If you have heard anything at all about good and evil, you probably have heard only a small part of the truth if at all about the truth. The most you will have heard springs out of the realms of fantasy and has absolutely nothing to do with the truth and how reality is. Many of things you know are brought to you by traditions and lore. And as everyone knows, oral traditions in combination with religions have caused more harm in this world than any natural disaster or disease. The truth has been hidden for thousands of years. Men have been conditioned to trust and believe in the things taught, without having the possibility or desire to confirm them. If falsities are allowed to enter into our knowledge, no matter how small or banal they might seem, falsehood is allowed to enter. To stand on the firm ground of the truth, and to stay away from assumptions or speculations about the unknown details of the truth is something very fundamental. Despite the knowledge of the truth, assumptions have lead to beliefs based on fiction instead of fact, and have brought men to believe the strangest things.
Therefore, one has to examining the facts, and has to compare them to anything taught today. If the facts do not fit to what is taught, one has a serious problem, and is most likely looking at the works of men who are trying to fit the facts into their preconceived ideas, instead of making their ideas fit the facts of the truth. The more assumptions can be found in an idea, theory, or doctrine, the further it is away from the truth.
What really is this truth I am talking about? Is it what I think I know, or is it really what is? How can a person even be sure that what he knows is the truth? Many misguided have done some awful things during the centuries based on the belief of knowing the truth.
Hundreds of years ago, people were putting witches to death. This seems to us today wrong and morally condemnable. But why? Are we today more human or more civilized than a few centuries ago? Do we know more, or better, today, than a few centuries ago? Surely, the reason why we do not execute witches today is that we do not believe there are such things. If we really thought, there were people going about who had sold themselves to evil and received supernatural powers through it in return and would use these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad, or bring bad weather, surely, most would agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, than these filthy quislings would.
It may be a great advantage in knowledge not to believe in witches, but there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set up mousetraps if he did so because he believes there are no mice in the house.
Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a billion something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another billionth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then by very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself to the extent of having minds.
I ran into a complicated situation when I ask the question "What is man?" because there are so many different ways of perceiving man. We could say or assume that man is a physical organism and that its basic issues are the physiological processes taking place within that organism. But wouldn't that just be our biological part, our body? However, there is much more to man, man is also a psyche, an individualized consciousness. If you want to call this part of man "Soul", it would be a sufficient description, I guess. So the very simple question of "What is man?" elicits complex and sometimes confusing answers. Therefore we have today so many definitions of man, such as: Man is a social animal, a socio-biological phenomenon, a molecular structure, a bio-chemical process, a product of interpersonal relationships, a conditioned reflex system, etc. I guess you get the point.
These various assumptions about man led to a variety of forever changing ideas. This clearly indicates, that they cannot be valid, because the truth is immutable. It does not change. Whatever is mutable and transitory cannot possible be the correct idea. Now we can be forgiven if we accept incorrect ideas because we do not know any better. But if we do not know that we do not know, then we are in trouble. I had to consider myself in the later category. I compared it to a blind man who does not know that he is blind. Such a man would be in great danger because he might hurt himself. But if a blind man knows that he is blind, then he can proceed wisely and cautiously, actually begin to see in certain ways and be safe. First I had to come to know and realize, that I really don't know and then I had to seek to know as much as possible. Once I recognized the tragic insufficiency of knowledge about man, it led me to seek out a definition of man, which had endured over ages. This knowledge has been neglected, skimmed over and not been taken seriously by many people, especially by the so-called scientific world. It has been accepted on the basis of pure belief, namely, that man is an "image" and "likeness" of God. Everybody is familiar with this. Scientists and even some religious people disdain it since it cannot be proven. Some people consider it even nonsense. But nonsense in my definition is that which fits not into the prearranged patterns, which we have superimposed on reality. There is not such a thing as nonsense, apart from a judgmental intellect, which calls it that. Nonsense is nonsense only when have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense. But exactly this so-called nonsense definition of man as the "image" and "likeness" of God is what I have realized to be the truth. I took this as a basic premise of my belief and I sat out to prove it to myself.
In order for something to be the basic premise of a belief, a theory or scientific system, it must be understood, not only believed in. It must be actually realized, otherwise the whole structure would be build on shifting sand and will turn into a shifting, changing idea, which I have already defined not to be the truth, because the truth is immutable. In order for me to understand the definition of man as an image and likeness of God, I had to see man in the context of God. It would be impossible to understand the image and likeness of something apart from it. There are already all kinds of endeavors, which try to study man apart from God, as a thing in itself. But all of them are inadequate because there is not such a thing as man in and of himself. Attempts to understand man as if he were a self-existing entity are based on erroneous impressions of which I had a lot. It is simply impossible to understand man apart from God, his Creator. Once I had considered that perhaps the biblical definition of man might be valid, I was impelled to study man in the context of God. But how could I study man in the context of God unless I already knew who God is?
This definition presented me with an additional dilemma. Not only did I not know what man is, but I also had to find out who God is, and do it scientifically. For this, I had to define science in broader terms. The traditional concept of science is, that whatever we are studying must be accessible to quantification, measurements and experimental validation. That really limits the scientific approach a great deal to things, which are tangible, which have dimensions, which have weight, etc. But science has already reached levels of understanding where we can study things, which are not measurable, not quantifiable, and not accessible to sensory perception. The whole theory of quantum mechanics is based on ideas, concepts, assumptions and mathematical formulas. Nobody ever has observed anything on the particle level of atoms, yet our whole modern technology is based on the theory of quantum mechanics, because we can see how it works in its results. Scientific concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.
In my endeavor to understand God, I was somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. I could see the face and the moving hands, even hear it's ticking, but I had no way of opening the case. Now, if I was ingenious, I may form some picture of a mechanism, which could be responsible for all the things I observe, but I never would be quite sure if my picture is the only one, which could explain my observation. I would never be able to compare my picture with the real mechanism and I could not even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison. I took the biblical definition of man as the image and likeness of God as a fundamental premise of my search for the truth and proceeded to ask questions. What or who is God? What is Life? How can an infinite power, a creative intelligence have an image and likeness? How can an invisible, non-quantifiable force be "imaged" and reflected and manifested through individuals? What a dilemma? How could I reach sufficient understanding of this elusive reality?
I learned, that those aspects of life, which cannot be done, would help anyone, who really wants to attain an understanding of God. The great confusion in which we live comes from the assumption and erroneous impression that we can do everything and that everything entails doing something, like for instance "making love". Around the issue of love there is a good deal of confusion, stemming from the operational bias with which we view life. We cannot "get" love, we cannot "make" love, and we cannot "give" love. If we try, we turn out to be inauthentic, consciously or unconsciously. Love can only be realized. What does it means to realize something? It means to become conscious of the reality of something. When we realize love, we discover, that love really is, and that which is, does not have to be produced, since it already is, then that which really is, becomes manifest in our experience. We could say love expresses it self through us. We become aware of it by the quality of our presence. Such a presence, I realized has a healing, harmonizing, enlightening impact on whatever situation it happens to be participating in. The right understanding of those aspects of life, which cannot be done, led me to an understanding of God. God became a tangible reality to me, and I live and move and have my being in Him, more and more with every new day passing.
My name is Rene Ward and I am the brother-in-law of William of Orange. William opened the proverbial box of Pandora when he converted my sister, a Saracen Princess, to Christianity and married her, causing the final confrontation between Christians and Saracens in Europe, restarting a millennia old conflict and even bringing it into modern times. This conflict can be traced through time and it is not the conflict between nations as William thought, but the conflict of two concepts of being. Only obeying my own instincts and intuition in writing this, I might not even understand myself what I am going to write, but I am secure in the knowledge that everything will become clear and meaningful in the end, because I have faith in the man who is writing, who is myself.
