Joining Miracles, by the author of The Grail Conspiracies

Katie drove, and I began reading her copy of Joining Miracles:
Navigating the Seas of Latent Possibility.

It opens with the unnamed narrator hiking in the mountains. He's caught
in a sudden storm, the latest in a string of bad experiences. “I should
have expected this,” he says. “Once one thing goes wrong, everything
goes wrong. It's just the way the world works.”

The storm worsens. He slips on wet rock, and slides down a cliff-side.
When he comes to, he’s sure he's broken his ankle. He rigs a makeshift
cane and stumbles onto an old, apparently forgotten chapel. Carved on
the stone wall are messages in a language he doesn't recognize.

An aged monk appears from the shadows, holding out his hand.
“Welcome. I'm Brother Freddy, and I've been expecting you.”

The old monk explains that he is now the last one at this forgotten
monastery, and refers to himself the Keeper of the Knowledge.

“What Knowledge?,” the narrator asks.

“The Knowledge conveyed by the inscriptions on the chapel wall.”

“Where did the Knowledge come from?”

Without answering directly, Brother Freddy explains that the Knowledge
is far older than the chapel itself.

Then he adds, “The Knowledge is an intuitive prefiguring of the findings
of modern science.”

Later in Joining Miracles:

"There are numerous accounts, not only in the Bible but in other
literature as well, of the seemingly inexplicable, mysterious, even almost
magical events and outcomes produced by people celebrated as
mystics and saints. Those mystics didn’t offer an explanation for how
they did what they did, they just proceeded to cure, to bring about
unexpected events and outcomes, to do what seemed impossible.
Beyond that, many of them insisted that they were not unique beings,
but rather role models that others could emulate.

"Many people, maybe most people, have rejected the stories of
miraculous events as ‘mere legends,’ ‘fairy-tales,’ ‘nice stories,’ and
even lies because they violated the laws of causality. But St. Augustine,
himself intuitively prefiguring the knowledge yet to be discovered, wrote,
‘miracles happen, not in opposition to nature but in opposition to what
we know of nature.’

"Now, as the tools of modern science open up fresh insights into the
true nature of reality, and what is possible within that larger reality, we’
re beginning to realize that these seeming miracles were not in
opposition to nature, but rather consistent with the potentials implicit
within nature all along.

"The mystics may not have had access to today’s scientific vocabulary,
but they knew—intuitively—what was possible, and acted accordingly to
show the rest of us what we could do.”

□

In other words,” Brother Freddy continues, “think of the Knowledge as a
technology for using the powers of the mind to shape the way in which
the reality that we experience emerges from the sea of latent
possibilities.”

Professor Larkwood: Agent Perceval may have turned up a way of
tapping a power within the human mind that can direct and focus
energies from other directions.

□

I went back to the narrative. “What is it you're ultimately saying?,” the
narrator asks.

“That reality is not what it seems,” the old monk replies. “Which means
that our assumptions of what is possible may be too limited.”

See the website for Joining Miracles: Navigating the Seas of Latent
Possibility at Joining-Miracles.com