faith Archives - Tacking Into The Wind

Global Capitalism, the Age of Reason, and the Primitive

Beauty is in the object, and it is in beauty that we see through the factual reflection of reality into Being itself. Plato

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is — infinite. We’re prisoners of our senses — imprisoned behind the five doors of perception. We can’t see through any others. William Blake

Those are old ideas, especially Plato (fifth century BC). William Blake lived in the 18th century.

Soren Kierkegaard, much more modern, lived in the 19th century. I keep going back to him, mainly, in order to gain some understanding as to the evolution of human culture. Christianity has played a major, world wide, role and Kierkegaard is known to have been a Christian though he certainly wasn’t your garden variety “Bible thumper”, though he was a minister, stood in th pulpit as such. I can imagine hearing one of his sermons. One wonders whether his philosophical ideas made it into same.

Existential mass, he thought, was the “medium” of architecture and as such was the farthest removed from language. He thought it was the most abstract medium. By this he meant language is the most concrete medium. By medium he meant these were modes of expression, of course. The most abstract “idea”, he thought, was the “sensuous genius” saying it is solely expressible in music because it is music alone that can express an energy, a storm, impatience, passion. And, it exists not in a moment, but in a succession of moments, moving always in an immediacy.

Kierkegaard believed that man’s evolution had somehow gone astray. That is the problem he wrestles with. The idea of concrete versus abstract modes of expression are intended to provide a basis for addressing this issue. He came to be convinced that Christianity through suppression of sensuousness has done the opposite. Now, sensuousness is excluded by Christianity because it is deemed contrary to spirit. This, then, becomes rather the affirmation of sensuousness as a principle power of Reality. This, of course, is not what was intended. But that is what happened. Now, we have a forbidden fruit.

So, to the extent we are bound by Christian ideals; to the extent Christianity has affected all subsequent modes of human behavior this corruption has persisted – in one form or another.

Now, this writer has a quite different view of the religion. While I hold to Kierkegaard’s ideas here there are other ways of understanding the religion if one considers even older religious ideas and possible meaning. Christianity is not, was not, a monolith. Its precursors, its reason for being in the first place, for some, give a completely different outlook on what “else” is going on here. Question is, which meaning survives and has the biggest impact on culture.

The Christian view, and this is certainly not from an esoteric tradition, is that homo sapiens have “dominion over the Earth”. The ideas of Kierkegaard were not those promoted by the church elders, of his or earlier times. Christianity was largely a political movement; its precepts were promoted in order to enhance the power of those who considered themselves as at the top layers of society. So, of course, they chose what to teach, what not to teach with that in mind. They thus corrupted the true meaning of the story of Jesus for their own corrupt purposes.

Dominion over the earth. Now, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have had the same impact on culture were it not for this underlying notion of man owning the earth. This ego centered movement continues to this day and appears to increasingly influence man’s life, the environment in which he operates. There’s been no abatement of this power we have arrogated to ourselves. Even those who struggle against global capitalism with its sole focus of exploiting people, ever expanding markets, consumerism run rampant, share the same ego-centrism as those who laid down the original bounds of propriety, rules of society.

One ring to bind them all, indeed. The machine only gets stronger. Its hold on us deepens ever more. It scoffs at the pale efforts of the environmentalist missionaries sent out to stem the tide that threatens to engulf every iota of life here and beyond.

Man not only worships the machine but is subsumed by it, is an extension of it happily making true in an interesting way the ancient Hindu precept that one who seeks God finds him in the same form in when he is sought. Like the early Christians we create the God that serves our desires best. For us, now, it is the machine “Hive”.

What is this mystery? Perhaps the alternate lesson tends along the lines of the only way to find the True God is to yield, not be a seeker at all. So mere meek reverence is the best way? One should simply wait (on the Lord). We’d do well to recall another Christian tenet, the forgotten one? “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

For mechanistic man steeped in the auto-phagia of global capitalism, consumerism, this is almost impossible but for the primitive it is the most natural thing in the world because he is close to, one with, nature. The primitive doesn’t own the world but belongs to it. So, the more “progress”, always increasing technological advances, the farther man is from his true self. Our artificiality increases with our absorption into consumerism.

The primitive knowing his soul, knows the soul of the Universe while the mechanistic man often denies even having a soul. And why not? There is no need for a soul if you have the soul of the hive. To have one of your own is mere superstition in that case.

My old teacher, Irwin Lieb, thought, rightly, in my view, that there was only one individual and that was the entire Cosmos. The Hindu notion above dovetails nicely with this. Our individuality is on loan from the True One and thus, so is the individual spirit. Lieb said we are only nominally individuals.

S. C. Gwynne, in his book “Empire of the Summer Moon” writes about the Comanche Indians. Primitives. He has a lament about the forced “repatriation” of one Cynthia Ann Parker who was adopted by her captors and became as they were “literally immersed in this elemental world that never quite left the Stone Age – a world of ceaseless toil, hunger, constant war, and early death. But also of pure magic, of beaver ceremonies and eagle dances, of spirits that inhabited springs, trees, rocks, turtles, and crows; a place where people danced all night and sang bear medicine songs, where wolf medicine made a person invulnerable to bullets, dream visions dictated tribal policy, and ghosts were alive in the wind. On grassy plains and timbered river bottoms from Kansas to Texas, Cynthia Ann – Nautday – had drifted in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody, and intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one.”

That contrast with the world of the “hive” is electrifying. Finally, I suppose, when our confusion, depravity, depradation, has reached infinity we will reach for a savior again, a messiah, but it will of necessity be a false one for we have long since passed the point from which redemption is even possible. Abandoned to our fate perhaps some might realize then just what the meaning of “My spirit shall not always abide with man.”

In that eternal darkness the abyss folds in on itself, collapsing infinities of deathly despair, hopelessness, and evil, lifelessness, where we eternally abide alone with our self induced pain, agony. We will have to own that “singularity” which we squandered our lives to reach and it is not going to be pretty after all. If only we recall before its too late what might have been had we taken the opportunity to follow the one true path of humility and selflessness. You know, those primitive notions.

We might see this now if only we weren’t so blinded by our moral relativism, our virtue signaling – a form of evangelism, from that missionary spirit, isn’t it? It says “I am holier than thou” so take heed of my new improved puritanism. It is a crisis of conscience that there is now a universal repugnance in western culture – Christian culture – to condemn anyone’s lifestyle no matter how outrageous. We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, right? We have given up ownership of any morality whatsoever when we are forced to celebrate deviant behavior, wantonness, because, you know, everything is allowed, therefore judgment, condemnation of anything at all is to be censured. I’d like to know when we decided that the “elevation of choice over all other human goods” was how we would proceed. This is the “absolutization of autonomy” that now dictates how we react to outrageous behavior. What, I ask, happened to moderation? It is a quantum leap from “tolerance of difference and diversity to the celebration of difference and diversity.” (Quotes from here)

Hope in vain that the societal tendencies providing for this “woke” dystopia will eventually be depleted of their energy and subside. This is a natural extension of “spreading the gospel” as modified by worship of the machine we’ve created to replace God. Wokeness is, then, a kind of theology. It says, for its adherents, “I own the truth” and the truth is whatever I say it is. They are full of certitude, ego-centrism again. They own God, indeed, made him again with their own hands. They believe they have every right to make everyone see the truth as they see it, for their own good, you see. They would annihlate those who oppose them. There’s no humility yet their frustration will eventually manifest as seeking for a leader, a savior; their actions speak to a nascent longing for such. They despair, have the sickness unto death, are filled with self-loathing – that’s why they mutilate themselves. But surely, they’ll never admit their hopelessness is of their own making. It’s always the fault of those who haven’t yet been converted. They seek eternally to transfer their despair to an agency outside their control. They are nihilists in the truest sense.

William Blake – from “Europe, a Prophecy”

Its axiomatic that the fundamental premise underlying the Age of Reason, it’s grossest manifestation, the Industrial Revolution, is that everything can be explained, measured, and ultimately known – eventually. However, this is the opposite of the truth.

That’s why we’ve no sense of belonging as did ancient peoples. We’ve sacrificed our sense of belonging to time, to place, for being a mere extension of the machine God we’ve made. We belong to that ever disappearing over the horizon singularity when knowledge reaches infinitude. No wonder primitives were better adjusted, lived a more fulfilling life. We are totally bereft of Mystery; there simply is no mystery that can’t be solved for those embedded in the Age of Reason and its outcroppings. For our forbears it was all mystery and you accepted this and that acceptance made you complete. Being complete made you happy.

Until the Greeks man was at the complete mercy of the unknown. It was then that Protagoras famously claimed that “man is the measure of all things.” Thus began our estrangement; thus we took the first tentative steps toward being a “stranger in a strange land.” I imagine about the same time we began looking for a savior. Protagoras was a 5th century BC man, So, the bronze age.

So, the way home? We missed it many centuries past and our evolution has surely confounded the absence. There are esoteric teachings. The quote from Blake and Plato above touch these. These are worthy of Jesus and Buddha but while Buddha did talk like this on occasion, Jesus didn’t, at least not as reported in the Christian Bible; it takes a special gift to get to the deeper meanings of the biblical writings. Jesus’ teaching, for the most part, seems tailored for the most common people notwithstanding the presence here and there of the profoundest thoughts on being and meaning and purpose. Jesus was everyman’s Lord. The evolved missionary spirit is a corruption thereof; it’s teaching leads to self loathing, guilt, despair. Fear and trembling are its hallmarks. There’s no exit. Your condemnation owns you yet you would save the world. Better to merely save yourself by taking ownership of same. Instead we intend that global capitalism, progress, will save us as before we intended that reason would. The Spanish conquistadors intended saving the (Comanche) Indians. Now they are as good as gone except for a few dusty old books. I here repeat the notion that has been advanced for millennia that one will appear that will appeal anew to all but that one will not issue from the good. No. It knows that we’ve made a Faustian bargain. That will be taken advantage of in the extreme in what is to come. If we fall for what we have now we’ll clearly fall for anything. In an infinite universe whatever at all is possible will eventuate. Want monsters? We’ll get them without some basis for boundaries.

There is a primitive creature, a worm, whose genes we have mapped. (I can’t find the reference to this but I got it from a talk by Sean Carroll, Astrophysicist.) One gene’s function is to tell the creature “this is my tail – don’t eat it.” Mankind has somehow willfully, blindly, misplaced that gene. Is this out of malice, ignorance, an agency working through us to promote our self destruction, i.e., evil. I’d be the first to admit I truly do not know, indeed, can’t know. Its as much a mystery to me as the spirit that lives in a spring is for a primitive. I just accept it and try to make do with what’s at hand. That would be understanding, noesis. I’ve given up on knowing a long time past….and, oh yes, I leave it to the divine mystery that actually owns it.

This great mystery in which we find ourselves is not, after all, knowable for it is a mystery to be discovered in the sense that discovery is the action of the unknown. In relinquising ownership of that mystery we come, at last, into our true nature. We own nothing. Its all void, all the way down. We don’t even own ourselves. We are mere motes in the eye of that which sends us. And yet. And yet! Somehow we give purpose and meaning to the world. Be humble!

Dream not of transcendence. Pure fantasy. Dream rather that “deeds cannot dream what dreams can do—time is a tree (this life one leaf).”

Concerning U Chan Htoon’s paper on Buddhism

Blaise Pascal, Pensee number 84: It is with rash insolence that we belittle the great to our own measure, as when talking of God.

Matthew 11:27 Neither doeth anyone know the Father, but the son, and he to whom it shall please the son to reveal him.

Matthew 7:7 Those who seek God find him.

We live on a planet orbiting what is known as a main sequence star, that is, rather common place. Our sun orbits the galactic center and is imbedded in a so called arm of its galaxy; the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. It has several arms and is disk shaped with a bulge at the center. The approximate distance from the sun to the center of the galaxy is about 26,600 light years. (When I studied astronomy some years ago that number was thought to be 30,000.) The diameter of the whole system is approximately 100,000 light years. It takes 225 million years for the sun to complete an orbit around the center of the galaxy. Now the sun, as a main sequence type star, has an expected life span of nine billion years of which it has lived about half. That means that it has completed about 20 orbits and has about the same number to go during its remaining life. The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars.(A 2020 article on this.)

That gives a little perspective to what follows, I hope. Everything I know, understand, and so forth, is nothing more than a fly speck on the moon. So, as is said nowadays, your mileage may vary. I certainly have no more standing than anyone else to comment on the subject matter at hand. It is by the Lord’s blessing, I suppose, that I have such inclinations in the first place.

U Chan Htoon, former Justice of the Burmese high court, spoke to the Sixteenth Congress of the International Association for Religious Freedom at the University of Chicago, August 12th, 1958. In 1961 G.V. Desani delivered the lecture “Vipassana Bhavana, Yoga, and Other Topics” to the diplomatic corp at the Israeli ambassador’s residence in Rangoon, Burma. Justice Htoon was in attendance.

In Buddhism we try to avoid the use of the word “spirit” because this may be taken to imply some kind of enduring entity…

He then goes on to claim it should be understood, rather, as a psychic process. I take this to mean it does not endure except in a (local) relativity-complex in the same sense that for movement (of bodies) to exist there must be a multiplicity of “bodies”, that is, more than one. Movement is relative only. More on this later.

It is further stated that “…rebirth is not the reincarnation of a “soul” after death, but more precisely it is the continuation of a current of cause and effect from one life to another. There is nothing in the universe that is not subject to change, and so there is no static entity which can be called a “soul”. A being is the totality of five factors; material, the physical body, sensations, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness. “All these factors are undergoing change from moment to moment and are linked together only by the causal law – the law that ‘this having been, that comes to be.’ Hence Buddhist philosophy regards a being not as an enduring entity but as a dynamic process.”

He goes on the claim that Nibbana is permanent and characterizes it as release from the realm of becoming, samsara. It has no qualities, no relative values which always require, what he calls a “relativity-complex”. Positive and negative attributes depend on one another for their existence, for instance. Also, light(ness) and dark(ness) being opposite poles of a “relativity_complex” depend on one another for their existence, too. Neither is absolute. In the Desani lecture cited above the claim is also made that Nibbana (Nirvana) is permanent.

Michelson and his colleague Morely, tried to establsh the absolute existence of the aether. Many thought at the time that it was required to have a universal medium whereby light was propogated. He found instead that the aether did not exist. Subsequently Albert Einstein explained that the speed of light was dependent on the (an) observer. The speed of light is only relative to an observer. Einstein also said, relevant to this, that there is no natural rest-frame in the universe. This leads me to speculate that were the universe a single body light would not exist, just as movement wouldn’t. There must be that relativty-complex. Also, I find it interesting that Einstein wrote, per Mr. Htoon, that “if there is any religion that is acceptable to the modern scientific mind, it is Buddhism.” I tend to claim, however, that Buddhism is not a religion because there is no personal God. Buddha never claimed to be a Lord or God in the flesh. Jesus was circumspect in this. He did say “I am the truth, the life, and the way. No man cometh to the father except by me.” Also, “Believest thou not that I am the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me…” John 14.

Commentary:
God can’t have self experience without descending into matter and assuming corporeal form(s). The “Word” is made flesh in order that God, the Divine creative spirit can have self knowledge. That is, in this writer’s mind, the purpose and meaning of life. The story of Jesus Christ is a metaphor for this. And, of course, the so called “relativity-complex” of Justice Htoon is required for this. This writer makes an assumption that the actual stuff of which we are made, the same as the sun, of course, has a kind of self awareness based on sentient forms compounded of the same stuff.

Furthermore, its my premise that U. Chan Htoon didn’t fully understand Judaism and Christianity. Consider Exodus (the Bible), Moses asks God “Who shall I say sent me?” Tell them, God replies, “I Am sends you.” Being itself sends you. I don’t find anything corresponding to this in the lecture.

So, the meaning of Jesus; God descends into matter in order to “re-emerge” an enlightened (fully self realised) being. Why wouldn’t one say the same of the Buddha? and that such beings, all sentient life for that matter, become, along the way, co-creators of the Real, the world. Certainly, it is put forward that Jesus was in hypostatic union with God, the Father. Why couldn’t the same be said for Buddha; 100% man but 100% God, too? Wasn’t he an Jagatguru? Having escaped impermanence in the permanence of Nibbana would one be considered to have also reached the seemingly impossible hypostatic union with the Divine creative spirit, or whatever you want to call it? Would that bit of the sun stuff of which we have the pleasure to be co-compounded realised once and for all exactly what it is? That fly speck? One would needs discover this for oneself.

Said another way, man (sentient life forms) supplies the cosmos with individuality while the cosmos gives man, in return, universality. Enlightened beings realise this whether said explicityly or no. This from my mentor. And this, too, seems relevant: “where the concentration is, there is the persistent, the lasting, the permanent. That to which attention goes is that which returns. In a sense to attend to something is to put consciousness into it, to bring it to life, to self awareness.” Put another way, if there is no observer there is nothing. Also,the recursive process that results in rebirth must be said to gain in vitality by the concentration, self awareness, of the successive lives so attached.

Kamma or Karma, as well as the precept that nothing endures, is permanent, and thus, there is no “soul” that carries forward through successive lives, is best understood, I think, when the Real, the world, is considered as a recursive phenomenon. Recursion, the Fibonacci sequence is the best example I know – 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13….. – Zero is the still point, of course, wherefrom the “beginning”. It is necessary for any meaning or understanding whatsoever. So, every instance of the Real is a product of the preceding (instances). It is a fractal wherein knowing the still point you know it all. Yes, its a mystery but, clearly, out of nothing comes nothing (Ex nihil, nihil fit). This is why its impossible to explain, why the talk about the ultimate having no attributes, why when the journey is completed one arrives at the beginning but knows the place for the first time. Something happens during the process, the journey! Consciousness? Moreso, all that is happening now added to all that has ever happened equals all that will ever happen. This is, to me, how karma can be grasped. To recap, the purpose of the existence of the elements of recursion in the “relativity-complex” is to source new instances which have no permanence in themselves. They are made to fade. The process, however, is a kind of permanence in the same sense that a river, though ever changing, remains the river, and the instances, drops of water, merge eventually into the sea through ever widening banks. Poetically, they widen to embrace the sea.

Further, as Desani puts it here, For whatever activity undertaken, there is a spirit for that doing and that spirit in time gets a life of its own, gets self awareness as it goes on. These acts eventually become forms of worship. Doing good enhances goodness. Goodness is the reservoir drawn from when acts of kindness are done. And it is thereby increased. These acts are like accretions. Charity grows by use. Doing right this time makes it easier the next and so forth. Of course, it works the same for evil doers. A murderer draws on a different kind of reservoir to do his evil. His evil adds to that and the next time it is easier to follow that path. Evil begats evil, one reaps what one sows. It works that way. Love, Beauty, Truth, begat more of the same, too.

The lecture’s full title is Buddhism and the age of Science. I can’t find it on the net except to purchase but my copy is a Wheel Publication No. 36/37.

This writer’s view is quite different especially concerning what is said about Science. I think they fail to understand Science and its place in the total scheme of human endeavors. I see it, as did Philosopher R.G. Collingwood, as an emergent phenomenon along with art, religion, and other modalities of being in the world. Collingwood’s scheme compares to Soren Kierkegaard’s in that Kierkegaard views faith as such a mode of being. Art, religion, science, history, then philosophy is how Collingwood describes the recursion of these modalities.

It is philosophy that Collingwood thought was the natural culmination of the preceding elements. He describes them in detail, their successes and failings. Here, I write of his work in this regard. Soren Kierkegaard’s work is much more difficult to grasp but I go into it to. Here.

I said above that Buddhism could be thought of as not being a religion in the sense of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and so on. Perhaps it could be better understood as coming after philosophy in Collingwood’s progression, after faith in Kierkegaard’s. If these modes, art and the rest, are truly like the Fibonacci sequence then philosophy is not the final element; neither would Buddhism be were it included. The Sun is, after all, middle aged. Having 20 more orbits to make around the Milky Way, 20 more galactic years to live, I’d imagine we’ll have ample opportunity to plumb the depths of Reality’s infinite malleability.

Collingwood describes philosophy as “consciousness returning on itself”; like a fountain. Pretty image. I think it is a prototype of what Buddhism and, also, the esoteric teachings of the yogis, is. My mentor’s writings give the best jumping off place for what might be the next big thing in mental culture.

In working this up I am indebted to David Warren and his piece on God’s Existence, here. I love this quote: “For science, or human knowledge more broadly, God is not an hypothesis, but an Axiom. Start in Aristotle, if you will, to see that the world has no purchase on sense, without the Unmoved Mover. The “Five Ways” by which the inevitability of God was demonstrated by Thomas Aquinas, and the related ways in which this was done by others before and after him, are easily misunderstood, because they are not proofs of an hypothesis but recursions. They show, without the “God Axiom,” that there can be no causation, no change, no being in itself, no gradation, no direction to an end. We need a Still Point, from which to depart. It cannot be hypothesized. It is too simple for that. You need to assume it even to contradict it.”

Finally, I write here about entelechy, the end within. According to Buddhist thought there is no end, no beginning, only the process has any claim on reality. So, any end within dependes on a local framework, a relativity-complex, in Mr. Htoon’s usage. I’d put forward that if you must have a concept of the end within then go with Mr. T.S. Eliot’s beautiful notion that after all our struggles, trouble, turmoil, conquests, losses, “we arrive where we started but know the place for the first time.”

Denis de Rougemont “Love in the Western World”

Emotional in the sense an agenda is in control. I don’t know at this time whether he is promoting any particular point of view; whether it be Christian, which I suspect, or paganism. He alludes to but I don’t think he embraces Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoga, the issues of the Mahabharata, or for that matter Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Platonism and several others. He does seem anxious to resolve the “stresses” into a “grand unified theory” subsuming all opposing spirits. He seems to write knowing the conclusion is foreordained, thus making his purpose suspect.

We argue the known outcome in order to have something to say! Noise! “Sound and fury signifying nothing.” Which is not to say his scholarship is not of the highest order of professionalism.

But anyhow, its hard to ignore the comparison of this work to Kierkegaard’s. An audacious question: Is Tristan and Iseult (the opera) to Rougemont as Don Giovanni was to Soren Kierkegaard?

On Good/Evil he assigns human agency, the Christian view. This is common practice and, in my opinion, a fallacy. Personhood does not necessarily pertain to the divine or the profane but is a reflection that man only understands, or rather, has knowledge of himself so God and Satan must be measured in terms thereof. Its simpler to accept Reality evolved to the world we see, are embedded in and will ever remain a mystery that, also ever, engenders discovery. Why must there be agency at all? Sure Good and Evil are real even without the “myths” adopted in order that we can easily grasp them on familiar terms. It is not necessary that understanding follows always from measurement in terms of human metrics. To do so merely reinforces the fact that man is self absorbed, self centered and not interested in Truth in and of itself. Divinity is not “personal” [to a God Head]. Divinity is universal, not finite but infinite. A Lord, The Lord, taking on the cloak of divinity is leaving the “person” aside and assuming the infinite quality of the divine in the same way a rose assumes the infinite quality of beauty. It is full self-realization.

Again, the rose is not itself beauty but beautiful. Rather it participates in, is a manifestation of beauty. Likewise things manifest are not the universe itself, but the universe, the Real – G_d, if you like – is made manifest in them. Divinity is thus made manifest in [all] man, sentient life forms especially. The Word is made flesh and Life is a tool in his box.

How long must we mistake measurement for understanding?

Thoughts

“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves. ” Churchill

Category error: Every assertion has built in premises, assumptions about the nature of the Real. If the assumption is wrong, then the containing assertion or claim can’t be right. In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means. Our experience, connection to the Real, as embodied, individualized, localized beings is the first of these. Dan Simmons

“This finding adheres to a general pattern that imagining a given action or sensation is likely to be neurologically analogous to physically carrying out that action or experiencing that particular stimulus.” Link

“That’s why we’re here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings.” James Lileks

…or consciousness, truth, beauty. Time and these are universal but must be individualized, localized to be meaningful.

God hides in plain sight. He does not do the things man does, think, etc., but he is (there) when we do them.

Michael Hanlon on theory of “pocket universes” This sounds a lot like Aristotle: “If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. This idea from the Multiverse theory. And from Michael Hanlon on string theory: “The many worlds interpretation of quantum physics….states that all quantum possibilities are, in fact, real. When we roll the dice of quantum mechanics, each possible result comes true in its own parallel timeline. If this sounds mad, consider its main rival: the idea that reality results from the conscious gaze. Things only happen, quantum states only resolve themselves, because we look at them. As Einstein is said to have asked, with some sarcasm, would a sidelong glance by a mouse suffice?”

Me: The north pole can’t be definitely located, seen, but we know its there.

Hawking: If Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, the universe began with a singularity called the big bang. Now because it was a singularity, all the laws of physics broke down. And therefore we cannot predict how the universe began. A few years ago I was at a conference on cosmology that was held in the Vatican. And at the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. The Pope said it was fine for them to inquire into the early history of the universe, but they should not ask questions about the big bang itself… because that was the work of God. However, at that conference I proposed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would have to be modified to take quantum mechanics into account. And that modification would mean that there was no singularity. Space time would be finite in extent, but with no singularities. In this picture, space time would be like the surface of the earth. It’s finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundary or edge or singularities.

Interviewer: SO IT WOULDN’T BE POSSIBLE TO SAY THAT REALLY THE UNIVERSE HAS A BEGINNING OR END, OR WHAT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO SAY ABOUT BEGINNING AND CAUSATION?

The universe… the universe would have a beginning and an end in the same sense that degrees of latitude have a beginning and an end at the north and south poles respectively. There isn’t any point with a latitude 91 degrees north. And similarly, there isn’t any point in the universe which is before the big bang. And the, but the north pole is a perfectly regular point of the earth’s surface, it’s not a singular point. And similarly, I believe that the big bang was a perfectly regular point of space time. And all the laws of physics would hold at the big bang. And if that is the case, we can completely predict the state of the universe from the laws of physics.

ALL OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEEMS TO BE DIRECTED TOWARDS THE EVENTUAL GOAL, THAT’S A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY, AN UNDERSTANDING OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS THAT UNIFY ALL OF NATURE, INCLUDING MANKIND. WILL WE EVER FIND SUCH A THEORY, AND IF SO, WHAT COULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES?

I think it’s an open question as to whether we will find a complete unified theory. All I can say is that we don’t seem to have one at the moment.

YOU WERE SAYING THAT THERE MAY BE SUCH A THING . . .

We may never find a complete unified theory, but I think that there is a 50-50 chance that we’ll do so by the end of the century.

WHAT WOULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES OF SUCH A THEORY? WOULD WE THEN KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT PHYSICAL REALITY?

In principle, but not in practice. Because the equations are very difficult to solve in any but the simplest situations. We already know the laws of physics that underlie the behaviour of matter in normal circumstances. So in principle, we should be able to predict all of physics, all of chemistry and biology. But we’ve not had much success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical equations.

My commentary: Science posits the Real, the source of meaning and purpose, in an absolute other. It’s over the horizon and is called something like “complete unified theory” and would resolve the general theory of relativity with the (theories of) quantum mechanics, the physics of the very large with that of the very small. There are no concrete objects, but waves in force fields. Every discovery leads to new postulates as the absolute other is approached but never quite reached. Like going the speed of light requires ever more energy as one approaches light speed, to make the final leap requires all the known energy in the universe. I postulate that to calculate the grand unified theory similarly requires ever greater calculus and that eventually you run out of calculus coincidentally at the same moment you reach the ultimate theory. Ironically the evidence can’t be finally owned because it hides in plain sight. You can’t find it because the premise you don’t already have it is false.

What’s interesting is the notion that if its possible it will eventuate. Aristotle postulated this, too, and noted that unimaginable horrors were necessary conditions. Also notable is the absence of anything not quantifiable from these types of proceedings. Sean Carroll, for instance, dismisses philosophical insights relating to consciousness, the soul, and religious notions of transfiguration, for instance, as flowery speech. Science generally doesn’t consider anything that can’t be measured. Thus measurement becomes the sine qua non of knowledge. But knowledge isn’t the only path to understanding. Indeed it can be an impediment. It seems to me a grand unified theory would actually account for time, beauty, love, truth, and such coming to have meaning when actualized in a field of consciousness of a sentient life form. My personal grand notion, call it theory if you want, is consciousness is the instrument of the soul and the issue of Grace working through the emotions, through mind, to affect the apotheosis of matter.

If that’s too much to swallow then here is a simpe formula that is known to work: “Praise no day until evening, no wife until buried, no sword until tested, no maid until bedded, no ice until crossed, no ale until drunk.”

Is it really cold empty nothingness? When we “Gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind” do we bring the star to the mind or realize the star where it is as already in “our” mind? I’ve lost my note on who first made this observation though Parmenides made a similar statement. Another interesting notion in this regard is from quantum physics, reality results from the conscious gaze. I’d suggest James Lileks has it right when he says “Thats why we’re here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings.” Replace “time” with space, or for that matter beauty, truth, love, God, or, The Whole Universe, and we might realize we confer individuality on much more than just this body in which we find ourselves. The Universe might consist mostly of the void which, as Nietzsche sagely observed, begins to stare back at those pondering, at length, its depths, but its an interesting void.

Ponder the incomprehensible Otherness of the opposite…
woe has its wisdom, sorrow enlightens the soul.

On Will , Faith, Instinct, Reason, and Thought

My use of the word Real below is as an aspect, a recognizable face (facet), of the motive force, spirit, that informs all that is. One could as easily use other words such as God, the Truth, the One, and so forth. This note ties in with much of what is written elsewhere in my blog and takes a step or two towards making a case for free will.

My reading of Blaise Pascal Pensee 340 wherein he observes that animals will but can’t do math leads me to contemplate that there can be will without thought. Consider that will as principle preexists thought in that sentient life must emerge, become self aware, evolve a sense of cause and effect, and develop the use of symbols before the emergence of thinking itself. I am suggesting that thinking in the anthropomorphic sense does not occur for every order of being but that will perhaps does. The Real itself is a kind of being but does it observe the consequences of action within itself and think to affect those consequences by offering different action? Or does the Real rather through an exercise of will set creation in motion and let the consequences work themselves out? I don’t think the Real apart from utilization of the self conscious faculties of created sentient beings has self awareness. I do think it has awareness itself but in the sense that one is aware equally of all that is in every particular as well as in total, that awareness can’t be reflexive. It is only when awareness, consciousness, enters into a part of the whole and looks back on the whole from the standpoint of a separate being that self awareness enters into reality. So I think thought is an expression of consciousness in adequately developed sentient life forms. Furthermore in the Real awareness is something possessed in the sense that it exists as a potentiality awaiting the arising of conditions suitable for its emergence.

Consider also that instinct is related to will while reason is related to thought. So animal’s instinct is a more primitive expression of the principle of will than in man while reason is similarly an evolute of the development of thought.

This brings up the question of whether faith is the opposite of will. I think not exactly. Faith is not intention but the yielding to intrinsic intention, existential will. Seeing there is something in the nature of existence that in reality is beyond my understanding, while I apprehend benevolence therein, I yield, that is, suspend “my” little will to preexisting will, that exists potentially and really in the very stuff of being. That, I think, is faith.

Evolution of History

Some thoughts provoked by Daniel Boorstin*, his chapter on evolution of history.

I am rather inclined to think that there is only one absolute truth, the conditio sine qua non, though infinite approaches to that truth are possible. These approaches are mere artifacts, and this is Boorstin, “shards” of mental pottery, transient vessels of aspiration for the “Truth”. Therefore, knowledge is not constant or immutable, but ephemeral, as dew on the rose. Knowledge is a mere contemporary of its zeitgeist. It paints the way, yes, but soon along that way, there will be newer signs appropriate to new contemporaries.

Sum

When there are no clouds
the sun shines-

Is that drinking tea from an empty cup?

All historians, indeed, all artists, theologians, and scientists, sate themselves on the contents of an empty vessel. I agree with R. G. Collingwood that only philosophy, of all man’s endeavors, categories of being, Stages on Life’s Way**, provides the framework wherein its practitioners can come to see that true understanding springs from the consciousness that returns on itself. Release the dichotomies! One simply cannot be brought out of darkness into light because darkness and light are in an interesting way the same thing.

So! Jews were never brought out of Egyptian slavery into the promised land. This historical/mythological paradigm of Christian salvation, coming out of the evils of the flesh into the salvation of the spirit, is one dichotomy. Christians are never “saved” from their sins by virtue of one defining moment in history. Similarly workers never free themselves, by whatever device, be it collective bargaining or revolution, from bondage to the controllers of the machine apparatus of production. And don’t fail to note the “self similarity” of the two historical trends of Christianity and Marxism touched on here. (One is a fractal of the other.) Freedom, individuality, independence are a simple turn of the mind away for one and all. A gymnastic juggernaut is not required. Living through a hellish history based on false myths of original sin is not requisite. See that art, religion, science, history are mere preparations of the mind for philosophy. Philosophy is the culmination of the journey past or through these signposts. Their modes of consciousness are directed out from itself. Philosophy is man’s consciousness turned back on its origin. That turn of the mind is a requisite of true understanding.

Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis lays out this idea that the first signpost, Art, is expressive of the aspiration for beauty and is a search for, a longing for, the “other”, that which is lacking. But is it really? In what respect would we lose our identity in blissful union? Isn’t annihilation already and always there in that empty cup? Religion posits absolute reality in an absolute other. History posits its goal in a distant future to be achieved through evolution. The faith of science is that measurement of infinity is achievable and mistakenly conflates knowledge with understanding. All are instances of the attempt of the soul to go beyond itself, of the urge to see reality as greater than it is.

There are, of course, many other considerations some of which I have addressed previously in this space. Beauty, truth, liberty, love, and similar attributes of consciousness are, besides what I say here, I believe, facets of a divine being and are in a sense also spirits in themselves in that “their” being is added to, enhanced somehow by participation in them of sentient life. The principles grow by being called on and their luminescence increases through this use. It also bears repeating that existential mass embodies these principles as potentialities that emerge, so to speak, in the presence of sentient life. Our consciousness directed in these categories is fertile soil for the growth of these spirits. Thus it is that God has commerce with creation. Thus it is that God has self experience. For what other purpose could there be for making this being? I am here at the cusp of projecting, I see, my human nature on the cosmos. This is a conundrum that recurs throughout history. My answer is that I am the cosmos in a sense, so this projection is of the cosmos onto itself. Keeping all the caveats mentioned here and elsewhere in mind, that is how I am able to be confident in my appraisal.

*The Discoverers
**Soren Kierkegaard