Category: The Mysteries of Us

What I Believe

Something is watching out for us. I don’t know what. Call it God if you like. Why do I believe that?

First, there’s all this perfection. Examples of perfection are never more than an arm’s reach away. I had this thought as I waded through dry leaves under a great linden tree after three weeks of midsummer drought. Stressed by too little water the tree sheds its leaves, cutting down transpiration to save water. Automatically it tunes itself to the conditions, keeping its leaf surface area just right and returning the nutrients to its feet. Absent some blight or the chainsaw that tree will go on doing that for hundreds of years without our laying a hand on it. Perfection. Virtually all the organisms we see are perfected to live in their current environment.

I don’t doubt that this is the product of natural evolution but I feel sure that there is something driving it, transcendent, infinitely powerful and ubiquitous. This force inhabits and invigorates nature’s realm, set it going in the beginning and keeps it running. Extend your senses, shut down the filters which are only there, after all, to keep us safe and alive. Perception does not equal reality, not by a long stretch — this has been proved over and over. If we reach beyond the survivalist chatter of our verbal reasoning we can feel it. Know it. And know that it is looking after us. Not gently. It permits all nature of savagery, excess and barbarism. It allows genocide and starvation in one country while other countries like Qatar throw money around like confetti.

One indicator is how every now and then this divine caretaking shows up in a single, identifiable moment when it saves us from falling all the way into global darkness, evil and destruction, coming to the rescue of the good and the wholesome, sometimes through the agency of a single human at a single moment. General von Rumstedt decides to halt his panzers 15 miles short of Dunkirk, ensuring the survival of an allied army that will eventually shorten the thousand-year Reich by nine hundred and ninety years. Vasili Archipov refuses to acquiesce in the decision of his two co-commanders to launch a nuclear torpedo at a critical moment of the Cuban missile crisis and literally saves the world from nuclear annihilation. Single decisions that changed the entire history of the species. You could say we got lucky those times but I don’t think so. At Dunkirk the weather was critically important; calm and clear for six long days, enabling sailing dinghies and little runabouts to cross the Channel. I know; there’s nothing miraculous about that but the timing was literally perfect. In the Soviet era Archipov’s independence of thought and courage of his convictions were virtually unknown, doubly so in the ranks of the military. Everyone followed instructions. I can’t prove it but I believe these were not rolls of the dice: we were saved.

I believe that it will often be a close-run thing but as long as there are enough good people in the world, (the ten good men of Sodom?), and most people are fundamentally good, that force of goodness will save us and the good world and, at times, show up in something that we can see and name. Jesus Christ was its epitome. Reminders appear in the form of the virgin, as avatar. After three separate Papal enquiries by appointed ‘Devil’s Advocates’, deliberately chosen atheists, we still have no explanation for what happened at Fatima. We were visited, spoken to, in human language. An explicit warning was given. Either three illiterate shepherd’s children in a rural Portuguese backwater had their finger on the pulse of Russian politics or a miracle took place. The warning was ignored and Russia and peoples all the way to the middle of Germany endured 70 years of misery and massacre. There have been other such miracles and not only in the Christian epoch.

The question is what do I do about it. Be as good as I can, obviously. But why do I and so many others feel the need to do more, to reach out, communicate, supplicate, humble ourselves and give praise and thanks? It is more than the essential homeostatic urge to bind with our neighbour and support the good and powerful among us in the interests of communal survival. It is a deep thing, a fundamental. Faith. We long for faith. Indeed if faith can be named as a thing among things, not sui generis, then it is an emotion. One of the basic emotions that we are kitted out with, along with love, hate, grief, joy and the others. Psychologists say, and they are right, that wellness requires the expression of a full range of our emotions, and every emotion contains within itself the powerful urge to share it with others. It’s why we have love songs and hate preachers. We are literally built to have, and share, the emotion of spiritual faith and without it we are incomplete, just a transport vector for water and cellphones.

Of course many, even most people are not aware of this potential for faith. But everyone who has ever asked themselves. “Is this really all there is? This the whole deal?” is feeling its absence. They just don’t know it. People of faith don’t ask themselves that question.

Which raises another question: why do we have the capacity for this emotion, faith in a higher being? Can we be furnished with with such an essential emotion as faith and it be based on an illusion? I think not. If we are made to be creatures of faith then there is something there that is to be the object of that faith.

God. We are designed to believe in God. It is universal. Truly atheistic societies have been rare, short-lived and chaotic. So I’m inclined to believe in God, aware of my desire for faith, but to be honest, most of the time it is not enough. I’m just too damn rational. Fortunately, realism in the 21st century, scientific rationality, has come to our aid. Thanks to advances in physics, belief in a creator is now the rational choice.

Traditional rationalists, the Richard Dawkinses of this world, would have you believe that faith in the supernatural has been superseded by our deep understanding of the natural universe, right down to the quantum level. We start out by discovering that thunder and lightning are not displays of the wrath of gods and advance to the present day to where there is no need for divine explanations of anything: we understand the world, we see how it works.

Well, as we will see, we don’t.

That proposition worked pretty well for a century or so but around the middle of the 20th century it began to unravel. I’m talking, if you haven’t already guessed, about the fine-tuned universe.

I think it got going with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why could no two identical particles in a system not be in the same state? And more importantly, how is that when you force one particle into a state already occupied by another its counterpart immediately changes state, regardless of the distance separating them? We don’t know – it just does and has been shown to do so in experiments that are now almost commonplace. Simultaneous interaction at a distance with no connection or information being transferred. It should be impossible. Showing this experimentally was, in my opinion, the point at which traditional rationalism started to come apart.

Far greater steps have been taken since then. Thanks to computer modelling and a hell of a lot of mathematical legwork, we are able to say what the universe would look like if the force of gravity, for instance, were just a shade stronger or weaker. The short answer is a universe totally unable to evolve or support life.

What about the weak nuclear force, the thing that keeps electrons orbiting protons? A fraction of a percent stronger and electrons would bind so strongly that no compounds could form. The same degree weaker and the electrons would fly off and everything would just be some formless stew of undifferentiated matter. Obviously, again, a universe without life.

The fact is, gravity could theoretically have any value. Likewise the weak force. There are no fundamental principles behind them – they just happen to have, within a tolerance of ten to the power of a ridiculously large number, the exact values needed to create and sustain a universe with stars and galaxies and planets like Earth. And, amazingly, the same can be said of literally dozens of other universal constants. Introduce the most infinitesimal variation and it all comes apart.

The same is true of life itself. In the mid-20th century there was a lot of excitement about the ‘primordial soup’. A couple of scientists sealed methane, hydrogen and ammonia, supposedly replicating the pre-biotic earthly conditions, in a glass container and passed steam over it. This produced a handful of amino acids – the building blocks of life, no less! The crowd went wild.

Alas, later work has revealed that pre-biotic earth was nothing like that. And supposing that chucking a whole lot of amino acids together could eventually produce the exquisite, densely coded phenomenon that is life is like saying, as the great Fred Hoyle put it, like supposing that a giant tornado blowing through a vast junkyard could leave behind a fully-functional Boeing 747 (although a single living cell is probably even more complex than a jumbo jet).

I won’t cover the whole subject here – there are plenty of works already doing that, and it’s huge – but get to the end point: maintaining a ‘rationalist’ conviction that life is accidental requires the rationalist to believe in something so unlikely that believing some lucky chancer could win Lotto week after week for years would be a safer bet.

The fact is that traditional rationalism now requires a far greater leap of faith than any deist has to face.

Some unimaginably intelligent force with unlimited agency created the universe and then, with a second wave of the almighty hand, created life, and us.

It is the only reasonable conclusion.

There you are: God exists. Science proves it. The rest, however, is supposition. I happen to believe that Jesus Christ, and possibly Gautama Buddha, were dropped in at the right time to give us some direction as to the deity’s intentions for us. They came along a mere few hundred years apart, i.e. simultaneously on any evolutionary or geologic time scale. It was time. I wonder if humanity was not going through some kind of phase shift around then, but we are too far down among the weeds to see it.

Perhaps one day science will prove those things too, although I doubt it. Never mind. I see no harm, and much good, in taking it on faith.

What I Believe — It Gets Stranger

It’s a process, this business of trying to understand the deeper dimensions of human life. At the time I wrote What I Believe I was not in possession of information that has since come to hand. Although I have nothing to renounce in that earlier essay, new discoveries take it further – much further.

Two very peculiar and unforgettable events have continued to puzzle and challenge me for decades. In 1969 I had the experience described in my post Another Force of Nature, where my mother 1,200 miles across an ocean absolutely knew that I was in serious trouble in Sydney and, thank goodness, acted on that knowledge. Two years later, in Bangkok, I had a vivid dream in which I was terrified by two Americans who, in a few hours, would walk into a room, identify themselves as FBI agents and do me serious harm. I saw into the future. I have always felt greatly blessed by those two events because they allowed me to know with a great deal of certainty that the Newtonian/Einsteinian view of space and time did not describe the limits of what we consider reality. Thanks to In My Time of Dying, an extraordinary book by Sebastian Junger, I just might now understand the true state of things. At least insofar as they can be understood because as Junger points out the comprehension of matters involving quantum mechanics may exceed the design parameters of the human brain.

We now know that neither physical reality nor the flow of time are anything like how our perceptions construct them. It started with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, moved on to quantum entanglement and has now arrived at the point where it has been experimentally proven that consciousness influences reality. Subatomic particles subsist in many places at once, each place being no more than a probability that that particle is in that position. But when we observe a particle it instantly coalesces into a single point. What’s more we can know that particle’s location or its momentum, but never both. Observing the particle blinds us to one or the other, always, as a law of nature.

That’s right. Just looking at something changes it in a provable, measurable way. This flies in the face of everything we consider rational and real. It is so alien to the way we think that many great minds have suggested that we may never understand it because our minds are intrinsically incapable of doing so. As Nobel physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” There is a temptation to regard the incomprehensible but real outcomes of quantum experiments as interesting but to us irrelevant events taking place only in laboratories. That is an error – quantum mechanics are at work in every atom of our bodies and the world around us, all the time. Recent computer modelling suggests that quantum entanglement plays an important role in our neural network. And what we observe, how we observe, is in all likelihood shaping external events and processes. We must learn to live with astonishment and incomprehension.

Which raises the question of what is meant by that ‘we’. Great meditators and many experimenters with hallucinogenic drugs share the experience of the non-separateness of living beings. Now that we know that consciousness changes objective reality there is every reason to suspect they may be right. We know of many instances of ‘hive mind’ in the natural world. What if all consciousness is one great hive mind, something our primordial antecedents may have experienced? We know that our senses are filters developed by evolution to process information in ways that enhance our chances of survival. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion the senses remove data; that is what filters do. Our senses shape our experience of reality by making us ignorant of much that is there to be observed. That approaching sabretooth tiger was so important to our survival that we learned to filter out birdsong, weather, and the falling of leaves to see only the tiger. Importantly, our senses and our minds limit our observations to what our individual biological organisms can perceive. But that may not reflect the true state of consciousness. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay “Experience”: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” An impressive observation for someone writing in the early 19th century.

I have come to the hypothesis that at some point way back in the evolutionary chain we broke our hive mind into apparently individual, separate instances of consciousness because that enhanced our chances of survival. Each separate biological pre-human organism then had its own, specialised instance of consciousness highly focused on taking care of itself. But perhaps the hive mind persists below our level of perception, breaking through under great pressure. Hence in 1969 my mother in Auckland knew with certainty that I was in serious trouble in Sydney. Is this universal consciousness what we call God? Why is there not a single human society that did not, historically, subscribe to some version of divinity? The belief that there is something conscious, with agency, that is greater than us and inhabits a universal realm is uncannily persistent across all humankind.

The ancient Hindus said that there is Brahman, the material world, and Atman, spirit or universal consciousness, and that they are the same thing. I’m starting to think they were right.

While we are at it, nor is time the linear absolute we perceive it to be. In the early 2000s scientists in the Canary Islands performed two sequential versions of the famous two-hole experiment with two entangled photons in which the second experiment caused the results of the first experiment, in the past, to change. Maybe under great stress we can also break the flow of time. It would explain how in Bangkok, in extreme danger, I was able to see in a dream the two men who in a few hours would turn up in my ‘real’ life and consign me to a hellish prison.

Astonishment, but perhaps some comprehension.

My thanks to Greg McGee for tipping me off about Junger’s wonderful book and to Robert Lanza for his thinking about biocentrism. See https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/

Sam Harris, Free Will, the Brain and Me (or You)

Two items of information have popped up close together on my personal timeline which seem to shine a bright light on the long-debated question of determinism, so staunchly advocated by Sam Harris in his book ‘Free Will’, which I haven’t read and don’t need to read since he has already paraded the gaping flaws in his argument on YouTube.

The delightful Philosophy Tube (thanks Holly) led me to an address by Mr Harris in which he trotted out what seems to be his schtick: free will is an illusion because we don’t create our thoughts, they just occur as a result of all the previous influences coming to bear on the instant of their arising in our brain. Since we don’t create our thoughts, says he, we’re not responsible for them and the idea that we control our mind and therefore our consequent decisions and actions is an illusion.

I was irritated that in both the presentations I viewed that no-one thought to challenge his conflation of spontaneous thoughts with what is clearly a subsequent volitional process. “You might be sitting there, listening to me, trying to pay attention, and you have the thought, ‘Yeah, he does look a bit like Ben Stiller,’” he joked. This is true, but he fails to note that you then have a choice: wander along that pathway – ‘Hmm, I don’t think he’s as funny though, he’s taller,’ whatever –  or tell yourself to stop and pay attention to the content he’s delivering. Nothing advanced by Mr Harris even starts to convince me that this subsequent decision is pre-determined by all previous influential causes. In fact, he doesn’t even raise the subject, perfectly happy to treat random thoughts and deliberation as the same thing. But we all know they are not. Yes, thoughts pop up. But then we – we! – take over. We exercise judgement, draw conclusions, not at all as a deterministic process but by the exercise of will. Free will. Obviously our previous life experience, our genes, whatever, will influence this, but the choosing part is something we are absolutely in charge of.

Volition arises out of desire. What do we want? Science, experience have amply demonstrated that within certain limits we can train ourselves to want certain things and not to want others, the obvious case being addictions. We learn to want something that we previously had no interest in. Millions work every day at ‘becoming better people’ and many succeed. Action-reward feedback cycles kick in. We weed the old lady’s garden, feel good, do it again because we want to, become a better person. We make choices that changes us.

Harris would say that this is also deterministic, because it’s all just synapses arising out of previous synapses in an ineluctable, iron train of events.

For starters we can confound this proposition by using a logical trick. Our every brain moment, says Harris, is nothing more than the product of our past. Therefore our life runs on rails we can do nothing about. Determinism rules.

But life isn’t like that. We can and often do choose randomness, buying a lottery ticket being the obvious example. (I suspect Mr Harris has never bought a lottery ticket.) After that, what happens is greatly influenced by chance. So much for determinism.

But I am sure it’s all just a blind alley anyway because Harris commits a greater sin of conflation, equating the mind with the brain. No-one has ever established that the mind is equivalent to the brain. Harris boldly declares that science says they are the same thing but that is simply not true. The mind certainly operates within the sphere of the brain but it has yet to be scientifically demonstrated that they are the same thing.  In fact we are still not even sure what the mind is.

On the contrary, the other tidbit that came my way would seem to indicate, in a perfectly ‘scientific’ manner, that they are not. Recently a team from Nottingham University conducted research on people who had suffered cardiac arrest and survived. Of the 140 interviewed 37% said that they had coherent, memorable experiences while clinically dead. The brain shuts down within 30 seconds of the heart’s stopping. Yet these people went on having intelligible, often out-of-body experiences after this time limit. One interviewee experienced himself floating above the scene, in a corner, watching and hearing everything that was going on. He recalled a machine beeping twice.

His precise description of the scene was supported by those present. The machine he heard beeps once every three minutes. This man continued as some sort of entity, clearly with a mind, when his brain was dead, his body lying with its eyes having ceased to send signals to his brain. Yet he saw, for a period of at least three minutes.

Let’s just pick at this to be certain we understand its significance. For something to be scientifically provable, it has to be repeatable under the same set of conditions. But scientific proof is not the same thing as truth. If a pig flies once, somewhere, even if no-one sees it, then it is the truth that pigs can fly. It has not been scientifically demonstrated, proved, but it is the truth. This man, dead, continued to have conscious experiences. These were the same experiences, seen from another perspective, that the live people were having in the same time and place. It is not scientifically proven, but unless everyone involved is lying or deluded it happened. It is the truth.

We have heard these stories forever. They tend to be more or less similar. I conclude that what I have long suspected is true: my mind, me, inhabits my brain but it is not my brain. The preconditions of my brain do not absolutely determine what I do and the choices I make. They certainly exercise a very powerful influence. Changing course is difficult. I have always had major difficulties with impulse control so I know what I’m talking about. This is my personal life challenge: to not follow every impulse, to guide my actions by will and reason. It’s hard, but I do it.

I also detect in Harris’s presentations a common corrupter of scientific objectivity: the promotion of a virtuous outcome. Science is objective. It doesn’t care whether the world comes to an end, whether we are good to each other. Science is the study of what is. These days we see the scientific discussion about climate change high-mindedly distorted by the wish to achieve a desirable result, the continuation of comfortable human life. Data are suppressed, exaggerated, knowingly misinterpreted, because it’s good that they should be.* This is where science stops and preaching starts. Scientists should not preach.

Harris is preaching. He goes quickly to arguments for compassion. “If we truly understood that even the worst criminals really had no choice in the moment of their crime,” he trumpets, “we would have no hatred, seek no retribution. We might have to lock them away, but we wouldn’t hate them.” Which would certainly make for a better world. He advances logical reasons for philanthropy, saying that people who help others need have no religious reason for doing so, it makes sense anyway.

In fact in the two of his presentations I saw he spent more time preaching than discussing theory. That alone, casts a long, dark shadow over his credentials.

Sorry Mr Harris. You have not proved one damn thing.

* For the record, I’m a climate change doubter but not what is commonly called a sceptic. It is simply a fact that some of the IPCC data has been fudged in the ‘right’ direction, which doesn’t prove or disprove global warming. It’s just the truth.

I was just about to … the Psychic Connection – Proved!

I was just about to call you. Surely the most common white lie of them all. But not always, and it may be the truth far more often than we imagine. This is my conclusion after three years of eerily simultaneous connections with a close friend. I’m now able to confirm, for myself at least, what I and many other people believe: that a communication without any visible connection between two people at a great distance is not only possible but may be common.

There are two kinds of proof. The first is by the scientific method. This requires a ‘control,’ a matching set of circumstances to the test environment minus the agent which is being tested. The standard double-blind randomised controlled trial of drugs is the most well-known example, and when the results are conclusive the world at large accepts the proposition as proved.

The other kind of proof is statistical. When something happens far more frequently than chance would predict, we can say for sure something is going on, but that’s all. What? Sometimes, often, there’s no way of knowing.

telepathyI have had a particularly close friendship with someone for three years. We are often apart and keep up with each other with texts and phone calls. The simultaneity of our connection occurs way, way more often than chance would predict. It has become commonplace for me to pick up my phone to call or text my friend and at or around that moment the phone rings or a text arrives. What does commonplace mean? At least one contact in four, perhaps more but certainly not less is simultaneously or near-simultaneously initiated at both ends. There are no causes. We just connect when we feel like it.

I say a quarter to be on the safe side – I actually think it’s more like a third. Why don’t I know? Because I’m reluctant to count, or ask her to count, in case it goes away. I have tried to get her to connect, focusing my mind, imagining her picking up the phone to call or text. No result. Whatever this is it is not connected in any way to the conscious mind and I fear the intrusion of consciousness may destroy this wonder. A wonder which has nothing to do with distance. It happened, repeatedly, when we were on opposite sides of the earth.

Spooky, eh? One day we may know what this is, how it works. But I hope not. I’ll plump for the mysterious but true any day.

That’s all. Scoff away.

The Cosmic Paradox of The ‘Virgin’ Mary

via The Buddha Christ – Pagola Erects a Lighthouse | Play With Strangers.

One of the many understandings I drew from reading Pagola: the story of the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Birth of Christ which we celebrate each Christmas was all quite clearly made up, something apparently accepted by all serious biblical scholars. How little I knew. Two gospels, Mark and John, don’t mention it. Luke and Matthew have contradictory versions. Pagola goes further though, putting it in the context of the midrash haggadah, a Jewish tradition of fictionally expanding on the lives of the great and holy with the intention of deepening our understanding of who they were, what they were like. A devotional tale, if you like.

The early church really went the doctor on it, revering Mary as ‘ever (i.e. always) virgin’ in spite of the fact that Jesus is specifically stated to have brothers in the New Testament. Probably sisters too, but women counted for so little it would be quite natural for them not to be mentioned. From the Annunciation story we are supposed to understand that she always knew he was the son of God incarnate in spite, again, of the gospel account of her accompanying her other sons on a mission to bring Him home after he supposedly lost the plot after his sojourn in the desert.

Fine. Nice story. But here’s the weird, weird thing. Of all the possible Biblical presences who might be supposed to be watching out for us, it’s Mary who keeps turning up. I made quite a study of Fatima. In spite of the Church commissioning more than one ‘devil’s advocate’ to debunk the story, no-one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain what happened in Fatima in 1917. Three illiterate children talked about trouble in Russia, reporting information which they completely failed to comprehend. Three weeks later the Bolshevik revolution erupted. When they asked the apparition who she was, she answered ‘I am the immaculate conception,’ words they again failed to understand but repeated to others. When separated and terrorised by the local police, all three steadfastly refused to recant. These are little peasant kids. Finally, of a huge crowd who had been told to expect ‘a sign’ (and that’s all) at three o’clock on the final afternoon, the great majority described exactly the same vision, the so-called Dancing Sun. Mass hypnotic suggestion can be ruled out.

I find it most logical to conclude that the apparition was real and genuinely treated the crowd to the promised spectacle. It didn’t physically happen, of course, but that’s irrelevant. There were cameras and reporters present; it didn’t show up on film. The point is that there is no known way to cause a crowd to experience the same vision with neither prior suggestion nor technology. Just in case you think the word spread through the crowd in some form of ripple effect, there were simultaneous identical or highly similar reports from as much as 15km away. The question which I keep revisiting after reading Pagola is: who is this? Lourdes. Guadalupe. Walsingham, not too far from here. All instances of the same miraculous presence. I’m now starting to look back and elsewhere and starting to find parallels which I will update but my thesis is already formed: there exists in the universe a benign entity, female in our understanding, long predating Christ, which has real agency in the world. Which is, in short, looking out for us.

Usually I post completed propositions. This time I’m looking for suggestions. Any takers?