Using Spirituality for Miracles and Magic

Over and over again we hear from our modern New Age Gurus and Media Gurus that Spirituality is not to be used as a means for acquiring magical powers. We are told that seeking for miracles is an infraction of some sort of spiritual code of ethics. Teachers therefore renounce miraculous powers while insisting that their students do the same.

Now first, before we get any further into this topic, let me take note of just how ridiculous is this renunciation of the miraculous. It should be laughable that people who had never ever in their lives even seen a miracle can pretend they can renounce miraculous powers. I may be a bit cynical but it seems to me that any such self promoting Guru who makes it a point to renounce the gift of miracles, that such a person is attempting to create the impression that otherwise he would in fact be in the same league as perhaps Jesus Christ or any other of the great saints. Really, now. Isn’t it much more likely that these Gurus renounce miraculous powers so they will never have to explain why they do not have any. And isn’t it likely that they insist their students renounce miraculous powers so as to avoid the lessons that the teachers know they are not qualified to teach.

Also, we should all understand the incredible arrogance that could be behind any sincere renunciation of supernatural powers. Those who claim that miracles violate their higher ethical sensibilities pretend to a moral superiority over Jesus and every other Saint in History.

Okay, so let us understand that all of our New Age Gurus are only making the pretence of renouncing miraculous powers as a cover, to excuse their lack of miraculous powers, which they would not so glibly renounce if they actually had any of these powers. This being so, it should now seem redundantly silly for any aspirant to spirituality to vow to avoid miraculous powers. Their Gurus do not deserve such loyalty or obedience. One should follow one’s Guru everywhere but into foolishness.

Indeed, while we see the general renunciation of miraculous powers in many of the New Age spiritual traditions, still, there are some New Age Cults that present as their primary attraction the pursuit of the miraculous. The most popular Movement in this regards of “The Course in Miracles” – some lady had pretended to channel Jesus Christ, writing a huge book which voluminously presented just one simple argument – that if one wishes hard enough, one can create miracles. One must transcend all doubts, that is, to have complete faith, then one can do anything. What the followers do with this Doctrine is that they emphasize every case in which they got what the wished for (never anything supernatural or truly miraculous, but the sorts of things that women generally wish for – romantic affairs mostly and winning small card lotteries), and then for every time that they did not get what they wished for, they were able to point out that they did indeed have their doubts – oh if only they had stronger Faith. And this brings us to the Doctrine of Faith which has always been something of a sham as I can explain.

You see, the Doctrine of Faith has never really been used to explain why miracles happen, but rather to explain, in the negative, why they do not happen. Simply look at all Spiritual History, apart from those particular scriptures that are meant to deliberately (and spuriously) set out arguments for the Doctrine of Faith, and we find that Miracles are presented to people, individuals or crowds, to their surprise and amazement. No faith was required as these miracles occurred unexpectedly. So, where is it that Faith becomes a factor? Faith, or rather the lack of faith is cited as the cause for why miracles are stifled. Who first presented this backwards Doctrine of Faith or Lack of Faith. It was the false apostle Paul who never was able to perform an actual miracle. If one reads the Bible closely one can verify this, that nobody attributes any significant miracle to Paul except Paul himself, and the few incidents that are cited as miraculous, are mundane happenings that are easily explained away (once Paul was present after a young man who had fallen from a window and had the wind knocked out of himself eventually caught his breath, which isn’t much of a miracle, is it? And then Paul’s other ‘miracle’ was that he yelled at a little old man until the poor old guy had a stroke. These are the complete list of Paul’s ‘miracles’. Oh, Paul had insisted that it was a ‘miracle’ that he had survived some earthquakes and ship wrecks, but, honestly, there have been other people who have survived such things without asserting Providential Interventions. What should have been remarked was that God had been trying so hard to kill Paul). Anyway, Paul contrived the Doctrine of Lack of Faith in order to explain away his impotence in regards to the miraculous – when his congregations complained that they were not getting the miracles that the congregations of the Real Apostles were getting, Paul fired back with the accusation of blaming them for their lack of faith. “It’s not my fault. It’s all your fault.” Then, as the Gospels were written, stories were created and inserted whereby a fictionalized Jesus attributed a few of his many miracles to the faith of those who received the benefits of these miracles, but we can be sure that it simply did not happen in this way. Where we have it reported that most of the miracles of Christ were wrought in surprise and amazement, having nothing to do with anybody’s faith or lack of faith, then we can assume that they were all equally ‘faithless’. Paul was simply using Faith – lack of Faith – as an excuse and a cover for his spiritual impotency. Indeed, everywhere today that we see New Age Gurus citing the Doctrine of Faith, if we look closely enough, we will see this doctrine not being used to explain how all their miracles are occurring, but rather to explain why nothing is happening. “You would be able to move mountains except for your lack of Faith”. And all the while the maps aren’t changing very much.

So let us all from this point on completely dismiss any notion of faith, or lack of faith as having any bearing at all on the Supernatural, unless your concern is simply that you would like to have a convenient excuse for being powerless. And as we have already determined, one needs no other excuse but to insist that one has no miracles because one has deliberately renounced them for ethical reasons… that one has more moral scruples than even Jesus Christ.

Okay, now let us move onto some more positive views, indeed, let us examine where miracles do in fact come from.

First, the bad news. If you have not already performed any miracles then it is not at all likely that you ever will. In the history of Spirituality we see case after case where the first miracles from known miracle workers occurred while they were still children. So skill in the miraculous does not seem to be an acquired skill but rather an innate talent. Yet there are some exceptions. I have a rare book, “The Healer of Los Olmos” about one Don Pedrito Jaramillo who had already attained to his adulthood before being given his powers to heal by an Angel. So, while attaining to the miraculous during one’s life need not be considered impossible, still we must acknowledge that all the best miracle workers are probably born that way. Oh, this reminds me of an earlier paper I had written concerning Karma, which points out not so much the special karma of our own individual souls but rather focuses on the biological karma of our families. In this regards, it may be easier for you to hope for miraculous powers if you have a long family history of spirituality, religiosity, righteousness and saintliness. Whereas if your genealogy is large with whores and horse-thieves then perhaps you should consider that your interest in miracles might only be academic.

Next, we move onto a seeming paradox, and we can remind ourselves here that paradoxes seem to be one of the hallmarks of any genuinely thorough spiritual explanation… yin and yang and all of that. Here the paradox is that while almost every saint and miracle worker in history insists that it is not they themselves who perform the miracles but rather that the true agents are God Himself or his angels; but despite these personal disclaimers, it appears on the surface that their miracles closely follow their own will and intentions – they appear to plan out the details of their miracles and they appear to be giving all of the orders. It does not look as though they are standing by passively while God and Angels are doing all the work. Now, what could resolve this seeming paradox is the notion that our miracle workers are summoning, or, to say it vulgarly, that they are conjuring God or the Angels. Well, this would seem extremely blasphemous in the context of some people’s religious traditions. But we need to look at this spiritually. So look at it this way, that spirituality is unitary – it involves an intrinsic Oneness of all things. But while we are observing actions, behaviors, and, indeed, any manifestation, we are likely to see such things dualistically.

What I suppose happens with our typical Miracle Worker is that at some very effective level that includes their will power and volition, there occurs a merging into the Collective Consciousness, which we may call ‘God Consciousness’ if we incline toward the religious view of things.

Well, this brings us to the difficult part in our path toward the miraculous, that we need to transform our existential orientation from that of individual consciousness to that of a collective consciousness, that is to see yourself not just as a single individual person but actually as one of the central points of consciousness of the Universe itself. Yes, sometimes we have people who see themselves as the central point of consciousness of the Universe, and therefore conclude that they are God Himself; however, this is the result of some incomplete thinking. In a Unitary Universe where there is extension within space, there are in fact multiple centers within this infinity of consciousness. And so it is that God Consciousness would not be exclusive to any one particular point in the extension of space. So it is that one crazy person claiming to be God Himself would not preclude a second person from honestly and actually making the same claim. Oh, and this reminds me that when Jesus said that he and the Father were one, that it never precluded the possibility that another soul could experience the same truth.

Oh, and speaking of Truth, we may here come to an unfortunate acknowledgment, and that is that being a Miracle Worker does practically nothing toward making one intellectually coherent. Saints are not necessarily capable of explaining their Sainthood in comprehensible terms and cogent arguments. While nothing else was impossible to them, explaining themselves was. Indeed, in some traditions they really needed to keep their mouths shut. For instance, in both the Catholic and Islamic Traditions their saints were carefully monitored in everything they said so as to discern their conformity to accepted doctrine. The Catholic Church has thrown out thousands of miracles and disparaged many a righteous miracle worker into the halls of heresy because the miracle workers had said something that disagreed with Paul and the Paulist doctrines of the Church, which really should have made somebody in the Vatican think, but all of their training was focused on renouncing such spiritual common sense (Think about what? Okay, the Doctrines of the Church had been drawn up by a man who never performed a miracle but who was skilled in making Big Promises – Salvation, Free Sin, Eternal Life. Those who actually do perform miracles are then measured by the standards of the guy who can’t perform miracles, but was good at making Big Promises. Common sense would lead the Church to rather except the Miracles and question the guy with the Big Promises than the other way around).

As the Catholics had to stay discretely mum, equally, the Sufi Saints in the land of Islam had to refrain from saying anything about the doctrines of Mohamet, or the ubiquitous Sword of Islam would have come into its play.

So it is that the Catholic and Sufi Mystics and Miracle Workers either said nothing at all or they cloaked their conclusions in intellectually incomprehensible poetry, which isn’t very helpful unless one is another poet.

The Oriental Traditions from out of India are far better in regards to deriving any solid understanding of what is going on. Hinduism is better than Buddhism, largely because Buddhism is very conscious of being dismissive of Hindu Traditions, and so where Hinduism may be correct as regards to anything, than Buddhism insists upon being wrong simply as a matter of proud contrariness. This is most noticeable as in regards to the concrete Spiritual Truths, particularly as regards to the Minor Gods and Goddesses, as we see in our dreams (proving their psychological reality at least). Hinduism has never rejected the Gods as Buddhism insists upon doing. Indeed, this reminds me of Catholicism which excels in regards to its worship of the minor Gods, calling them Angels and Saints, and in the worship of its Goddesses, the various forms and incarnations of Mary Mother of God. So it is that this Goddess is actually appearing time and time again, as well as its Saints and Angels, making Catholicism, despite its numerous errors of oversights, one of the last Living Religions with a vein of true Spirituality. But, getting back to the East, what I have noticed about Buddhism, especially as it approaches the most genuine Buddhism of Gautama Buddha Himself (a spoiled rich kid from start to finish), is that it is atheistic, escapist and nihilistic, and tries to over-simplify everything. Well, I believe it is this tendency for oversimplification which makes it the favorite of neophytes in the West. Babies in spirituality find Buddhism well within their grasp. But those of higher culture and education come to prefer the far richer traditions of Sanskrit Philosophy and Yogic Vedantic and even the Tantric Traditions to the more sterile outlines of Buddhism that draws its philosophy with crayons in the form of three fingered stick figures.

But in either case, the Miracle Workers from the Indian Subcontinent, because they feared far less recriminations, could be far more open, even the Sufis if they could get out of the Islamic neighborhoods. So it was that the Wisdom and Philosophy could develop and grow from each succeeding generation to the next. It was a literate culture with a common written language and so knowledge could be widely shared, and since records had been kept, we can see the progress and advance in the knowledge of Spiritual Metaphysics. Indeed, it has come to something of a Golden Age. The 20th Century saw Vivekananda, Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, and Aurobindo as well as a plethora of fine Sanskrit Scholars, all publishing, all teaching. Its all quite an impressive field of Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom. Also remarkable is that English has become something of India’s Common Language, and so it is that most of the important Spiritual and Philosophical Works have either been translated into English or were written in English in the first place.

Now we arrive at an embarrassing problem for this essay, and that is that I must admit that despite this huge cornucopia of spiritual wisdom being available to us, there are today almost entirely no miracles. How can this be explained. Well, turning myself from an Intellectual to a Prophet, I can provide the insight from several dreams I have had. Remember what I had said about the Collective Oneness. Well, we have more than ourselves to consider while in the pursuit of the miraculous. While the personal self has to attain to something of an adequate perfection of attunement to the Collective Will and Universal Consciousness, on the other side of it, the Collective Being has to be healthy and vibrant.

The problem today is that the Collective Consciousness and the Collective Life Force may be morbid. God may not be dead, but He might be terribly sick. I have had several dreams which spoke of the World being inflicted by a Spiritual Drought. Recall how Christ and the Christian Mystics had spoken in terms of the Vine of Christ – the Universal Body of Christ to which the Saints attach themselves. The Life of Christ flows through us all. Well, if that Vine were healthy, then it would blossom in leaves, build in strength and grow, bloom into flower and then into Fruit – fruit being the Providential Miracles that are the proof of Divinity. But now we are witnessing a Spiritual Drought where even the Universal Vine of Christ is weakened and withering.

Well, on the hopeful side, my dreams indicate that a Lake of Spiritual Waters will be revealed, and the Spiritual Health of the Vine of Christ will return to the World.

The first dream in the series indicated Peoples of Three Higher Religions, all experiencing the drought. Each People had a Mountain. One mountain was in the North, with another mountain off to the West, and then there was a mountain to the South directly under the North mountain by about half the distance. I saw a map that showed that the Lake of Spiritual Waters was just to the East of the Southern Mountain, but apparently the people of the South Mountain didn’t know how close they were to it, or failed to discern its importance (if people think that a Mountain is Spiritual, than they may fail to appreciate the value of valleys and lakes). The problem discussed in this dream concerned how it would be possible to lead these peoples away from their Holy Mountains and towards the Spiritual Lake.

The second dream, years later, showed the beginning of the movement of religious refugees. The problem of prying the peoples away from their holy mountains would solve itself as the drought worsened, and then the peoples finding it necessary to wander off to seek water. Necessity would be the best persuasion. We began collecting the refugees.

Incidentally, I dreamt a while back of a very righteous and spiritual Catholic Bishop who would die at about the same time as Pope John Paul (and the validity of the Catholic Church would die with him). In my third dream of the series, this same Bishop, having died just as predicted, came back as a Ghostly Saint from Heaven, dressed in Reddish Purple and wearing large spiritual rubies on his high belt and on his hat. This Bishop came with Providential Powers and used them time and time again to ease the way of the Nations of Refugees on their way to the Spiritual Waters. It turns out that the first Miracles were intercessions to stave off genocidal disasters, but the people themselves were unaware of their Luck. Disasters that do not happen are no problem. In this dream, when the Lake of Spiritual Waters was finally reached, and the World became happy and spiritual, those who knew everything that had happened established a holiday of thanksgiving, but the refugees wondered what all the fuss was about as they didn’t remember encountering much trouble along the way. But those who had been in the Higher Circle who had seen the providential miracles knew what disasters had been averted.

Will all of this occur in this generation? I think so.