future state. We cannot expect to get to it unless we have good reasons to posit a special explanation of the present facts. As things stand, however, contemporary scientific doctrine tells us this special explanation is not required. Then our strategy, should perhaps, be to go out and uncover new facts that do require it: facts that prove the current doctrine wrong. Human beings may have faculties, and be surrounded by agencies, which physical science does not take into account in its theory of the Universe and of human nature. Of God’s ever-present eternity all years stand at once (omnes simul stant). The divine will is toward life, since being the very principle of life it cannot contradict itself; it must be toward life. It is toward givingness, since in giving it expressing itself. Therefore we know that as far as the divine is concerned, it is always its will that we be self-expressed. For God is expressed through the expression of humans. The divine will is harmony, peace, love, goodness, truth, and beauty. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7