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Worship Service for May 18, 2008



 
Inflow Meets Hologram



 
WELCOME


Welcome to today's worship service by the on-line Swedenborgian community.  



 Light a candle                                                                                                                                                 
Open the Word   

 
 
 Enjoy the opening music


 
 OPENING MUSIC

Many people use use music and dance as forms of worship.  One such group was the Shakers.
Today's opening music is based on a Shaker hymn,  Simple Gifts.

Lord of the Dance
Here are two options for your opening music.  You can pick which you'd prefer to hear; or play both.

"Lord of the Dance"  with words by Sydney Carter in 1963  
arr. by Larry Fleming for National Lutheran Choir Series


 
 
"Lord of the Dance," from Michael Flately's award-winning international  dance presentation.
 
 




READINGS

All this- whatever exists in this changing universe, is pervaded by God.
Isa Upanishad

Time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen. … In the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation. 
Swami Vivekananda

Divinity fills all space of the universe nonspatially.
Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom,  #69, NCE

Divinity is the same in the largest  and the smallest things.
Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom  #77, NCE

II Samuel 6:14  NIV
14 David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the LORD with all his might.
15 while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

Exodus 15:20
20 Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing.


MESSAGE

Dancing has always been a form of worship in some religious traditions. In today's readings from the Bible, we are reminded that David danced and shouted before before God to show joy and gratitude.  After the Isaelites crossed the Red Sea, Miriam spontaneously took a tambourine; singing and dancing as the women followed her.



Click Here to explore these themes in paintings.



So we've noted some of the ways dance has been used to worship  God -- the dancing Shakers, modern dance derived from their music, and David and Miriam from the Old Testament dancing. Let's look now at how the universe itself is a dance. Fritz Capra tells us that modern physics has discovered that the universe is intrinsically dynamic:

 
Modern physics thus pictures matter not at all as passive and inert but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular, atomic, and nuclear configurations. We have come to realize that there are no static structures in nature.
In the 1960's,  University of London physicist David Bohm was recognizing that subatomic particles remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them. He saw the "dance of the universe."  

Around the same time, Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram was studying the brain, and he realized that memories were located throughout the brain; not just in the one part.  For example, a physician, Richard Restak, has reported a case, in a twenty one year old female in which the entire left side of the brain was removed surgically in order to control epileptic seizures that were unmanageable with any other known form of therapy. The results of the therapy were astonishing. Although the seizures were stopped, within a few weeks the woman began to regain control of the right side of her body. She was able to return to work and to lead an active social life. Where did the right side of her body receive its motor information with the left side of the brain in the surgeon's pail? 

Pibram and Bohm each came to the conclusion that the brain and the universe function like a hologram:  the whole is in each part.


MUSICAL INTERLUDE
 

"The Rhythm of Life" from Sweet Charity  [in this musical, the main character Charity is invited to visit the Rhythm of Life Church.  This is a grass-roots "church" that grew from a jazz band, exists in the streets, and has a congregation primarily of people who are "down and out."]



In Sorting Things Out, Rev. Dr. George Dole says that he came to see Swedenborg’s theology differently through reading the work of  neurologist Karl Pribram and physicist David Bohm on the subject of the hologram. “It attracted me because it contained statements that reminded me of statements in Divine Love and Wisdom. These were statements that I had taken as presumably true in a philosophical sense, but as basically incomprehensible, statements such as Divinity is the same in the largest and the smallest things." [#77, NCE]

Dole indicated that he was especially intrigued by the laser that is used as a light source for the hologram. The film records the “interference pattern of two sets of waves.” That rang a bell for Dole; “Swedenborg’s apparent fascination with influx, both mediate and immediate, and with actives and passives.” Like many others, he had wondered “just what it is that inflows. Swedenborg strongly implies (cf. D.L.W. 88) that no substance actually moves from one discrete level to another, so we shouldn’t think of influx as being like a river in any literal way. It seems to make sense, then, to think of influx in terms of wave motion.”

Dole also noted, "Bohm's notion that the objective reality is actually the product of a constant series of enfoldings and unfoldings is mirrored uncannily in Swedenborg's assertion that everything in the universe is the result of two intersecting forces he calls direct and indirect inflow. As he put it in Arcana Coelestia, "There are always two forces which hold anything together in its coherence and its form - a force acting from the outside, and a force acting from within. Where they meet is the thing that is being held together (AC 3628 [3]). Similarly, in Heaven and Hell he wrote, "The Lord unites all the heavens by means of a direct and an indirect inflow - by a direct inflow from himself into all the heavens, and by an indirect inflow from one heaven into another" (Heaven and Hell, 37).

George told a group of campers at the Fryeburg New Church Assembly, probably with great emphasis: “I’m suggesting that we take our own wave properties seriously, using as a guide our basic theological understandings of influx.”

Modern physicist Michael Talbot comes to the same conclusions as George Dole about Swedenborg and the new physics:
 
If Emanuel Swedenborg were alive today, it is very likely that he would consider many of the findings of the "new physics" compatible with his own thought. This is surprising, for many of the concepts arrived at by contemporary physics are so foreign to everyday ways of thinking that it is difficult for modern sensibilities to grasp them. That a man born three centuries ago should articulate them in his writings is nothing short of remarkable ... perhaps the most astonishing foreshadowing of new-physics ideas in Swedenborg's writings are the similarities between his world view and a revolutionary new way of looking at nature known as the hologram.

So perhaps influx [inflow in the New Century Edition translations] is the same as the holographic concept of the universe:  that the whole is in each part.  If so, what does that have to do with our everyday lives?  That is an important question to ponder and discuss further.  Here are a few thoughts to get us started:
  • Every cell in our bodies contains the pattern of the universe. How we treat our bodies and how we treat each other and our world all converge.
  • We can never be really alone or abandoned; we always have a place in the wholeness.
  • Whatever you learn, feel, believe has an impact on everything else. Remember the 100th monkey? Quantum physics shows that even the smallest action has an impact on the whole. Whatever happens anywhere in the world, is also happening in every cell of my being.  
  • Swedenborg is clear that God is not expecting us to do great things in the world to live a useful life.  Every little action every day impacts our universal web. 
  • We can no longer live with the denial of our oneness. It is not only in the religious traditions that we revere this, but is proven in quantum physics.
A great adventure lies ahead; allow yourself to experience the way science, Swedenborg, and the wisdom from many other religious traditions blend together in every cell of your being.


OPTIONAL MEDITATION

Enjoy this meditative relaxation with nature sounds.
 
CLOSING PRAYER

Thank you, God, for the glorious web of existence in which we life.   Help us to become ever more mindful of how it shows us Your presence in every moment in our lives, in every fiber of our being. 

Would you like to offer prayers for another or others in your life?
Would you like to add any particular prayers for yourself?