You might say that life is not predominantly—or even superficially—a logical endeavor. Life transcends logic, and therefore religion does too. At the practical level logic does its manual labor, but the higher reaches are intuitive. Christianity illustrates this. It is the only monotheistic religion which features a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Belief in these three persons, who are yet a single God, is the mark of all those who subscribe to the Apostles’ Creed. The scriptural roots of this appear in Matthew 28:16-20, the concluding verses of that gospel. The resurrected Jesus appears to his followers on a mountain in Galilee. There Jesus said to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” This verse is then formulated, in or around 390 AD into the Apostles’ Creed. In the Latin version, the Son is conceived of the Holy Spirit (conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto)—and since the conception is actually experienced by the Virgin Mary, the obvious reading is that God is most definitely masculine. How else can we read this?
But religions are intuitive structures. Not surprisingly, therefore—and almost by way of a kind of Law of Compensation—the Our Lady becomes a very major symbolical figure, at least in Catholicism. Her statues and images are everywhere—and rare the office of Jesuit professors I used to visit in college where a prominent painting or statue of Mary was not the distinctive art in those offices. Indeed I remember reading, with approval of course, Robert Graves opining that the enduring quality of Catholicism as a religion, and (he might have added) its continuing strong attraction of converts everywhere, is due to a cultural correction introduced into the extraordinarily masculine theology by popular intuition. Once you open up that indivisible number, One, and thus (however explained, however theologized away) multiple persons appear—which, of course, happens in every religion sooner or later, if the real essence of it is strong—the numbers will multiply and the Feminine will make its appearance.
Catholicism makes a kind of conceptual but in practice meaningless distinction between veneration and worship. It is permissible to venerate the Virgin Mary but not to worship her. Doing that would be Mariolatry (rhymes with idolatry), a word of Protestant coinage dating to the eighteenth century.
Religions have a life of their own—and the cultural realities of it have more weight than the theological skeletons that are largely always out of sight. Thus also Buddhism evolved from a kind of very focused, ascetic elite pursuit into the Mahayana, with far more members than any other of its endlessly growing strands. But women in Buddhism are still written in very small letters. How many people know, for example, that the Buddha had been married? Or what Mrs. Gautama’s name had been? Well, for the record, she was the Princess Yahodharā. And she and the Buddha had had a boy called Rāhula. Learn something new every day.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Eye in the Jungle
There is reality and then the cycling of mentation. The latter is largely a physical phenomenon. It is influenced by weather. We tend to be more cheery on a sunny day; our moods also reflect the overcast. The environment closest to us is that of our body, although we think of “the world” as starting beyond our skin. Not so. By far the most influential in shaping our mental states is that tiny—and I do mean tiny—portion of the world we carry about with us. We project the weather of this personal cosmos and then perceive that as the state of society, the state of the world.
It is possible to detach enough so that the difference—between ourselves and all else physical—turns visible. But it’s not habitual. The curious thing is that all habituation is of the physical variety whereas naked awareness always requires an act of the will. We can habituate ourselves to repeat actions or routines that wake us up, but, amusingly, no sooner are they really habits than they stop being effective. It’s very tough being real, easier to flow. And as we do, we like to say, It’s a jungle out there.
It is possible to detach enough so that the difference—between ourselves and all else physical—turns visible. But it’s not habitual. The curious thing is that all habituation is of the physical variety whereas naked awareness always requires an act of the will. We can habituate ourselves to repeat actions or routines that wake us up, but, amusingly, no sooner are they really habits than they stop being effective. It’s very tough being real, easier to flow. And as we do, we like to say, It’s a jungle out there.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
“Illusion” as Interpretation
A recent earlier post here (“Whose Illusion?”) touches on this subject, and more is provided here. To put it as succinctly as possible, it is unreasonable to speak of the world as illusion once you understand the world in some in detail. The assertion that it is, which we encounter in Brahmanism and in Buddhism, arises not from reasoning but from an overwhelming feeling. The root of that feeling is the unitive experience—as we call it in the West. We call it that because it is taken to be unity with God (or the Cosmos) reached in ecstatic states. That sense of unity is also present in the Vedantic saying Thou Art That, meaning that Atman is Brahman (soul is God). Different Vedantic schools give this doctrine different interpretations, thus ranging from “soul is a part of” to “soul is.” The sense of unity is also present in the Buddhist Enlightenment but without being called that; but all multiplicity is conquered; absolute liberation characterizes the enlightened state.
The experience certainly produces both a radical devaluation of the world and sometimes an equally radical indifference to it. The world is suddenly seen in a very new perspective. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent his life writing the most profound works of theology, had a mystical experience while saying mass late in 1273. He stopped writing. Asked to resume his work, he said: “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (source). He did not resume his work.
D.T. Suzuki, in Essays on Zen Buddhism, First Series, quotes the Buddha saying, p. 137: “These questions are not calculated to profit, they are not concerned with Dharma, they do not redound to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillization of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to Nirvana. Therefore is it that I express no opinion on them.” The questions referred to were: Is the world eternal? Is the world not eternal? Is the world finite? The source given is the Pottapada Sutta (in which a beggar, Pottapada, asks the Buddha questions). That word Dharma is a killer, by the way. It means all sorts of things, including “doctrine.” In this context it is best understood as “the path.”
One of the striking features of the unitive experience is that those who’ve undergone it never say anything concrete, never mind new, about the world. They have a feeling of overwhelming knowledge, but it produces nothing they’re able to articulate. What we get from them is a valuation. That’s plain enough in Aquinas’ statement—as in the Buddha’s. Aquinas now dismisses his own works as more or less worthless—more or less because straw isn’t entirely worthless. The Buddha asserts that answering questions about the nature of the world is irrelevant to the achievement of the experience of nirvana. Valuations.
The most accessible written source about a full-fledged modern unitive experience is Pathways Through To Space (1973) by Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887-1985). The book is readily available still and makes fascinating reading. Merrell-Wolff then tried to give some explanations in his The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. That second book, in my opinion, has virtually no content—nor does a later one in which he includes commentary on his second book.
Having looked at such matters for many years now, I’ve gradually come to see the unitive experience minimally as a non-starter for cosmological thought. Those who’ve had it are overwhelmed by knowledge, but its content is inaccessible, not least to themselves. Now let’s suppose that it is—and I don’t by any means think that it is—an experience of the Ultimate. But if that is the case, it gives us two polarities and absolutely nothing in between. At one pole is Everything at the other Illusion—or something valued not at all. But how one relates to the other—and why it is that life-forms are so very, very intricately engineered, and ditto the elemental world beneath that engineering—that is never even remotely illuminated by this very energetic experience of enlightenment.
The experience certainly produces both a radical devaluation of the world and sometimes an equally radical indifference to it. The world is suddenly seen in a very new perspective. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent his life writing the most profound works of theology, had a mystical experience while saying mass late in 1273. He stopped writing. Asked to resume his work, he said: “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (source). He did not resume his work.
D.T. Suzuki, in Essays on Zen Buddhism, First Series, quotes the Buddha saying, p. 137: “These questions are not calculated to profit, they are not concerned with Dharma, they do not redound to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillization of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to Nirvana. Therefore is it that I express no opinion on them.” The questions referred to were: Is the world eternal? Is the world not eternal? Is the world finite? The source given is the Pottapada Sutta (in which a beggar, Pottapada, asks the Buddha questions). That word Dharma is a killer, by the way. It means all sorts of things, including “doctrine.” In this context it is best understood as “the path.”
One of the striking features of the unitive experience is that those who’ve undergone it never say anything concrete, never mind new, about the world. They have a feeling of overwhelming knowledge, but it produces nothing they’re able to articulate. What we get from them is a valuation. That’s plain enough in Aquinas’ statement—as in the Buddha’s. Aquinas now dismisses his own works as more or less worthless—more or less because straw isn’t entirely worthless. The Buddha asserts that answering questions about the nature of the world is irrelevant to the achievement of the experience of nirvana. Valuations.
The most accessible written source about a full-fledged modern unitive experience is Pathways Through To Space (1973) by Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887-1985). The book is readily available still and makes fascinating reading. Merrell-Wolff then tried to give some explanations in his The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. That second book, in my opinion, has virtually no content—nor does a later one in which he includes commentary on his second book.
Having looked at such matters for many years now, I’ve gradually come to see the unitive experience minimally as a non-starter for cosmological thought. Those who’ve had it are overwhelmed by knowledge, but its content is inaccessible, not least to themselves. Now let’s suppose that it is—and I don’t by any means think that it is—an experience of the Ultimate. But if that is the case, it gives us two polarities and absolutely nothing in between. At one pole is Everything at the other Illusion—or something valued not at all. But how one relates to the other—and why it is that life-forms are so very, very intricately engineered, and ditto the elemental world beneath that engineering—that is never even remotely illuminated by this very energetic experience of enlightenment.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Playing JEOPARDY!
CONTESTANT: I’ll have to try Enigmas, Alex. For $300.
ALEX TREBEK (selecting, reading card): Enigmas for $300. “When the cold weather comes, the fowl flies up in the trees, while the wild duck goes down into water.”
CONTESTANT (ringing bell): What is Zen?
ALEX TREBEK (selecting, reading card): Enigmas for $300. “When the cold weather comes, the fowl flies up in the trees, while the wild duck goes down into water.”
CONTESTANT (ringing bell): What is Zen?
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Dimensionally Speaking
In mystical context as well as in science fiction, people talk about “other dimensions” frequently and casually—as if that word, dimension, had some kind of concrete reference. Use of that word in a way illustrates how concepts drift. It comes from the Latin dimetri, meaning “to measure out”—and it was used, still is, to indicate measurement. What are the dimensions of this room? Well, they so many feet long, wide, and the ceiling is so-and-so-many feet high. The drift began, according to my source (Online Etymology Dictionary, of course), in 1929. It started to be used to mean “any component of a situation,” thus some aspect of a situation that might be judged separately, on its own merits—as opposed to other aspects. What are the political dimensions of that? Thus, what are those aspects or relationships of the subject under scrutiny.
Now we say that space has three dimensions—but if we think in measurements, that’s not really true. I can measure a diagonal distance as well, thus from the left-hand upper corner at the ceiling to the right-hand bottom corner on the floor. That particular measurement (dimension) is a kind of mixture of the three. But that number, three, is conventionally accepted (except by people who play with fractals). And the playful mind then imagines that there might well be a fourth space dimension—and if a fourth then why not many more? For that to be real, the fourth would have to be at right angles to all three of the usual kind. Now our brain will balk. “Enough already,” it will say. “Can’t picture that. Cannot measure that. And if I can’t measure it, it’s not a dimension.” But people are more than their brains. They can’t imagine it, but they can use a symbol for representing it. And that symbol will work just fine in various equations—and hence we have whole fields of mathematical physics in which such phrases as N-dimensions will be tossed about quite lightly—although the few remaining Large Hadron Colliders, like the brain, simply refuse to bring us any physical proof of such dimensions.
Why mystical scribblers have learned to love the word is quite understandable. They deal with very-tough-to-explain experiences and want to find a place for them—one dimension over as it were. Now as for science fiction writers, they’re up against it too. The nearest star to us is 4 light years away. Light travels at the rate of 671 million miles per hour. Using the highest speed achieved by a manned rocket, Apollo 10, we can just about approach 25,000 mph. But that speed is less than one percent of the speed of light (0.004% to be exact). SF writers therefore must travel a great deal faster than light—but Einstein stands at that gate holding a flaming sword. SF therefore has recourse to the speculations of mathematical physics, produces worm holes that get around the problem, and suddenly the star ships are all over the galaxy in the flash of an eye, and only the galactic rim is a little more distant and takes a few days…
While we’re waxing dimensionally, I must mention Time as a dimension. But is it really? The neat thing about the Familiar Three is that we are free to move in them—now to this side, now to the other. Up then down. We can go back and we can go forth. But time presents a problem. We can only go in one direction. That seems to me a disqualifier. The way Time manages to get a foothold in the respectable society of dimensions is by transforming itself into a symbol, usually rendered as t. Once a symbol it can enter the sacred precincts (or are they dimensions) of abstract thought, marry space to become spacetime, and coyly hint that even time travel is possible if only we could harness the energy of a quasar to power our little time machine.
Now we say that space has three dimensions—but if we think in measurements, that’s not really true. I can measure a diagonal distance as well, thus from the left-hand upper corner at the ceiling to the right-hand bottom corner on the floor. That particular measurement (dimension) is a kind of mixture of the three. But that number, three, is conventionally accepted (except by people who play with fractals). And the playful mind then imagines that there might well be a fourth space dimension—and if a fourth then why not many more? For that to be real, the fourth would have to be at right angles to all three of the usual kind. Now our brain will balk. “Enough already,” it will say. “Can’t picture that. Cannot measure that. And if I can’t measure it, it’s not a dimension.” But people are more than their brains. They can’t imagine it, but they can use a symbol for representing it. And that symbol will work just fine in various equations—and hence we have whole fields of mathematical physics in which such phrases as N-dimensions will be tossed about quite lightly—although the few remaining Large Hadron Colliders, like the brain, simply refuse to bring us any physical proof of such dimensions.
Why mystical scribblers have learned to love the word is quite understandable. They deal with very-tough-to-explain experiences and want to find a place for them—one dimension over as it were. Now as for science fiction writers, they’re up against it too. The nearest star to us is 4 light years away. Light travels at the rate of 671 million miles per hour. Using the highest speed achieved by a manned rocket, Apollo 10, we can just about approach 25,000 mph. But that speed is less than one percent of the speed of light (0.004% to be exact). SF writers therefore must travel a great deal faster than light—but Einstein stands at that gate holding a flaming sword. SF therefore has recourse to the speculations of mathematical physics, produces worm holes that get around the problem, and suddenly the star ships are all over the galaxy in the flash of an eye, and only the galactic rim is a little more distant and takes a few days…
While we’re waxing dimensionally, I must mention Time as a dimension. But is it really? The neat thing about the Familiar Three is that we are free to move in them—now to this side, now to the other. Up then down. We can go back and we can go forth. But time presents a problem. We can only go in one direction. That seems to me a disqualifier. The way Time manages to get a foothold in the respectable society of dimensions is by transforming itself into a symbol, usually rendered as t. Once a symbol it can enter the sacred precincts (or are they dimensions) of abstract thought, marry space to become spacetime, and coyly hint that even time travel is possible if only we could harness the energy of a quasar to power our little time machine.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Why The Reverent Music?
I watched a two-hour presentation of Nova’s Finding Life Beyond Earth on PBS. It’s easy to summarize the substance. What we need for life is oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, liquid water, and a source of heat. Voila! Nova tries to answer the question of whether or not we are alone. Interesting question. It does so by looking at photographs of planets and moons in the solar system searching for water, the right elements, and volcanoes. Now there is nothing particularly new or surprising here. It is the consensus of our times that life is just a natural form of matter that springs forth as soon as the appropriate conditions for it are present. So why use majestic, reverent, grandiose, exalted music when scouring the planets for these grubby particulars?
Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.
Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:
Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.
Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:
If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.My own entirely unscientific notions don’t require comet-borne sperm and viruses, but I agree with Hoyle on insisting on design—and disagree with modernity that it arises from a handful of elements, water, and heat by lucky accident. And we’re not alone. But that’s not the reason why.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Playing with Modern Dualities
A modern version of Aristotle’s elegant concept (that substance is a duality of matter and of form) is David Bohm’s suggestion of two orders in reality. One he calls the conditioned, the other the unconditioned order. They suggest something analogous. The conditioned order for Bohm is matter, in that it follows laws. He proposed the unconditioned kind in order to explain intelligence; he found it impossible to derive it from the material, the conditioned order. Intelligence, as I conceive of it at least, is not something self-existent. It is the characteristic of an agent. Therefore his two orders might be named Matter and Mind.
In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.
The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?
Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?
Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.
It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.
In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.
The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?
Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?
Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.
It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Substance-Of-We-Feeling
We tend to think of Revelation as communication of knowledge, guidance, and of information from the realms beyond the border. That’s also the context in which I’ve written on the subject in multiple posts here (see Categories). That human renditions of revelation might decay over time and need to be renewed seems obvious to me—but such a view tends to be resisted by those who control its dissemination. They’d agree that interpretation may be necessary—but they reserve the right of interpretation to themselves. I’ve never encountered a sharply put interpretation saying that revelation may also be nutrition, indeed necessary spiritual nutrition. These are my two subjects today.
Let me start with the first by focusing on a single word, Grace. The first dictionary definition of that word is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The first example Merriam-Webster’s online version gives is “She walked across the stage with effortless grace.” The last three examples mention God. One of these is “By the grace of God, no one was seriously hurt,” but you won’t see that in newspapers. They will substitute “fortunately” for the leading phrase. Neither the deeper meanings of the word, nor its role in religious controversy, is present here.
The word does have such meanings in Christianity. There it is a gift of God linked to salvation and said to flow from right deeds and holiness. Luther disputed this by asserting that faith alone saves—and grace is unnecessary. Its meaning therefore as an active, indeed necessary, support, arising from a real and transcendental source has very much thinned out, more or less replaced by modernity’s secular explanation for all mysteries: chance and probability.
Now concerning the subject of nutrition. In her science fiction novel, Shikasta, Doris Lessing tells the story of a galactic empire, but of a different kind. Multiple planetary settlements have taken place over many eons from the star system Canopus, in the constellation of Argos. All kinds of species have been, as it were, planted, and they are evolving. Sustaining their evolution is an energetic emanation called Substance-Of-We-Feeling, abbreviated SOWF. It isn’t necessary for simple survival, but it is what sustains harmonious development. All is well for a long, long time—but then the emissaries from Canopus notice that something very troubling has taken place. An unexpected cosmic realignment causes the flow of SOWF to thin. Another empire, Canopus’ enemy, Puttoria, attempts to exploit this situation. A degenerative disease begins to affect settlements, among them Shikasta (read Earth); it’s not a physical disease; it is the higher levels—spiritual life, community life—that are affected.
The story of Shikasta, of course, merits interpretation as a new or as a renewed revelation—this one emanating from Sufi roots. Doris Lessing was associated with the Sufi teaching projected by Idries Shah from Britain. When I first read Shikasta, I had to smile when I encountered SOWF; to me it was an obvious reference to Sufism; later I discovered that others had had much the same thought. Lessing’s series of novels, collectively known as Canopus in Argos, is the framing of a cosmology in modern terms, thus accessible to a secular and technological age. SOWF functions as Grace—a gift, a source of higher nutrition, regenerative, as Webster’s has it. Lessing’s intent, to be sure, is far from suggesting that God is a distant galactic civilization. The effect of her, alas, very difficult fiction is to make such ideas of a conscious and meaningful cosmic plan—in which, as it were, energetic emanations like Grace play a vital role—visible to modern minds and, when thought about, illuminative of ancient and by now moribund structures of belief we’ve come to dismiss as backward superstitions.
Let me start with the first by focusing on a single word, Grace. The first dictionary definition of that word is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The first example Merriam-Webster’s online version gives is “She walked across the stage with effortless grace.” The last three examples mention God. One of these is “By the grace of God, no one was seriously hurt,” but you won’t see that in newspapers. They will substitute “fortunately” for the leading phrase. Neither the deeper meanings of the word, nor its role in religious controversy, is present here.
The word does have such meanings in Christianity. There it is a gift of God linked to salvation and said to flow from right deeds and holiness. Luther disputed this by asserting that faith alone saves—and grace is unnecessary. Its meaning therefore as an active, indeed necessary, support, arising from a real and transcendental source has very much thinned out, more or less replaced by modernity’s secular explanation for all mysteries: chance and probability.
Now concerning the subject of nutrition. In her science fiction novel, Shikasta, Doris Lessing tells the story of a galactic empire, but of a different kind. Multiple planetary settlements have taken place over many eons from the star system Canopus, in the constellation of Argos. All kinds of species have been, as it were, planted, and they are evolving. Sustaining their evolution is an energetic emanation called Substance-Of-We-Feeling, abbreviated SOWF. It isn’t necessary for simple survival, but it is what sustains harmonious development. All is well for a long, long time—but then the emissaries from Canopus notice that something very troubling has taken place. An unexpected cosmic realignment causes the flow of SOWF to thin. Another empire, Canopus’ enemy, Puttoria, attempts to exploit this situation. A degenerative disease begins to affect settlements, among them Shikasta (read Earth); it’s not a physical disease; it is the higher levels—spiritual life, community life—that are affected.
The story of Shikasta, of course, merits interpretation as a new or as a renewed revelation—this one emanating from Sufi roots. Doris Lessing was associated with the Sufi teaching projected by Idries Shah from Britain. When I first read Shikasta, I had to smile when I encountered SOWF; to me it was an obvious reference to Sufism; later I discovered that others had had much the same thought. Lessing’s series of novels, collectively known as Canopus in Argos, is the framing of a cosmology in modern terms, thus accessible to a secular and technological age. SOWF functions as Grace—a gift, a source of higher nutrition, regenerative, as Webster’s has it. Lessing’s intent, to be sure, is far from suggesting that God is a distant galactic civilization. The effect of her, alas, very difficult fiction is to make such ideas of a conscious and meaningful cosmic plan—in which, as it were, energetic emanations like Grace play a vital role—visible to modern minds and, when thought about, illuminative of ancient and by now moribund structures of belief we’ve come to dismiss as backward superstitions.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Cosmologies are Optional
Action is always possible, but understanding rests on knowledge. We act on feelings, but these do not invariably communicate knowledge. We give recurrent feelings names, but the names do not inherently explain the feelings. Let me proceed with an example: hunger. As one venerable Zen statement has it, When hungry, eat. When tired sleep. Hunger produces eating, but it will take many years before we’re old enough even to understand that eating sustains our bodies. And for most of us—unless we look it up—precisely what it is that causes hunger remains a mystery. In effect it has no practical bearing on anything. Most people live and die without understanding anything about hunger beyond the feeling, which produces the action of eating—indeed they live and die without thinking much about all of the many radiations of that simple, daily experience.
So now you’re curious. Well, let me tell you something. Your curiosity will not be satisfied—as your hunger easily is. It’s a long story. In the center of our brain resides the hypothalamus. It is a kind of regulator. It receives input from the nervous system and causes the endocrine system to take various actions. The endocrine system causes glands to release hormones. The liver signals glucose levels to the hypothalamus. When these levels are too low, that organ causes release of hormones that produce the feeling of hunger. There are some twelve such hormones involved, but the most important is one called ghrelin. When hungry, ghrelin levels rise. With food intake, fat cells generate leptin, and their presence inhibits ghrelin’s effectiveness in signaling a state of hunger. These two hormones, therefore rise and fall, one motivating the urge to eat, the other inhibiting it. And the shift from one state to the other is signaled by blood sugar levels examined by the hypothalamus.
But this is not the end of the story. Real understanding requires us to answer why appropriate blood sugar levels should be present. Very long story. Eventually we have to ask: Why are bodies necessary? How did they come about? What is life? Is it prior to or produced by bodies? Are we, who feel the hunger, just another name for a collective of hypothalami, nerves, glands, ghrelins, leptins, glucose, and all the rest? Or are we, who detect the hunger, and act on it—or refrain to maintain slender figures—something separate? And if so, did we originate when semen penetrated ovum? Did we come later? Or did we exist before? In either case, why?
Good heavens. I was thinking of breakfast, and here I am, committing cosmology. But cosmology is optional, isn’t it? It seems to be on another level entirely, in a different category. Action and feeling suffice me if that’s where I want to stay. But what organ, then, makes me long for understanding?
So now you’re curious. Well, let me tell you something. Your curiosity will not be satisfied—as your hunger easily is. It’s a long story. In the center of our brain resides the hypothalamus. It is a kind of regulator. It receives input from the nervous system and causes the endocrine system to take various actions. The endocrine system causes glands to release hormones. The liver signals glucose levels to the hypothalamus. When these levels are too low, that organ causes release of hormones that produce the feeling of hunger. There are some twelve such hormones involved, but the most important is one called ghrelin. When hungry, ghrelin levels rise. With food intake, fat cells generate leptin, and their presence inhibits ghrelin’s effectiveness in signaling a state of hunger. These two hormones, therefore rise and fall, one motivating the urge to eat, the other inhibiting it. And the shift from one state to the other is signaled by blood sugar levels examined by the hypothalamus.
But this is not the end of the story. Real understanding requires us to answer why appropriate blood sugar levels should be present. Very long story. Eventually we have to ask: Why are bodies necessary? How did they come about? What is life? Is it prior to or produced by bodies? Are we, who feel the hunger, just another name for a collective of hypothalami, nerves, glands, ghrelins, leptins, glucose, and all the rest? Or are we, who detect the hunger, and act on it—or refrain to maintain slender figures—something separate? And if so, did we originate when semen penetrated ovum? Did we come later? Or did we exist before? In either case, why?
Good heavens. I was thinking of breakfast, and here I am, committing cosmology. But cosmology is optional, isn’t it? It seems to be on another level entirely, in a different category. Action and feeling suffice me if that’s where I want to stay. But what organ, then, makes me long for understanding?
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Neti, Neti
How can a believer “have problems” with the Creation? (Here I have in mind creation in time, not in the sense of the origin of reality.) That’s simple enough to explain. My leanings are in the direction of what is called negative theology, thus one that denies the possibility of knowing anything at all about the Ultimate. The opposite stance is positive theology; it affirms that we can too know something—but that knowledge will come to us through revelation. We’re a late civilization and hence have the luxury of using technical words here. The two are called apophatic and cataphatic theologies, derived from Greek roots apo- meaning “away from” and kata- meaning “down into.” Away from is used here as denial (of any knowledge) and down into as meaning that knowledge comes from above into this created realm. (I pity the old Greeks; they had no “Greek” of their own to signal that their knowledge came from ancient times…)
Every religious tradition has its negative modality; in some it is very strongly to the fore and thus represents the very core of the teaching. Buddhism is a good example. The mystical schools of other traditions tend toward negativity and to the degree they do, they live in tension with their cataphatic orthodoxies. In the Sufi tradition ibn el Arabi’s writings prominently feature wujûd. It’s plain meaning is “being,” but in el Arabi’s writings it is the single reality of God in contrast to which the created world is as nothing—Maya, the Buddhist’s would say. Pure illusion. In the Judaic tradition the kabbalistic tradition’s En Sof is the infinite, unknowable God. Christianity has strains of this negative theology. My Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion only mentions an unknown but famous theologian called Pseudo-Dionysius (fourth century), but Meister Eckhart comes to mind. Taoism seems rooted in negative theology as well. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching assert:
Pantheism, in a way, is the inversion of that stance. Put into Sanskrit it would be “Sarva, sarva,” all, all. All is God. Interestingly, the apo- and the kata-style approaches tend to converge. When Moses stands before the burning bush, the following exchange takes place (Exodus 3:13-14):
Every religious tradition has its negative modality; in some it is very strongly to the fore and thus represents the very core of the teaching. Buddhism is a good example. The mystical schools of other traditions tend toward negativity and to the degree they do, they live in tension with their cataphatic orthodoxies. In the Sufi tradition ibn el Arabi’s writings prominently feature wujûd. It’s plain meaning is “being,” but in el Arabi’s writings it is the single reality of God in contrast to which the created world is as nothing—Maya, the Buddhist’s would say. Pure illusion. In the Judaic tradition the kabbalistic tradition’s En Sof is the infinite, unknowable God. Christianity has strains of this negative theology. My Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion only mentions an unknown but famous theologian called Pseudo-Dionysius (fourth century), but Meister Eckhart comes to mind. Taoism seems rooted in negative theology as well. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching assert:
The way that can be spoken ofMy title here comes from the Hindu tradition, specifically the Upanishads, where a teacher, Yajnavalkya is asked about the nature of God and answers, “Neti, neti,” meaning literally “not this, not this” That phrase later become a chant, a mantra—and I encountered it almost immediately long, long ago when I first looked into the religious life of India. I liked it then—the sheer simplicity of it. Not this, not this.
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
Pantheism, in a way, is the inversion of that stance. Put into Sanskrit it would be “Sarva, sarva,” all, all. All is God. Interestingly, the apo- and the kata-style approaches tend to converge. When Moses stands before the burning bush, the following exchange takes place (Exodus 3:13-14):
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”Ibn el Arabi calls this ultimate wujûd, Being. And who can say what that really means?
Sunday, October 9, 2011
On Physical Cosmologies
Back in the 1950s I acquired a five-volume series of essays from Scientific American. One of these was titled The Universe. Part IV of the book carried two essays, one by George Gamow and the other by Fred Hoyle, summarizing, respectively the “Evolutionary Universe,” read Big Bang, and “The Steady-State Universe.” It is revealing that a book from a scientific publisher, issued in 1956, should have given the Steady-State theory equal billing. Since then the Big Bang has come to rule virtually absolutely—so that physicist who challenge it are systematically marginalized.
Despite my frequent references to that theory on this blog, I was already dubious about it in the 1950s, and the more I learned about the subject in detail, the more so. Does that sound odd coming from a person who has a pronounced belief in the transcending? Doesn’t the Big Bang seemingly offer scientific proof for Creation? My personal starting point, however, isn’t science (never mind scientific orthodoxy) but experience—the experience of the self. The arbitrary nature of the Big Bang troubled me from the outset—indeed so does the notion of Creation. I became somewhat reconciled to the theory thanks to David Bohm’s writings. He minimizes the Big Bang and conceives of a much greater Implicate Order of which our universe is but a small “wavelike excitation.”
The Big Bang theory rests on a single observation by Edwin Hubble, namely that light from distant galaxies is shifted to the red of the spectrum. When a stellar or galactic body is moving toward us, the light is blue-shifted; when moving away from us, red-shifted. In our own neighborhood, the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us at a speed somewhere between 62 and 87 miles per second. It is a blue-shifted galaxy. Hubble interpreted his data as an instance of the Doppler effect, dating to 1842. It says that the wavelength of anything wavy (sound, light) is enlarged (red) or minimized (blue) by the motion of the emitter. Red means moving away from, blue moving toward us. He concluded, therefore, that the universe was expanding. The Big Bang itself, therefore, is an inference. If the universe is expanding over time, at one time it was smaller. Tracing that motion back, Hubble put its age at 2 billion, Gamow in the 1950s at 5 billion, and today it is nearly 14 billion years. With every passing year the universe gets older—because observations discover yet older galaxies based on the red-shift measurement.
The assumption that red-shift measures taken from cosmic objects represented their movement was so well-established an idea in the 1950s that Fred Hoyle himself, steady-stater although he was, felt obliged to propose that new matter was continuously being created all over the universe. This new addition of matter then accounted for the observed expansion. To be sure, if the universe is not expanding, indeed is eternal and has no special space containing it, thus space produced by matter, as modern theory asserts, Hoyle need not have bothered.
The modern theory that space and time are both functions of matter has always bothered me as well. Something inside the self, which is where I begin, resists the notion of a universe curved in upon itself. So what is outside that curvature? But this view has also produced the very odd notion that the galaxies Hubble saw moving, thus causing the Doppler effect, weren’t really moving at all. Instead, space was expanding between them. But if space is expanding, why is Andromeda rushing toward us? The hapless explanation for this—and for clearly observable galactic collisions—is that “local” clusters cohere by gravity, and space only expands between galactic clusters. So space, supposedly, knows where it may—and where it may not—expand. If instead we opt for another view, namely that the galaxies are really moving, impelled by dark energy, then there is something wrong with our spacetime concepts.
Back about a decade-plus ago, in the course of writing a book, I looked into the Big Bang theory much more intensely than I had done before. In the course of that work I discovered one of the marginalized groups of astronomers and physicists who have reason to believe that the red-shift of light may not always and invariably—particularly at cosmic scales—signal movement at all. The basic discoveries of this were based on astronomical observations of quasars, quasi-stellar objects. The responsible party was Halton Arp (1927-). He observed quasars physically linked to galaxies. If red-shift measures movement, the galaxies are much closer to us and the quasars very far away. Yet they are directly and visibly linked to the galaxies. Indeed, most quasar are associated with galaxies and some have theorized that galaxies produce them in their spiral arms. They are part of the local system, but based on Hubble-style interpretation of their red-shifts, they appear to be vastly more distant. The illustration, below, shows two linked galaxies and, within the connecting band between them, two quasars. The numbers are the red-shift measurements: the greater the number, the farther away.
This is a big subject, but permit me to summarize. Arp has theorized that the red-shift observed in galaxies and quasars may not be due to movement at all but to an intrinsic and as yet unknown characteristic. The evidence is very strong. The orthodox response to Arp is a story very few people know about. He may well have falsified the Big Bang theory, but it will take yet another generation, maybe several, before this shall be acknowledged.
Needless to say, there is substantial community of scientists who are critics of the Big Bang; they’ve taken on that theory and produced much evidence, and cogent arguments, to show how it fails. But Big Bang has become an orthodoxy now. It has formed its own reservation, as it were, and critics are unwelcome. Another physical cosmology, based on plasma physics, also exists. It is a steady-state theory with substantial observational and experimental work to back it. But this post has gone on too long already.
Let me conclude by pointing to the first in a nine-part video series on YouTube called The Big Bang Never Happened (link). Once you see it, YouTube presents other parts of the series on its menu. If oppressive orthodoxies interest you, if science fascinates you, if cosmology is something you wish to study, this is not a bad place to start. The illustration I am showing is a screen-shot from that video, but taken from Part 3. The major galaxy shown is NGC 7603.
Despite my frequent references to that theory on this blog, I was already dubious about it in the 1950s, and the more I learned about the subject in detail, the more so. Does that sound odd coming from a person who has a pronounced belief in the transcending? Doesn’t the Big Bang seemingly offer scientific proof for Creation? My personal starting point, however, isn’t science (never mind scientific orthodoxy) but experience—the experience of the self. The arbitrary nature of the Big Bang troubled me from the outset—indeed so does the notion of Creation. I became somewhat reconciled to the theory thanks to David Bohm’s writings. He minimizes the Big Bang and conceives of a much greater Implicate Order of which our universe is but a small “wavelike excitation.”
The Big Bang theory rests on a single observation by Edwin Hubble, namely that light from distant galaxies is shifted to the red of the spectrum. When a stellar or galactic body is moving toward us, the light is blue-shifted; when moving away from us, red-shifted. In our own neighborhood, the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us at a speed somewhere between 62 and 87 miles per second. It is a blue-shifted galaxy. Hubble interpreted his data as an instance of the Doppler effect, dating to 1842. It says that the wavelength of anything wavy (sound, light) is enlarged (red) or minimized (blue) by the motion of the emitter. Red means moving away from, blue moving toward us. He concluded, therefore, that the universe was expanding. The Big Bang itself, therefore, is an inference. If the universe is expanding over time, at one time it was smaller. Tracing that motion back, Hubble put its age at 2 billion, Gamow in the 1950s at 5 billion, and today it is nearly 14 billion years. With every passing year the universe gets older—because observations discover yet older galaxies based on the red-shift measurement.
The assumption that red-shift measures taken from cosmic objects represented their movement was so well-established an idea in the 1950s that Fred Hoyle himself, steady-stater although he was, felt obliged to propose that new matter was continuously being created all over the universe. This new addition of matter then accounted for the observed expansion. To be sure, if the universe is not expanding, indeed is eternal and has no special space containing it, thus space produced by matter, as modern theory asserts, Hoyle need not have bothered.
The modern theory that space and time are both functions of matter has always bothered me as well. Something inside the self, which is where I begin, resists the notion of a universe curved in upon itself. So what is outside that curvature? But this view has also produced the very odd notion that the galaxies Hubble saw moving, thus causing the Doppler effect, weren’t really moving at all. Instead, space was expanding between them. But if space is expanding, why is Andromeda rushing toward us? The hapless explanation for this—and for clearly observable galactic collisions—is that “local” clusters cohere by gravity, and space only expands between galactic clusters. So space, supposedly, knows where it may—and where it may not—expand. If instead we opt for another view, namely that the galaxies are really moving, impelled by dark energy, then there is something wrong with our spacetime concepts.
Back about a decade-plus ago, in the course of writing a book, I looked into the Big Bang theory much more intensely than I had done before. In the course of that work I discovered one of the marginalized groups of astronomers and physicists who have reason to believe that the red-shift of light may not always and invariably—particularly at cosmic scales—signal movement at all. The basic discoveries of this were based on astronomical observations of quasars, quasi-stellar objects. The responsible party was Halton Arp (1927-). He observed quasars physically linked to galaxies. If red-shift measures movement, the galaxies are much closer to us and the quasars very far away. Yet they are directly and visibly linked to the galaxies. Indeed, most quasar are associated with galaxies and some have theorized that galaxies produce them in their spiral arms. They are part of the local system, but based on Hubble-style interpretation of their red-shifts, they appear to be vastly more distant. The illustration, below, shows two linked galaxies and, within the connecting band between them, two quasars. The numbers are the red-shift measurements: the greater the number, the farther away.
This is a big subject, but permit me to summarize. Arp has theorized that the red-shift observed in galaxies and quasars may not be due to movement at all but to an intrinsic and as yet unknown characteristic. The evidence is very strong. The orthodox response to Arp is a story very few people know about. He may well have falsified the Big Bang theory, but it will take yet another generation, maybe several, before this shall be acknowledged.
Needless to say, there is substantial community of scientists who are critics of the Big Bang; they’ve taken on that theory and produced much evidence, and cogent arguments, to show how it fails. But Big Bang has become an orthodoxy now. It has formed its own reservation, as it were, and critics are unwelcome. Another physical cosmology, based on plasma physics, also exists. It is a steady-state theory with substantial observational and experimental work to back it. But this post has gone on too long already.
Let me conclude by pointing to the first in a nine-part video series on YouTube called The Big Bang Never Happened (link). Once you see it, YouTube presents other parts of the series on its menu. If oppressive orthodoxies interest you, if science fascinates you, if cosmology is something you wish to study, this is not a bad place to start. The illustration I am showing is a screen-shot from that video, but taken from Part 3. The major galaxy shown is NGC 7603.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Sovereignty, Attention, Identification
I use the word “sovereignty” in a special, personal, technical sense to mean being centered, being attentively detached, ready for action, prepared, but above the fray. I’ve mentioned it on this blog before in the context of contemplation (link), saying that successful practice of contemplation produces a “feeling of sovereignty” in me. I’m not troubled by anything. In that state my troubles haven’t magically vanished—but they are spatially below me and cannot reach me.
This feeling is closely linked with attention—and is the very opposite of identification. A good example of identification in its raw but easily detectable form is watching my favorite baseball team, the Tigers, struggling. It’s the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees are at bat. The score is 3 to 2 in our favor. The bases are loaded. Two outs. The count is full, three balls, two strikes. I am a seething mass of the worst possible tensions. Sovereignty? Attention? Neither. I am a total slave of my lower being which is absolutely identified with the outcome of this game. But identification need not take this form. It tends to be our normal state. We’re just going with the flow, as the saying has it. And any little thing, arriving unseen from the edges of awareness—somebody’s statement, the telephone ringing, anything at all—can put me in a rage or a delight. Nobody at home, it turns out. To rise up from this state of waking sleep is, in a way, exactly like waking from a dream. There is a moment’s pause.
Genuine spontaneity—the admired kind, what pleases us when we behold it in the arts or in sports—arises from a fusion of sovereignty, thus presence, and attention—but in the midst of an action. The artist or the athlete is highly trained, disciplined, practiced, and alert. His or her attention is on the job at hand. And all those deliberate actions of training, study, practice, self-control, and so on have prepared the actor to act in a pure unity of intention, skill, and execution when events, unfolding with great rapidity, require instant reaction.
Identification is the ordinary state. Combating its sway is the banal but efficacious way of trying to become human. The spacesuits we now wear in this dimension—with which we are very, very identified—make the continuous achievement of sovereignty virtually impossible. But our ultimate well-being requires that we go there as often as we are lucky enough to remember to do so.
This feeling is closely linked with attention—and is the very opposite of identification. A good example of identification in its raw but easily detectable form is watching my favorite baseball team, the Tigers, struggling. It’s the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees are at bat. The score is 3 to 2 in our favor. The bases are loaded. Two outs. The count is full, three balls, two strikes. I am a seething mass of the worst possible tensions. Sovereignty? Attention? Neither. I am a total slave of my lower being which is absolutely identified with the outcome of this game. But identification need not take this form. It tends to be our normal state. We’re just going with the flow, as the saying has it. And any little thing, arriving unseen from the edges of awareness—somebody’s statement, the telephone ringing, anything at all—can put me in a rage or a delight. Nobody at home, it turns out. To rise up from this state of waking sleep is, in a way, exactly like waking from a dream. There is a moment’s pause.
Genuine spontaneity—the admired kind, what pleases us when we behold it in the arts or in sports—arises from a fusion of sovereignty, thus presence, and attention—but in the midst of an action. The artist or the athlete is highly trained, disciplined, practiced, and alert. His or her attention is on the job at hand. And all those deliberate actions of training, study, practice, self-control, and so on have prepared the actor to act in a pure unity of intention, skill, and execution when events, unfolding with great rapidity, require instant reaction.
Identification is the ordinary state. Combating its sway is the banal but efficacious way of trying to become human. The spacesuits we now wear in this dimension—with which we are very, very identified—make the continuous achievement of sovereignty virtually impossible. But our ultimate well-being requires that we go there as often as we are lucky enough to remember to do so.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Densities and Subtleties
In the last post I called our material order dense and others (beyond the Borderzone perhaps) subtle. I was using conventional language quite accessible to those who like to wander in mystical orchards, as it were. This sort of wording became popular in West via Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), the agent behind the Theosophical Society. Thanks to her prolific writings, for those tired of talking of the soul that mysterious entity came to be changed into the subtle body. Subtle, the word itself, comes from the Latin subtilis, and that word gets its hard meaning from tela, or web, and texere, to weave. Fine, thin, delicate, finely woven.
But let’s suppose that this view of things is parochial, rather than accurate, based as it is on sensory experience. Suppose that our material order is thinned out, rarefied—like high-altitude atmospheres were oxygen is not quite enough to let us breathe. And, by contrast, the so-called immaterial order is where all the density resides—but in an energetic form. Is there some basis for this? Yes.
Our physicists are now reluctantly concluding that 96 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark energy (74%) and dark matter (22%)—and, it seems to me, these two may be the same. Back in 1980 already, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm gave a theoretical grounding for this based on quantum theory. Bohm points out that the smallest possible energy wave present in a vacuum (like space) is 10-33 cm, but waves down to that very tiny wavelength are present. Anything smaller than that renders concepts like space and time meaningless. He continues:
Applying this to our interests, it suggests that which we call life, soul, subtle body, and so on, may be something energetic, real, but undetectable—its subtlety arising from a failure of our instruments to detect it—whereas our intelligence, also a function of this energetic order, has no problems seeing it at all. If we turn the phrasing around, it is our instruments that are insubstantial, not our souls—like catching a butterfly with a net made of air.
If the Big Bang was a sudden thinning out of the Implicate Order, that process may have deprived the agents present within it, us, of ready access to that which makes us whole; my analogy here is oxygen, but suppose we call it life-force, the Chinese ch’i, the Arabic baraka, the Hindu prana, the western grace. And our project here, in this rarefied dimension, is to collect enough of it to give us the power, once more, to get home.
---------------
To pursue David Bohm’s thought in a strictly scientific context, I recommend The Undivided Universe, 1993.
But let’s suppose that this view of things is parochial, rather than accurate, based as it is on sensory experience. Suppose that our material order is thinned out, rarefied—like high-altitude atmospheres were oxygen is not quite enough to let us breathe. And, by contrast, the so-called immaterial order is where all the density resides—but in an energetic form. Is there some basis for this? Yes.
Our physicists are now reluctantly concluding that 96 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark energy (74%) and dark matter (22%)—and, it seems to me, these two may be the same. Back in 1980 already, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm gave a theoretical grounding for this based on quantum theory. Bohm points out that the smallest possible energy wave present in a vacuum (like space) is 10-33 cm, but waves down to that very tiny wavelength are present. Anything smaller than that renders concepts like space and time meaningless. He continues:
This [wavelength] is much shorter than anything thus far probed in physical experiments (which have got down to about 10-17 cm or so). If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space, with this shortest possible wavelength, it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all matter in the known universe.Such considerations eventually led Bohm to suggests that our cosmos is a limited, unfolded, explicated region within a much greater enfolded, implicated region: Reality.
What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.… In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. The two opposing notions of space as empty and space as full have indeed continually alternated with each other in the development of philosophical and physical ideas. Thus, in Ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum [fullness]. This view was opposed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first seriously to propose a world view that conceived of space as emptiness (i.e., the void), in which material particles (e.g., atoms) are free to move. Modern science has generally favored this latter atomistic view, and yet, during the nineteenth century, the former view was also seriously entertained, through the hypothesis of an ether that fills all space. Matter, thought of as consisting of special recurrent stable and separable forms in the ether (such as ripples or vortices), would be transmitted through this plenum as if the latter were empty. [p. 190-191]
Applying this to our interests, it suggests that which we call life, soul, subtle body, and so on, may be something energetic, real, but undetectable—its subtlety arising from a failure of our instruments to detect it—whereas our intelligence, also a function of this energetic order, has no problems seeing it at all. If we turn the phrasing around, it is our instruments that are insubstantial, not our souls—like catching a butterfly with a net made of air.
If the Big Bang was a sudden thinning out of the Implicate Order, that process may have deprived the agents present within it, us, of ready access to that which makes us whole; my analogy here is oxygen, but suppose we call it life-force, the Chinese ch’i, the Arabic baraka, the Hindu prana, the western grace. And our project here, in this rarefied dimension, is to collect enough of it to give us the power, once more, to get home.
---------------
To pursue David Bohm’s thought in a strictly scientific context, I recommend The Undivided Universe, 1993.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
What the Muon Told Me
Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.
So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.
To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.
We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.
Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?
Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.
Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Theory, Technology, Experience
Take two broad categories of human activity, religion and science. In the latter we divide the activity into the theoretical (as in theoretical physics, which largely runs on math) and the experiential (observation, as in astronomy, geology and experiments as in chemistry, particle colliders, etc.). There is also a kind of middle ground where knowledge is turned to use: technology.
I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.
Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.
The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.
The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.
The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.
Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.
I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.
Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.
The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.
The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.
The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.
Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Attraction or Compulsion
Everything, of course, about the military nexus, signals compulsion. It is designed to move against the natural stream of things—thus to compel individuals to overcome their natural impulses in order to exert a directed force against an opponent, even at the cost of what is supposed to be our greatest good, life itself. Force is at the center of it, not least in those who must apply it. They must force themselves to act against internal resistance. The negative here rules.
By contrast the Piper and his seductive melodies simply attract, spontaneously, and all the action that follows is voluntary and pleasurable.
We find the Piper, stripped of all his pretty garb, sweet music in Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, derived by logic from the sheer existence of motion and the old Greek’s view that nothing moves unless it’s moved—and hence, rejecting the possibility of an infinite regress, he projected, at the heart of movement, of whatever kind, the Unmoved Mover who moves everything, ultimately—by attraction.
That attraction can become compulsion is an assertion only true if we permit the meaning of the word, attraction, to change its meaning in the process. It never becomes compulsion because compulsion implies resistance.
Attraction is also at the root of true religion—whereas the hell and brimstone kind is its fake equivalent to compel social behavior. No true religion ever took root by force—and all those that would maintain themselves by force are mere compulsion; they are dressed in the Piper’s striped garments but are tone-deaf to the core.
Well to remember Toynbee’s contrast in assessing what keeps flooding all the lands.
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Image from Wikipedia Commons (link).
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