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Don Salmon's avatar

The idea that a miracle is impossible because it’s an exception to an exception less law is one I will have to send to Iain McGilchrist (who writes on the dangers of pure, abstract, linear and literal analytic thinking having taken over the world, and thus posing a mortal danger to the survival of humanity).

I remember in writing my thesis on lucid dreaming (a dream in which you are aware you’re dreaming) I came across philosopher (!!??) Norman Malcolm who performed a similar feat of illogic with regard to dreams. He said, “Sleep is defined as a state in which we are conscious. Since dreams are alleged to be states of consciousness that occur during sleep, it is obvious, by definition, that dreams are impossible.”

What!!!!

It recalls the steam locomotive invented George Stephenson’s response to skeptics who insisted his steam engine simply could not move the locomotive. His response: “And yet it moves.”

(This might seem like Samuel Johnson’s attempt to refute idealism by kicking a stone; “I refute it thus” except Johnson completely misunderstood the fact that the dream foot kicking the dream stone was actually a support for idealism!)

Sri Aurobindo tackles this “laws of nature” question quite simply (and I would add, psychologist Jim Carpenter, with his “First Sight” theory of psi, has provided us with the best empirical verification of what Sri Aurobindo offered.

As long as we are confined to the ordinary waking consciousness, the “laws of nature” (I’m going to substitute “habits’ from here on) that we observe in the various objective phenomena that appear in Consciousness are pretty much unchangable.

But when we waken to the subtle much vaster consciousness within which all physical phenomena occur, these habits of the apparent “physical” world change quite radically. And when we awaken to the causal realm (sushupti, as it is referred to in the Upanishads) we arrive at that which can “break” or modify the habits of the “physical’ realm.

We have thousands of valid experiments of psychokinesis to prove this, as well as centuries of examples in which hundreds and even thousands of people witnessed incidents of levitation and other events which are only “miracles’ to those whose consciousness is limited to the modern left-hemisphere linear, logical, quantitative thinking that rules our modern world and is coming to destroy it.

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Michaela McKuen's avatar

Laws of nature only apply to repeated events. Trying to apply a law of nature to a non-repeated event is like trying to divide by zero. Rupert Sheldrake says the laws of nature might be more like habits anyway and cites Nietzsche as having a similar idea originally.

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