Monday, February 28, 2011

Sir Isaac Newton



CENTRIPETAL FORCE
is that by which a moving body is perpetually urged towards a centre, and made to revolve in a curve, instead of a right line.

The centripetal force that draws the individual members of one nationality together.

Sir IssacNewton: Of the forces that are of Nature, binding us all to Earth, the centripetal force, is one which I think most applies to how we live on Earth as well as the laws by which we live, both in an absolute sense and a relative one.

Interlocutor: Why do you think that particular force can be applied to our lives? I take it you are speaking metaphorically.

IN: I am, indeed, though it is a way of expressing myself that I am unused to; being more used to the immutable laws of physics and the plasticity of man.

I: The plasticity of man is a strange phrase, what do you mean by it and how do you relate it to the centripetal forces that guide him in his social and his spatial world?

IN: I mean this; that in man’s societal movements, he does not feel himself bound by any immutable laws, although of course, he is, and that in his feeling not so bound, he moves in ways that seem at first not to make any sense to the mathematician or the physicist.

Man is a complex being, driven by laws of which we know only very little.

I: Is it not strange that men like you can express the laws by which our planet and others in our own solar system move, and yet are perplexed by the movements of men.

IN: It is indeed strange, made the more so by the fact that I am a man. We look outward as men, rather than inward, I think, and so we discover the worlds outside the confines of our own bodies.

I: Back to centripetal forces; why do you think that law is applicable to mankind?

IN: Because we are all drawn back to our roots, our origins, whatever those may be and wherever they may be.

I: I must think you are speaking on several different planes of meaning now, are you not?

IN: I am. Let me make a start by saying that our roots and our origins may not just be thought of a geographical, but rather spiritual and psychological, as well as relational.
What I mean by our spiritual origins, to which we are drawn over the course of our lives is that although we may stray in our thoughts and in our actions, there is something there to pull us back, some spark of goodness that is never quenched, even in the hardest heart.
There is a spiritual dimension to all of us, and if we allow ourselves, we can be drawn back to those spiritual origins to which I refer.

I: But why do so many seem to never return to those origins?

IN: You must realize that the centripetal laws that govern us seem weak and easily overcome, which they are. However, being laws, they are relentless in their presence upon us and even as we are committing dire offences against our own kind they are drawing us still.

What we need to do in times of peaceful solitude, is to allow those forces to draw us back to our spiritual home which is God. Like the forces of gravity, which cramp our movements and our wishes, this force, the force of our spirit, God, is everywhere, it is all around us and yet some hardly hear it or are even aware that it is there.

The poets expressed as much; ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ Is that not our folly, that constantly striving for more material wealth? Are we not constantly straying from God by losing our way among the paths of the mundane.

I: Why do you call them the paths of the mundane? What do you mean?

IN: By the paths of the mundane, I mean those paths that take us, not to the self-examined world, but to the unexamined self in which, as we have been told, is not worth the living.

I: Is that what you mean by the word mundane?

IN: It is. Can you not see that inhabiting a world of things is a poor substitute for living in one in which the spirit soars; ‘A robin in a cage sets all Heaven in a rage!’ So it is with humanity; we are held in the cages of our own making and devising, and in those cages and behind those bars we are denied access to the ways of our Maker – bound in love, in honesty and in friendship, not merely in contractual obligation, which we are as often wont to break, those being seemed by us to be greater chains, greater cages, when in fact they are nothing of the sort.

A man held in the most infamous prison cell can find God through his own ministering to his own true sprit from the prison house whence he came. ‘Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.’ He needs no prison of steel bars and stone to hold him, but he can come to see the light, ‘But he beholds the light and whence it flows.’ It is in that beholding that comes his salvation; his finding himself again. That light shines through the darkest night, through the deepest mire and into the deepest dungeon cell.

We only have to prepare ourselves for that light to come back into our lives, dispelling those ‘shades of the prison house’, and filling our lives with light even if there is the blackest world all around us.

This is the truly centripetal force of which I speak, this force that is forever drawing us back to our home – our spiritual home, God. It is an immutable law, as immutable as any of those I have measured and displayed through my writing and my workings. It is as immutable as any of those – the physical laws that keep our feet firmly rooted to the ground.

I: But many do not know it, or if they do, work to go against it. Why is it they do that?

IN: Are they not led astray by others who are lost already. If I have lost all, I might wish you to have lost everything too; in that way, my loss does not seem so hard to bear. Being equal in our vacuity, we are full again, somehow made full vessels, and yet this is the way down to deeper levels of sin, to which the light of day does not penetrate.

I: So those that go deeper are as if blind in that darkness, are they not?

IN: Yes, they are, but even at that appalling depth of depravity, they can receive the light, for it is a constant, it is constant in its presence, even to the depths of man’s sin against his fellow man, even to the depth he may have stooped in his sin against God. His Forgiveness is present and can be availed by even the worst, simply by an avowal to quit those ways that have plummeted him to the depths he has reached in which he imagines all is lost.

All is never lost to God.
Robert L. Fielding

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