Alchemy

#533

Alchemy

A CIA agent visited me at my house. He had heard me on the radio and called telling me that he would just like to meet me and visit with me for a few minutes. He was totally astonished at my book collection...because he loved books. He was more emphatic with his appreciation because of my total blindness. I told him then, as I tell you now, I like to be surrounded with books. I like the feel of them because any person who knows how to read, and who can use a dictionary, has all the knowledge of the world at his fingertips. It is simply a matter of using your time wisely to read and study. I have little patience with individuals, adult or otherwise, who spend their life in front of an idiot box called a television set. Don't you realize that these programs are not real...they are manufactured to captivate you...to extort from you all reality of imagination, decency, motivation? You think that visually you are getting a cheap high...letting alchemists of degeneracy infect and warp your mind leaving you none the better for your experience. It is molestation of the worst sort, a rape of the intellect to watch the stench or triviality portrayed so convincingly...often silly maturated, literary hi jinx that in the long run leave you less than what you were before you saw the activity.

In reading good books there is a methodological stability of learning first from the eyes which receive the impulses from the page then through the optic nerves to the cochrane cortex of the brain...knowledge forever stored, brought back in recollection. Of all the historic sciences, alchemy is the oldest probably, 3000 years before the birth of Christ, first in Mesopotamia then in about every civilization...Persian, Egyptian, Chinese etc. There were those who practiced and studied as alchemists...seeking for their own knowledge and imparting their knowledge to others, knowledge they had redeemed from life and everything affecting life. The Greek and Roman civilizations were punctuated by brilliant minds who wanted more than just the ordinary. Within their reasoning abilities they sought for answers to the questions of earth and human existence.

The alchemist's wisdom was manifest not just in their knowledge of life's objectives but in conjuring up elixirs and other minerals and metals of interest both from a healing and helping parameter. It is from the helping aspects of this pseudo-science that many systems were developed and it is from the healing aspects that the materia medica which we now call pharmaceuticals, have developed.

Gold and silver were already known to be precious metals and a feeble attempt was made to create such. This was the beginning of organic and inorganic chemistry. Using weird combinations of herbs, plants, fire and water...probably the birth of medicine. Standing at Oxford University is a statue of Roger Bacon, one of the first alchemists who was born, probably around 1214. Bacon introduced the scientific method or empirical knowledge to the academic curriculum. Until this very day, the scientific method projects that any theory must be subjected to scrutiny and that others must, with the same experiment, get the same results. It was Bacon who introduced “peer review” and, with the honesty of the Catholic Church, the fact that he was a Friar of the church, he so introduced spirituality into the human concept of learning.

The inner life of a man is much greater than the outer life of a man. The vertical aspects of life are just as great as the horizontal aspects of human living. Though a member of the genus homo-sapiens, man is the only animal who knows he is going to die. Man is blessed by his creator, made by the sovereignty of God (Psalm 139). An individual, unlike any other, who has ever lived, your own distinct facial and body characteristics, your own distinct voice, your own distinct iris flex in your eye, fingerprints and soul. Like the masterful handy work of every snowflake that has ever fallen, designed by God, you are your own person and your inner life is greater than your outer life. Your DNA, your personality, your physiology, determines your life. Within yourself, you are your own alchemist, certainly with divine perceptions, prepared to run the race set before you.

Within your mind, you have a relationship with your creator that pagan man cannot understand. One book, and one book only, when you open it, the Bible, it is like opening the mind of God...the creator of the universe...the one who threw the very stars into space, who has them individually named...the one who holds the oceans of the world within his hands...the one who measures the height of the Himalayas with his fingers...the one who gave the exact measurements of the gold “Ark of the Covenant” to his “chosen” people...and who had previously given the measurements of another ark of deliverance, the ark which Noah built using the measurements given him by god, measurements which are still used in ship building until this very day.

How men cheat themselves by not having a personal relationship with heir creator. Religionists cannot understand this relationship...they can understand keeping a few laws, rules or regulations. They cannot understand the freedom of inner thought any more than they can understand how and why religious people stoned Stephen, but just before Stephen died, the sky opened up and he saw the one who had created him.

In all my world travels, there is no city in the world as interesting as the city of Rome. I thought of what it must have been like when the apostle Paul finally reached it. Paul, an old man, imprisoned in a cistern, but from that prison came some of the most remarkable information the world has ever known...divinely inspired. His hand held onto parchment by the very one who had knocked him off his horse on the road to Damascus and then, instead of killing Christians, became the expositor of the church, writing 14 books of the New Testament. Such is the saint's delight in knowing personally the creator of the universe (John 1).

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? (Psalm 8:4)