By Nicanor Perlas
Today, Easter Sunday, marks the celebration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. This is momentous event for the billions of Christians around the world. The Christian world celebrates the victory of Christ over the force of death in the universe. Without this singular event, the Christian faith would have no meaning.
This event is not just a momentary event performed by an extraordinary Divine Being. It is also an event that has profound implications for the evolution of human civilizations in the entire planet.
Earlier, in the I-RISE article on “The Cosmic Christ and Human Solidarity”, we showed scientific evidence regarding the notion that Christ is the Creator of the Universe. And that this Divine Being then took on a human form, a profound “mystery” that still remains to be understood scientifically.
And because Christ performed this deed, after having been in human form, then he imparted new capacities for all human beings, no matter what their religious beliefs may be. It is much like the law of gravity. It is a law that operates in a uniform fashion whether it is Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or any religious soil.
A scientific glimpse of how this may work can be found in Rupert Sheldrake’s scientific work on morphogenetic fields. Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life, earned the unique distinction of being the best candidate for burning by dogmatic scientists. In his book Sheldrake shows that morphogenetic fields are active across space and time in a manner very much like the non-local effects of quantum mechanics. (See The Cosmic Christ and Human Solidarity for more details.)
These fields have the interesting property that once something or someone somewhere learns something, that learning is not lost. The next generations of the same kind build upon this achievement and can even improve upon it.
Thus, when Christ resurrected from the dead after being human, that means to say that this power of resurrection can be found in any human being today.
And so where may we find this resurrection force active today in the human being?
It can be found in a place where most people least expect it. It can be found in our creative thinking. This living thinking is the focal point of the resurrection force that Christ imparted to humanity by his deed.
The resurrection power of thinking can be found in a number of significant aspects of the life of the human being. And it may be surprising to some that 21st century science is beginning to indicate this reality.
Let us start with psychology, the new science of Positive Psychology to be exact. In his landmark book, Learned Optimism, Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, points out the central importance of reframing as the central key creative act that can help individuals escape from the prison of depression. Whereas individuals who used Freud’s psychoanalytic approach for decades with little or no results, but surely no permanent results, patients who use Seligman’s approach can get rid of depression permanently in less than a year or even shorter.
Reframing is the resurrection force active in our creative thinking. It enables us to resurrect from the chains and psychological death of our depressive thinking styles to a new way of being and behaving in the world, a behavior that empowers us to be who we need to be truly in the world.
Let us continue seeking for this resurrection force in thinking. We find it next in neuroscience and the phenomenon of neuro-plasticity. This mainstream science shows us that our thinking consciousness is so powerful that it can literally rewire the way our neurons network with each other. We can so work with neuro-plasticity that when we “die” to the patterns of our old neural pathways, we resurrect ourselves with new neural networks that can then become the basis of new behaviors, a new you.
Epigenetic biology is our next stop. The old biology taught us that we are nothing but our DNA. We are trapped into meaninglessness and unfreedom by our genome system that we inherited by chance from our parents. We are the way we are because of our genes. In a sense we die as free human beings because we are predetermined in our behavior by whatever DNA sequence has been imparted in our chromosomes.
Fortunately, this reductionist dogma has been complete turned around in the last decade or so. Today, thanks to epigenetic biology, we now know that the functioning of our DNA depends more on environmental factors than on anything inherent in DNA itself. And the ultimate “environmental factor” turns out to be our belief system, our thinking habits and patterns.
Our thinking can affect the way our genes function. In fact, according to Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief, one gene can have over around 30,000 expressions (or phenotypes) depending on the cue that it gets from its environment especially our consciousness. In our minds, therefore, reside a power of resurrection, a power that can help us fashion not only a new vision of the world but also a power that can remake the expression of our entire bodily organization.
So whether it is positive psychology, neuroscience, or epigenetic biology, the message is the same. We die when we are stuck in old patterns of thinking, believing, and behaving. We resurrect and heal ourselves when we take control of our thoughts and feelings and become more truly and fully human.
And when we resurrect as new individuals, with a purpose aligned with the evolutionary direction of the universe, we can then take charge of our life and contribute meaningfully to the renewal of society. Then we begin to introduce the resurrection force that we have inside into a resurrection force outside by transforming society itself.
A clue as to how this can be done comes from that unusual branch of sociology called structuration sociology pioneered by Anthony Giddens who became an adviser to former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. This field of sociology clearly demonstrates that the source of real change in society comes from the individual. The socialization of any person means that we are all programmed from birth to think and behave in a certain way. This programming of various societal structures is the death force in us because it robs us of true freedom.
Yet when we start truly thinking for ourselves, we liberate ourselves from decades of societal programming from our parents, teachers, peers, media and others. And when we do this, we can start introducing something truly new and innovative in society. We can then give that society a new future. This is the resurrection force active in society.
This is the reason why we at I-RISE have decided to publicly launch our initiative on Easter Day. We are thankful to a cosmic deed that has enabled humans to gain access to a force of resurrection, capable of transforming, renewing ourselves and the world.
At I-RISE, we are dedicated to enabling more and more people to access and understand this force of resurrection and renewal in themselves and through them the world. And then when we are able to act in our own healing ways and even more important, collectively, then we will truly enable the world to have a new future.
It will be a future where the forces of resurrection will be active in all areas of life, whether in culture, politics and economics. It will be a future aligned with the evolutionary direction of the entire evolution of the universe. And because it is so aligned, then initiatives for renewal will have a greater chance of bringing healing forces into and thereby transforming the world.
