Church of the Churchless

Let's give thanks to the big bang, plus...

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Almost everybody is into thankfulness, whether sincere or feigned.

Myself, I'm thankful that I was able to get a HP wireless printer working with my wife's new iMac this afternoon. It was touch and go for a while but I finally figured it out.

My philosophical problem, though, is who or what I should offer my thanks to.

This quandary is common to every exclamation of gratitude, including religious ones such as  "Thank you, Jesus" or "Thank you, God." Where the heck do you stop?

I read some reviews of the Photosmart C4780 that pointed me toward the need to download Snow Leopard compatible software from the HP web site. I'm thankful to the people who took the time to share their experience with getting the printer to play nicely with a Mac.

They wouldn't have been able to do this if they hadn't been born.

So I also need to thank their parents. Along with every relative, human, animal, or whatever, along the several billion-year timeline of life's evolution on Earth.

Which wouldn't have been possible if the universe didn't exist, of course. Fourteen billion or so years ago the big bang started everything off. About ten billion years later the Earth formed.

And here we are.

Now, scientifically minded religious believers don't want to stop with thanking the big bang for making everything exist. They assume that God or some other supernatural entity was responsible for the big bang.

(Fundamentalists, of course, don't accept that the big bang and evolution even happened, but that's so crazy I'll ignore them in my thankfulness analysis.)

I get blog comments on this subject fairly frequently. Someone will say, "There had to be something before the big bang, because something can't come from nothing." Well, who says?

The human mind is doing that saying, using human cognition based on human perceptions. Why, though, should we believe that the cosmos operates in accord with the limitations of the human mind?

We're certain about all kinds of things that we shouldn't be. Including who to thank for existence. Such is the central message of Robert Burton's "On Being Certain," a book I like a lot (and blogged about here and here).

Burton is a neurologist. He points out that reason can't be separated from bodily sensations, since "any notion of space -- no matter how abstract -- must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space. In our mind's eye, emptiness occupies space."

So our notions about the big bang get confused by our perceptual conditioning.

Close your eyes and try envisioning a face. You will see it against some kind of contrasting background, whether it is a neutral color or a vague grayness or blackness. Now try to visualize a perfect vacuum.

Even if I know that a vacuum contains nothing, there is still an "it," a nothingness that must exist within some type of space. My mind serves up a dim empty darkness as it simultaneously tells me that this can't be so. Empty space is a visual non sequitur; there is no visual counterpart of nothingness.

Let's move on to cosmology. Try to visualize the big bang -- a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes. To see this object in our mind's eye, we place this dot against some contrasting background.

Most people, when questioned, will offer that they see a dim darkness against which the initial singularity is framed. This problem of borders isn't confined to spatial considerations; time is equally impossible to visualize as either always existing or suddenly beginning.

We see a beginning in contrast to what was present just before the beginning. The cruel irony is that a mind's eye representation of no surrounding space or time occupies some space and suggests a prior time.

To relieve the resulting tensions, we feel compelled to ask a key question shared by science and religion -- what, if anything, was present before the beginning?

However, Burton says, we have no way of knowing whether this question is even meaningful. It could just be a product of our all-too-human way of perceiving things.

So in the end I'm thankful to...mystery.

Because nobody knows what, if anything, is at the end (or beginning) of existence. Our thanks directed toward ultimacy echo into the seeming infinity of time and space, landing nowhere.

Yet maybe also, everywhere.

Whichever or whatever, I'm thankful for being alive and able to ponder the wonder of being able to wonder.

The universe is unity

Look around. Outside of yourself. Inside of yourself. Do you find any sharp divisions between utterly distinct aspects of reality?

I can confidently predict, "No, you don't." (If I'm wrong, enlighten me.) There's a reason the word universe starts with "uni." It's a whole.

Most religions, maybe all, are founded on a duality of some sort.

Heaven and earth. Soul and body. Spirit and matter. God and creation. Salvation and sin. Liberation and karma. Truth and maya.

Yet these supposedly separate spheres of existence aren't evident.

They're concepts, belief structures that have to be taken on faith. So religious believers necessarily defend these notions without recourse to everyday experience, whether personal or scientific.

Where is the person with a soul but no body? Where is a God absent any creation? Where is a heaven detached from any earthly connection? Where is a pure Platonic truth unsoiled by material existence?

Nowhere. Yet true believers act as if the universe where we live out our entire lives is a cosmic afterthought, or a deception, or a pale image of some more radiant realm.

I don't get it.

Yes, I had strong dualistic leanings myself for a while, but I tempered them with an appreciation of the unified reality that science has found to exist -- and which non-dualistic philosophical teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism also posit.

It amazes me when fundamentalists are so adamant that what is scientifically known about our universe is worthless, mistaken, false, dangerous to one's spiritual health.

Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that God created the universe, wouldn't it be more likely that creation reflects divinity rather than being utterly opposed to God's nature?

This is the attitude of many religious scientists with a non-fundamentalist bent. They consider that understanding the nature of the universe provides a peek into the nature of God, because reality isn't divided into separate and distinct realms of existence.

Somewhat similarly, but in a fashion I much prefer, Taoists say that whatever is happening at this very moment, here and now -- that's the working of Tao, the Way. Look for it outside of everyday experience and you'll miss it.

Evolution is a prime example of how fundamentalist religion rejects knowledge of this world because it supposedly conflicts with what a holy book or person says about the next world.

Yet here we are...here. Not there. Why elevate a concept of an alternative reality above the actual experience of this reality?

I was encouraged to learn about the Clergy Letter Project. 

For too long, the misperception that science and religion are inevitably in conflict has created unnecessary division and confusion, especially concerning the teaching of evolution. I wanted to let the public know that numerous clergy from most denominations have tremendous respect for evolutionary theory and have embraced it as a core component of human knowledge, fully harmonious with religious faith.

Amen. The Clergy Letter Project has a long list of science-friendly sermons. I looked at one from Eugene, Oregon and found a lot to like. Such as these images.

 

Right on.

What?! The universe isn’t all about me?!

Warning: if you're comfortable feeling that the cosmos is designed around you, or humanity in general, what you're about to read runs the risk of putting some leaks in your belief bubble.

I'm not only speaking to the religious, even though theology and metaphysics is where you'll find the most egregious examples of Homo sapiens centeredness. The churchless also are prone to self-centered grandiosity.

I know, because I am one.

For me, faithlessness came down the track of my psyche long before humility. Understand, I'm not claiming any sort of ego-loss now. I'm still as full of myself as ever.

The difference is that I'm increasingly able to recognize how much I want to believe that the universe has a special concern for me, or is fashioned in a way that makes its ultimate reality potentially comprehensible to my consciousness.

Here's a seeming paradox: the less religious I become, the more I feel like I'm approaching the central goals of religiosity – and without the nasty side effects of ingesting dogmatism.

Namely, I'm coming to see myself as a humble part of a marvelously grand whole. I bow down before this imaginably vast cosmos, recognizing that little me can do nothing other than accept the oft-heard adage, Man proposes, God disposes (except I like to substitute Nature for "God"). I do my best to embrace what comes to me as the result of forces far beyond my control – which will include whatever happens after I die.

So the aforementioned paradox really isn't one at all.

What religion seeks, union with a greater reality beyond that known to our limited mind and senses, is contradicted by the privileged position almost every faith claims for its followers.

I've had a lot of experience with this, since for over thirty years I was a member of an organization that held out the goal of a soul "drop" merging with God's "ocean," while simultaneously proclaiming that believers were chosen people on a unique path that couldn't be traveled by others less fortunate (such as my wife).

Eventually this disconnect – how could I be on the road to losing my ego while continually being told how special I was? – led me to recognize that if I wanted what led me to sign on the religious dotted line, I'd have to tear up the contract.

I want to be in harmony with the universe and other people. I'd like to be content with what I have, not desiring something always beyond my grasp. I yearn to live happily and die content, not worrying about what will happen in the next moment.

For a long time I thought that expanding my consciousness until it was co-equal with the cosmos was the way to achieve this. Now, this strikes me as both an exceedingly unlikely eventuality and also disturbingly focused on me, me, me.

What's the matter with the cosmos doing what it wants, and me adjusting myself to it the best I can? The universe is a lot bigger and more powerful than I am, so I don't have any choice in the matter anyway.

I've got a lot more faith now that I'm churchless – faith that everything has been fashioned just fine, without any existential blunders.

In this regard I've got more trust in the rightness of creation than John McCain, who said today that life isn't fair (because Obama is rising in the polls after McCain put his campaign on hold to supposedly work on the financial bailout plan).

Last year I explained why life is fair, saying:

By "fair," I mean there's a reason for things. They don't pop out of nowhere, miraculously or randomly. Even the laws of quantum physics, where randomness is an integral aspect of the subatomic world, have a foundation in well-formed mathematics.

When people say, "life isn't fair," they're speaking anthropomorphically or personally. What they usually mean is that stuff happens that shouldn't, in their opinion. Babies are born blind. Tsunamis strike villages without warning. Bad things happen to good people.

But unfairness doesn't exist without a privileged position, either human or divine.

Religion demands a privileged position: a special relationship with God, a favored understanding of metaphysical reality, a unique method of merging with the divine.

This presupposes that human beings in general, and people belonging to a certain faith in particular, are centrally located in the cosmic sphere of things. Naturally this is a comforting feeling, which goes a long way toward explaining why religions are so popular.

In "Wanted: Intelligent Aliens for a Research Project," Olivia Judson points out how biased toward us is our view of the cosmos.

On the overestimation side, we only need to look at history to see that humans tend to have any number of self-aggrandizing beliefs — we have a long tradition of believing ourselves to be the center of the universe, for example, or to think the planet was created especially for us. We often forget that for the first two billion years of its existence, the planet was home only to bacteria, and that bacteria make all other lifeforms possible: we are as dependent on the bacteria in our guts as a termite or cow.

She finds a bright spot in our increasing recognition of how un-special we are. Still, it's likely that we'll never be able to fully illuminate the blind areas of human consciousness. If you can be comfortable with this, you won't mind giving up the illusory enlightenment of religion.

As we continue to learn about the inherent human tendencies towards bias, and the flattering illusions we like to maintain, it may get easier to guard against the problem, and to assess ourselves more clearly. Yet perhaps — probably — there are some biases that our brains have that we simply can't see at all, blind spots that we, as a species, can never discover we have.

Brains vs. the universe

So who would come out on top in this contest? Might as well put it on pay per view, for more dramatic effect. Brains vs. the Universe – ultimate smackdown!

My bet is on the universe. It's a lot bigger.

And, when you think about it, smarter than brains. Because brains are part of the universe, and the universe is the whole deal (that's why it's called a universe).

I got to pondering this in the course of leafing through a book I'd already read, "Creation Revisited" by Peter Atkins.

Atkins is a chemistry professor at Oxford University. So his take on a scientific explanation of the universe is pleasingly different from that of physicists who write Big Picture books like this one.

But that really isn't my point here.

I was inserting post-it notes by passages that I might summarize in a future blog post, when I came across a thought that stood out so much for its stimulating provocativeness, I honored the page's post-it with an asterisk.

Previous to that page, Atkins was pondering why mathematics is so successful in describing physical reality. Does mathematics merely mirror physical reality? Or are they actually the same?

By weak deep structuralism I shall mean that mathematics and physical reality merely share the same logical structure and mathematics is a mirror that can be held up to nature. By strong deep structuralism I shall mean that mathematics and physical reality do not merely share the same logical structure but are actually the same. In other words, according to the hypothesis of strong deep structuralism, physical reality is mathematics and mathematics is physical reality.

Now, readers who are deep into spirituality should keep in mind that Atkins keeps referring to "physical reality." True, his overall thesis is that God or any other supernatural force isn't necessary to explain the universe.

I just want us to focus on an evident reality: you and I are physical beings in a physical world. We may be something more than that also. Maybe.

What isn't to be doubted is that, crudely speaking, brains are made of meat. And brains are what we think with – about God, spirituality, the universe, what brains are made of, and lots of other stuff.

Including, mathematics.

Getting to my asterisked, post-it noted page, Atkins observes that we (meaning mathematicians, not me) "can write down the Pythagoras theorem for a space of 1000 spatial dimensions."

But as we do not appear to live in a space of 1000 spatial dimensions, this expression does not seem to have a counterpart in reality…So at first sight it looks as though strong deep structuralism cannot work.

Here's where things got most interesting for me.

Because just as people can envision mathematical propositions that make some sense, but have no apparent counterpart in really real reality, so can they envision religious or spiritual beliefs of the same sort.

Ideas that are self-consistent. Just not consistent with how the universe seems to be.

Atkins suggests one way of reviving deep structuralism: by weakening it.

We could resort to weak deep structuralism, assume that mathematics can throw up a froth of many classes of object, and then accept that only some of those objects have their physical counterparts. That is weak-weak deep structuralism.

He presses on, coming up with another alternative that produced an intuitive oh yeah! in me. Not because I totally understand what Atkins is saying, or what he's saying is right.

Just that it merits an oh yeah! since it's got a ring of rightness to me.

We may have to distinguish between the universe, which must presumably be self-consistent globally, and a local entity, a brain, which can generate mathematical structures free of the constraint that they need to be consistent with the structure of every electron and the motion of every planet.

The mathematical structure we call the universe may have to be simultaneously, globally, and perhaps nonlocally self-consistent. Our mathematics, the statements we make on paper, need in some sense be only locally self-consistent.

Yeah, I know. This sounds so scientist'ish, so intellectual. But really, what Atkins is saying is deeply mystical and Taoist.

What you can say about the universe, that isn't It. The universe has its Way, and then there's our way. The two are linked, obviously, because we're part and parcel of the universe.

However, all of our theorizing, our hypothesizing, our speaking to ourselves and others, our theologies, our metaphysical systems, our mathematics – all that only has to be consistent with our limited view of the universe to win a stamp of approval.

Meanwhile, I picture the Universe As A Whole sitting in its corner (not that it has a corner, because it's everything, including my imaginary smackdown), smiling.

Sort of how, when I go to the dog park, I see a Mastiff looking at a big bad Chihuahua when it runs up to the much larger animal with a Woof, Woof, I can kick your butt!

Yeah, right.

Brains aren't the universe. We've got to reminding ourselves of that. That way lies humility. And a reverence for mystery, rather than premature explanation.

 

 

 

No beginning, no end. The universe simply is.

Why would you need religion, mysticism, or spirituality to expand your mind? Or, blow it. Science works just fine.

Much better, in fact, because science starts with is rather than what could be. If you're going to expand or blow your mind, you might as well be standing on a solid foundation before you explode into mindlessness.

Take the question of the universe's beginning and end.

Most of us assume that the universe began at some point. After all, the Bible tells us so in Genesis. And if we're scientifically minded, wasn't the Big Bang the beginning of time and space?

No, not necessarily.

Yesterday I was happily reading along in my copy of The Portable Atheist, re-reading an excerpt from physicist Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis (I've already read the book, and blogged about it here and here).

My mind was rolling along fine, connecting ideas cleanly, until I came to this paragraph.

Craig and other theists also make another, related argument that the universe had to have a beginning at some point, because if it were infinitely old, it would have taken an infinite time to reach the present. However, as philosopher Keith Parsons has pointed out, "To say the universe is infinitely old is to say that it had no beginning – not a beginning that was infinitely long ago."

Mind blow! Red alert! Meltdown, meltdown!

I stopped reading. I put the book down. I tried to let the notion of a universe that had no beginning settle into what was left of my mind.

It was an enjoyable, though disconcerting, experience. Like being on the edge of an abyss that would be a hell (or heaven) of a ride if you jumped off.

No beginning. No end. A ride that just…is.

A few pages later, once I got my mind functioning again, I came to this:

While he avoided technical details in A Brief History of Time, the no boundary model was the basis of Hawking's oft-quoted statement: "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

When I wrote about "it is what it is" recently, I wasn't thinking that this was a profound scientific statement. Yet here's Stephen Hawking saying about the universe, "It would simply be."

Taoism agrees. From the Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition (excellent book), verse 14.

Eyes look but cannot see it
Ears listen but cannot hear it
Hands grasp but cannot touch it
Beyond the senses lies the great Unity –
invisible, inaudible, intangible

What rises up appear bright
What settles down appears dark
Yet there is neither darkness nor light
just an unbroken dance of shadows
From nothingness to fullness
and back again to nothingness
This formless form
This imageless image
cannot be grasped by mind or might
Try to face it
In what place will you stand?
Try to follow it
To what place will you go?

Know That which is beyond all beginnings
and you will know everything here and now
Know everything in this moment
and you will know the Eternal Tao

Hubble photo of deep space is naturally divine

There's no reason, none at all, to look for divinity in a holy book, person, building, or icon. The Hubble space telescope's Ultra Deep Field photograph of the farthest reaches of space contains more authentic mystery and awe than any religious dogma.

And readers of the Sunday comics were exposed to it last weekend, thanks to Opus.

Berkeley Breathed, Opus' creator, points to the craziness of considering that we humans are the center of the cosmos. Science has revealed, in countless ways, that the Earth and everything on it is just a part of the whole called Universe.

A very small part. Very, very, very small.

Seeking humility? Embrace science, not religion. Religious believers hold that God looks with special fondness upon the members of Homo sapiens, that we are made in the image of the Creator, that we occupy a pinnacle at the top of creation.

Well, I doubt very much that this is so, since the universe is vastly over-designed if its purpose is to showcase you and me.

The Hubble telescope was trained on a minute speck of space for about a million seconds, 11.3 days of viewing time. As described in this 2004 news release, 800 exposures were taken of a seemingly almost empty small section of sky.

How small? The Opus comic describes it as the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Alternatively, science writer Chet Raymo explained it this way.

Take two pins or sewing needles and, at arm's length, cross them. The small square where the two pins overlap is approximately the visual area represented by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph.

There are about ten thousand galaxies in the image. Ten thousand. An average galaxy has around 100 billion stars. Ten thousand times a hundred billion. That's a lot of stars. Many of which surely have planets. Of which some sustain life. Where, I bet, beings much more sentient than us ponder the nature of the universe in a much wiser fashion than we do.

For we humans are, by and large, completely clueless about our place in the grand scheme of things. Back in my health policy days, I used to give quite a few talks on health care rationing, death with dignity, and other subjects.

I remember going to the medical school in Portland to speak. I asked a class, "does anyone know how many galaxies there are in the universe?" I figured that these science students were good candidates to have an approximate answer. I figured wrong. No one even hazarded a guess.

It's at least 100 billion. Galaxies, not stars. Each of which, remember, has about a hundred billion stars. A hundred billion times a hundred billion. That's more than a lot. It's inconceivable.

Like how God is supposed to be. Except, the universe is really real. The whole sky is 12.7 million times larger than the tiny deep space speck of it photographed by the Hubble telescope. Yet that infinitesimal bit contains at least 10,000 galaxies.

And we're on a planet orbiting one of several hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is 100,000 light years in diameter, another impossible-to-conceive-of number, but which pales in comparison to the 13.7 billion light year distance from us to the edge of the observable universe.

Observable. Not the whole thing.

So come on, religious true believers who consider that your faith knows What It Is All About. Get real. You don't. You haven't even got a glimmer of understanding of what It is, not to mention what It is About.

I'm deeply grateful to live in a time when humans can point a telescope at a minute speck of sky and reveal a hint of the universe's nature. I called it "divine."

That's just a word. But it's a fitting word. For if anything is going to fill us with a sense of divinity, of how marvelous it is to be existent, alive, and conscious, it's the Whole Thing – Universe.

My review of “The Secret” DVD points to a super-secret

Yesterday I found a free way of watching "The Secret," so immersed myself for 90 minutes in an ocean of New Age platitudes. On a pad of paper I jotted down such pearls of positive thinking wisdom as:

Thoughts become things
The Law of Attraction will give you what you want every time
What you think about, you bring about
You are the designer of your destiny
Life is meant to be abundant

The universe must have wanted me to see "The Secret." (A hugely popular book and DVD, as noted in this TIME article). But not spend $4.95 to watch online.

Which raises a criticism my wife had after watching part of the movie: instead of us choosing desires that design our destinies, it's possible that our destinies cause us to choose those desires.

Einstein quotations appeared several times in the movie. Not this one though:

Honestly I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom?

What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."…When you mention people who speak of such a thing as free will in nature it is difficult for me to find a suitable reply. The idea is of course preposterous.

Yet not to the various spokespeople for "The Secret" who appeared in this attractively slick production. Some of them had appealing titles such as "visionary" and "metaphysician."

The hardest science type was John Hagelin, "quantum physicist." His Google results page contains a lot of "world renowned" references, which leads me to think that he isn't. He is, however, professor of physics at Maharishi University of Management, for whatever that's worth.

Not surprisingly, those 90 minutes of positivity left me feeling pretty darn positive. I liked how "The Secret" spoke about the power of the placebo effect in healing (absolutely true), and the benefit of visualization in athletic activities (also true).

And I resonated with emboldening statements such as, "When you have an inspired thought, you have to trust it. And you have to act on it." Plus, "You are the designer of your destiny. You can break free."

The question comes to mind, though: To what extent am I the designer of my destiny? Also, from what and to where am I breaking free? I'm standing beside (more accurately, behind) Einstein on my answers, which are considerably at odds with "The Secret."

Undeniably the universe is seamlessly interconnected. No one and no thing stands alone. My thoughts and actions arise from many sources: genetics, family influences, education, nature, and so much else. Indeed, everything that I've experienced during my life has helped make me the person I am now.

So the notion expressed in the movie that "Whatever you're thinking and feeling today is creating your future" masks a grander reality. What I think and feel today arises from my past. Similarly, what I think and feel tomorrow will be a product of all the preceding yesterdays, as well as the evanescent present moment.

"The Secret" would have me believe that I am a shopper with no limit on my free will credit card, capable of choosing whatever I want from the universe's catalog of possibilities. Wealth, health, love, a cool car, close-in parking space—all I have do is follow a three step ordering process:

Step 1. Ask. Let the universe know what you want. The universe is your catalog. Place the order.
Step 2. Believe. It is already yours. You don't need to know how it will come about.
Step 3. Receive. Feel the way you'll feel when it arrives.

Well, I'm often late driving through Salem to a class or appointment. I habitually think with all my might, "May all the lights be green." Occasionally they are. Can I change the pattern of the traffic signals through Ask, Believe, and Receive?

Undoubtedly there are other drivers on the cross streets who are just as late as I am. They too are asking the universe for a green light. But one of us will get a red. It has to be that way to avoid chronic intersection wrecks. Like the Rolling Stones sang, "You can't always get what you want…"

Nor should you, or I, want to. To live in an interconnected universe is to be part of a whole, not just a part. Would any of us want it any other way? If I could break free from everyone and everything in the cosmos, where would I be? And who would I be?

I don't know. But my guess is that I'd be in a lonely void, wishing (if I still had wishes) that I could return to waiting at a red light, anxiously glancing at my watch, seeing a steady stream of cars pass in front of me, feeling powerless to be on time—wonderfully part of an often frustrating, yet delightfully engaging, world that is beyond both my comprehension and my control.

"The Secret" claims to be a distillation of ageless spiritual wisdom. Not really. It's much more a justification for egocentric materialism, a New Age version of the prosperity Christianity that preaches, "God wants you to be rich!"

Images of the Buddha are shown repeatedly in the movie. I seriously doubt that someone whose teaching centered on extinguishing worldly desires would endorse "The Secret." Wanting, according to the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Plotinus, and many other sages, only leads to more wanting.

Even if the Rolling Stones are wrong, and you can always get what you want, the nature of this universe is change. Health deteriorates. Wealth declines. Parking spaces are driven away from. Green lights turn red.

I was told that "the Law of Attraction will give you what you want every time." Please, spare me this hellish possibility. After fifty-eight years of wanting and getting (along with not getting), what I'm attracted to now is the Law of Unattraction that Buddhism, Taoism, Neoplatonism, Sufism, and mystical Christianity have told me about.

That's the super secret beyond "The Secret." I'd say more about it, but it's difficult to reveal what you're still trying to discover.

All I know, or strongly suspect, is that there's more to life than wanting and getting. My happiest moments have been marked by a peace that passeth understanding. It didn't have anything to do with Jesus. Nor with, obviously, anything else understandable.

It just was. And I wanted more of it. In that wanting, I lost it. So deliver me from the Secret. Give me the Super-Secret. Yet not in a way that I can understand. Surprise me, universe, with what lies outside of wanting and getting.

(Here's another critical review of "The Secret" that I mostly agree with.)

[Next day update: Just read in Matthieu Ricard's "Happiness" that "those who believe themselves to be happiest are also the most altruistic...The interdependence of all phenomena in general, and of all people in particular, is such that our own happiness is intimately linked to that of others."

Regarding research with students: "The satisfactions triggered by a pleasant activity, such as going out with friends, seeing a movie, or enjoying a banana split, were largely eclipsed by those derived from performing an act of kindness."

In "The Secret," I can't recall a single mention of intending a good for others, rather than for ourselves. Yet even me, a selfish soul, has been known to park around the block from a meeting place when I knew others would be arriving after me, because I have no problem walking a fair distance and I know that others do.

This isn't really selflessness on my part, because I got more satisfaction from this little act of altruism than I would have from zipping into a nearby parking space.

The guy in "The Secret" who is so proud of his ability to manifest close-in parking spaces might consider whether a better intention might be, "May the universe give me what is best for all concerned."]

Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness

There’s always another side. To anything. A coin can’t have “heads” without “tails.” Being on this side of the wall implies a that side. So I have no problem flipping the pancake of my “Consider a cosmos with no consciousness” post.

Reading the final pages of Suzanne Segal’s Collision With the Infinite this morning got me thinking about what lies behind, beyond, within, and without my consciousness of thinking about those final pages.

Early on in the book I read that Segal had a profound experience at a bus stop in Paris. In fact, it’s listed in her Acknowledgments:

The Parisian mass transit system, for providing a bus stop in lieu of a bodhi tree.

Suddenly she felt separate from her body, a disconcerting feeling.

“I” was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body’s eyes…Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy on the sea.

Segal had been a long time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation before she became disillusioned with the TM organizational bullshit and ego trips. Yet, she writes:

The thought did arise that perhaps this experience of witness was the state of Cosmic Consciousness Maharishi had described long before as the first stage of awakened awareness. But the mind instantly discarded this possibility because it seemed impossible that the hell realm I was inhabiting could have anything to do with Cosmic Consciousness.

Her book describes the frustration of consulting psychotherapist after psychotherapist, spiritual adept after spiritual adept, none of whom could explain what had happened to her. Segal eventually earned a Ph.D. in psychology, which didn’t cast light on her condition either.

On her own, with the aid of some intensive meditation, she got it. Which essentially was: Segal was it. Or you could say, IT. That’s all there is. One substance she likes to call “vastness.” In other words, the infinite.

What seems to have occurred at the bus stop in Paris is that the human circuitry of this life started to participate consciously in the sense organ with which the vastness is constantly perceiving itself. The vastness is the substance of all things, existing everywhere simultaneous with the appearance of form.

…The human circuitry is made of the same substance. When it consciously participates in the sense organ that the vastness is always using to perceive itself, the human circuitry becomes aware—not through its own sense organs, but through the sense organ of the vastness—that the substance of the infinite is its naturally occurring state.

Cool. And believable. I liked Segal’s book a lot more than I thought I would. I was prepared for New Agey pabulum. But she drew me in with her apparent honesty and forthright determination to figure out what had happened at the bus stop.

For a long time Segal thought that she was going (or had gone) crazy. That indeed is one interpretation of her dissociated state of consciousness. But she eventually concluded that if the cosmos indeed is only consciousness, realizing this is so “awesome” (a word I don’t like much, but Segal does), it’s crazy to expect that the experience is going to be akin to anything familiar to her, or us, now.

The infinite reveals itself to the mind in mysterious, unimaginable, and ungraspable ways. But the mind, by its very nature, tends to reject what it cannot grasp…In my case, the mind mounted an all-out effort to pathologize the emptiness of personal self in an attempt to get rid of it. This attempt proved unsuccessful.

…Life is being lived out of the infinite substance of which it is made, and this substance—which is what and who we all are—is constantly aware of itself out of itself. What an extraordinary way to live!

Indeed. And a scientific way also, in my opinion. For the vastness of the cosmos clearly is conscious, in some mysterious fashion, of the laws of nature that are identical with the vastness of the cosmos.

As above, so below, it’s often said. But to Segal, there’s no “above” or “below.” Just It.

Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

I’ve always thought that the “we create our own reality” folks didn’t have much of an argument to stand on. It just seems so darn obvious that the universe stands apart from any conception of it.

How we perceive the cosmos certainly depends on our sensory and cognitive capabilities. However, that there is a cosmos—however it may appear—prior and separate to any perception struck me as self-evident common sense.

In other words, I considered that the universe stands on its own (anthropomorphically envisioned) feet. While we humans are able to create subjective realities within our minds, the grander cosmos outside our cranium is objectively real, existing independent of any consciousness of it.

But a thought experiment is leading me in a different direction: I try to imagine a cosmos with no consciousness. No human awareness. No animal awareness. No plant awareness. No alien life form awareness. No angelic awareness. No awareness of any kind. None at all.

(Note: I consider “consciousness” and “awareness” to be terms pointing to the same mysterious phenomenon, as this Wikipedia article implies).

Now, this is where the thought experiment should end, because it’s already failed. For I’m aware. And awareness, or consciousness, obviously can’t envision a cosmos with no awareness, for the same reason I can’t picture what the world would be like without me in it.

Nevertheless, I keep forging ahead because the experiment is so intriguing, ignoring the impassible existential abyss that’s stopped me in my tracks.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

Still, my thought experiment has led me somewhere, though not to my intended destination of an imagined cosmos with no consciousness. I’ve understood that different sorts of consciousnesses are aware of the cosmos in different ways. We may not create reality, but our own unique perception of it is indeed created.

However, the question still remains: What is the “it” that any consciousness is aware of? Even if it isn’t possible for any of us to know whether “it” exists independent of awareness, isn’t there an answer that could be known, if it weren’t for that damn existential abyss?

We’re now venturing into the dense jungle of quantum physics, a world that I’ve spent a lot of time exploring, but which still remains mostly a mystery to me. I do know, though, that somehow the quantum domain of reality is intertwined with conscious observation of it.

Physicists agree that there is some intimate connection between the observer, “I,” and the observed, “it,” when it comes to quantum phenomena like photons. Light appears as either a particle or a wave depending on what sort of photon sensing apparatus an experimenter sets up.

But what if there was no conscious observer around to detect any sort of light, whether wave-ish or particle-ish? And the bigger question: What if there was no consciousness anywhere in the cosmos? Would light, or anything else, exist as we know it?

I’m already over my head in the scientific/philosophical sea of quantum physics. If you want to explore these questions with a guide who can actually float on the surface and paddle around, click on over to an interview with renowned physicist John Wheeler: “Does the Universe exist if We’re Not Looking?”

Here’s an intriguing excerpt:

At every moment, in Wheeler's view, the entire universe is filled with such [quantum] events, where the possible outcomes of countless interactions become real, where the infinite variety inherent in quantum mechanics manifests as a physical cosmos. And we see only a tiny portion of that cosmos. Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet fixed.

And here’s the view of another noted physicist, Andrei Linde:

“The universe and the observer exist as a pair,” Linde says. “You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words— it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.

“We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device?

"In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.”

Wheeler and Linde see the universe as participatory. Humans aren’t passive bystanders on the cosmic stage; we’re active creators of reality.

Makes increasing sense to me, as I gravitate toward the Taoist-Buddhist slope of metaphysical explication. I want my spirituality to be grounded in science. Or at least, not floating separate from modern scientific explanations of reality.

For me, a religion that can’t come to grips with the mystery of how consciousness relates to the cosmos isn’t worth holding on to. For somehow our awareness is part and parcel of the universe that we’re trying to be clearly aware of.

We’re Ouroboros.

Who should I thank on Thanksgiving?

For a churchless guy like myself, figuring out who deserves my thanks tomorrow requires some careful thought. That’s because I’m philosophical in addition to churchless.

Sure, I could blurt out simple thanksgivings directed at the usual suspects—wife, dog, makers of the tasty Now & Zen unturkey that we’ll be eating—but that goes against my nature.

I want to get down to the core of this giving thanks business. Follow the trail of thankfulness back to the source. Take care of every possible “thank you” recipient at one primal swoop.

When I began my mulling this morning, my mother and father came to mind. Obviously they’re responsible for my being here at all. I wouldn’t be doing any thanking if they hadn’t engaged in some wintry Massachusetts coitus around the beginning of January 1948.

(Don’t know why, but until today I’d never backed up my birthday nine months. I just realized that I could be the product of some New Year’s Eve sexual celebrating. Way to go, Mom and Dad!).

So at first I concluded that my primal thanks are owed to Carolyn and John Hines, since without them there would be no “I” named Brian who now is capable of doing all kinds of things—such as being thankful.

Yet it didn’t take long for me to realize that without their parents, my mother and father wouldn’t have been born. Hence, not me either. And obviously the thankfulness story doesn’t stop there.

My branching family tree is unimaginably vast. It necessarily is unbroken, since I’m here now. Back and back in time it goes, all the way to the common ancestor from whom all humans are descended. Ah, seemingly there’s the person to whom I should be most thankful.

Except…humans are the product of evolution from other species. Thus my ancestors are chimpanzees, fish, flatworms, single celled organisms, and much more. All of which sprang from a single source of earthly life billions of years ago.

Well, you see where we’re heading. Way back. For the heavy elements that make life on Earth possible came from exploding supernovae, and those stars formed from gases early in the universe’s history, and the universe itself—it burst into being via a big bang.

Thank you, big bang! Finally, a thankfulness stopping place.

Except…big bangs don’t bang into being unless there is a place for them to exist. Which is, existence. In the beginning there had to be existence. Also, I suspect, in the end.

Well, I’ve finally reached my Primal Thank You recipient. Existence, you’re the man! And the woman. And everything else that ever was, is, or will be. God is a piker compared to existence. If God exists, it’s due to existence.

If this doesn’t make sense, read my “Existence exists. Amazing!” That post probably won’t make sense to you either, but at least you’ll see some consistency in my nonsensicality.

This is difficult stuff to talk about. Yet beyond words, there’s an ease to it. Right now I’m aware. I’m alive. I’m conscious. In short, I am.

That is so incredibly amazing, so inconceivably precious, the awareness blows me away. More frequently, the older I get. I gripe, moan, and complain about countless things. However, I’m 100% thankful and grateful about one thing: that I’m able to exist.

I have no idea who or what, if anyone or anything, is responsible for my being able to think “I have no idea….” Still, I can’t help saying, from the depth of my unknowing, thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving. There’s a lot to be thankful for. I am. You are. Wow!

What if this is all there is?

It’s a joke without anyone around to hear the punch line: “Did you hear the one about the people who based their lives on the assumption that God was real and there was life after death? Then they died, and…”

What?

If there is nothing after death, ha ha! Jokes on them. Except, they won’t be around to be part of the laughter. Neither will I. Neither will any one of us.

Which isn’t all that funny. Nor, all that serious. It’s just what it is: a likely reality.

What’s disturbing is the prospect of so many true believers giving up the chance to fully live what may well be the one and only life they’ll ever get. That’s tragic.

I’ve known quite a few people who lived with one eye focused on their afterlife. Not surprisingly, this left them unable to focus properly on the presentlife. They would forego natural enjoyments—sex, having a child, drinking a glass of wine, movies, sleeping late on Sunday instead of going to church—because they expected the next life to be better than this one if they did the right things.

Well, anything’s possible. But the more churchless I become, the more precious each moment seems to me. If this is all there is, then it deserves to be deeply appreciated. And even if life goes on after death, it won’t be this life, which never will come again.

Either way, life is astoundingly precious. It’s to be savored, not chewed hastily while looking ahead to the anticipated next course.

It seems to me that whatever form of spirituality we choose to practice, it should be life-embracing, not life-denying. This might include shutting yourself up in a cave or a monastery, so long as you feel more alive that way, not less. However, for most of us this means living a natural life, enjoying natural pleasures, doing natural things.

Fundamentalists have a strange notion that if you don’t believe in God, you’re not firing on all of life’s cylinders. My experience is exactly the opposite. The more I accept that I don’t know what happens after death, or what the nature of ultimate reality is, the more vivid and divine life appears to me.

Many times a day now—almost continuously, in fact—I’m blown away with a sense of “Wow, I’m here, doing this, experiencing this, though it didn’t have to be this way, and fairly soon there’ll come a time, after I’m dead, when there won’t be any this to do or experience.”

So I disagree with the whole Christian mindset of “What if the cosmos is all that there is?” The proffered answers to this question reveal a complete lack of understanding of what a considered churchless life consists of (by “considered” I mean thoughtful, consciously chosen, sensitively embraced—not just fallen into for lack of an alternative).

To someone who believes that this is all there is, everything in the cosmos appears infinitely valuable, infinitely worthy of reverence, infinitely marvelous. For so far as he or she knows, there is nothing else to which it can be compared.

To someone who believes that this is all there is, life is of infinite value. Life is to be preserved and enhanced whenever possible, for death is considered to be the stopping point, not an avenue to somewhere else. To die for a higher cause may be admirable, but it isn’t expected to bring any reward other than death.

Thus genuine morality, in my opinion, begins and ends with an acceptance of life as it is known to be, not surmised: short, one of a kind, irreplaceable, a gift from an unknown giver.

Drink deep from this present moment. Intoxicate yourself. The wine of life doesn’t flow from a bottomless bottle. It will run dry one day. Wet your lips while you can.

What are the chances you’re right about God?

More and more, for me spirituality comes down to two basics: “What are the chances?” and “The odds are pretty good.” The first question points me toward humble skepticism, the second toward energetic inquiry. Here’s what I mean:

What are the chances…?
--That my chosen religion or philosophy, out of the thousands of religions in the world, just happens to be the one that is right about God, while the others are wrong.
--That any religion or philosophy, mine or another, possesses the complete truth about ultimate reality.
--That once I’ve settled on a spiritual direction for my life, there will no need for course corrections along the way
--That the nature of whatever power or law rests at the root of the cosmos can be described in words by a human being.

On the other hand:

The odds are pretty good…
--That during the thousands of years mankind has been searching for the truth about God, some persuasive hypotheses have been generated.
--That the faculties of my everyday human consciousness are less than what I am capable of, leaving open the possibility of finding new avenues for truth-seeking.
--That no matter what the nature of ultimate reality may actually be, and no matter whether it is possible to fully understand it, progress can be made in its direction.
--That given how the physical laws of the universe seem to lead back to a primal unity, whatever spiritual realities may exist are likely to be reflected in us as well as the cosmos.

In short, I’ve come to look upon spirituality through a gambler’s eyes. I’m more realistic about what I know and what I don’t know. My goal is to clearly see which cards are lying face up on the spiritual knowledge table and which are facing down. I want to end up a winner in this Game of Life, not a loser.

I’ve only watched the game show “Deal or No Deal” once. What I saw, though, helped to confirm my belief that most people are prone to ego-centered magical thinking, whether it be about their religion or about how much money they’re likely to win on a game show that is basically a lottery.

The contestants I watched were prone to disregard the evident low chance of winning a lot of money. Even when they had several hundred thousand dollars in hand, and they faced two out of three odds of going almost completely broke compared to winning a million dollars, they’d “go for broke.” And, that’s just what happened. They went broke.

The Banker on this show has a blog. A recent April 3 entry says about a current contestant: “I don't want to come off as negative, but I can tell it's going to be the same old story with her: nice person comes on show, pushes her luck too far, and gets eaten by the Bank. I can just see it in her eyes... GREED. I love it. She's mine!”

Similarly, most people are way too confident about how lucky they are to possess their current religion or belief system. They are gambling everything on an assumption that it is correct, just as I saw contestants on “Deal or No Deal” roll the dice based on flimsy intuitions such as “I feel in my heart that this is the right thing to do” or “Grandma’s birthday was on the 23rd, so I’m going to pick briefcase 23.”

When it comes to knowing God or ultimate reality we’ve got to think clearly. Understand, as Kenny Rogers advised, when it’s time to fold ‘em or hold ‘em.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
…Now ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

Superstition and conceptual dogma: throw away
Reality and direct experience: keep

Compared to the cosmos, you’re nothing

Like you, my goal every day is to make something of myself. A successful, knowing, active, loving, happy thing. The problem is, on the scale of the universe the value of each of us is vanishingly close to zero. Rounded off to any reasonable number of decimal places, we’re nothing--no thing.

We are small. Very, very small. Check it out for yourself. Each of us is one of six billion people on a planet circling one of 200 billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion or so galaxies in the observable universe, which many physicists believe is but one of a near-infinity of alternative realities in the multiverse.

Well, on the positive side this means that my problems also are nothing. However, being nothing never has been on my life’s to-do list. Like the cartoonist said, “No, I don’t want to live forever, but I damn sure don’t want to be dead forever, either.” So here’s my recommended approach to the Being Next to Nothing problem:

Forget about being something more. Become something less. A lot less. Janis Joplin, along with countless mystics, tells it like it is: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

There’s a big world to explore between us and absolute Nothing. Take this trip down to quantum spacetime foam. And beyond. That’s easy to do in virtual reality. The trick is making it happen in real reality. It’s the adventure of a lifetime, the only thing for a nothing to do, really.

Just watch out for the Total Perspective Vortex that Douglas Adams warned about. It’ll blow your mind. Which, given the anxious, confused state of my own psyche, I consider to be a good thing.

Embracing the oddness of everything

Does life ever seem absolutely weird to you? It does to me. Often. I’ve got some distinguished company in this regard: George Will, who wrote a great piece in Newsweek called “The Oddness of Everything.”

Will shares a bunch of strange facts about the universe culled from Bill Bryson’s book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” Now, facts aren’t really “strange,” “odd,” or “weird.” They’re simply facts.

But when it comes to facts about the basics of life, time, space, and the universe, human cognition blows a fuse. Our brains can’t handle that much reality.

There’s an awful lot of mystery remaining in the cosmos, no doubt. Yet Will shows that even what has been revealed is deeply mysterious and mind-blowing, leaving aside all that we have no clue about.

For example: “If all the stars in the universe were only the size of the head of a pin, they still would fill Miami’s Orange Bowl to overflowing more than 3 billion times.”

Suddenly I feel very, very insignificant. Which is how I should feel.

Will also points out that the body of every person has about 10 thousand trillion cells. We’re made of trillions of trillions of atoms, so he says that lots of atoms—perhaps billions—in each of us have been recycled from Beethoven. And Jesus. Indeed, everyone who has ever lived.

Suddenly I feel very, very significant. Which is how I should feel.

For the mystery of life and the cosmos is that we’re simultaneously so nearly nothing and so nearly everything. We’ve learned that our sun is one of some 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is one of some 140 billion galaxies in the universe. We’re nothing.

And what is responsible for this learning? Human consciousness, which somehow is able to reach out and touch the edges of the deepest mysteries of existence. Who knows? Take a single step over that edge and we may very well find out that We’re everything.

It’s the oddness of all this that Will eloquently speaks about. We’re poking around the periphery of “this,” whatever the heck it is, and the more we learn about it, the more we realize that it’s way freaking beyond our capacity to grok.

The scientific advances in understanding cited in Will’s essay should make humankind deeply humble. Deeply uncertain. Deeply cognizant of how much remains to be learned about who we are, how we came to be, and where we’re headed.

“Wow!” “Oh my god!” “What the _____!?” To my mind, expressions like these are the only truly honest religious utterances. Confronted with the fundamental mysterious oddity of creation, what else can we say?

I liked how Will ended his essay:

The greatest threat to civility—and ultimately to civilization—is an excess of certitude. The world is much menaced just now by people who think that the world and their duties in it are clear and simple. They are certain that they know what—who—created the universe and what this creator wants them to do to make our little speck in the universe perfect, even if extreme measures—even violence—are required.

America is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging, clashing certitudes. That is why there is a rhetorical bitterness absurdly disproportionate to our real differences. It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right. One way to immunize ourselves against misplaced certitude is to contemplate—even to savor—the unfathomable strangeness of everything, including ourselves.

Existence exists. Amazing!

There’s something. And I’m part of it, as are you. This simple fact is so amazing, it should be a daily wonderment—the Wow! that keeps on wowing through all of life’s routines and trivialities.

Existence exists. Seemingly there could have been nothing, though this is a subject that philosophers love to debate: can “nothing” be? Parmenides, I seem to recall, said “no.” Calling something nothing makes it something—a nothing. Buddhists similarly speak of the emptiness of emptiness, though speaking in this fashion fills the void with words, displacing the emptiness.

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For me, existence pure and simple is absolutely real, though I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted it. I have no idea what it is, this essence of everything that can’t be a thing itself and certainly isn’t nothing either. I feel it much more than I think it. Not emotionally, but like sensing an invisible presence in a dark room that you know you’ll never be able to put your finger on.

Yet, is there. Oh yes, is surely there. So there, it’s more there than solid, substantial things. Existence somehow can make us starkly aware of its omnipresence without revealing the barest hint of its essential nature (assuming it has one).

My experience of the mystery of existence seems to be more abstract than that related by others. However, we seem to be touching the fringes of the same profound sense of wonder. John Horgan, for example, writes in his excellent essay “Beyond Belief”:

One of my fondest altered-state memories dates back [to] my late teens. I was sitting alone on the porch of my parents' house on a warm summer night. My mother and father had gone to a party, and my brother and three sisters were in a room just above me watching television. There was a kind of urgency in the air; the trees shimmered like dark flames against the starry sky, and the crickets and cicadas seethed and pulsed toward a crescendo. So loud was this insect symphony that I barely heard the inane laughter from a television sitcom drifting down from the open window above me.

I was suddenly overcome with astonishment that I exist, that the world exists, that anything exists. I wanted to run upstairs, grab my siblings, and tell them to stop watching that stupid TV show and pay attention to the miracle of being right there in front of them. Fortunately, I restrained myself. But everything I have learned and experienced since then has reinforced my sense of the unutterable mysteriousness of things.

Horgan notes that a British Buddhist, Stephen Bachelor, wrote about a similar experience. This, Bachelor says, was not “an illumination in which some final, mystical truth became momentarily very clear. For me it gave no answers. It only revealed the massiveness of the question.”

Yes, the question is massive indeed. As massive as everything that exists, and then some. Leibniz phrased the query as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Unlike Bachelor, though, Leibniz answered his own question: Because of God. That’s an unsatisfying answer, but it worked for Leibniz. I have to ask a follow-up, though: “Why is there God rather than nothing?”

In the end, the mystery of existence is insoluble. I’ve read all or part of some heavy-duty philosophical books on this subject, and I’m pretty sure that the authors would agree that either Leibniz’ question can’t be confidently answered, or the question itself is meaningless (See “The Mystery of Existence” by Milton K. Munitz, “The Faces of Existence” by John F. Post, and “The Philosophy of Existence” by John Micallef. None of these books could be called light-reading.)

As was noted in an earlier post about Plotinus’s vision of the One, even a cutting-edge physicist such as Brian Greene, who is used to dealing with exceedingly abstract and far out cosmological concepts, says that a primal state of existence beyond space and time as we know it “pushes most people’s powers of comprehension to the limit.”

Still, I believe that even this is an understatement—pushes over the edge is more like it, presuming that you open yourself up to the mystery of existence and let it serve as a spiritual bulldozer. Or, if you prefer an attractive rather than repulsive metaphor, as the Mother of All Black Holes.

Existence is warm, fuzzy, and all too familiar if you keep yourself at a fair distance. But, as Horgan and Bachelor experienced, lurking beneath the surface of our habitual everyday perceptions is something more. A lot more. So much more that we can’t even begin to imagine it.

Plotinus called it “the One.” He said that you’ll never know it from the outside. However, if every possible distinction between you and the One is erased, then you can know it from the inside, as your very self. Which makes perfect sense (Plotinus was a rational mystic), for if we exist, then knowing the nature of Existence with a capital “E” should be feasible.

The problem is, few of us genuinely want to be one with Existence. Or, if you like, “God.” The prospect of being sucked irrevocably into that freaking ultimate mystery of all mysteries is just too much for our egos to envision, much less actually experience.

Believe me, I can relate to Horgan’s honest words: “One morning, I confessed to my journal that in spite of my professed interest in cultivating mystical wonder, I am actually quite content to remain in my ordinary dull-witted state. Deep down, I fear confrontation with reality. I keep it at arm’s length by turning it into an intellectual puzzle.”

In my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” I wrote back in 1994: “The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life remain only so long as we ourselves are a part of the puzzle. If you have done your best to fit together the puzzle, and find—as has the new physics—that some pieces needed to arrive at a complete understanding of existence seem to be missing, consider this: is it possible that the very consciousness which is trying to solve the puzzle is the only missing piece? Is there a way for you, yourself, to become the piece which completes the jigsaw puzzle of reality?”

I still think so. And I’m still trying to become that missing piece of the puzzle.

I am. Existence is. That’s the logical answer to the Big Question. But logic isn’t experience. I’m still waiting for the Cosmic Bulldozer or Black Hole to push/pull me from the idea into the reality. Patience, grasshopper. Patience.

[Those who want to dive right away into an intellectual black hole of philosophical musings about the mystery of existence can click here, here, here, and here.]

Meditating like an extra-terrestrial

What sort of spirituality would be practiced by an extra-terrestrial being? I find this an interesting question, one which points to a more practical question: “What sort of spirituality should be practiced by us right here on earth?”

Many people have pondered how the world’s religions would be affected by the discovery of extra-terrestrial life—particularly life from a civilization much more advanced than ours. Physicist Paul Davies, in his article “E.T. and God,” observes that Christianity would have the biggest problem with the discovery of alien superbeings because “of all the world’s major religions, Christianity is the most species-specific.” Jesus died for humanity’s sins, not those of extra-terrestrials.

Buddhists and Hindus, says Davies, “would seem to be the least threatened by the prospect of advanced aliens, owing to their pluralistic concept of God and their traditionally much grander vision of the cosmos.” Agreed. But this still begs the question of what sort of spirituality aliens would practice. How would Buddhists and Hindus have to expand their religions to accommodate an extra-terrestrial spirituality?

Or, would any expansion be needed at all? In other words, is there a common ground in Buddhism, Hinduism, or other capacious religions which could comfortably accommodate an alien religious expression?

Consider physics. Almost certainly the basics of human knowledge about atoms, molecules, elements, and so on wouldn’t be affected by contact with an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization. For these aliens wouldn’t be so alien as to live in a different universe.

They likely would perceive physical reality with different sense organs than ours, and “think” (if that is the right word) about what they perceive with different cognitive faculties. But earthly and E.T. physicists would be able to bridge these gaps by using the Rosetta Stone of material existence. However a hydrogen atom is described, with whatever words or symbols, that atom undeniably exists apart from the descriptions.

However, what would be the Rosetta Stone, or common ground, of earthly and alien spirituality? Obviously it couldn’t be any historical event that happened on only one planet (such as Jesus’ incarnation), since this wouldn’t be part of a shared reality. And it also couldn’t be a theology or metaphysics dependent on culture-specific concepts, for vast differences would almost certainly exist between earthly and extra-terrestrial cultures.

I think bare naked consciousness has to be the common ground. Not thoughts, emotions, and what-not that clothe consciousness, for these would be unique to humans and unique to aliens. And also not conscious perceptions of physical reality, for these are, by definition, of material origin. Thus I keep coming back to consciousness plain and simple when I try to imagine how earthlings could share a sense of spirituality with alien beings.

If a spiritual reality exists apart from the physical it can only be known by consciousness. Otherwise it would remain unknown. The nature of consciousness is a mystery. Yet it is clear and evident to both you and me right now. This is why it is such a mystery: obvious, yet hidden; right in front of our eyes (and also behind our eyes), yet unseen.

I meditate every day. I like to try to form my consciousness into an alien consciousness. I don’t know how well I’m succeeding. I haven’t met an alien with whom I can attempt to share meditation experiences.

Still, I suspect that any technologically advanced extra-terrestrial civilization would have explored the consciousness that produced those advances to as great a degree, and likely much more so, as has our own civilization. They would have stripped consciousness down to its core, to its essential irreducible reality—just as earthly scientists seek to discover the root of physical matter, energy, time, and space.

I like to imagine that the essence of my consciousness is the same as an alien consciousness. Maybe this can be called “soul.” Maybe it can’t. Whatever it is, whatever it can or can’t be called, I strongly suspect that the more empty it is, the more alike it is to extra-terrestrial consciousness.

I probably will never meet E.T. on the outside.

But I might be able to meet E.T. on the inside.

Big bang stretches the mind

I’m a big bang addict. The one that created the universe, I mean. That’s the Really Big big bang. Other big bangs necessarily pale in comparison, for the original is what created everything in existence.

I’ve read countless books and articles about the big bang. I never get tired of trying to envision what can’t be envisioned with the limited human mind.

How is it possible that the entire universe was once much smaller than a sub-atomic particle? What force could end up creating one hundred billion galaxies (or more), each with an average of about one hundred billion stars, along with the precisely configured laws of nature that evolved people like you and me who now ponder the question?

I was excited when the March 2005 issue of Scientific American arrived. On the cover was a teaser: “Big Bang Bungled: 6 Common Errors about the Expanding Universe.” Inside was a fascinating piece by Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis, “Misconceptions About the Big Bang.”

They start off by saying, “The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist…Since this discovery [of the big bang], the expansion and cooling of the universe has been the unifying theme of cosmology, much as Darwinian evolution is the unifying theme of biology.”

The big bang was the moment of creation. Whether you believe in God or not, it is undeniably the moment that separates the profound Mystery of our ultimate origin from the lesser mystery of how we and the universe as a whole have evolved from that explosive beginning some fourteen billion years ago.

Understanding how creation has unfolded from the big bang doesn’t reveal the Creator. The power that lies behind the big bang is as much an enigma now as it was forty years ago. This is when evidence for the expansion of the universe was first discovered: background microwave radiation that fills the entire sky. But it makes sense to me that some clues, however subtle, about the nature of the Creator must be present in the big bang.

So far the clues I’ve discerned lead me to this succinct conclusion: Wow! And that one word, in my opinion, better conveys the nature of our source than thousands of pages of theological or metaphysical suppositions. You don’t need anything other than modern science to feel a sense of awe, even reverence, toward a creative power that is utterly beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.

As I’ve written before, reality is the best religion. Scientific literature often is much more inspiring to me than religious texts because an ounce of reality is better than a pound of guesses.

That said, the Scientific American article observes that even “renowned physicists, authors of astronomy textbooks, and prominent popularizers of science have made incorrect, misleading or easily misinterpreted statements about the expansion of the universe.” In large part this is because the big bang blows the mind. Even a highly trained and intelligent mind.

Yet so many people are confident that they know a lot about the nature of God, the Creator, even though the fundamental nature of the creation—which seemingly should be much easier to discern—is still a mystery even to advanced scientists. If the big bang is so difficult to understand, it stands to reason that the power lying behind the big bang is vastly more impenetrable.

Read the Scientific American article.

Try to imagine the big bang as an explosion of space and time itself, not an exploding of matter/energy from a particular location into preexisting space and time. For it is.

Try to imagine space expanding at more than the speed of light. For it is.

Try to imagine how much of the universe is forever beyond our knowledge, light emitted from distant galaxies never being able to reach us due to the expansion of space at greater than light speed. For it is.

And after trying to imagine these and other almost unimaginable attributes of creation, try to imagine how it is possible to imagine anything about the Creator that lies unseen behind it all.

If I’m sure of anything about God, it is that imagination doesn’t lead to ultimate truth. Reality lies elsewhere: beyond the mind that imagines God and the big bang.

Creationism is blasphemy

Gosh, there are still five hours until Sunday, and I feel the spirit moving me to write the Church of the Churchless equivalent of a “fire and brimstone” sermon. Reading a New York Times article, “An evolution in teaching: Fear of religious fundamentalists keeps the topic out of the classroom,” via the Portland Oregonian yesterday got me incensed about how ungodly a blind belief in creationism is.

Brothers and sisters, I call upon you to open your hearts and minds to God. Cast out the evil of creationism. Vow that you will never allow the wiles of devilish ignorance to turn you from the Almighty Truth. Worship the Creator who made heaven and earth, not the blasphemous creed of creationism.

Look around you and marvel. God is not obvious, but God’s works are. Until we are able to behold the Creator’s countenance directly, gazing upon the face of Creation is how we can best discern God’s qualities. Do not turn away from the immediate truths of this physical reality, for this will distance you from the greater truths of spiritual reality.

There are those who would substitute the insubstantial beliefs of man for the unchanging Truth of God. Do not trust these creationists. They elevate their subjective interpretation of a few words in a book over the objective evidence of the actual Creation. The delicious fruits of God’s majesty stand directly before them, yet they cast their eyes down to discredited notions from unreliable texts.

Evolution is the Creator’s will. Creationism is mankind’s imagination. Whenever you deny the evident facts of science and embrace a mere belief, you worship a false idol. God will not be mocked. The truth will win out. It is our sacred duty to fight on behalf of the Almighty. Take up your God-given arms of crisp reason and clear perception; do not let our children be deceived by the anti-God of creationism.

I read in the newspaper yesterday that teachers are avoiding the topic of evolution, “fearing protests from religious fundamentalists in their communities.” Fundamentalists they may be, but religious they are not. They are blasphemers, God-deniers, dangerous humanists. They seek to blind our children’s eyes to the glory of God’s creation. They want to confuse students with purely human conjecture instead of allowing them to know the truth of how the Creator willed creation to be.

My friends, we are becoming a Godless country. Americans are much more likely than people in other nations to accept the heresy of creationism. The United States is last, dead last, in a ranking of how knowledgeable citizens in twenty-one countries are about evolution. We should be #1 in knowing God’s reality. Instead, creationists are succeeding in keeping Americans ignorant of the power and glory that manifests as evolution.

From the One came many. All living beings are relatives of the same Common Ancestor. There is a direction to life: Upward. We can begin to discern the nature of the Creator through the laws of creation.

This is the truth. Stand firm and do not let the devilish forces of superstition and ignorance into people’s minds. Crush the malevolent seeds of creationism before they sprout. Face toward the light and shun darkness.

Above all, protect the children:

Evil: made by man or God?

“Evil” is a word much in fashion after 9/11. Bush loves to use it, as in “we will root out the evildoers,” but if he was asked to define the term, I doubt that he’d be able to do it. This isn’t a knock on Bush, because last Thursday three philosophers spent an hour on PBS’s “Philosophy Talk” discussing the nature of evil. Even they didn’t come close to agreeing on an answer.

The two hosts of Philosophy Talk were joined by Peter van Inwagen, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame. He said that there is a distinction between “radical evil” and “bad things.” Examples of radical evil are Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, people who are way over at the dark end of the good-bad scale. The things they do are truly horrific, not merely bad—like stealing, parking in a handicapped space, needlessly killing an animal.

It was generally agreed that natural disasters can’t be called “evil,” even the tsunami that killed over 150,000 people. Yet a man or woman who brutally killed just a few people could. The main difference between nature and humankind is that men and women supposedly have free will, while nature just acts, well, naturally. No one gets angry at tectonic plates for shifting and creating an earthquake. But if an evil genius could willfully produce a massive destructive earthquake, the outrage would be incalculable.

Free will, then, seems to be a prerequisite for evil. Absent free will we just have bad things. If a large fir tree fell on my house during a windstorm that would be a bad thing. If someone with a chain saw willfully caused the tree to fall on my house, that would be an evil deed. At least, so argues common sense and the law.

However, the philosophy talkers raised some points that blur the distinction between “natural” and “willful” disasters, especially if you believe in God. Prof. van Inwagen, a Christian, argued that even God, an omnipotent and omnipotent being, can’t know what people will do with their free will. This helps explain why God, who also is considered to be omnibenevolent, created a universe that now contains so much evident evil.

In the Christian view, the progenitors of humankind were given free will and then made bad choices. This caused a separation from God which made things even worse. Now we supposedly have been left to our own devices, which includes evil-doing, while God watches from afar, unwilling or unable to eliminate the bad stuff in our world. We made our own mess, and now we have to deal with it.

There are many problems with this theological premise. If you’ve got a high tolerance for philosophical argument, ponder the “Evil” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Or as much of it as you can understand, if you’re not familiar with symbolic logic. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

What properties must something have if it is to be an appropriate object of worship, and if it is to provide reason for thinking that there is a reasonable chance that the fundamental human hopes just mentioned will be fulfilled? A natural answer is that God must be a person, and who, at the very least, is very powerful, very knowledgeable, and morally very good.

But if such a being exists, then it seems initially puzzling why various evils exist. For many of the very undesirable states of affairs that the world contains are such as could be eliminated, or prevented, by a being who was only moderately powerful, while, given that humans are aware of such evils, a being only as knowledgeable as humans would be aware of their existence. Finally, even a moderately good human being, given the power to do so, would eliminate those evils. Why, then, do such undesirable states of affairs exist, if there is a being who is very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good?

What one has here, however, is not just a puzzle, since the question can, of course, be recast as an argument for the non-existence of God. Thus if, for simplicity, we focus on a conception of God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, one very concise way of formulating such an argument is as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

It’s hard to refute this argument. Once we conceive of God as a person who is “very powerful, very knowledgeable, and morally very good,” it’s almost impossible to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of such a being. This is why I strongly lean in the direction of an impersonal monistic God—One without a second. For if there truly is God and also what is not-God, then the contradictions laid out in 1-7 above are virtually inescapable.

On the Philosophy Talk program it was pointed out that even seemingly natural disasters like earthquakes can be traced back to God. For if God created the universe, He/She/It also created plate tectonics and all the other laws of nature that cause earthquakes to happen. So there is a divine intentionality behind even the “blind” destructive forces of nature, which perhaps is why they often are called “acts of God.”

My personal suspicion is that what we call “bad” and “good” happenings are just that: things that simply happen. They are caused, but the ultimate causes are difficult, if not impossible, to discern. This means that a judgmental word such as “evil” is, as several callers to the program argued, a way of rationalizing feelings of anger and of compartmentalizing people/events that we don’t understand.

Once Osama bin Laden is labeled an “evildoer,” we don’t have to try to comprehend his inner nature. We just have to try to kill him. Yet bin Laden himself calls America evil. One of the hosts of Philosophy Talk observed that half of bin Laden’s message that was released around election time was rantings and ravings, but half made pretty good sense. But if we write bin Laden off as someone qualitatively different from ourselves, evil with no hint of goodness, then he can be objectified as a Satanic thing rather than a Human person.

I don’t use the words “evil” or “bad” very often. If someone asks me about a movie that I didn’t enjoy very much, I’m much more likely to say “I didn’t like it” than “It was bad.” Not liking means that the movie scored low on my personal good scale. It lacked goodness. This is quite different from considering that it reeked with badness.

Plotinus, my favorite Greek philosopher, held that there is nothing but the Good, or God. However, the Good can manifest in an infinity of ways, from One all the way to essentially zero—just as heat ranges from absolute zero to as high as you want to go.

“Cold” isn’t the presence of something; it is the absence of heat. Similarly, my wife and I both believe, along with Plotinus, that “evil” isn’t anything real in itself; it is the absence of good.

Maybe the word itself contains a clue to its meaning. Spell it backward: LIVE. So long as we live, there will be evil. Until we are One.

Scale of the universe

We are small. Very, very small. The universe is large. Very, very large. Most people have no idea how insignificant we, Earth, and even the Sun are in relation to the universe. Even smart scientific people.

Once I gave a talk to a group of medical students at the Oregon Health & Science University. Instead of telling a joke to warm up the audience, I asked them, “Does anyone have an idea how many stars there are in our Milky Way galaxy?” No one knows the answer for sure, but I figured that I’d get some reasonable guesses. Yet I didn’t. I was surprised. (Estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion stars).

Most of us want to have a sense of where we stand in relation to the cosmos. Often you hear someone say, “I felt so connected to everything at that moment.” But shouldn’t we have at least a vague sense of what that “everything” consists of, if such a statement is to possess any validity?

Usually God, the purported creator of the cosmos, is considered to be someone you can have a relationship with. You can relate to him, her, or it on some sort of personal level. This presupposes that God exists on a scale accessible to humans. The creator’s power, wisdom, intelligence, consciousness, love—whatever anthropomorphic qualities we might assign to the ultimate Mystery—are not so distant from our own as to make them impossible to perceive or comprehend.

Well, whenever I start to think this way, I like to ponder the scale of the physical universe. For whatever attributes the creation possesses, the creator seemingly should possess in more abundance. Aren’t a mother and father greater than their baby?

A Question of Scale is a web site based on “The Powers of Ten:” a book and movie that take us on a grand journey up and down from the scale of humans, outward to the furthest reaches of the universe and inward to the equally unfathomable quantum world. I urge you to take Bruce Bryson’s cyber-journey. I did just now and it brought tears to my eyes (but then, I get all choked up over scientific stuff like this).

We have no idea of where we stand in relation to even the material universe, not to mention any metaphysical realities that may exist. None whatsoever. Bryson’s web site attempts to give us a glimpse of the immensity of the cosmos and how small we are in relation to it, but I hesitate to call this an “idea.” Our minds are too limited to hold such an understanding, even if each of us had the mind of an Einstein.

For more mind-boggling, read To See the Universe in a Grain of Taranaki Sand by Glen Mackie. Mackie wonders whether Carl Sagan’s words could be literally true: “The total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”

Since he is a Lecturer in the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in Melbourne, Australia, Mackie is able to come up with an answer to this question. In short, yes, the stars probably do outnumber the grains of sand. I’m feeling even smaller…

I’m finding that embracing insignificance can be exhilarating. I rushed back to Google for more web pages and found Steven Dutch’s Scale of the Solar System and Universe. This is a more straightforward treatment of the subject, but it has some nice sand-related facts. I learned that if the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across.

Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—maybe not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

Good God. I have no idea, none at all.

And that, for sure, is the wisest thought I’m going to have today.