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The Parapsychological God |
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The Cayce readings indicate that God created souls for the purpose of companionship. When someone asked Cayce what was the greatest psychic realization, he answered that it was to know that God still talks directly to people. Perhaps the key to companionship with God is through psychic perception. The greatest commandments are to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. We can follow these laws out of a sense of duty to moral obligation. We can also follow them as a natural expression of a direct perception of our oneness with creation. Yet since oneness is not evident to the physical senses, such love is dependent upon psychic perception. Our sixth sense may indeed provide the experiential foundation for spirituality, a spirituality based upon a transformed experience of the world rather than founded upon a set of inherited laws. That psychic ability might be the basis of a new approach to spirituality is the essential idea in a thought provoking new book, Frontiers of the Soul: Exploring Psychic Evolution. (Quest Books). The author, Michael Grosso, is a philosopher at Jersey City State College. Professor Grosso has researched and written extensively on the connection between spirituality and parapsychology. As an example of the type of novel integration he pursues between these domains, his book The Final Choice explored the connection between UFO sightings and sightings of the Holy Mother. There he hypothesized that both were symptoms of a planetary near death experience, a transpersonal call for change in our worldview. His current book extends his thinking to explore the role of the psychic imagination in evolving the soul and cosmos into unknown frontiers. He begins with an historical account of how the gods, or God, raged war against the stability of our religious conceptions by infiltrating our imagination with new images and impulses. Throughout this history, psychic ability has been a major protagonist in the evolution of religious thought. The spiritual imagination is energized by psychic sensibility, a sensibility that is often persecuted by those who would maintain the status quo. The original spiritual experience of the shaman becomes codified by the priests who seek to shape the minds of the followers rather than help them have similar experiences. The mystic doesn't seek followers but companions. Jesus and Cayce indicated that we could so the same as they. Priests nevertheless create rulebooks for how to be like the mystic, photographing for analysis a momentary shadow of the saint while the saint's spirit ventures onward. Followers quote scripture rather than living the love the scripture describes, they refer to Jungian principles rather than meditate upon their dreams, or revere the Cayce readings as their highest source of guidance rather than their own higher selves. God challenges the status quo through the psychic imagination. Edgar Cayce's psychic perspective on the relationship between God and humans is that our destiny is to become co-creators and companions with God. Carl Jung's vision of our destiny, based upon his clinical and scholarly research, is that the purpose of human consciousness is to transform God. Both these visions of our spiritual destiny place God and humanity into a relationship. Grosso explores this relationship by examining people whose exploration of its outer limits point toward the frontier of the soul's evolution. Jesus, for example, was a master psychic, with a life and ministry abundant in miracles, or paranormal events. Grosso uses these facts to explain the rapid spread of Christianity in spite of Jewish opposition and Roman ridicule. He analyses Jesus's suggestions to his disciples in terms of their psi-conducive quality and presents evidence that Jesus was training people in developing psychic abilities. Although he is aware that many Christians will find the cozy connection with the psychic uncomforable, Christianity is the most irrational religions of all, asking us to suspend disbelief in many of our assumptions about the world. Viewing these facts from a psychic point of view, however, makes them seem quite self-evident. He analyses the lives of two more recent holy men, Padre Pio, an Italian monk (1887-1968) and Sai Baba (1926--) a Hindu guru in India. Both evidenced miraculous, stunning psychic abilities. Their feats have created as much consternation as awe. They arouse debate as well as love. Their lives stretch our imagination. The path of this evolution is paved with the imagination. Grosso explores the idea that one purpose of psychic ability is to enable us to "inhabit the imaginal," thus allowing us to find as real that plane of existence. One application of his thinking on the imagination is that of guardian angels. The doctrine of angels speaks of a divine connection, an inner inlet to the highest, and it would seem to acknowledge a psychic function, listening to the still small voice. Grosso proposes that we imaginally co-create the angels--something "in here" unites with something "out there" to create a union that has paranormal implications in our lives. He suggests that "angels are true to the extent that we make them true." When we give such beings a psychic life we make a link to our higher, psychic selves, and the angel image makes it easier to surrender to that higher power. He applies the reality of the psychic imagination to the survival of death. In the Cayce readings, for example, we learn that we get a taste of the afterlife in our dreams becasue the subconscious mind becomes the conscious mind after death. Grosso suggests that the Eleusian mysteries of the ancient Greeks were transformative rituals lifting the veil on the role of the imagination in transcending death. He analyses the bodily transformations that Padre Pio experienced in terms of our evolving into a spiritual body of light, expressing the creator's imaginal power in its purest human form. Transcending death, if you can imagine that, is on the horizon of our evolution. The frontier of the soul, then, is literally our imagination. Its infinite reach, according to Cayce, has no peer save one--our companionable Creator.
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This page was last updated 03/19/02 |