For Vivienne Louise Hinds

 On the occasion of a family outing a few days ago we were driving back to my place when the conversation turned religious. This is a rare thing. Three year old Vivienne - Vivi - sitting behind me asks "What is God?" Her mother, who is driving, makes an answer which doesn't satisfy Vivi who repeats the question. At my son's suggestion, I chime in but my words likewise do not suffice. I, of course, am very vague, I guess, to a three year old. Daughter-in-law gives the standard orthodox version. My answer is congruent - well somewhat. I didn't want to say, like her mother, that God was our heavenly father. So I said, basically, the whole of creation was the deity and that "he" was impossible to know.

But my purpose here is not to give details of the conversation. After thinking about it and making a note last night I just want to do a small spin off of my previous post about Sean Carroll. The operative word here is small. This is just a thought fleeting.

January 25, 2023 note:

There is no such thing as eternity except in the context of time. Likewise: No such thing as good except in the context of evil. Or - vice versa...(for all opposites).

Another view/way: God is context in which man makes sense as man is context wherein God makes sense. Or: "God" confers on man universality. "Man" confers on God individuality.

Likewise:

Time and eternity are each axiomatic of the other, etc. - as is true for Beauty, Truth, Love, Liberty, etc. To accept one the other must also be accepted. You must believe one to deny one. (Axiom)

Hopefully Vivi will find this along her way.

From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll

 The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. St. Augustine, Confessions

You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the  advantage. John von Newuann, to Claude Shannon

Sweet is by convention, bitter by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void. Democritus

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. Stephen Toulmin

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Thoughts on reading Sean Carroll, particularly his "From Eternity to Here." (2016)

December, 2022

In the interest of full disclosure I'll put out front that I am decidedly not of the same mind as scientists when it comes to empiricism. I have my own ideas about the proper place of science and its methods and they do not comport with that which is commonly accepted in today's world. I am skeptical about any claim of any kind as to the nature of the Real. To my way of thinking the predominate feature of the phenomenal Universe is silence. (According to the ancient Rabbis of Israel the likely reason for this is that God, having created man, found it necessary to "withdraw", in order to make room for his creation.) That needs to be respected and it might be true that it follows that the reason for that silence, if opened, might reveal an alternative to empirical approaches, to so called scientific proofs, that one might find overwhelmingly obvious. In short our methods, while disclaiming anthropocentrism, are yet just that...in so many words. Scientists, and their progenitors, are, some more obviously than others, difficult if not impossible to pry apart from their theories. That is what a real search for Truth, for Beauty even, entails at its very heart. This requires surrender not clinging to dogma, orthodoxy.

Obviously I will not be able to do justice to Carroll's work. Lack the capacity. Furthermore, and quite bluntly, science, I'm led to conclude - not from reading Carroll's book, or any scientific work, but through philosophical studies - is nothing but religion dressed up in esoteric formulas, theories, equations. So, if you are bound to faith in science, you won't like what follows. My interest is in unbinding and is characterized by an individual cupping his hands to receive that which is given, not in grasping at that which merely moves beyond. There are many ways of being in the world, beginning with the primitive and moving through phases - science is one - and culminating, perhaps, in the one true path. I don't know the way and claim its not truly knowable anyway. Understanding, however, is a bit different.

Science generalizes from small samples to the whole universe. For instance, Einstein's field equation(s) of General Relativity which purport to tell us that spacetime is a single "thing" and that it "controls" how bodies, energy, all the stuff in it, behaves, moves, and evolves while the same things determine the features of spacetime.

R_μν − ½Rg_μν = 8πGT_μν

For what its worth this is exactly how Carroll renders Einstein's field equation of general relativity. Searches for this on-line find the same except the value following the equal sign is shown divided by 4 to the 4th power. I don't know why and besides its beyond the scope of this report to get into the depths of this. Honestly, I don't have the expertise necessary to give a complete exegesis of the equation but will note its not really "one" equation it is a series of 16, of which this particular rendition is, I suppose, just enough to get started, a summary, if you like. These are differential equations measurimg rates of change and in one case, I understand, the rate of change of the rate of change.

Having said that I would make this further contribution for a little clarity:

"Einstein assumed that the universe was static and unchanging. He thought this was true because that was what astronomers at the time thought they saw when they looked out into their telescopes. A static universe would be unstable if gravity was only attractive. Every piece of matter would attract to every other and any slight imbalance in distribution would force the whole thing to eventually contract down into itself. Einstein added the cosmological constant to his equations (technically, he subtracted it from the scalar curvature) to hold back gravity so that his equations would have a solution that agreed with the static model."

What this means is not having obtained the results he wanted Albert Einstein rewrote the formula such that it's solution was more to his liking, prejudice. There was an orthodoxy, a scientific dogma he sought to accommodate. Science's immediate predecessor, religion, would burn offenders of the church's dogma at the stake. Science has moved beyond such extreme measures. Now there are more subtle punishments, ruined careers, and such. Carroll cites some of these in passing. Also noted are those scientists in the Elmer Gantry mold who delight in making headline getting claims about their discoveries, theories. Niehls Bohr comes to mind.  These don't hesitate a nano second to speculate but, to illustrate their dogma, a carry over from religion, they never consider that which they axiomatically reject, namely an agency, a creator, sustainer, destroyer; a qualitative immanence.

That said I'd note this formula occupies the middle ground between Newtonian physics and Quantum leaving aside the very long time we wasted, so to speak, in geocentrism  before it gave way to the heliocentric model. This kind of science is very speculative - I wish I had counted how many times Carroll fell back to "we don't know" statements or the like. Scientific theory is very much an unfinished work when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I'm concerned here, of course, with cosmology.

These various views are basically all mechanistic and none of them venture to risk saying what matter is, just how it behaves, that it works something like a machine; quantum theory being somewhat willing to leave that behind, focuses on waves or fields, but it still is called quantum "mechanics". But a wave or field is an ephemeral thing compared to solid bodies moving around in orbits. One can identify where such waves, fields might be found but only with limited precision. The thing about planets, and such, is that their place, path, can be identified with great precision, you know, good enough that we can fly a spaceship to the moon and land and return to earth.

Quantum mechanics is a step towards replacing Newtonian, classical physics which treats objects, masses, as definite in space time while quantum mechanics recognizes them as not so certain in their existence as to where they can be definitely said to be, especially at the micro level where they are wave functions rather than objects in the classical sense. So, yes, one can say with certain probability that a gross object can be found at so-and-so place but not so much with something like an electron which location is much less probable. We speak of electron clouds surrounding nuclei as a way of expressing this. Electrons can be said to be somewhere in that cloud. Think, how can one state precisely where a ripple on a pond is? It's there but its location is more ephemeral than say a tree along the street; though strictly they are both "waves" on the surface of reality. But this oscillation through spacetime for things on the atomic scale means location is not definite but still can be said to be with a certain probability here or there.

As we journey through the successive phases of our knowledge of science we realize these equations can't measure the Universe itself and are used instead to measure a small sample. Knowing how spacetime behaves in this sample along with that which is embedded therein, the bodies, their mass, energy, radiation, etc., we apply that to the Universe itself in the pattern "knowing this I know that."

Supposedly there are about a trillion stars in the Universe. (We count the number in a somewhat smaller area and apply that data to the whole, for instance.) The Universe is thought to be expanding at an increasing rate of speed. The "red shift" of very distant objects (supernova Ia stars) - these are exploding stars and are very bright so can be more readily observed at cosmological distances - is increasingly larger for these novae. That's how we know of the expansion. Note there's not enough explosive power from the "big bang" to account for this apparent acceleration. Gravity should slow the expansion down; so a mysterious force, "dark energy" is posited to account for the expansion of the Universe where one would think it would be impeded by gravitational attraction of all the mass. Dark energy, though thought to be rather weak - and which we haven't isolated, proved -  provides just enough extra push to the explosive force from the big bang to account for the observed acceleration.

Dark energy. So, a mysterious force or agency, is assumed to account for an unknown, perhaps unknowable circumstance. True, its not "outside" the known universe as they tend to think a "divine creative force" would be, or is thought to be by their assumed religious antagonists. One wonders if they appreciate this irony.  Dark energy is treated as a little understood constant that is used to account for an invisible magical force. They can make the numbers work so its plugged into their assumptions, theories. In religion, god is used as a constant in a similar sense, to account for the unknown, perhaps unknowable.

The big bang model assumes the universe began in an exquisitely ordered condition of the lowest entropy, hot and dense. Carroll calls this a singularity, infinitely dense, zero size - size would have no meaning, but he says zero timespace came into existence at that event. Of course time has a direction much different than spatial directions. Carroll points out that any direction in space is about the same. The direction of time is always away from the past for which there are many illustrations. He writes that while the earth orients us in space, the big bang orients us in time. (Pg. 32) You'll never walk down a beach and have a sand castle materialize out of the chaotic surroundings; you'll never separate an omelet back into an egg, or coffee with cream back into its individual constituents. This is what it means when entropy is said to increase, when the arrow ot time is always toward the future - at least that is the simplistic view. Entropy is a measure of the disordliness of things in a closed system and can be said to explain why we remember the past and not the future. And, of course, its based on the second law of thermodynamics. Carroll says this is science's most important law. It states that the entropy of an isolated system either remains constant or increases with time.

Ludwig Boltzmann's formula for entropy is S = K log W and he defined it as "a measure of the number of particular microscopic arrangements of atoms that appear indistinguishable from a macroscopic perspective."  Further, "in an isolated system entropy tends to increase, because there are more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy."

Before the big bang there is no frame of reference. In fact it makes no sense to say "before". "At" the (infinitely?) exquisitely low entropy of the primordial egg, singularity, or whatnot, to spacetime emergence with the big bang - only then does "before" or "after" or "at" have a context in which to make sense. Only then is there a "then". Otherwise its from the standpoint of nowhen/nowhere. Its claimed the primordial egg whence the big bang is the lowest possible entropy, the highest possible order.

So, as John Archibald Wheeler noted, "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." Clever physicist, John Wheeler.

So the Universe goes from beginnings of very high order, like an egg, and proceeds to increasing disorder; and that disorder as it progresses is said to gain momentum. Interesting. Sort of like the birth of anything at all, isn't it? First the egg, then the incubation, then the birth, then the dissolution. "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dieing." the poet says. (Dylan) So, they invoke a chicken to illustrate the process but Carroll and cohorts are careful to be somewhat dismissive of any idea or principle construed as anthropic which I question because, after all, people - and chickens (fowlthropic?) - are made of atoms and such just like the rest of the observable universe.

Entropy increases eternally and it all ends with nothing but dead stars, galaxies, in a uniform distribution of high entropy, heat death for all that is. This seems to ignore the observation that everything that is is cyclical, a single exception being made for the whole thing taken as one. The final end is meaningless, purposeless, cold, lonely, Carroll writes. We might as well never have been.

Parity. Is the low entropy of the boundary condition of the big bang in parity with the high entropy of a dead universe? Were there a "big crunch" instead would that also be parity? This question comes to mind, but the answer is unknown.

Layers of complexity keep getting piled on while assuming averages of these states are adequate to their extrapolation to the whole. So they add complexities then simplify them to make them easy to work with, plug into their equations. After awhile the bewilderment grows into necessitating a kind of omniscience on the part of reaching an understanding. They claim this power at the same time admitting unknowns; they claim god like status where the deity is a statistician finagling the way through a mechanistic milieu. Mass and energy and all the various components are treated as things, manipulated like a game of marbles. Its called "physics" for a reason

One other thing to note early on would be science's attitude towards consciousness. Carroll thinks it is emergent. Carroll is especially hostile to the idea of a God outside the Universe and purports to be an atheist. This writer agrees with Carroll that its a primitive and unhelpful idea that "he" is outside; this notion dates back to Aristotle and before. This writer subscribes to the notion that Christianity errs in following the Aristotelian ideas surrounding the corruption of the world below compared to the perfection of the incorruptible regions above - heaven. I'd rather think of the divine creative force as immanent in nature. Carroll seems to give some credence to this notion.

Carroll brings Buddhist cosmology, if their is such a thing, to the table. He doesn't attribute this to Buddhism but it sounds like what I understand the Buddha said - I don't know which Buddha, however. Any how he (Buddha) made the claim that our experience of the world is separated into exquisitely brief slices of time; the world arises anew in each and they are not really connected in the way one would commonly think; this Buddha is said to have made the claim that nothing endures. Carroll puts that:

"So the world exists, and what is more, the world happens, again and again. In that sense, the world is like the different frames of a film reel - a film whose camera view includes the entire universe. (There are also, as far as we can tell, an infinite number of frames, infinitesimally separated."

Carroll continues, substituting a view not from nowhere but from nowhen:  "...when looking down from nowhen ...we don't see anything changing with time, because we are outside of time ourselves. Instead, we see all history at once - past, present, and future. It's like thinking of space and time as a book, which we could in principle open to any passage, [and view any page at random] rather than as a movie, where we are forced to watch events in sequence..."

What science aims at is a theory of everything. Thing. Is key here; materialistic. Now science does not purport to tell what matter is, just how it behaves. Carroll seems, in his epilogue, to make a concession, however small, to the notion that something is missing in the methods of science when he mentions natural theology. Further, he has left Caltech and now is on the faculty of John's Hopkins university in Maryland as a professor of  "Natural Philosophy, hearkening back to the days before science and philosophy split into distinct disciplines... I've always been interdisciplinary, between physics and philosophy and other things, and also always had an interest in reaching out to wider audiences. But there was inevitably tension with what I was supposed to be doing as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. My predilections don’t fit comfortably with the academic insistence on putting everyone into a silo and encouraging them to stay there." From his blog post, here. (His web site is here.) So, he left Caltech because, partially because, I guess, he wanted freedom to explore more widely the mindscape beyond physics and cosmology. I think he is a good man and appreciate this insight into his thinking. But I also appreciate that its tantalizing, and you get drawn in, attracted to the notion, as a scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, you might be the special one that actually puts forth a theory of everything that conflates Newtonian (classical) physics, special and general relativity of Einstein, and quantum physics and string theory and explain the arrow of time as it relates to the big bang, the death of Universe, in short, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. One who pays scant attention to all this might be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of such a discovery. Reading "From Eternity to Here" leaves one with the opposite notion - we've hardly begun this exciting discovery of a theory that explains all that is. We are also led to understand that the community of scientists have unshakeable faith in their enterprise and will some day achieve their aims.

But. What if the universe, what if being, existence, reality does not care or even take note of your prognostications? What does that leave you with? It leaves you with nothing. Which might be a something nothing but also might teach one that the discovery itself is the meaning and purpose that seems to elude us.

I certainly don't know and live with the realization that I actually can't know. One question that seems to point to a contradiction in the science is how can it be said that the earliest universe was characterized by extremely low entropy. (S _{inflation ≈ 10¹²} ) is the formula Carroll gives for the entropy at the inception of the big bang, the birth of the universe. But if the big bang did not happen at a place nor a time - these have no meaning, space and time being products of the big bang - how can it be said what entropy was when there was no spacetime? I don't think there can be entropy without spacetime. Take any condition you like, it depends on there being a place and a time, a framework.

Why multiverse and not universe? Carroll writes a lot about these; and others, too. Personal, speculative. "Creator" was not sure of outcome, so plant many seeds, allow several potentialities to eventuate in order to pick the best of the several. Or, is it like Darwin's natural selection at work? Also, Carroll is careful to say many scientists don't like this theory of a multiverse - he calls it, rather, a prediction, because its not falsifiable - it makes no predictions than can be proven/disproven. He also says the formulae can be tested and that science is a messy business.

The conundrums never cease. Carroll writes about opposing theories, for instance, quantum gravity could allow that "time never begins but stretches for all eternity".  This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which has time dependent on entropy increasing. Personally, again. I'd speculate, posit, that time is not quantitative but qualitative so its meaningless to say it begins, ends, is eternal. Perhaps Time can be better understood as being like, for instance, beauty, or truth, or liberty and other emergent phenomena. Maybe, going back to Democritus, time is by convention. At any rate we're not there yet though cosmologists seem to think a full theory of quantum gravity would be the Rosetta stone to this end. Final thought. If time is eternal why should we be surprised that a final theory of everything, a grand unifying theory, is attainable at all? Meaning, the discovery, the search is itself eternal.

In Carroll's epilogue to the book he gets philosophical. This makes a beautiful contrast to all that went before. Nature is universal; what happens here happens everywhere. "The entire universe is in a glass of wine." He quotes Richard Feynman. And, finally "True understanding leads you to places you didn't know you wanted to go." That is the heritage of the great men of science, Tycho Brae, Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, and my favorite, Eratosthenes of Cyrene who having taken note of the sun's light shining straight down a well on the summer solstice coupled with the angle of the sun's shadow in nearby Alexandria used that difference in angle to derive the Earth's circumference. I'm awestruck by that and Carroll's work, too. Reverence is in order.

G.V. Desani (and here) was my mentor. I'd like to bring his studies to bear here as a contrast in my thoughts on Sean Carroll's work, indeed, on Science itself, as, one may term it, a mode of being.  In particular I have in mind his experience with so called "Nadi" writers, ancient "seers" - that would be an Indian, more particularly, a Hindu phenomenon. Desani wrote about this in an essay, here; there are other writings of his that impinge on the Nadi Texts, but I'll concentrate on the one cited. First citation in that piece, on page 17* he defines science:

"One uses the word "science" mostly for that body of
knowledge which is gathered empirically from nature and by
observing man: and for that body of knowledge which is
found to be of service to man. According to this definition,the knowledge acquired through revelation (religious knowledge, for example) or intuitively divined knowledge (anything at all, including the mystical) would not be termed "science". There is an obvious conflict between the view of "reality" afforded by each of these sources of knowledge.

"If the above definition of "science" is accepted, then, for
all practical purposes, the Law of Causality (the relation of cause --"antecedent" -- and effect -- "consequent") must be accepted as scientifically valid. A thing, an event, is caused. A tree is from a seed: water boils from heat. For all practical purposes, all perceived consequences or effects are from antecedents or causes. That is -- in the sense in which we use the word science -- an accepted law of science."

In this article Desani confronts events he has experienced that contradict the Law of Causality. According to Desani the writers of the Nadi texts are humans who have overheard, had dictated to them, non-human, great beings; I suppose it would be correct to call them divine entities. They have perfect knowledge of all past and future and it has been demonstrated to Desani's satisfaction as outlined in his linked piece by that name. I'm not inclined to lay out his thoughts on the subject at this juncture but its clear that they couldn't run more counter to science and its methods, theories, equations. So, there is another world view antithetical to anything most of us have ever been exposed to. It deserves consideration and, in my opinion, is no more fantastic, unlikely, than the scientific claim that experience depends on affirmation by a conscious being for its being, or that observing photons actually determines how they behave, and mabye cats, too.

So, I'll leave it at that with this final thought. The immanence of a divine creative spirit, force, is as a quality, faculty, attribute, rather than a "person". Is consciousness a similar phenomenon, and if so can it be said that it is an emergent phenomenon, or is it immanent, too? Is it a "built in" quality that necessarily emerges? Is it always true that said emergence occurs along with the various concomitants of consciousness? Does Truth (a concomitant of consciousness) play a role in the Real? Perhaps it's a mere random fluctation. How would one know? Wrong question! It is what it is. You wouldn't know, you couldn't. Forbidden knowledge. The Real is no more accessible than the speed of light. You - one - can imagine -dream? - but it is ever just beyond one's grasp. So. Only mystery remains, only unsolved, unsolvable, puzzles. And you thought this would be easy. That is, just relax and it will come to you. Well! Not so fast, there. It's intended to be obscure, impossible, unsearchable. "G_d" withdrew to make room for man. Screaming conclusion: That withdrawal makes of man, sentient life anywhere/anywhen, co-creator. Put slightly differently, "G_d" descends into matter in order to (re-)emerge a fully self realized being. There's a bit of natural philosophy for you.

*The name of the .pdf is NADI_SHASTRI_3_GVD.PDF. A search of the site does not find it but its there, as of this writing, under the heading "Articles, Lectures, & Academic Papers" at: "The Nādi Shāstra," based on the first six columns of " 'Very High' and 'Very Low' ", The Illustrated Weekly of India and likely developed for inclusion in Desani's planned Rissala. This is a compilation of several of Desani's pieces about this subject.

What do we know and ..... when do we Understand

 With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot (exerpt)

This is akin to the idea that one can, as has been noted by a forbearer, "gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind."

I've been thinking about knowledge, understanding, and how man uses these to make his way through life. One can know something without understanding it yet many conflate knowledge and understanding. Science takes measure of the material world and then concludes the measurement is understanding, for instance. Knowledge and understanding are subtly different. As for particular realities understanding and knowledge do conflate rather nicely. But there are boundaries to this conflation. If you want to know all the information in the universe you find that you can know an awful lot but the nearer you get to your grand unifying theory the greater the task of reaching that conclusion. It is at this event horizon, the boundary of particular knowledge, that mere "understanding" cannot reach beyond. Without the suspension of what has become an encumbrance, knowledge of phenomena, the transition of the particular into the universal is arrested and though the thought processes that went into the edifice of knowledge were exquisitely constructed that final leap to full comprehension escapes the precision of the exercise.

There are several other ideas that impinge on this consideration. Consciousness itself and its relationship to mind and in turn to understanding and knowledge. No doubt these all work in a simbiotic stream of dialectic. Knowledge must be first because it is the mouth of the dialectic, so to speak, that consumes the output of the senses which in turn consume the input of their collision with the phenomenal reality in which people find themselves. In this processing of data, of taking measure, the mind partners with knowledge and is the faculty that connects this with that to conclude the other. I see such and such, then so and so, and conclude something other. If A happens, then B, I have learned that if A then B. Understanding is the faculty of mind that makes the leap beyond a mere set of particular knowledge to arrive at something new in a synthesis of the precursors.

Mind is the field on which as a result of perception knowledge comes and goes and it is mind that gives rise to understanding of the relationships among things, the implications. That is understanding with a small "u" because it is restricted to phenomena.

Consciousness is a much more subtle constituent. It cannot be defined, and indeed, science largely ignores its presence and treats it as a mere given. It is easy to use a throw away idea that it is merely analogous to light. It does illuminate the activities of the mind, perception, knowledge, understanding. But this begs so many questions. Is it a function of life? Is my consciousness the same as yours? That is to say, we might all sit and watch a sunset. The light of the sun is something that we all participate in to share the experience. Is consciousness also something we all participate in and is it as omnipresent as light itself in the universe? Would animals, plants, so called inert matter, not to speak of planetary systems, suns, and galaxies participate in some fashion in the same consciousness which a human being makes use of to contemplate the stars?

There is a word, numinous, Latin for surpassing comprehension, or understanding. It points to the realm of the mysterious, for instance in art, there always remains an element that escapes the precision to define what it is exactly that is the beauty of a particular work. That final breach of knowledge in the universal set of all things leaves one in bewilderment, in awe; understanding with a small "u" must be abandoned, given up on, at which juncture a new, in fact an ever new, field comes into view, not in the phenomenal sense, but in a spiritual sense. Then Understanding with a capital "U" is brought forth to invade the profane with a sacred glimpse of the divine.

Plato thought that beauty, for instance, was a window through which one could have a glimpse of the transcendent. His thought that one could see right through beauty to the Real itself thoroughly encapsulates his thought. Thus, Beauty acts as an attractant - the sweetness of a rose, its color, texture, even its evanescence - are inviting portals indeed to the unlimited vastness that lies "just beyond". The phenomenon is not so much real in itself as giving its existence as a means of transport to that being from which it emerged.

Sceadugengan

 I'm going this way

this way, this way
without a trace
no track more
than a hawk leaves.

The fall, fall, fall
who remembers, take note?
Not you, not them or those or these
Barely me, barely me!
Just a little....I guess.

It matteers
not, not, not
never mind, even.
Who cares?
To notice, benefit from,
this passing air, ephemeral contrail.

Vapor, vaporization,
a sparrow falls in the forest
old, decrepit, moldy mottled feathers
lieing in the grass
decaying death.

Must a sun heed its
its planets becoming cinders?
A sun expends its ending life
devouring in seas
of burning burning
seas of gold,
seas of gold,
burning seas of golden seas.
planets, life, cares,
long forgotten traces of
memories, memories,
forgotten memories.

Oh! Lost to eternity!
Shape of Reality
sweet words, kisses.

Did I perhaps pass this way?
Its not for me to say.
Do you recall
what I whispered?
Secretely, just for you,
you alone, alone, alone.

Words, Oh Yes!
Those words. You know the ones.
Told eternally,
not remembered
but discovered anew
anew, anew, anew, anon
just for you
dearest one.

Where was I bound,
coming from?
They are the same
aren't they, aren't they?
They are.
Destination is its own
self made origin,
beginning, beginning, fulfilled
ending, dieing, despair.

Despair, despair, despair
dark dank death
birth astride graves
ending as it begins
before it begins
its over, over, gone.

But what do I know?
This fathomless depth?
Yeah! Sure! Fool yourself,
yes you. Yourself, yourself.
Infinite, finely machined
regress of self
self, self, abyss, abyss, ex nihilio.

I don't know.
Never heard of it even
I'm lost in these words
can't climb out of their
meaning, meaning, unreal purpose.

Purpose? Don't kid me!
I'm co-creator here
dread, dread, sorrow!
What purpose is mine alone to give
when I find it?
Find, discover, realize
suffering, suffering, alone in
golden seas of pain.

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."

[caption id="attachment_677" align="alignnone" width="228"] Creatrix Singularity - John Hinds[/caption]

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.

[caption id="attachment_676" align="alignnone" width="210"] William Blake - from "Europe, a Prophecy"[/caption]

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)."

Contrasting World Views

 

Desani: If there was only one religion you would only have a partial view [of being/reality]

Co-creator - Rabbinic Judaism

Means by which world has self experience, knows itself - Distillation of Hinduism by G.V. Desani

Sinner who must be saved - Christianity

There is truth in all of the above. The idea that we are partners with the divine as co-creators merges with the idea that we are the means by which the world has self experience; God descends into matter in order to re-emerge a self realized being. That is the story of Jesus. In a sense Jesus is everyman, then. But pride inhibits this unfolding and is the sin from which we must evolve in order to be who we really are. Saved from our sin is to give up our will, humble ourselves before the divine creative spirit. It is expressed as "Take up your cross and follow me." Give up your will to mine, is what that means. Then our life is no longer ours but "his", our father's. God, the creator then lives through us. If the will, our little will, is triumphant, then the self, our little self, won't humble itself and we will continue as slaves to our passions, or worse, if one believes in demon possession. The path most, in the Western world, are on leads to self-loathing as we struggle in vain to shed this guilt which has been inculcated into us for two thousand years. Instead of understanding it for what it is, a key to redemption, we sublimate it only to have it continuously crop up in every aspect of our lives.

Be like the bamboo leaf on which snow accumulates until the leaf gives way and the snow slips off. It follows its own nature without effort, without willing. There is no will involved whatsoever. The leaf surrenders to the weight of the snow flakes flawlessly; the Beauty of this is ineffable.

Surrender to God is in the Hindu's Gita. So is love of God (Bhakta) and ritualized worship. Self denial, asceticism, is there too. Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity seem to have appealed in ancient times to a common undercurrent. What they commonly teach distills down to what, in Yoga, is called "inhibition of the citta vritis". Suppression of the modifications of the mind. That would, of course be Patanjali's first sutra on the nature and meaning of Yoga in his Yoga Sutras. Inhibition of modifications of the mind, or consciousness, could be viewed as surrender to God and is intended to accelerate the realization that we finite beings point to the infinite, are made in the image of all that is; we are sparks of the divine, it is taught. As David Goldman puts it in his Beethoven essay, the infinite is ever present and appearances always point to it as that is where the infinite, so to speak, hides. So, God is omnireal, omnipresent and there is no finite absent the infinite. This is similar to there being no light absent darkness, no good absent evil, no positive absent the negative. There are contrasting pairs, aspects, of reality everywhere.

Failing to realize these points is a spin off of our diabolical endeavor to build a machine to replace God; call it the "web", the "interNET". It is, at least, intended to be all providing (Amazon), Omniscient (Wikipedia, e.g.), and Omnipresent (Google, et al), Omnipotent (the State). It is infinitely malleable; we make it whatever we want and call it good but I think it likely is the opposite. We've made a Faustian bargain? And this machine god is ruthless, takes a terrible toll among the impressionable young. Should we encourage the measurement of the value of one's life on facebook likes, on re-tweets, up and down votes?

Sixty years ago I lived, as a young soldier, in Gablingen Kaserne. It was an old barracks used formerly, during WWII, by the German Wehrmacht. I was a soldier, an Infantryman. Looking back on that, taking its measure from long perspective, I now realize that likely those couple of years were the best of my life. That young soldier would think me crazy for saying this now. He was so full of himself, of longing, of ambition, restlessness, eagerness. He never, or hardly ever, saw himself for what he was. Yes, he'd been brought up right, had good parenting, learned the religious things they taught then, which he mostly rejected being so self absorbed. He didn't know it but he was like a bird fluttering over the abyss.  Now I'm still that bird but the abyss has grown to infinite proportions. If someone had told him the way to understand, simply put, what I have written here and elsewhere is to realize that man confers on God individuality and in return God confers on man universality That is a simple truth and is, I believe, the true story of Jesus. Put a bit differently, the story of Jesus is intended to teach that man, at least potentially, displays the attributes of God. As co-creator he even has the power to replace God with a machine and worship that. Realizing this is near impossible, because, of course, we are mired in our "sin" which, that young man would never understand, means simply that we cling to our will at all cost. Given this being we manage continuously to corrupt it in ever new and shiny ways. The web tangles us the more in that net.

History is pressing us forward. We are on a journey through unfolding cultural epochs. The transition from one to the next is anything but seamless. The features fractalize, get corrupted, intentions take on a life of their own in spite of whether they were good or bad. They morph, combine, bubble up out of the mire and forever sprout evolving manifestations of themselves. First we lived as artists, artisans, primitavely assemblying our world mainly into questions about who we were, what this was that we found ourselves in. Art asks questions but expects no answers but soon our questions led to primitive answers about purpose and meaning and we merged into the succeding epoch, religion which had the answers putting them above man in a separate realm called heaven with God as custodian. Reality was perfect above, beyond man, and corrupt below. It was an Aristotleian view of the world. That morphed into science - we were only three steps removed from our beginning where the impossible to access answers as to meaning and purpose continues to be beyond us in the sense it perpetually awaits explication in a "grand unifying theory". One theory creates ever successive opportunities for new and better explanations of how things fit together in an assumed mechanistic universe. Science enhances our material nature and we become ever more enslaved by it thereby but history as cultural epoch comes to us now and further emphasizes the material aspect of being. We theorize that history shows the way logically by steps through a heuristic and dialectic process, a recursive and infinite regress for the betterment of mankind's lot. As in Religion and Science, in History we similarly a final synthesis to be reached on a perpetually vanishing horizon that we somehow can neveer quite reach. This is where we are now. In these epochs consciousness is directed out from us into the world. The West having learned through Christianity to "spread the good word" continues that missionary zeal with endless meddling in other people's affairs "for their own good" - in short, the historical effort to colonize continues with zeal the evangelists of old would admire. Some even say we are now colonizing ourself. Now, if only we could connect everyone somehow with a live system that is always on we would have achieved history's wildest dream as everyone merges into The Hive with the necessary loss, of course, of any individuality. In The Hive Sobran says that like an Hive bound insect one loses the need for a soul of one's own. That's the cost of being in the collective. In the ancient Vedas it is written that "Knowing your own self (soul) you know the soul of the Universe." Its of paramount importance to guard your individuality though we are almost to the point of totaly losing ours. Only a few luddites, old people, stand in the way and of course we know how to deal with those. War, famine, divisiveness, not to speak of custom made pandemics and fear, are useful tools in this. There are too many people anyhow.

To recap, the crowning achievement of these cultural epochs was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolutin is evolving into total interconnectivity, interdependence of all mankind when this material machine completely replaces God. Our primitive man would rebel against this intuitively. But Religion, Science, and History could care less. Reason  finally has its triumph as it gloats over its great achievement of destroying man. Thing about a dystopia is everyone is on the same page, everything finally makes sense and is in logical order whatevere it costs. But, there will be another epoch sprouting out of this, to be sure.

Eratosthenes (276-194BC) in Syene Egypt, now Aswan, discovered the circumference of Earth. It was measured in Stadia, based on the size of the then current Greek unit of length. From that was calculated the diameter of the Earth, about 8,000 miles. Now, in astronomical terms that is indeed a tiny thing. We live on a planet that is likely almost impossible to detect outside the solar system. The earth/sun orbits its center of mass which is deep inside the sun. We are barely here, unknown, alone in the abyss of space. What are we doing to earn our keep? Oh, we are kept, make no doubt about it. By what/whom is unknowable to us but we are, it seems, somewhat sentient life forms. If there is a purpose and meaning we might come to have at least a rudimentary understanding of it. The first step should be to humbly accept what we truly are and that is decidedly not the author of our own inheritance of this tiny dirt ball we call planet Earth. Think about this. Until we came along as sentient life forms there was no beauty, truth, love, understanding, wisdom, or any concomitant of consciousness whatsoever. Our emergence as living beings capable of self understanding was a precursor event for the emergence of these values or faculties. What is unfolding here? What further emergence will these precipitate? Could it be the divine itself? Or, have we perhaps reached our credit limit?

Consiousness is heretofore directed outwards. What would be the consequence of somehow managing to have it - realize it -as returning on itself?

I'm grateful for Paul Kingsnorth whose writings I've lately been studying for inspiring me to write this entry.

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."

Notes extracted from my "A Plus Notebook" which also contains notes on Don Juanism from Poteat's class

 Desani, March 14, 1973

Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

Margin note here that I got Texas tags today; quit moving houses. March 21, 1973. This means I retagged the 72 Chevy yellow van that I bought in Virginia and that I no longer worked with Jerry Sires. This leaves some confusion in my mind because I thought we finished moving houses prior to my purchase in VA. of the van. Maybe it means I quit "leveling" houses with Jerry.

Now the notes.

Heavy Karma is in the mind. There is a diagram here, a circle with a small area at the top delineated as "fixed destiny" while the larger area is labeled "unseen karma". This unseen karma it is noted, consists of inumerable past deeds, words, lives.

The desiring of an object is animalistic.

Clinging to an object is equivalent to fear of losing same.

Fear is equivalent to guilt. Or rather, their natures are intimately entwined. (This is not attributable to Desani. It is mine.)

If one tends to animalism one eventually falls into violent experiences, employment, etc. For instance, the proliferation of armaments.

A sanskara is an unaccountable karmasaya.

Important: To have a spiritual mentor is a fixed destiny.

Attachment (is related to) revulsion.

A selfless action is a virtuous action.
Duty, not? intention, with love, with compassion.

Desani spent five years learning to walk without intention. It is exceedingly difficult, he said.

Restraints must be imposed on things that are easily overindulged in, for instance, sex.

My aside: Desani is a composer, a maestro, a conductor. He draws ideas, words, etc., into a mosaic.

When sattva rises to its highest level illumination is produced (in a situation).

There is a need to rise above the sweet and the bitter experience; there is a reward.

Told story about being in Burma, about yogis, hills, snakes, very large mosquitoes, AHIMSA (non violence). Desani reformed - first "clean" room - for a smooth pursuit of practice.

"The Science of Yoga"
I.K. Taimini

Sutra is an aphorism. (Patanjali's Yoga Sutras are aphorisms.)

First sutra: Yoga is control of the vriti, modifications, of citta, consciousness.

Patanjali was the compiler of yoga, an ancient tradition. (Later note: He was a retainer of a King I expect somewhat like the European Kings retained astronomers, mathematicians, etc.)

The Gita notes there are many yogas. The sage Patanjali's yoga is a precursor of these:

Raja yoga
Dhyana/Zen yoga
Karma yoga - yoga of action (without desire)
Bhakti yoga - yoga of devotion - like a practiciing Christian's love for his God. This would be Krsna.
Hatha yoga - physical yoga
Kundalina yoga

Samkhya is the theoretical basis of yoga.

The yogi seeks quiesence in order to attain samadhi or satori.

The philosophy derived from the yoga sutras is outlined thus:

Here a chart is drawn showing two realities. On the left is Purusha or spirit and on the right is Prakriti or existential mass, the substance of the universe, nature. Prakriti consists, with reservations, of three elements known as the gunas. They are Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas. (see below)

A line extends downward through Mahat, cosmic intelligence and then to Ahamkara, the principle of individuality, of "I am".

A margin note here explains that the first product of the union of Purusha and Prakriti is Mahat.

Below Ahamkara comes Manas, the cosmic mind. Below Manas the chart branches into, on the left, Indriyas, the power of the senses, hearing, smelling, seeing, etc., and on the right the Tanmatras or subtle elements of sound, odor, visibility, etc.

Another margin note explains that it is from the Mahat that Patanjali intellectualized his compilaton. It is also the Mahat that westerners allude to when they speak of universal mind.

That is the chart.

Consciousness is made of, consists of (the) three gunas. A rose is made of the gunas. The "image" of a rose in one's mind is made of the gunas. The difference is, with some reservations, a matter of quantity.

Sattva is the most subtle substance in nature. It is mental substance. On the moral level it is goodness. On the aesthetic level it is the most beautiful.

Rajas is the animating element.

Tamas is the passive element, the tendency to procrastinate is tied in with Tamas. It is also the steadying element. It pulls toward sleep.

Yoga has to do with the second guna, with stopping the animating element so that Sattva can shine forth. This is the quieting of consciousness.

Samadhi grants mokti, freedom. There are different levels of Samadhi. (page 41 of book)

Incomplete note on Samprajnatta (sp.) Samadhi.

There are five kinds of citta vritis.
1. A person feels full of lethargy, sleepy. Sattva and rajas are conquered by tamas. (The god's never sleep and Desani, as monk, went ten or so days with no sleep. In this condition sattva reigns.)
2. Full of anger, tamas dominates.
3. Full of restlessness, rajas dominates.
4. Full of good works, Sattva dominates.
5. The highest Samadhi is the one that grants knowledge.

We have Purusha, or spirit on the one hand and Prakriti, cosmic substance on the other.

Yoga means union or yoke. The first result of the union or yoking of spirit and cosmic substance is cosmic intelligence.

On foreknowledge, a side note on the Nadi shastras, he said that two centuries ago on palm leaf [was written references] to Desani by name. It gives date of birth, place, and so forth. More on this here.

Qualities of Purusha: It is the Lord. It is not material. It is conscious.

Qualities of Prakriti: Sattva, mental substance, Raja, activating element, Tamas, inertia.

A 2500 year old commentary says that space and time are schemes for the understanding.

In Mahat Sattva dominates. Mahat is the source of wisdom. Mahat is the first evolute. Literally mahat means the great.

When Purusha and Prakriti are joined and the first evolute arises it is Purusha who sees this. It is Purusha that sees all.

Ahamkara is the precondition for the mind's ability to discriminate. At Mahat there is no discrimination but just an ocean of light. (A thought that most people evolve to Ahamkara and stop, especially westerners.)

Yoga is the stilling of cita vritties, of modifications of consciousness.

(Yoga nirodha citta vritti.)

Consciousness is material so what we think effects others. Thought empinges on the object of thought: Highly advanced yogi might think of a person as dead that person will find his death. If I think good..... Desani has seen it.

Thought is substance. Think Sattva will increase, it will. Think Raja as increasing, it will. Think Tamas as increasing and it will. Example of a teacher at Cambridge hitting a student who questioned whether thought could be proved to be a substance in the stomach with a visualized (by thought) heavy object. Desmond hit his student, turned, whirled to face student. The student fell, was hospitalized, almost died. Desani said this was a petty trick. Also a man worked ten years to perfect a trick whereby he could not be moved by five men from a train he refused to pay for. He thought heavy object into existence at the base of his spine. That is, he cultivated Tamas at the base of his spine.

There are four states of consciousness. Awake, sleep, profound sleep, Samadhi.

One must practice and practice detachment.

The intellect is material. If it is mirror like, superior material, it is comprised mostly of Sattva.

Purusha is masculine, the divine father. Prakriti is feminine, the divine mother.

Gita and Rabbinic Philosophy, and Lieb, and others

 This is a workup which I might edit later.

Irwin Lieb, formerly Chairman of the University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Department, and my professor, stated that the only individual is the entire Universe itself. We are only nominally individuals, he said.

Vedas: Soul of man is same as soul of universe

(Svetasvatara) Upanishad: He is not a male, He is not a female,He is not a neuter. He neither is nor is not. When He is sought He will take the form in which He is sought, and again He will not come in such a form. ... It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord.

Buddhism: There is no soul; there is nothing permanent.

Christian Bible (Exodus): Tell them "I Am" sends you (to Moses)

Albert Einstein: Speed of light depends on the "observer".

(How to resolve these)

Rabbinic: Man is in partnership with "maker of heaven" in the continuing work of creation

Compare Rig Veda 10.129 with Parmenides (see David Goldman)

Compare this to Gita/Vedas: For the Greeks, time is the demarcation of events. But in Hebrew time, it is the moment itself that remains imperceptible. As Kohelet 3:15 states: “That which is, already has been; and that which is to be has already been; and only God can find the fleeting moment.” From David Goldman

Soloveitchik, "Lonely Man of Faith": at end, pgs. 59 on he succinctly characterizes the dilemma of modern man in terms that have a ring of truth. Could compare to Rougemont and Kierkegaard, e.g. Compare also with Bhagavad Gita's characterization of "man of faith", or, as Soloveitchik terms him, "Adam the second". "Faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality....Faith is experienced not as a product of some emergent evolutionary process..."

So I guess this might mean, contrary to what I have thought, it isn't a concomitant of consciousness?  I don't understand how eternity can be an an intrusion at all. I think the temporal is as likely as not designed to make eternity meaningful.

Goldman on Beethoven and the sublime: "The Sublime challenges us to conceive of something that transcends the way we process sense information. Because the Sublime demands our intellectual response, it evokes freedom: We are not the passive observer of fixed and limited phenomena, but the artist’s collaborator in the recreation of the art work. We must lift our spiritual level to engage it."

Goldman applies Soloveitchik's thesis here that "Man is in partnership with the "maker of heaven" in the continuing work of creation."

The Jews were brought out of Egypt, bondage, crossed a river via a miracle. Americans were brought out of the Old World, escaping servitude, crossed an ocean, resumed their journey across the continent, seeking an ever escaping redemption.

On reading Milton Rothman's "The Laws of Physics" and Bishop George Berkely's theories on motion:

"There is motion only in relation between objects."

Apply to understanding and knowledge.

Knowledge is always of the "other"; only in relation between objects.

Understanding, on the other hand, does not require multiplicity. See (Nous) Noesis, intuition. Understanding is reflexive, consciousness returning on itself, R.G. Collingwood. Only when multiplicity is dropped can understanding arise. Apply this to Goldman on Beethoven, above. Understanding is sublime, is the finest exemplar of true Freedom. It is transcendence. It is not a thing but a verb. It is merging of the soul of man with the "I Am" of Exodus. The state of passive observation of "fixed and limited phenomena" must be dropped, pass away. Only then can the "I Am" take the forefront. Only then can we truly exercise collaboration with Being, with the Art of a Beethoven, the Philosophy of a Soloveitchik or a LIeb.

Rougemont finis

 M. de Rougemont intends with his analysis of the literature surrounding the Tristan and Isolde myth, its development through the centuries, to diagnose the breakdown of western civilisation, especially marriage. While he believes he succeeds he stops short of prescribing a solution thinking instead it would likely do more harm than good. He adopts the attitude that its best to just let it play out hoping along the way we don't destroy ourselves in the process. For, indeed, the morphology of the myth in its final stages invests our predatory nature with fantastic war making abilities augmented, it seems, with ever increasing machine, and now computerized, and it would seem biological, methods of killing vast numbers of people, whole populations, or segments thereof.

Though he makes no prescription for the culture as a whole he does embrace Soren Kierkegaard's views on coping with the madness.

Cite SK. Pg 315: Adopts Kierkegaard's view as his own that human life tends to proceed in stages from the aesthetic through the ethical, ending in faith. Passion, he thinks, is "the highest value in the aesthetic stage" while extolling marriage as the highest in the ethical. But marriage is claimed to be the highest obstruction in the religious stage for it fetters one to time whereas faith requires eternity.

In this writer's view the image of the sword placed between Tristan and Iseult as they sleep signifies what is said about renouncing marriage as an obstruction when entering life's final stage of faith. "Goal was no longer redemption through love but redemption through renunciation." One gives up passion, love, in favor of dissolving the little self with the eternal. This is why Tristan can say I am the whole world as Wagner has him do.

Doesn't this correspond nicely with Kierkegaard's attitude? Rougemont writes: "When the lover in the Manichaean legend has undergone the great ordeals of initiation he is met ... by a dazzling maiden who welcomes him with the words: 'I am thyself!' So with fidelity in the myth, and Tristan's. Fidelity is then a mystic narcissism ... imagining itself to be true love for the other. In analysing the courtly legends, however, we saw that Tristan is not in love with Iseult, but with love itself, and beyond love he is really in love with death - that is, with the only possible release there can be for a self guilty and enslaved. Tristan is true neither to a pledge nor to a symbolical being named Iseult. She is but a lovely pretext, and all the time he is being true to his most profound and secret passion. The myth seizes on 'the death instinct' inseparable from any form of created life, and transfigures it by bestowing upon it an essentially spiritual goal. To destroy oneself, to despise happiness is thereupon a way of salvation and of acceding to a higher life, to 'the highest bliss of being' sung of by the expiring Isolde (in Wagner's opera)." Life for the sake of death was Tristan's passion and "The love of Tristan and Iseult was the anguish of being two; and its culmination was a headlong fall into the limitless bosom of Night....Iseult is no more, Tristan no more, and no name can any longer part us!"

Kierkegaard's existential anguish, his fear and trembling (Frygt og Baevan) resulting from the lost love of his Regine brought him low and he ended as a "fatally unhappy" man which he equates with man's relation with an eternal and holy God from the standpoint of the finite and sinful human. He said "God creates everything ex nihilo." Whomsoever God elects by his love, "He begins by reducing to nothing." This, he said, makes God "my mortal enemy." M. de Rougement writes: "Here we are being brought up against the extreme limit, the pure springs of passion; and in the same moment we are thrust into the heart of the Christian faith! For, behold! the man now dead to the world, killed by infinite love, has to go forward and to live in the world....(such a man) has renounced all things with an infinite resignation, and .... is constantly leaping into the infinite, but faultlessly and with complete confidence, so that he drops back into the finite, and nothing is noticeable about him but the finite."

Finally, Rougemont continues: "Thus the extremity of passion - death in love -introduces a new life, where passion never ceases to be present, but is under the most jealous incognito; for it is now far more than regal, it is divine." (This is in contradiction to his former exegesis of the myth, in this writer's opinion, but is in reality much nearer the actual Truth. While all that goes before goads the reader into plumbing the myth's and western civilization's morbidity his final summation and recap is rather uplifting, offers some hope.)

This makes sense, I think, of Tristan's "I am the world" attitude. Whereas mystic union, the explanation thereof, fails completely one can nevertheless circumscribe it, though perhaps only in increasingly vague terms. While it admittedly is a slippery matter perhaps one learns that though it evades our attempts to grasp or hold it we can gain somewhat by just accepting it (with cupped hands, so to speak). Receive instead of take, in other words. Denis de Rougemont is a master of all this, as was Soren Kierkegaard, and for that matter Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha - its a long list. Suffice to say, Rougemont continues: "We are unendingly and incessantly in the thick of the struggle between nature and grace; unendingly and incessantly unhappy and then happy. But the horizon has not remained the same. A fidelity maintained in the name of what does not change as we change will gradually disclose some of its mystery: beyond tragedy another happiness waits. A happiness resembling the old, but no longer belonging to the form of the world, for this new happiness transforms the world.

As said elsewhere Beauty is infinite, eternal, ever increasing, ever glorifying the divine. To get a little taste of this is man's lot gained by living in the finite, as intended, but from an eternal perspective. And, quoting Mr. T.S. Eliot, "when arriving at our destination we see it as our beginning but know it for the first time."

Infinite resignation is like total surrender to God......only then can we live perfectly in imperfection. Also said elsewhere in this blog, though its in error to ascribe to G_d anything at all, not even being itself (after all, Soren Kierkegaard himself, and he was and is known as a Christian philosopher, actually stood in the pulpit and expounding on faith, said that God does not exist. Why? Simplicity itself - "He is eternal" - that's why. That should need no explanation. And yet, in Exodus, appearing in a burning bush before Moses, asked "who shall I say sent me?", he replies, " Say that 'I am' sends you.")  it nevertheless dips into the limitless vastness of Beauty and Love and Truth to say that we sentient life forms, human beings on planet Earth, are the eyes and ears of the Cosmos, that simple device whereby G_d, if you like, has, or gains self realization, self understanding. The horizon of discovery is thus ever and anon pushed into infinity with we humans in endless renewal making pursuit. At the very least, I think, we are of the same stuff as the Sun, so our perception is no doubt the Sun's way of knowing itself. As stated this can not be explained for it is a matter of direct knowledge, Noesis, from which derives the noosphere wherein we find the concomitants of consciousness.

more thoughts

 self manifesting first principle

fundamental idea with the power to self manifest

potentiality with the power to actualize

The present is a realization or actualization of the past and future which are potentialities.

 

Music lives in the moment but its yearning is for the next moment. It is the essence of restlessness, of finding completion in the infinite regress of the horizon beyond the now.

 

If knowledge is always knowledge of something, then only reason leads to knowledge. All knowledge is through sense perception and memory. Direct knowledge, intuition, noesis, is not based on experience.

 

The oak dreams of the acorn. The acorn dreams of the oak. The stump lives in them both.

 

There is nothing that can be said that can do more for understanding the full meaning and purpose of life (enlightenment) than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for 'seeing' the moon.

 

Matter conveys individuality, form universality.

 

Guilt is the father of anger, hatred, self loathing. Salvation is the undoing of guilt through forgiveness, redemption. Guilt is self loathing. Achieve blamelessness through self sacrifice...accept the self as sacred.