On Being Eve

My ministers, Rev. Bob and his wife, Rev. Lilly, are enlightened. Nevertheless, like all the males I've met (my own husband included) he's occasionally a little chauvinistic . Lilly keeps this in check and Bob's friends know he's well-intentioned and ignore it. Yet, I was a little surprised he did a recent article on the Adam & Eve story where women get all the blame. He was talking about esoteric symbolism and I'm pretty sure he doesn't take Genesis to be literal. He did, however, kind of blame women for evil. So is it our fault?

Yes...and no. Only half the story was told, Adam's view point. I've got an alternate version:

"Good morning, Eve. Fine morning in the garden isn't it?"

 "Hi, Mr. Slither. I haven't seen you around here before."

"I just came by to pay my respects to His newest creation. Thought I should warn you, tho. His majesty is being a little deceitful about the whole "leave the magic fruit alone thing."

  "What do you mean deceitful?"

"To start with, what did he say to you Eve?"

 "Me? He didn't say anything to me. He told Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil lest we become like gods."

"See! Isn't that a little misleading? How are you and Adam supposed to choose the good if you can't tell the difference?"

 "You've got a point. Sometimes it's hard to figure what he really wants from us."

"Besides, he never actually said anything to you about the fruit, did he, Eve?"

 "Well, no. Not to me."

"Who are you created for? Didn't he make you as a help-mate to Adam? Shouldn't you be looking out for Adam and not His Majesty? Don't you want Adam to become like a god? Come on, now Eve. Don't you think he set this up so you could pick the apple for Adam? Then he won't be breaking His Majesty's commandment."

 "I guess if I ate it first we won't be breaking his commandment." Eve takes a bite. "Wow, this apple thing is pretty good. Awesome! It changes your whole world view!  Duality! Two valued logic.! I can see divisions of choice everywhere!"

"See! Now that you can see what's what, you can see that this whole thing is a setup. His Majesty rigged the game. Now you can enlighten Adam as to the difference between right and wrong. Between left and right. Between black and white. Between good and evil."

 __________________________________________

I love to blame my husband for pretty much everything that's wrong with life. After all, wasn't it Adam's fault for not being able to handle things without a help-mate. To blame our whole sex for evil just because we discovered it, well that's just not the whole story is it?  

Since it's not the whole story, I'm going to need a part 2 to come...

Evolutionary Deism

Evolutionary Deism

I have found so many errors associated with an unexamined assumption in discussing the nature of the Divine that I finally feel compelled to addressing the issue. The assumption is this: that an atemporal being can be completely exist within the framework of time. This is going to take some explaining because, unlike "God", we humans do exist within the framework of time.

First let's consider whether or not evolution exists. On second thought, let's not. Evolution exists. Period. It is a scientific fact. Since Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace so many pieces of evidence for biological evolution have accumulated that to disregard them for a non-scientific "theory" pretty much requires throwing out our entire understanding of the universe. There are differences between a scientific theory and any old crackpot proposal, the first of which is that a scientific theory needs to be testable. This is a problem for some really interesting proposals such as string theory as an explanation for all observed physical phenomena, much more so for creationism in its usual form. Evolution exists in ourselves, in biology, and even in those awful engines that allow life to exist at all - the stars. Everything we know of changes. Everything we know of evolves. Why, then do we exclude the Divine from change?

Twentieth century paleontologist/philosopher Tielhard de Chardin in his seminal work, The Phenomenon of Man, envisioned the Divine as "the Omega point". De Chardin saw God as the limit point of evolution. I am in complete agreement. A centralm myth in the esoteric philosophy of the Kabbalah is that the angels (which we can think of as the intelligent operators of cosmic principle) were granted a boon by the supreme Deity. The boon they requested was to participate in the creation/construction of the universe. Our reality has not been presented to us as a fiat accompli. It is moving. It changes. It is alive and we are participants in its life. Voltaire's statement: "Si Dieux n'existe pas, il faudrait l'inventuer. {If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him}" was probably meant as a sarcastic comment on the inability of humanity to stand on its own two feet and take responsibility for his actions. Yet I have adopted it as my personal motto. We, like the angels, are involved in the creation of the Divine.

As creatures within the framework of time we cannot always see the effects of the ripples of our actions (for want of a nail, shoe, horse, battle, war was lost...) but we can be quite sure that for every action an equal and opposite reaction will occur. Karma is quite real for the simple reason that our consequences have actions. The universe around us changes because we change it. Too often do we use only minuscule foresight. Yet, at the boundary of time we can sense the Alpha Omega that exists outside of time. The meditation of the moment can align us with the joyful Creation in which we, like the angels, are participants in creating a living God worthy of the highest ideals and dreams of humanity.

Om. Peace. Om

To The Children's Children

TO THE CHILDREN'S CHILDREN

Recommendations to the Descendants

    Thornton Wilder's "By the Skin of Our Teeth" chronicles a family of man that survived the extinction of mankind multiple times thru the course of history. They survived by the skin of their teeth. Today's generation  faces another horrific challenge to human existence. The Earth is essentially a closed ecosystem. Our experiments in building closed ecosystems have failed to achieve long term human habitability.  The only successful bio-system we currently know of is spaceship earth. We members of the rat-race have overpopulated and gnawed the insulation to the point that it threatens the life support systems. The ozone layer insulating us from deadly U.V. radiations is breaking down. The icecaps are melting at a pace that threatens the inundations of the seacoasts. Water tables that provide the irrigation for major food producing areas are dropping at alarming rates. Heating from the hydrocarbons we've pumped into the atmosphere by the undisciplined use of fossil fuels have guaranteed that the world will see a period of increased desertification with wild fires burning the remaining mitigating forests. The spectors of mass migrations, starvation, and disease loom over humanity. We baby-boomers are to soon leave the world in a mess. The future looks grim.

Yet, I have a great deal of faith in future generations. The future has looked pretty grim before. In 1962 I was a young teenager living very near what was most likely the number 2 priority target for Soviet missiles, the Cheyenne Mt. complex of NORAD responsible for all of the air defense communication of the U.S. and Canada. During that infamous two week period of October my mother stated that she expected nuclear war to break out at any minute. It looked as if we would all be reduced to radioactive ash. By the skin of our teeth, we survived. I have faith that we, as a species, will continue to survive and thrive. Thus, I want to pass this message on to future generations: have hope; all is not and never will be lost.

My parents generation faced the demon represented by the Nazi's and won. The threat of domination by an insane dictator passed but left the A-bomb. My generation faced the demon of all out nuclear war and won. Though it is perhaps probable that nuclear arms will be used again,  likelihood of all-out, life extincting nuclear war is no longer with us. Yes, it is almost inevitable that our lack of foresight and collective greed are going to result in ecological disaster. It's the problem we you of the future. Have hope for you will have a future.

There is so many predictions of disaster out there that it's time to look at the positive alternatives. Science and technology are often unfairly blamed for the state to which we've our influence on the eco-sphere evolve. Personally, I think most of the responsibility lies with corporate entities which by their very nature (the quarterly stockholder's report) seldom look very far into the future for the consequences of their actions. Be that as it may, I am convinced that some of the greatest positive hopes for the future lie in science and technology.


This does not mean that we must necessarily abandon all of the positive benefits that technology has brought us. New ways to generate clean energy are being investigated.

As suggested in Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Days of Rain series science offers many possible methods of mitigating the affects of global warming.

 Most of all, your generation has the opportunity to begin to look at what Bucky Fuller called "spaceship earth" in a new and integrated way where mankind is not the master of the planet but a passenger and custodian.

The recent movie Tomorrowland (at this date Disney's first real S.F. movie) gives a parable of two wolves:

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves
 One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.
The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"
The old chief simply replied,
"The one you feed."

quoted from http://www.sapphyr.net/natam/two-wolves.htm.

On Approaching Death

On Approaching Death

A letter to a relative

I must say that I disagree with your "atheism" regarding the afterlife. While I admit I'm a bit agnostic myself, I lean strongly towards the idea that something of the person survives death. Eliminating the trite argument that a negative can never be proved I think there is quite a bit of evidence for this. Which ever of the family goes first, I plan to meet up with them beyond the veil. So, you're not going to get away from being pestered by the rest of us by the easy out of dying.

I'm going to disregard the argument passed down verbally from first century cultists claiming that their leader came back from the other side. If (saint) Thomas who knew the principals first hand can demand to be shown, I figure I'm entitled to a little scepticism. Nonetheless, I think the preponderance of evidence is on the side of there being an afterlife.

I have three main points that incline me to this viewpoint. First is the simple recognition of the Law of Conservation of Everything. A recent Smithsonian magazine reported that biologists believe they will soon be able to use the DNA from stuffed specimens of the carrier pigeon to bring it back from extinction. I once had a great conversation with my graduate philosophy teacher where we pondered the idea that eventually science may progress to the point where we can resurrect the dead. Matter, energy, and most importantly, information can't be created or destroyed. Everything we can observe about the universe leads me to the conclusion that it's frugal.

Secondly, there is some really interesting research on the near death experience that indicates there's more to life than, well, life. There are several websites on NDE and the one I found recently that appears to attempt a very unbiased scientific approach is Horizon Research. They report a really interesting case recently where a woman with a tumor on the brain stem was refrigerated and "killed" so that she had no measurable signs of life - 100% flatline - which allowed surgeons to operate. The risky surgery was successful and she was revived whereupon she related details of the procedure she observed while dead that it's extremely unlikely she could have known or guessed at.

Lastly, I have had some rather unusual personal encounters with the afterlife. These are of the nature of past life memories. Take these with a grain of salt (I certainly do). I can't definitively say that they are actual "memories". I can only say that they have the same quality as consensus reality "memories". They "feel" the same.

In the first case I had woken from a sound and dreamless sleep concerned about what to do for the upcoming birthday of a good friend. With no money, I couldn't get her a present.For some reason I immediately started dictating a story for her as I "remembered" it (she was interested in all forms of psychic phenomena). What I remembered was the occurrence of two parallel past lives in 13th century Germany. In one I was a village herbalist. In another, I was a baron of the same area and officiate of the Roman church. Very briefly: the baron was desirous of the herbalist and when she spurned him he used his influence to have her burned at the stake. Later, the baron was riding a horse across a wooden bridge when the horse threw him, he hit the railing and broke his neck. The most interesting part of this vision/imagining/memory is that it didn't end there. I, as the baron, was ushered by a figure like Dante's Beatrice through a judgement kind of scenario where he was shown the herbalist burning in hell. Looking on the herbalist in the pit from the point of the baron, I became the herbalist suffering in the flames. This continued until I realized that I was there because I had denied the Christ under the baron's torture and thought myself worthy of this punishment. When I realized I wasn't, I was released from hell immediately and the peculiar vision/imagining/memory ended. I went on to give this strange tale to my friend as my birthday present.

In the second case, about twenty years ago a friend had taken a seminar on past life regression and (as I'm a good subject for hypnosis - learned self-hypnoses quite a while ago), we decided to experiment. I went into a self-induced trance and my friend used the techniques she had learned to guide me back through time. I was the wife of a Roman charioteer. In my friend's apartment I suddenly started coughing extremely violently and snapped out of the trance. In the trance I had been suddenly enveloped in a cloud of gas that was burning my lungs and I couldn't breathe. I had, of course, heard of Pompeii where the Vesuvius eruption had buried everyone in ash. That didn't fit the experience. I found later that at Herculaneum, a small seaport nearby, a burning cloud of gas had smothered people in a manner similar to my "past life" experience.

Finally, I am with Saint Whitehead who is attributed with saying the universe preserves value. I don't need to always be the same person I am now. I certainly wasn't in the past. What is important to "me" is that my values survive. If love, intelligence, the appreciation of beauty, harmony, music, if these things survive then surely the best parts of this personhood have survived.

So, though I reserve the right to change my mind, I'm convinced that something of us survives beyond death. I hope to see you there.

Not any time soon, though.

The Seal of Solomon

There Are Many Mansions

 

  On a Spiritual Interpretation

 of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics

John 14:2: "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you."

A couple of days ago my father in law asked me to listen to a CBC podcast about (among other things) quantum gravity and the role of imagination in physics and give him my feedback. This appealed to my ego as he is no intellectual slouch. Appealing to my ego is a successful strategy in motivating me to write. Besides, I'd been thinking for some time of writing an article about the many worlds interpretation of QMech and it seems the time is ripe.

Werner Heisenberg's now famous Uncertainty Principle (which he mathematically  proved from accepted and verified physics equations) is that one cannot know with exact precision both the position and the momentum (directional velocity multiplied by the mass) of an object. This was the death knell for classical physics. The widely held opinion of the time, that all of physics was essentially known and that all that was left was mopping up was shown to be false. The billiard ball universe of the late 19th century where everything could be completely predicted from the initial state play came unglued.

Two interpretations of this uncertainty were available: 1) that observation interfered with the observed phenomena because of a limitation in the observation or 2) space-time itself had a certain kind of uncertainty built into it. To paraphrase the Copenhagen interpretation, space-time was itself as holy as Swiss cheese.

Surprisingly, though new to physics, this was not a new problem at all. It was a very physical version of Zeno's Paradox.: you can't get anywhere at all from where you are now. It begs the question still unanswered by today's physics: is reality discrete or is it continuous? The current answer appears to be that at the distances of the Planck wavelength space-time is discrete. Distance itself comes in little quantized packages. I'll come back to this point later but for the moment let us focus more on what the U.P. might mean for predictability.

Keeping in mind the Copenhagen interpretation of the U.P. we note that there are many possible ways a physical system may develop from a specific state and they are all dependent on probability. Since the mathematical description of how wavicles (wave/particle dualities) propagate is the Scroedinger equation which intrinsically incorporates probability rather than trying to determine exact outcomes, the outcomes themselves are probabilistic.

Suppose that the wave equations predict an equal likelihood of two possible outcomes then there is no a- priori reason why one outcome would be favored over the other. This leads to the ""Many Worlds" interpretation of  quantum mechanics. The idea is that there is a multiverse, a multiplicity of universes, in which every possibility is played out.

Scroedinger himself formulated his famous cat paradox from these elements. Suppose, he proposed, that a cat is put in a bell jar connected to a device set to dispense a lethal gas if a geiger counter counts enough radio active decay in a certain time period. Since the radio active decay of substances is governed by quantum effects that have probabilistic properties can we predict that the cat (after a certain time) whether will be alive or will it be dead?

It's a very famous problem. I'm convinced that we human's tend to look at it the wrong way. Instead of looking at it from the viewpoint of the rather heartless experimenter, let's look at it from the point of view of the cat. I.'ve met some strange cats in my time. I think our cat is just a little bit nuts. However, I have never met a suicidal cat. From the viewpoint of the cat, it's never in the universe where it is extinguished. The wave form of  it's consciousness ALWAYS COLLAPSES TO THE STATE WHERE IT LIVES.

In essence, the consciousness of the cat has made the choice as to which universe it's in. This puts a whole new slant on the idea of how our consciousness affects the universe around us. Maybe imagination is not just a mental creation tool, maybe it affects our physical reality.

"the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..." Sir James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (1930)

Burning Questions

On the Existential Focus of the Tanach

   
    The talking bush told Moses "I AM THAT I AM". Here is the central epistemological tenant of the religions of the book. The divine is an existentialist. "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam", says Popeye the sailor man. "Yah cant's define me cause I gets to do that." "I am a verb", said Bucky Fuller. I'd expand that to I am a vector (directional change of mental coordinates with respect to time). A tensor even.

    Are we to conclude that God (an nebulous term at best) is a burning bush? Any burning bush in general or a specific burning bush? Yes we are.

    I was recently reminded of an old joke:
DEFINITION OF A PHILOSOPHER: a blind person who is looking for a black cat in a dark room.
DEFINITION OF A THEOLOGIST: a person who claims to have found it.

    The problem with ordinary language in coming to terms with the divine is that it is self-referential. In this scriptural passage god (and I'm not going to capitalize the term anymore as I'm not referring to any specific subset of the conceptual universe) himself is self referential . The Tao that can be told is not the tao. What did god have to make the physical universe from? As THE apriori, he had himself. All substance is necessarily first spiritual or at least divine. As I state in my essay on the 1st Commandment, any attempt to reference the divine ("God") is only a hand wave in the general direction of, rather than a specific pointer to, the nebulous referent.

    So, is god actually giving Moses any information at all here? Yes. I think two very important principles that defined Judahic theology and inform Christian and Muslim theology are given here:
1) the universe is self referential and therefore fractal.
2) the creative free will of the divine is embedded in us and therefore the correct approach to purpose must necessarily be existential

    The meaning of principle 1) is that however we categorize our thought the closer we look at the borders of those categories, the less clear they become. There is no "us and them."
    The meaning of principle 2) is that we get to define meaning in our lives. To truly identify with the Creator ["A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson]. we take part in the creative process. We get to choose! His Endlessness has made us junior partners. How wonderful!