Category Archives: philosophy

Exercise and gluttony

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My selfSim comes home from jogging and makes spaghetti. Hopefully I will be able to eat spaghetti again soon – my digestion seems to slowly recover (most of the time) from the antibiotics three weeks ago. 

The Zeitgeist – spirit of the times – is certainly strong. Today my pulse watch told me that I had burned 1500 calories (well, a bit more, but I think it exaggerates). And I was feeling all “Yay! Lots of fat burned!”

And then I thought “Wait, what? I’m not overweight! This just means I have to buy more groceries! The more I exercise, the more I’m going to eat.” That is certainly true in the long run, if any. And I actually don’t even run – I just take long walks with some jogging here and there.

I believe it is right, or wise, to exercise the body somewhat when I have a job that mostly leaves me sitting. The body is not built for passivity; it needs to be reminded that it is still inhabited, at least at my current level of development. I believe that when people become more alive inwardly, the need for external exercise becomes less. Certainly scholars and sages seem to live just as long as athletes, if not more so. So there is probably more to this than what meets the eye. But for now, it is an enjoyable way to stay healthy, I think.

So where does the gluttony come in? Well, in its crassest form, there is the notion of exercising more so that I can eat more. This is not all that different from the rumored practice of the decadent Roman parties, where people supposedly gorged themselves on expensive food, then threw up and went back to the orgy. OK, it is healthier and less insane, but the underlying mode of thought is disturbingly similar. They attribute this quote to Socrates: “Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.” I suspect most of us fall somewhere in between, but I also think we will gradually drift in one or the other direction over the years.

But even if you eat and drink to live, or mostly so, the fact remains that you eat more if you are physically active. Of course, if you have manual labor, if you work with your body, this is for the good of society (presumably). But simply by running around, it is within your reach to double your energy output. (Not that I am near that, even on my best days; but then I don’t even jog more than short stretches.) If you double your energy output and keep the same weight, you obviously also double your energy input, or in other words the food you eat. And once you’ve eaten it, no one else will.

Luckily we now live in a world where there is enough food for at least 9 billion people, perhaps 10, and we are only just over 7 billion. So other things probably count more, like throwing away food (huge amounts both privately and especially from shops) or distribution problems in poor countries. There is in and of itself no reason why we should need to eat less right now. And if we do, the first thing would be to eat less meat (and to some extent milk) since much of the energy in plant food is lost while passing through animals.

But there may be a future, not so far away, when food might be less abundant. Fossil fuels will surely continue to grow more expensive, and western agriculture (especially American) uses a lot of oil to produce all this cheap food.  So with more expensive oil, food will also be more expensive. This could put it out of reach for the poorest, and the more we in the rich world eat, the less there will be overall. So at that time, eating twice as much may cost someone else their life. That is a heavy burden … except we really don’t care usually. It is not like we can’t afford, most of us, to keep some poor kid alive in a developing country if we really, really want. But most of us don’t do it, at least not regularly. So we’ll probably not think of our eating that way either.

In either case, eating more veggies and grains should help keep the world fed for a while at least, and that may be all we need. The population explosion is set to stop and even reverse around the middle of the century.

Still, there are definitely purer motivations for exercise than eating as much as possible. And it may be that at some point I am going to change my exercise to  get more health benefits with less energy use, like hard interval training instead of long, leisurely walks. But for now, this is not a high priority. I just want to be aware of what I do, and not drift mindlessly like flotsam on the stream of time.

 

Mouravieff, first impressions

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A few days ago I got a packet from Amazon.com: Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis: Exoteric Cycle, the first of three volumes in his life work Gnosis. The next two, which I have not ordered (yet at least) are named Mesoteric Cycle and Esoteric Cycle. Exoteric refers to the outward form of religion, Esoteric to its inward and hidden meaning. I have not seen the word Mesoteric anywhere else, but it would presumably lie in between the two, as its name implies, as well as its number in the trilogy.

Even the 5 start reviews freely admit that Mouravieff is a bit apart from consensus reality, if you know what I mean – it can be hard for the casual observer to say whether the man was out and out crazy. So I expected a challenging read. To my pleasant surprise, the beginning was quite sane, or at least quite similar to my own understanding. Here’s from the start of the actual book (after several levels of introduction):

“Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed by external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed. Today like yesterday, and tomorrow like today, he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere. Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed and still absent from himself.”

Isn’t that the sad truth? It certainly fits my observations. Even people who are smarter than me are easily pulled along by this “machine”, or the maelstrom of physical life. By experience we know that various physical goods (like food and shelter) makes life a lot more comfortable very quickly. So it is oh so easy to assume that accumulating worldly goods is the fast lane to happiness. But the faster we run this race, the less time we have to check whether it really works. It doesn’t.

There is an article going the rounds over on Google+ from time to time, “Top five regrets of the dying” as recorded by a nurse doing palliative care. There is nothing new and surprising in this article, it is exactly what you would expect. Not more sex and bungee jumping, but less time in the office, more time with friends, and more honesty, courage and simple happiness.

Instead of getting terminal cancer, I recommend reading the article. Also, at least the first chapters of Gnosis. The effect is somewhat similar. In one word: Sobering.

Your faith may vary

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When we think of faith, some may think of miracles – but when Jesus saw the people he had fed coming back to make him king, he was exasperated. They had not realized that it was a sign, but just that they got free food. In faith, there are layers of meaning, not all of them available to everyone at the outset.

Religious “faith” is a word that means different things to different people. Usually it means something weird to people who don’t have it, of course. That is probably why so many of them flee it like the plague. But it also means different things to different people even within the same religion.

Since most people I converse with are thoroughly agnostic if not outright atheist, their idea of faith is obviously one that harmonizes with this life choice. As they see it, faith is the lazy or stupid person’s alternative to thinking. Rather than gather actual facts and think logically about the conclusions they lead to, the religious person can simply believe whatever makes him or her feel good, regardless of whether it is factually true or not. Consequently, while they may be happy in their belief, they are likely to cause all kinds of trouble for themselves, others, and the world at large. The conclusion is that faith should be fought on every opportunity, in order to reduce its cancerous influence. The atheist may or may not actually be bothered to do this, depending on whether he has tried and failed sufficiently often.

Undeniably there are people who fit this description all too well, especially in America (or perhaps they are just getting more publicity there). Stupidity and faith are certainly not mutually exclusive. But perhaps they should have been.

“Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies; for they are ever with me.
 I have more understanding than all my teachers; for I meditate on your testimonies.
I understand more than the old, because I have kept your precepts.”
Psalm 119, 98-100

“The seeds that fell on good ground are the people who hear and understand the message. They produce as much as a hundred or sixty or thirty times what was planted.”
Matthew 13, 23.

A funny thing about that Jesus quote is that if you give it to others but leave a blank where it says “understand”, they will usually insert “believe” or “obey” instead. Jesus was not unfamiliar with either of these, but chose to use “understand” here.

Faith is supposed to cause, and coexist with, understanding and eventually wisdom. It is not supposed to be a quick way to avoid thinking – rather it should form a better container of thought than we can fashion out of our personal experience. Or you may think of it as the skeleton on which our thoughts are fastened, if you prefer that image.

In light of this, we see the absurdity of trying to avoid faith. Your average atheist does not avoid faith at all, but rather has faith in some other model of containing thought. Frequently this is some form of socialism, which is a philosophy that competes squarely against religion. The atheist is rarely entirely devoid of ideals – usually quite the opposite. He has ideals, and he is usually sure that what he is doing is for the greater good. Everyone needs some kind of overarching system of thought and meaning of life, or madness ensues. If you don’t have religious faith, you have faith in various other sources that you find more reliable. And it is no great wonder that you do, given that most religious people are stupid hypocrites – just like most people everywhere and at all times.

You should be aware that the usual religious person knows next to nothing about his own religion. I refer you to the occasional questionnaires by Pew Research (like this one) and the unavoidable embarrassing statistics that are published afterwards, showing that Christians only know about half of these easy questions while atheists know somewhat more. This is because in America, you have to actually make an effort to be an atheist; in some countries it is the other way around, but the majority will always be ignorant and not particularly care about it.

Thus, the willful stupidity that you observe in the religious person is NOT an effect of their faith, but the opposite: This is how you end up when you DON’T meditate on the testimonies, to use the Jewish description. Other faiths have somewhat different ways to express this, but you should find the same at least in those religions with which I have a passing familiarity.

***

The representatives of the religion is its saints and sages, just like the representative of science is the scientist, not some random quack who has read about quantum physics in Science Illustrated and believes he can use it for magic. Yes, unfortunately there is quite a bit of religion on this level.

It is not difficult to find in religious text things that are upsetting or that seem to run counter to common sense. But it is not difficult to do so with science either, if you are as ignorant of science as most people are of religion. For instance, to go back to quantum physics, pretty much the only thing common people know about it is that really small things can be waves and particles at the same time. This is obviously not true. There can’t be waves if there isn’t something to make waves in, like some kind of liquid or something. Stupid scientists! They should get out more. Well, no, we don’t actually say this because it happens to be demonstrably true, even though only a few people have actually seen it happen. The same largely applies to religion.

Science is not a religion. Religion is a science. It is a platform for exploring the deeper reality of the spirit, just as worldly science is for exploring the physical world. But in both cases, most people simply read the cliff notes and have faith in them; they are neither scientists nor saints. Well, neither am I, I guess. Still, you pick up some when you look around for decades.

Now you would expect this from me, who wanders the jnana (insight) path, while most Christian walk the bhakti (loving worship) path, if any. And certainly the Bible assures us that God has chosen that which is foolish in this world, to put the wise to shame. But it seems a bit of twisting words to think that this encourages stupidity. Rather, it encourages an alternate wisdom, based in a completely different container of thoughts. And, generally, based more on practical exercises than thought-building. Religion was originally experiential, it was based on things you could do and experience for yourself the truth of the words. If we don’t, well, we can hardly blame the religion for our shaky understanding.

***

In short: The stupidity of the religious is not from our faith, but from not understanding it or not practicing it. A faith that is only meant to serve as an insurance is unlikely to cause wisdom.

If we were sims…

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See the old man in the background? This is right before the end, before his life flashes before his eyes. He has a lot of memories that are unlike mine, such as marrying and raising kids. And throwing eggs and stink bombs. Well, I think I got the better deal… but actually I hope it is a bit early to sum up yet.

As you can see from my personal journal, my health challenges are not over yet. Of course there are others who are worse off than me, but they are not me, and that makes a difference from my perspective. And my friends and relatives generally don’t blog or write a journal, which one can understand since they know about mine. You know, it is possible to write something less embarrassing than this if you want. -_-

Some time ago I wrote about the YouTube trailer for The Sims 3 Generations. The part that really got to me was the ending, where the camera zooms in on the old man in the park and we see his life pass before his eyes in a jumble, and then stop at one particular moment of his life. I am in no hurry at all to test the whole “life flashes before your eyes” part, I assure you. But if that movie had been about me, what would those pictures have been and what would that final picture be? I believe that unlike him, my pictures would mostly have been of me alone or more rarely with groups of people, although Supergirl (or Superwoman as she wanted me to write) would probably also have featured in some of them, and probably a couple other girls. But mostly me and a computer, or me and a book, I guess. And I think the last one might have been of me in my grandfather’s rocking chair the day I read the tract by Elias Aslaksen about the way to react, and realized that I had free will, regardless of what people did around me. But I don’t know for sure, and I am in no hurry to test it.

If we were sims – I would have wanted to be played by someone like me. That may be a very small thing indeed to boast of in recounting my life, but I generally treat my sims the way I would have wanted to be treated if someone up there played me. Well, I guess I might have wanted a little more freedom… but my sims get to play if their fun motive is low, eat if they are hungry (and frequently their favorite food, at that) while at the same time I nudge them to work toward their long-term goals when the opportunity exists. They live long, happy lives and generally achieve permaplat (in Sims 2), roughly corresponding to an unshakable mind in this world, well before they pass on.

There is no mention in the Holy Scriptures of treating our Sims the way we want to be treated, so I don’t know how much it matters. But I think it does, if we play games like that at all. And they are indeed a way to wisdom, if you don’t lose yourself in them. In the higher speed of time in these simpler worlds, the consequences of choices play out much faster than in our world. And some of us also consider the possibility that there are levels of reality higher than this one, higher dimensions not made of the same elements, from which greater minds than ours may watch us but we may not watch them. But it is probably not quite the same.

There are scientists who say that this world, which we consider 3-dimensional, may actually be a hologram. Others again say that it seems not to be divisible endlessly, but that there are minimum measures of everything, such as the Planck length and perhaps even a Planck time, similar to the clock ticks of a computer… But then, each era has cast the universe in the perceptions of its own age. Perhaps if we begin to understand the universe, it will change again … like a new expansion … or perhaps it is our minds that need to expand?

Universal genius

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Yozora is not desperate to have friends, because she has books and an invisible friend. Clearly a case of genius! Also note how many thin books there are on the shelf behind her. That’s because they are written in kanji, a much more compact script than ours. Yes, all these things appear in today’s little essay.

“Universal genius” is a literal translation of the Norwegian word “universalgeni”, which is roughly equal to “polymath” in English, but easier to understand. It is actually based on a Latin phrase (“genius universalis”) and is also used in nearby languages.

A related term is “Renaissance man”, as the ideal at the time was a person who was thoroughly familiar with all the arts and sciences. The world had recently emerged from the Middle Ages and retrieved the knowledge of the Classical era of ancient Greece and Rome (with a little help from our Muslim friends, or sometimes enemies). At the same time the printing press had made knowledge easy to spread, and the era of great discoveries had expanded the world greatly. It was a time of opening of the human mind in space and time, leaving the cloistered garden of the previous era. It seemed that nothing would now be impossible. That turned out to be a bit optimistic, of course.

In our modern age, nobody can be an expert in all sciences. In fact, it is probably impossible to be an expert even in one science, such as history or physics or chemistry: They each cover so much ground that you can only have a moderate knowledge of each sub-field, and there will be many, many people who know more than you about the details.

Even so, some of us feel that a broad overview of human knowledge is important. Without it, we cannot easily – if at all – understand our own place in the world. There are those who don’t care: As long as they get paid and preferably enjoy their specialized work, it does not matter to them whether it is meaningful in a broader sense. But not all of us can be satisfied with this. We want to see the world as if from a much higher place, where it becomes obvious how all things are connected. Luckily this is still possible, but perhaps not common.

Universities were founded to give a universal education, as their name implies. I think it is fair to say that things have changed a bit since then, although there is still an element of this expansive role of higher education. Even a century ago, a “liberal education” did not mean being indoctrinated in leftist politics, but rather an education that was free from attachment, a study of knowledge for its own sake or for the sake of the student, rather than associated with a particular career. The original meaning of the “liberal arts” were those that were considered suitable for a free citizen. So universities would teach universal truths with the purpose of setting the student free, to make his own decisions and choose wisely how to contribute to society. (Your university may vary.)

***

Myself, I don’t even have a university education. I have two school years of college-level education, paid by my employer, and it was (unsurprisingly) mainly about economy and law, not philosophy. I have read randomly about the sciences from my early childhood, but did not really think hard about First Principles until middle age. Still, already for many years I have seen the sciences as a vast dome, where there are no lines (much less walls) between each science and its neighbors. For instance, astronomy seamlessly changes into cosmology as the scale of things increases. But cosmology is not the end of the world (except in the most literal sense). It wraps around to quantum physics, which again is fundamental to chemistry, which again cannot be separated from biology and medicine…

I don’t see many people who are even officially interested in seeing the world like this, as an organic unity. It is not something I have striven to achieve, cutting out parts that did not fit in or adding controversial fillers. It is a natural result from grazing all over the place since I was little. My father has a similar attitude, I think, but he grew up in an age where knowledge was hard to come by. So did I, for that matter, but not for as long. Today, the place where I had to dig wells for information is so flooded with it that people are striving not to drown. Information overload.

***

As I said, it is probably not possible to be a universal genius today, but one who still tries is your would-be god and savior from Venus, Ryuho Okawa. Those extraterrestrial and religious aspects may be somewhat creepy, but you can’t go wrong with reading 1000 books a year. Of course, I can’t prove he actually does that, but it certainly looks like he has an extremely wide-ranging knowledge. And it just may be possible in Japan, because Japanese books are mainly written with kanji, signs that represent a basic concept.

There are a bit over 1000 kanji in modern Japanese books and newspapers; most words consist of two kanji, some common words of only one. For grammatical particles and words that lack modern kanji, Japanese use hiragana, a syllabic script (each letter is one syllable rather than one sound). This makes for extremely compact books compared to English, and particularly well suited for speed reading.

When we speed read, we don’t look at the individual letters but use the brain’s amazing pattern matching ability to recognize words or even groups of words by their shape. Expremients have shown that we reogcnize words, epseically long words, mainly by their first and last letter and the length of the word. (Teachers are probably an exception to this as they are conditioned to become very agitated if every letter is not in the right place.)

Japanese, and Chinese even more, skips the whole letter phase and teaches the shapes of the concepts that are the building block of the language. As such, once you know all the signs so well that you don’t have to stop and think, you can read these languages at a ferocious speed. The more you read, the better you get. So 1000 books a year is definitely doable.

For the same reason, I believe that the West will inevitably fall behind in the information age. China, Japan and Korea will dominate the world unless they manage to get themselves into yet another war with each other. It is too late for us to change to a pictographic language now, and we also lack the culture of reverence for learning. We had some of that, but not to the same extent, and it seems to be fading now. Japanese children do as much homework in a day as American children do in a week, according to The Economist. Here in Norway it has been proposed to abolish homework entirely.

To return to what may be the world’s strangest man, Ryuho Okawa, you can (and almost certainly will) be wary of his claims to be a god from outer space and able to summon the spirits of everyone who has ever lived on Earth (and probably Venus as well). But anyone who has written 800 books and reads 1000 books a year is definitely a genius, and probably the closest we come to a “universal genius” these days. Although the words of Aristotle come unbidden to mind: “No great genius has ever existed without a touch of madness.”

It may be that the price of being a universal genius is a touch of universal madness. That would be a high price indeed. Of course, madness may be partly at least in the eye of the beholder. According to the Gospel, Jesus’ family thought he had lost his mind when he was out preaching. I have acquaintances even today who hold the same view on him. And while I am just barely extraordinary myself, I would not be surprised if people are already getting suspicious. Not least after an entry like this. ^_^

 

Stupid, ignorant fools!

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Don’t get it? Color me unsurprised.

“Stupid, ignorant fools!” Does today’s title sound like someone you know? Perhaps like a good many people you know? It should, for it is the human condition. If I am a little wiser than the average, it is largely in this that I am aware of the foolishness in myself as well as others.

There are the great thinkers of history, of course. I would be a real fool to not admit that they tower above me intellectually. But they were also limited. Aristotle was one of the founders of philosophy as we know it; he thought you could choose to have a boychild or a girlchild by tying off the appropriate testicle. Martin Luther, no matter what you think of the Reformation, was a great scholar, speaker and linguist; he was also a raging anti-semite.

As I have previously quoted C.S. Lewis on, by reading the books of previous ages we realize that each age has its own particular myth-takes which are accepted without question at the time, but not in our time and not even in other ages before and after. And unless we are complete morons, we should begin to suspect that the same is bound to be true about us.

Apart from the collective delusions, there is also the fact that we are born knowing nothing but a few basic instincts, and only live for some decades at best. It is the rare soul that stays lucid for as long as a century. Of those who do, not many have devoted themselves to knowledge and insight. Not saying that this will shorten your life – quite possibly the opposite – but few people are scholars at the best of times, and few people grow old without losing their mind. And even if you do both, there is still simply too short a time to become an expert on more than a couple things, and get a passing acquaintance with some others.

It is not like we have unlimited processing capacity in our brains, either. We learn a little more than we forget for much of our lives, but only a little more. Things we don’t understand deeply tend to fade unless we use them. And to understand things deeply, we often need to know quite a bit already. “Inspiration comes more frequently to those who make effort.”

To once again quote Ryuho Okawa (although this may well be a familiar view in Japan), you should not consider yourself an intellectual until you have read a thousand books. I would assume fluffy entertainment and trashy romance novels don’t count in that number, but a lot of people would not reach it even then. How then can one think himself a scholar on a particular topic without having read at least a hundred books from various sources? I hope I have mentioned this before, but on Google+ I frequently see people who have very strong opinions. And in very nearly all cases it all comes down to the Dunning-Kruger effect: Being too ignorant to realize even that one is ignorant.

I am convinced it is hard to have a strong opinion on, for instance, Islam or Mormonism once you’ve read a couple *dozen* books by insiders, outsiders, friends and enemies of the faith. What I don’t really know is what happens once you have read a couple *hundred* books on the topic. Are you still uncertain? I think perhaps not. But I do not know:  There is no single topic I have read hundreds of books on. I tend to flit from one topic to another, so I am at best a jack of a few trades but a master of none. So perhaps you are certain – but something I know, even if you are certain, you deeply understand the views you disagree with. Now that I think about it, Aristotle said the same: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Quick note on that ancient proverb. What you find with the people with the intense opinions is that they have latched on to a thought and accepted it, then either simply not come across an opposing view, or shunning the opposing view. Usually, they are not able to entertain the opposite thought because that would be like accepting it. There is nothing morally wrong with this when used rightly: If you have found a virtue you should not seek a vice. But intellectually speaking, it becomes wrong, because the burden of an intellectual is to see things from many sides. Not necessarily to live many different lives: Life is too short for this, and it may be bad in other ways too. But the price of being an “educated mind” is to be exposed to lies, lots and lots of them. The reward is sometimes knowing them for lies, when you would otherwise not.

Even if you are educated in the most literal sense, having a Ph.D or some such, that actually only tells something about your mastery of one particular field. You probably also have had to sit through some more general classes, of course, but that may be a while ago and their impression on you may not have been all that deep. I see from time to time people who are experts in one field and make bold statements about unrelated fields of which they are clearly ignorant. Having a long education or even having contributed noticeably to the world does not make you a universal genius. And even if you are that, you may still end up saying something stupid. That’s human nature.

We all make mistakes, walking in twilight at best compared to the blinding light of absolute Truth. But we should not stop trying to chase truth and wisdom, even if our progress is like that of the snail. If we do not, then who? And if not truth and wisdom, then what?

 

 

The miracle of understanding

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If only I could transfer understanding like that! But in this world, understanding is quite unpredictable even if all involved do their best, not to mention when not.

Last spring I wrote in one entry: “Madness is not the only danger in books. There is also the danger that something may be understood that can never be forgotten.” But what is this unique experience of understanding something, that suddenly makes a permanent change, completely different from the normal mode of learning?

It occurred to me recently that if understanding was not already widely accepted as a fact, it would fail the Randi bet.  Former “stage magician” (illusionist) James Randi has organized a standing prize of $1 million to whoever can prove supernatural or paranormal powers or events in a controlled test environment. So far nobody has run off with the prize, although some have complained about the conditions. Generally, the supernatural event must be predictable, so that one can ensure that it takes place during the experiment. It must be repeatable, so that it is not just a chance occurrence. And it must be unusual. It is on the last count that understanding (barely?) would be rejected at the outset. But actually it would not fit the other two either.

As I am sure any teacher can testify, there is a big difference between rote learning and understanding. Learning – such as memorizing vocabulary in a foreign language – follows a predictable curve. The amplitude of the curve may vary from person to person, but the shape of the curve is the same for nearly all. In contrast, understanding may or may not occur at all. It is certainly not possible to predict exactly when someone will understand something difficult. It may be today, tomorrow, next year or never. Furthermore, once you have understood it, the event is not repeatable: You cannot un-understand something simply by waiting, the way you can do with French irregular verbs. Once it clicks into place, it takes extreme measures to wipe it out.

If this is the case with scholarly topics such as special relativity, it is even more so with moral and emotional understanding. I have repeatedly mentioned how my life changed in a matter of minutes one day while I was reading a tract by Elias Aslaksen about the way to react. Until then, I had been like almost all children: If you insulted me, I would fly into a rage. My oldest brother had made this a routine amusement, it seems to me. But at that time – I think I was 15, but it may have been the year before – as I was sitting in my grandfather’s rocking chair, my view of life changed completely. I realized with blinding clarity that no one else can lift my hand. (Well, technically they can, but I mean they can’t do so by words or gestures.) I was responsible for how I acted, it did not matter what others had done to me. As long as I was alive and in control of my own body, I was the one who could – and must – decide what it would do.

This did not automatically change my life completely, but pretty drastically. There are certain reactions that are bordering on instinct, but even there a range of different actions exist. This understanding has continued to spread through my life, but its actual creation – or whatever you would call it – happened in a matter of minutes at most. I rose from that chair a different and much freer person than I had been when I sat down. Yet there are people who die at a ripe old age and have never had this experience, never gained that understanding. They continue to believe that their behavior is formed by their genes or their environment or some such that they have no control over.  Of course, these things act as input on us. But there is something between the input and the output. There is a space between impulse and action. For some of us.

There are various types of understanding, but it seems to me that they are all to some extent unpredictable and non-repeatable. As such, they fall short of the Randi bet in the same way that healing by prayer or reading thoughts. These things simply don’t happen on command, but sometimes they happen when you don’t expect it at all. And to some, they don’t happen at all. But once they do, they don’t unhappen. You cannot spool life back and play it over.

So if we were to categorize it, I would say that understanding is a miracle. (And understanding between humans even more so, but let us limit ourselves to understanding things this time.) Whether it is supernatural, depends on how super you consider nature itself to be. But it can certainly feel like a magical moment.

Life: Short, narrow & shallow

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Beach with ocean

Newtonian worldview?

It is well known that life is short. In all fairness, it was generally shorter before. Life expectancy in the rich world is still increasing by about five hours a day. But even if I lived till I was a thousand years old – which is as unlikely as sprouting wings – I would still feel that my life was short, and wish for it to last longer.

There are those who struggle with suffering – usually of the mind – so severe that they prefer life to end. But I am unfamiliar with this feeling. And even that is not all.

Life is not only short, but also narrow. I have written about this before, saying that there are so many things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot be married and single, atheist and worshiper, or even hold different religions at the same time. (Well, at least it is hard to do, although Huston Smith came pretty close.) And so on. But even of the non-exclusive things we could do, there is not really time to do more than a sample.  This is what I say now: Even if I had a thousand bodies, none of them would get bored. There are just so many things to do, so many things to learn, so many thoughts to think, so many words that should be spoken before they are lost forever. There is just so much of everything, that even a thousand bodies for a thousand years would not find time for boredom. That is how I feel.

But there is yet another dimension! Even beyond the length of time, and even with only this one body, this one life, there is so little of that life that “sticks”, so little that is actually taken in, and so little that is actually done. I call this the shallowness of my life. Well, I can’t blame anyone else for that. But I have this thought experiment that I run in various forms. To make it simple this time, let us imagine I had some magic or technology that let me send my mind, with all its memories, one year back in time.

You may have seen the movie “Groundhog Day”. If not, you should at least read up on it. It is pretty good. As a friend of mine said, she could watch it over and over. ^_^ That is basically what it is about, a man living the same day over and over until he learned his lesson. Well, that was what I got out of it. Anyway, my thought experiment is a kind of “groundhog year”. How many times would I want to live the last year over?

A year is long enough to make some different choices, but not to live a completely different life. I would not be able to get a new job, probably, or at least not anything radically different. I would not be able to move very far. I sincerely doubt I could marry even had I wanted to, much less have children. So basically a minor variation of the same life I have lived this past year. Would I do that once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times?

It is hard to say, but my best guess is a few thousand. I mean, if I could take my memories with me. There are so many books I would want to read, so many stories I would like to write and rewrite to see whether they were worth it, so many people I could get to know, so many languages to learn, so many problems to get better at solving in my job… there is so much even in an ordinary year of an ordinary life, that I feel like dart hurtling through time, barely seeing and doing anything.

I don’t think I could do it millions of times though. Not that I would not enjoy it, but at some point I think my mind would run full, so I would forget as much as I learned. Eventually I would read what I thought was a new book, while I actually read it 5000 rounds ago and just forgot it in the meantime… Perhaps. Or perhaps my mind would evolve and expand, to see things from an ever higher perspective, in ever greater depth and richness. There has been a vague, halting tendency in that direction, I think.

(But realistically, I would probably spend some of those years playing Sims 3. -_- Even now that I don’t have unlimited time, I still play either Sims 3 or City of Heroes at least a bit, most days of the week. And even more on the weekend, such as now.)

Anyway, those are the three dimensions of how much larger life is than me. There may be more. Perhaps if I live long enough, I will return with a fourth or even fifth. Actually I can kind of vaguely see at least one more even now, see my mention above about the possibility of seeing things from a radically higher perspective.

How I feel about life is that I am like a bottle with a few drops at the bottom. That is all I have managed to get out of my life so far. Even though it seems to me that my time passes slower than for most, I still feel like it runs through my fingers. Isaac Newton said: “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the same feeling, I think. Except his ocean was wider and deeper, because he was.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found…
-Tim Rice, Circle of Life.

An immense beyond

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A breakthrough of LightAn immense Beyond will one day burst forth and absorb the universe?

I want to share a quote from Frithjof Schuon. It is eerily double in its meaning. Perhaps you don’t find it as spine-tingling as I do, but let’s give it a try:

Our world is but a furtive and almost accidental coagulation of an immense beyond, which one day will burst forth and into which the terrestrial world will be reabsorbed when it has completed its cycle of material coagulation.

Schuon means this in a metaphysical sense; that is his area of expertise, after all. But lately, theoretical cosmologists have come to almost exactly the same description of the physical universe.

You are no doubt familiar with the “Big Bang” hypothesis about the origin of our universe. But what has gained less attention is the “cosmic inflation scenario”. In this, which is our best approximation to facts so far, the Big Bang was not actually the start of our universe. Well, it was a prerequisite for it, but the energy (for lack of a better word) of the Big Bang is not contained within our known universe. Rather, our universe appeared as a bubble of “false vacuum”, most likely one of a myriad such bubbles (although we will never be able to know, since we cannot see beyond our bubble).

Yes, what became our universe was simply a bubble in the stream that flowed from the Big Bang, a limited area that was filled with fields of potential – protoenergy, perhaps we could call it – which later coagulated into matter and energy as we know them today. The current laws of nature did not appear until this bubble universe coalesced from a field-filled bubble into actual space, time, matter and energy. (And dark matter and dark energy, presumably, about which we only know that they probably exist, not what they are.)

According to this theory, it is more probable than not that an enormous number of “universes” exist, with a varying number of dimensions, with and without matter and energy as we know them or some other waves and particles that may have a similar relation to each other as our energy and matter have in our known universe. If these universes don’t share any forces or particles that interact with ours, they could occupy the same space and time and we would never know. Of course, it is not obvious that they have space and time at all, they could have completely different dimensions.

According to the same theory, it is not at all obvious that our configuration is the most stable. If it is not, then elementary particles will eventually decay and the universe will evaporate. Or another universe might burst into ours and engulf ours, triggering a change in our natural laws that would make the universe spontaneously change into a different configuration. There is no particular reason why matter and energy should continue to exist indefinitely. There is however an extremely high probability that they will do so for many millions and even billions of years yet, so this is not exactly something scientists lose sleep over.

***

Atheists generally assume that consciousness is a more or less accidental function of matter and energy. Schuon, on the other hand, holds the opposite to be true: Consciousness is pervasive, the form it takes is accidental. In our universe, consciousness settles in certain configurations of atoms, but this could not have happened unless the universe was already permeated by consciousness. Much like energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed by natural processes, information theory says that information can also not be created or destroyed, only transformed. It is then no big leap of faith to assume the same for consciousness, as the next step up from matter – energy – information. Well, for metaphysicists it is not; for physicists, it may be too big a leap, perhaps.

But in any case, regardless of whether we will be around in some form to witness the end of the universe, it is still an amazing thing to speculate about. In a manner of speaking, our mind is already present at the Big Bang through the power of our imagination. If we were to know enough about the end of the universe, we would in a manner of speaking be able to “fore-see” it with our mind’s eye. The human mind, as I have said before, is not bound tightly to the flow of time. We constantly make jumps backward in time (memory) or forward (anticipation), showing that we ourselves belong to a higher dimension than the fourth dimension of time. If not, we could not traverse it with our mind.

This fifth dimension, through which we can break “the fourth wall”, is itself part of the immense beyond. So it seems likely, in a way, that the end of the universe need not be the end of consciousness. That said, most of us would probably prefer to stay in this “coagulated” universe as long as possible. ^_^

Everyone else too

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“I have trouble talking to people who look like they have friends” says this girl. Not all pains or disabilities are visible on the body.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” I was surprised to see this attributed to Plato, and by all accounts this is just a way to add authority to it. It is not much over a century old. But the idea itself has certainly been true since Plato and before. It is also a fundamental tenet in Buddhism, although not a direct quote there.

If we look at it simply, we can say that people experience suffering from their body, from their mind, and from their relationship with other people. It is rare to meet anyone who does not have at least two of these three more or less constantly, or at least frequently. Some carry all three of these burdens at the same time.

Even if you do not see a person wince in pain, chances are they still have their afflictions. And if not directly painful, then certainly limiting. Some weakness of the body, or some phobia, or some obligation to a family member, may keep one from the path in life that they have always been longing for. You cannot see such a thing and will not hear about it unless you learn to know them well, perhaps. But these things are very common even among those who seem successful.

Of course there are differences, and some people are simply luckier. But it is not easy to know which. It is not always those who complain the most who carry the heaviest burden, far from it.

We should understand that everyone else too is carrying a burden, and cut them some slack at the least, if we cannot help them. Unfortunately people will sometimes lash out, not knowing the other person, adding insult to injury and salting the wounds. Sometimes we may have to act to protect one person from another, to stop an injustice, but to attack simply because we are irritated or upset is not a good thing.

One of the things I have learned from Happy Science is to notice this, that illness tends to make us self-centered. If we experience pain, the first thing we drop is helping others. This is not in itself evil, for we also have an obligation to look after our own body. If we let it continue to grow sicker because we exert ourselves, we will soon be unable to even care for ourselves, even when we otherwise could have done so. But there is a seductive side to this being excused from our duties. It is something we can get addicted to, and make use of more than is right. It may even turn into a subconscious desire to fall ill, for those who are weary of their duties and wish to relax. So that is something to be aware of.

Of course I am thinking of my own recent experiences when I say this. We each have to look out for our own tendencies and temptations first and foremost.

But even those who don’t write about it on the Net, have their struggles. Let us be kind, let us be merciful. Would we not hope to meet that kind of good will ourselves on our day of need?