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Shakespeare’s Spirituality: A Perspective: An Interview With Dr. Martin Lings

This film is the last surviving footage of the renowned Dr. Martin Lings. Ira B. Zinman, the producer and director, interviews Dr. Lings about his lifelong devotion to the works of William Shakespeare. Lings demonstrates that many themes in Shakespeare’s works cannot be correctly understood without reference to the esoteric meaning contained in them, and shows how the true function of art is not merely to educate but to give us a “taste of wisdom, each to his own capacity.”

An interview with Dr. Martin Lings

produced and directed by Ira B. Zinman

When Martin Lings saw a Shakespeare play performed for the first time, for several days afterwards he found himself “plunged into an extraordinary state of happiness” such as he had never experienced before. Which play was it that caused him such euphoria? It was Othello—not only a tragedy, but arguably the most heart-rending of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

How could such a sad play produce such joy? Dr. Lings, in this interview by Ira Zinman, illuminates his experience—which is surely shared by many who appreciate the works of Shakespeare—by explaining the nature of sacred art, in the context of an account of his own life’s spiritual journey. The resulting film will be appreciated both by admirers of Lings, who will treasure this last footage of Dr. Lings before his death, and anyone who has experienced the sacred in a work of fiction and wondered how it can reside there.

The function of literature, like that of all art, explains Dr. Lings, is not to preach, but to reveal. A play reveals spiritual wisdom by drawing us into it, “from cold objectivity to the warmth of subjectivity.” The audience is not being offered spiritual laws and principles, but individual characters—and so, in the words of Titus Burckhardt, whom Dr. Lings quotes, by watching the play we are able to “participate naturally, and almost involuntarily, in the world of holiness.”

Dr. Lings is specific. He uses examples from many of Shakespeare’s plays not only to make his case that Shakespeare’s plays are indeed sacred (though non-liturgical) art, but also that they are concerned with the esoteric theme of the purification of the human soul, and the restoration of our primordial state of beatific union with God. If a play is about the soul’s journey toward perfection, which it reaches at the end, and if the play draws us into it—then watching the play becomes a spiritual experience for the audience.

What, then, accounts for this taste of bliss that we find, surprisingly, even in the tragedies of Shakespeare? What is present in this world into which Shakespeare draws his audience? It is, says Dr. Lings, “the harmony of the universe.” We are being drawn through the tapestry—from our usual vision of its reverse side, in which the threads seemed tangled and chaotic, to the front of the tapestry where the harmony of the design, and each thread’s contribution to it, is apparent. We are drawn in, and then drawn through. And hearing the venerable Dr. Lings speak of these things, one realizes that this is a man who has, for a long time now, been dwelling in this harmony.

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/Quantum_Physics/StructureOfMatter.asp It may surprise you to learn that the speed of gravity is something of an ongoing debate among many cosmologists today.  The textbook answer to the question “what is the speed of gravity?” is that it propagates at the speed of light. This answer is derived from Einstein’s version of relativity, which demands that nothing be able to propagate faster than the speed of light. Yet there is a large body of physical evidence that contradicts this theoretical assertion. In 1998, physicist Tom Van Flandern authored a paper in Physics Letters A that remains one of the best refutations of Einstein’s version of relativity ever published. Van Flandern argues that Hendrik Lorentz’s version of relativity, which incorporates an aether that all matter moves through, is more correct than Einstein’s version, based on experimental observations about the speed of gravity. Lorentz and Einstein’s versions of relativity are actually very similar. The main difference being that the speed of light is not a limiting factor in Lorentz’s version of relativity. Van Flandern argues that the speed of gravity is far faster than the speed of light, just as Newton’s laws describe it to be. Newton’s laws declare gravity to propagate instantaneously. I’m sure by now you may be wondering what kind of proof does Van Flandern have to offer? Van Flandern starts out by demonstrating that the visible light arriving from the Sun to Earth comes from a measurably different location in the sky than the point that the Earth is accelerating towards in space. This is because light propagates at light speed, while gravity propagates at infinite speed. The fact that the Earth is not accelerating toward the visible location of the Sun, but rather 20 arc seconds in front of the visible Sun (where the Sun will visibly be 8.3 minutes in the future) is very strong evidence against gravity propagating at the speed of light. This same light delay effect is seen in the positions of stars as well. If gravity propagated between the Sun and the Earth at the same speed as visible light, the Earth would double the distance from the Sun in 1200 years, which obviously isn’t happening. Many other notable physicists besides Newton and Lorentz also concluded that orbital calculations must be made using an infinite speed of gravity. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s orbital calculations rely on gravity having an infinite speed, and Pierre-Simon Laplace calculated gravity to have a speed of at least 10^8 times the speed of light. Van Flandern goes on to discuss GPS clocks, which are often cited as being proof positive of Einstein’s relativity. It may surprise you, but the GPS system doesn’t actually use Einstein’s field equations. In fact, this paper by the U.S. Naval Observatory tells us that, while incorporating Einstein’s equations into the system may slightly improve accuracy, the system itself doesn’t rely on them at all. To quote the opening line of the paper, “The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would seem to require.” Van Flandern explains why this is so: Finally, the Global Positioning System (GPS) showed the remarkable fact that all atomic clocks on board orbiting satellites moving at high speeds in different directions could be simultaneously and continuously synchronized with each other and with all ground clocks. No “relativity of simultaneity” corrections, as required by SR, were needed. This too seemed initially to falsify SR. But on further inspection, continually changing synchronization corrections for each clock exist such that the predictions of SR are fulfilled for any local co-moving frame. To avoid the embarrassment of that complexity, GPS analysis is now done exclusively in the Earth-centered inertial frame (the local gravity field). And the pre-launch adjustment of clock rates to compensate for relativistic effects then hides the fact that all orbiting satellite clocks would be seen to tick slower than ground clocks if not rate-compensated for their orbital motion, and that no reciprocity would exist when satellites view ground clocks.

1.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and was written as a study by Philip Zimbardo after conducting an experiment where he used students as "prison guards" and other students as "prisoners" after only six days the experiment had to be stopped because of how brutal the would-be prison guards (students, mind you) had become.

As I have not delved fully into the book, or the study itself held at Stanford I will say that if a person is focusing only on the lower aspects of existence and becomes convinced that there is only evil and embraces that paradigm as their own "reality" then sure it would work. I wonder though if the "guards" were simply manifesting what they thought a "guard" should be, like taking what they know from the un-reality of popular media. I think it would have gone very different if they did not use all male guards (they did) and chose people from different cultures and social standing (these were all Stanford students). Regardless history is replete with many more examples where people spontaneously act with kindness and compassion. Consider the Japanese after their quake. Consider the world coming together for Haiti after their quake (I was there doing humanitarian work, and there were amazing things happening). Sure there are some douche bags, and you know what, sometimes I'm one of them - but not all the time. Hope this didn't muddy the water too much.

Kay Thomas PhD


Presented at the

WORLD DREAMING: WORLD CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY;

24-28 August 2011 Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Australia.


Abstract: How did Jung and Steiner both come to understand their own ‘dreaming’ consciousness? This is the same consciousness that Indigenous Australians describe as their ‘dreamtime’. This dreaming consciousness, which I call ‘out-of-body awareness’, was common to all our remote human ancestors prior to written history, and still plays a vital role in bringing us health, insight and enlightenment. Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner were fellow Austrians born around the same time who understood the significance of this dream-time awareness. They were mystics with a deep interest in the future wellbeing of humanity. Both left an enormous legacy that goes far beyond psychotherapy, in education, agriculture, and, above all, to our spiritual understanding. They had an understanding that dreams opened the portals of spiritual enlightenment by enabling individuals to grow in understanding of themselves and their connection to the universe. The dream-time consciousness known to Australian Indigenous people (described in “Dark Sparklers”, by Bill Yidumduma Harney and Jim Cairns, 2004) has many parallels with the dreaming consciousness described by Jung and Steiner, which we can explore further. Both Steiner and Jung showed us how we can monitor our spiritual progress in our dreams as Jung did in his description ‘On Life after Death’.