Volume 9, Issue 10, page 11

Big Questions with No Answers
Seekers Re-establish Contact with Entities
In Hopes of Proving Who, What, Why of Life
By JACOB and ROSE APSEL
THY ARE we here? Where do we come
from? Where are we going? Will we
continue to function as intelligent entities without physical
bodies after death? These questions have beset men of little
formal learning as well as the
erudite. Nor does it depend on
how much or how little economic
security a person has.

The desire to attain knowledge and understanding can be more easily satisfied by those
who can spare money for attending schools,
taking private lessons, or the buying of books.
Also, those who have cultivated their minds
can glean more from complex dissertations. Unfortunately, it is not at all certain that
factual information is disseminated in all
schools, by all teachers, from all books. And
it is not possible to extract more from a
school, teacher, or book than that school ,
teacher, or book contains.

Modern thinkers have reached a wider field
of knowledge, but harking back to the above
one-pointed questions, it is evident we have
not progressed one iota from the days of the
beginning of religion and philosophy. We would
not be asking those questions today if the
learned men of the past and present had correctly answered them. Their answers, which are
recorded in books, are answers more of theorization than of knowingness. Factual teachings
are teachings which can be substantiated by
performance.

The late Joseph McCabe, British one-man encyclopaedia and one time Jesuit priest of 13
years, said, "Profound thinkers are the worst
enemies of truth. Profundity has to prove itself by discovering something as far removed
as possible from the obvious, and the natural
result is that a man loses his way in a maze
of abstract speculations of mere words." .

Lord Gotama, the Buddha, said of these people in the tail of "The Two Brahmans", "Thus
the three Vedas should be able to show the way
to a state of union with that (God) which they
neither know nor have seen. Just as when a
string of blind men are clinging to one another. Neither can the foremost see, nor can those
in the middle see, nor can the hindermost see.
Even so, methinks the talk of the Brahmans
versed in the three Vedas is but blind talk;
it is ridiculous, consists of mere words, and
is a vain and empty thing."
More and more, fewer and fewer people are
willing to accept or believe in the God of the
Bible who seems to have no power to substantiate the revelations of yesterday with performance today.

Many look to the Bible for answers. An exceedingly brilliant lawyer told us, "The Bible
should be evaluated scientifically with a tolerance of 20% (plus-minus)." This you can see
is comparable to a traffic light at an intersection with all three lights on -- red-ambergreen -- stop-hesitate-go.

In the absence of knowledge, it is well to
abide in faith but not to wallow in it, to
swear by it, to defend it desperately, because
you lack the initiative to open your eyes and
compare with other avenues of knowledge besides that which has been implanted in you before you were able to reason.

A person who knows what to do to alleviate
certain types of distress proceeds to perform
what is necessary to relieve it, or refrains
from doing what is causing it. He does not pray
for relief, he does not sit in meditation hoping for relief. If there is a God at all, He
creates thru knowledge, not with faith, that all
might be well. Knowledge supersedes faith --
that is why we said in the absence of knowledge, it is well to abide in faith, not to wallow in it.

Many who do not seek the knowledge to help
themselves are compelled to abide in faith,
often to their own destruction, as the Jehovah's Witness who died rather than permit a
blood transfusion.

My father, too, was one of those "stout
ones". "God is my fire insurance," he boasted
to the agent who tried to insure his business
against fire. After the second fire loss (God
neither pr e v e.ted the fires nor paid the
losses), he defiantly asked the broker to insure his place.

Schopenhauer put his finger on it when he
said, "There is a boiling point at the scale
of civilization where all faith vanishes and
man longs for a better insight."
Santayana dug deeper into truth when he
said, "Faith in supernatural is a desperate
wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his
fortunes."
Religion and Bibles have had more than 2,000
years to produce answers still missing. Metaphysics and all the high pressure 'osophies
too have had scores of years without furnishing anything but promising promises.

I know of many people, including myself, who
have given a mountain of faith and received a
mole-hill of results. Who had more faith than
Jesus? Yet he was nailed to the cross.

Defenders need not rush to the defense of
Jesus, saying he wanted it thus. If this is
what Jesus wanted, why then did he piteously
cry, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me? " (Matt. 27: 46).
Neither did all his previous praying help, as
in Luke 22-42: "Father, if thou be willing,
remove this cup from me."
If Jesus could not get much from faith and
prayer, what chance have you?
That is why I suggest we lay aside all past
and present teachings which have failed us.
Let us all together, here and now, make a fresh
start based on what we know. For not to admit
to ourselves that we truly know not prevents
us from seeking what we should know. Let us
make no excuses for our lack of knowledge. Let
us admit we do not actually know who we are.

MARCH, 1963 The ABERREE 1