Everything Is Happening On All Possible Levels At All Possible Times

I realise now that the type of Reality I have been trying to describe is nothing more than a collection of fluffy, amorphous blobs - clouds of vagueness which trap us and make us forget their form, like the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. 


I have spent a lot of time blithering on about the grandiose things - the very fashionable cosmological discoveries which lend themselves well to those romantically, philosophically and magniloquently predisposed - in order to reveal some Big Important Headlines about who we are and what we are doing here.  (Have a look at my Everything Really Is Waves blog for a link to the beautiful chromoscope, which shows most elegantly how many levels of Reality are manifest in the skies.)

Yet we can get equally lost in the clouds of the very small.  The kindest British doctor on television without a moustache, Michael Mosley's new series Inside the Human Body is an incredible and intrepid Innerspace-type journey through the human body.  Using cutting-edge (ha! funny because there is also a lot of graphic imagery of surgical procedures!) CGI imaging based on what we have actually observed happening inside us, the programme paints us as planets - enormous colonies for autonomous, exquisitely alien cells.  It becomes very quickly apparent in watching this show that we have little to no control over the vast majority of what we do.  Our breathing, our immune system, our digestion, our emotions, our blood supply - in fact, everything which keeps us alive - is nothing to do with at all, much as we have colonised our city, our country, our planet, without it having any say at all.  

And it is miraculous.  

There seems to be a current trend at the moment in the media- every generation has had an apocalypse to face, but ours is shown in high definition, backed up by data, and all the more terrifying as a result - to find the unity between humankind, to try to remind us of all we have in common and therefore how much we all have to lose.  Humility based on facts - how I wish that this could be what defines us as an era, rather than the looming tsunami of disaster which seems ever-present (although it may well be that the distinctly apocalyptic tip the weather seems to be on at the moment may not strictly be climate change just yet - much of the most recent catastrophes - in Pakistan, in Australia, in the US, in South Asia - have been attributed to La Niña).


But sharing a common genetic heritage and corpus operandi is not nearly all.  


Beyond the cellular level, we are atomic.  Each cell is made up of incredible strings of proteins, made from amino acids, each made from tiny ornamentations of elements, bound inextricably together.  Each atom is a combination of protons and electrons, separated by comparatively enormous distances of nothingness.  Beyond that, we are at the quantum level, which (as I most recently blogged about) is tantamount to a different reality altogether.  In fact, each layer of existence is in itself a different Reality, as separate as it is inter-connected, each organism both a universe unto itself and part of many other universes, like messing with the zoom on a camera, microscope and telescope all at once.

I argued last time that it is possible to argue anything, to believe anything, if you thought about it for long enough.  When you consider how ENORMOUS Reality is, everything really is everything.


As Einstein said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

Of course, it isn't as easy as all that, Einstein.  We have evolved to perceive the world the way we do because it is the most useful for us to survive.  Contemplating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't make running for the bus easier (may even render the whole thing futile and cause us all to lie down like in the video for Radiohead's Just).  It is perhaps just as difficult to understand that we are part of a human collective, part of a mutually upheld present, part of a generation, part of a planet, part of anything.  It is perhaps merely enough to contemplate, every now and again, perhaps while letting the entire planet of your bowels do its unbidden work, this fact.  


We are just as much sketches as paintings:

And it is little wonder that we find so much wonder in all of this, how a "God"-creature can be the only way our mind can cope with the the fluke of its birth - we have accidentally developed to be able to appreciate the vastness, we are fleetingly unbound from our most primal urges to be able to stare, blinking, at what is happening all around us.  It is perhaps redundant to name this feeling, to worship it - this is, however, an impulse which has existed exactly as long as we have had the brains to deal with the Looking Around - but it is important to be grateful for it.  Even the mighty Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was humbled thus:
"All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one Truth.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.
We should not say ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a citizen of the Universe'.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)"

We are, within and without, made of Universes.  

Close-up image of a tumorous pancreatic mass

Simulation of the current most accurate model for the structure of the entire Universe as we understand it

Go On, Be Fickle. Well, You Can If You Want, It's Up To You. Unless....

As is often the case, I recently got embroiled in a conversation which ended up turning into a rather spiky argument (I think it was about the question of porn on the internet). I became over-involved, took everything personally and ended up shouting loudly in the pub, much to the sympathetic disdain of other people in the vicinity (I might add that despite often shouting and gesticulating like a drunkard, I had only had one pint, it's just my way).


Why am I telling you this?  What do you care about my porn views?


I am telling you because I realised, after the intensity of the conversation reached a level of awkwardness that even I could perceive, and piped down a bit, that the line of argument I had taken bore almost no resemblance to my true views.  Yet I had been arguing for them with such ferocity that I had, for that moment at least, truly believed that that was my reality.

I realised that I am a Pathological Devil's Advocate.

I wrote recently that the truest form of love that I could describe was where you and your partner attempted to carve out a worldview together.  I reasoned that it was perhaps easier to have a bounceback boy - someone to check and iron out your responses to the world, in order to better understand it.  This is typically expressed (particularly in my house) in the form of outrageously overwordy arguments.  When we emerge, blinking, from the Argument Tunnel, I often become aware of how far I have strayed from the bounds of my own perceived opinion.  Having berated myself for a long time for my lack of commitment, my slutty morals if you will, I have come to realise that complete fluidity of opinion is much truer to the nature of Reality than we give it credit for.

Welcome to Diesel Island - Land of the Stupid and Home of the Brave

Our society is geared to the individual, to the self.  We are our lifework.  We are our greatest achievements.  (Luckily there is a whole panoply of consumer durables available Right Now at Half Price with a Red Sticker On to aid us in our odyssey, but this isn't a blog about the hypocrisy of capitalism, however this article in Bloomsberg Businessweek both supports and posits a fantastic alternative use for this profit-driven selfishness.)  We are all to strive to better ourselves, and we do this by whittling a personality out of the lumpen mass of our childhood.  How could you possible engage as a socialised, educated, worldly individual unless you have an arsenal of Opinions at your disposal?  Why don't you care about Issues?  Come on, look at them - we will Clockwork Orange you in front of Newsnight if you don't Form Some Opinions About Current Events Right Now!

I believe that we are entirely mistaken in this.

If you have paid attention to the world for anything up to one minute, it becomes very clear that nothing is certain at all.  (Yes, yes, uncertainty and death, fine, you can have those.)

Famous old hag/hot lady picture to demonstrate visual paradoxes

Everything which is true is almost always feasibly untrue at the same time.  The colossal ball-ache of politics is that it tries to separate and create distinction in the infinite gloopy cloud of our reality.  You can literally pick an arbitrary startpoint on any Big Topic - immigration, healthcare, education, foreign policy, warfare - the list is endless - and immediately the opposite is also conceivably true.  Perhaps the opposite view feels uncomfortable, wrong, even, but someone out there thinks that, there will be reasoning behind that view, and therefore the concept can legitimately stand.  (This is where Kantian ethics, in particular his Categorical Imperative - Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law - i.e. if you cannot justify murder as a universal law for all, then you must not murder in any circumstances - sounds reasonable, but the current brouhaha surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, shows clearly that this kind of dichotomy falls away pretty rapidly in the face of Reality.  There are very few Universals.)


Hold on! you cry, that can't be right! The Nazis had a well-argued manifesto but we have universally condemned them as wrong!  What are you talking about?  Why aren't I entitled to my opinions?


Well, hush your beak, for a start, I haven't finished.  The trick of living as a Devil's Advocate is that, if you truly embody a point of view, any point of view, outside of judgement, even for ten minutes, then you have a sense of the other side, a frame of reference from which to sketch out something which feels relevant for you.  Opinion-forming is a personal and malleable thing - what is true for me today is not necessarily going to be true for me tomorrow, but that doesn't make me a shallow, unprincipled person.  Indeed, as Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said:

Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice, for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. 

It is infinitely easier to condemn what is unknown rather than try to understand.  Even "evil" has a rationale.  

Perhaps it isn't so strange that it is so difficult to form views, to cement opinions.  If, as I have said before, the value and clout of science often comes from its being upheld consensually by many, then the closest form of "Truth" we can admit is one which has been proven, calculated and agreed upon by many separate experts, each in their turn having tried to disprove it before acquiescing.  One of the most controversial but niggling "truths" that the 20th century coughed up was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, explained here by Professor Jim Al-Khalili (whose Everything and Nothing you should watch to see quantum mechanics explained with the flair and cinematography of a Darren Aronofsky film).

If, at the very heart of existence there exists an infinity of uncertainty, then it seems somewhat naive to doggedly be chasing certainty throughout our lives, because it doesn't exist.

The Zen Buddhists' famous paradoxes or koans (the tree falling in the forest guys) thought that the acceptance of the inherent unknowableness of the Universe was the quickest, truest and most profound way to Enlightenment - these simple and enigmatic statements cannot be understood by using conventional logic or the part of the brain that seeks certainty - it can only come about through letting go of our reliance on certainty, a deep questioning of all that we take to be real.  


This, ultimately, is at the heart of all scientific enquiry - we cannot rest on our laurels (as the religious do, because it is written) of our description of reality, we have to keep imagining what might be, what is not, what is unlikely, what is not yet proven, in order to keep pushing forward what we know about the Universe.  Here is the almighty Richard Feynman speaking in 1983 about the need for a creative imagination in order to test the limits of theory (which in some cases have subsequently been proven - for example his speculation on the origins of quasars, which we have now discovered and proven) - this is the first part of two on Youtube, but for a clearer and more comprehensive archive of his most inspirational lectures please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/10704.shtml.

So, by playing Devil's Advocate, by loosening your attachments to your opinions and choosing to stand on the other side from what you take to be true, even just for the duration of an argument, is most important indeed, both in terms of reflecting the true nature of the world, and also in terms of its future, for unless we make wild imaginative leaps from time to time, criss-crossing from Right to Left and everywhere in between, we may never grow and we will never learn to tolerate those who differ from us.  As Feynman says: "You can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways."


That sounds like much more fun, after all...

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.
Voltaire 1694 - 1778

Your Soul Is Made of Money

I was musing over the state of my life the other night while trying to get to sleep, and I realised something quite profound.  I realised that every single regret I have, every missed opportunity and moment I wish I could have extended, is at heart down to a lack of money.  Money is the thing which enables life to happen in so many more ways than we like to admit to.  You have money and you are a successful citizen, you can pay your bills, improve your education and that of your children, you will dress well, eat well, travel well, experience much more of life than those without money.  I would very much like to be able to talk about the wealth of experience, spritual and otherwise, which is afforded outside of the magnetic pulse of cashflow, but I fear it is pretty much impossible in the society we have built for ourselves.  Even those who meditate can afford to take time out to stop working for enough time to transcend themselves. 

Is this right?  What are we to infer, for example, from new government policy  - that millionaire overseas businesspeople can enter the country and have normal visa requirements streteched to accommodate them, and, it seems, essentially act with impunity, simply because they have a shitload of cash - other than the clear notion that one's value is inextricable from one's wealth. 

Niall Ferguson (the most smouldering of Historian Bonfires) is currently on Channel 4 fronting a show called "Civilisation: The West vs The Rest", in which he expounds his at times bone-crunchingly honest views about the nature of empire, with the cold yet inexpressibly hot arrogance of a man of complete objectivity (so far as such a thing is possible).  This Sunday's episode, Work, discussed the Protestant Work Ethic as the driving force behind economic growth and modernisation - potentially over 30 million Chinese have moved away from Confucianism and Buddhism (less kerching! more I Ching) towards Protestantism since Mao died, for example, which, Ferguson argues, is one of the main reasons why Chinese ecomonic growth has been so consolidated and so fast, as it once was in Europe and America. 

Once you kill God then what do you have left?  You have man. 
Once you kill the primacy of the Pope, then what do you have left?  You have man as an individual. 

Damien Hirst's The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, a collection of 28 sculptures and paintings first presented at Hilario Galguera, Mexico in 2006.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

When every moment of your life is no longer controlled by edicts from On High, you must introduce a system of self-regulation, which was actually already very neatly done by the twin Protestant towers of hard work and renunciation of material wealth in order to glorify God.  Whereas Europeans used the scientific and philosophical freedoms this world eventually afforded them to experience an almighty existential crisis, the Americans kept the faith but inadvertently fell either into abject greed, or else religious extremism (see last week's post), yet China (so far at least) seems to have maintained some modicum of self-control, saving and investing and building and, subsequently, terrifying the West with its shimmering potential. 

The largest Christian church in Beijing, China http://bit.ly/g9ZhIu

So the question is this: are we content to only take the death of God so far?  I have spoken before about the beauty and ubiquity of myth, story, advernture and legend until very very recently.  The vacuousness and stale, dried-up sick on a Sunday morning vibe of modern Western Europe is such that we end up going through the motions of worship, exhausted as we all are by the compunction to work, but devoid of the glory that working for a God brings.  Guess we're all our own Gods now.

Jonny Depp as Jesus at http://www.magazine13.com/if-celebrities-were-gods/

Can we come up with something which can unite and inspire us, drive us forward into a future, rather than allow ourselves to get so far and give up?  I had a conversation with a Professor of Philospophy the other day who expounded the ontological argument - look at how complex this watch is, we musty infer a maker, look at how complex the universe is, there must also be a maker - genuinely thought we had gotten over that idea at least 250 years ago - and he represented what is true about all religion which falsely purports to belong to the Waking World.  This is what we know, they say, here is what is proved.  Here is what we do not know, they say, and this is what is God.  They pay no mind to the fact that their mentality, if shared by everyone, would have meant a complete and utter lack of scientific, humanitarian, techonological and intellectual growth.  It is only by the constant reduction of God's power (i.e. finding out that which we do not yet know) that we move forwards.  As I have said before, progress in civilisation is not a one way ticket - we can Decline and Fall just like everyone else.  We have gone so far as to realise some truths which do not necessarily make us feel comforted and cherished - the lack of specialness, the loss of the Holy Parent, whatever this may be - but it seems that we are now those embarrassing teenagers who still get into bed with mommy and daddy after a bad dream.  We should be brave enough not to regress into ever more fervent religiosity, or a rejection of the merits of science, and stand on the plateau, shaking our fists into the sky and fucking daring ourselves to be scared in the face of the truth. 

If we don't work out how to do that, then we have died in the water, like so many dead sardines or birds fallen from the sky.

Just Everyone Pipe Down, Alright?

After having carefully delineated the separation of science and religion (you remember, science is for when you're awake and using your ruler, religion is for when you're asleep and have no access to pens), it turns out that there has been a similar line of thought happening all over the bleeding shop. 

Last week saw the final instalment in a series of lectures that I would love to have gone to called Uncertain Minds), which tried to set out with some cohesion if any common ground is possible on the increasingly more fashionable topic of religion in this smoky stew we find ourselves dodging the chunks in at the turn of the century.  (For a full review of the event see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/24/uncertain-minds-uncertainty-faith) I found particularly interesting what Manchester University's own ex-Official Badass, Terry Eagleton, says about the polarising which has taken place in our society, between those who have no faith and those with too much. Here is a video of him being vague but wise: Eagleton Meaning of Life (As an interesting aside, Eagleton talks of the power of the lexicon in shaping our mental landscapes, citing the ubiquity of "like" we all use now as being indicative of a blurred, undefined cognitive realm, where we need not make anything precise.  I have thought that the use of the word "whatever" also functions in the same way, allowing us to make no judgement whatsoever if we don't feel like it.  These words make it easier to not commit to what's going on in the world.)  As Bunting says:

"Late capitalism is inherently faithless, he [Eagleton] argued, and its rationalism conditions the way we think and speak. The result is that a "shallow, technocratic managerialism pushes all deeper questions aside and abandons them to the red-neck fundamentalists"."

If we do choose to engage with the world around us (you brave souls, you) we must carve deep and thus recognisable fissures between the poles - left/right, believer/non-believer, East/West and so on (I mean, you've practically done an entire RE GCSE by reading that paragraph) - and plant ourselves firmly one side or the other. I agree that it is an interesting and perhaps unforeseen side-effect of all this globalisation that, instead of updating our palettes with ever more exquisite shades of grey, we have credit-crunched the whole paintbox to leave us with the bare minimum.  

Doris Salcedo's work Shibboleth - a 500ft crack along the length of the floor in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/leaflettext.shtm

Unfortunately, the truth is never going to be like that.  If there is nothing else that this current (UK) government has taught us (apart from representing quite a wonderfully painful and complete tableau of What Not To Be Like, Ever, As A Human Being, Not Ever) is that the crude scoring that separates ideas such as left and right is outdated, irrelevant, divisive and useless.  We are mostly so terrified of the growling juggernaut of living in a modern society that we scatter into corners, draping ourselves with our Likes and Dislikes, Star Signs and Pet Peevs, clinging to an identity which isn't necessarily the one we wanted, but hellfire! it's the one that was available.  Difference is to be celebrated, of course, we are all special unique snowflakes, I'm sure, but the ready-made opinions that we can instantly affiliate ourselves with seems to me to be so superficial as to be utterly without meaning.

So what you get is an ever-widening gap between the Believer and the Non-Believer.  The healthiest mental option, surely, of the Pick 'n' Mix Brain, the Mind at Large (learning as much of the world as you possibly can in order to make the most educated guess about where you fit in with it all) becomes increasingly difficult as this trench widens. 

There was an article in last week's New Humanist (which I must say, despite containing some irritatingly interesting articles, is on the whole one of the nastiest pieces of smug, self-congratulating arsewipe I have ever had the misfortune to not throw out of my balcony sooner - sample sentence: "The Rationalist Press Association (or RPA, founded 1899), the predecessor of the Rationalist Association, which publishes this magazine, does have a long history of publishing material sympathetic to various forms of eugenics. It’s not all bad news. There’s some comfort perhaps in the news that the key figure in the birth of eugenics was not a rationalist but a Protestant vicar." Thank God, eh boys?!) covering the new book by Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance.  The idea is that since we (arguably rightly) decided that religion should not be the force that described our waking life, that this should be the domain of science and that which is provable, testable and is agreed upon by qualified people, we have shunted religion to the sidelines, in that it is no longer directly intertwined with everyday culture.  Whereas in many cultures the year still rotates around the upkeep of various sacred rituals, designed to connect you to your religion, in the West at least, if you can't make money out of it then better keep it to yourself, pilgrim. 

Super-ironic pro-abstinence poster

This has meant that if anyone has the misfortune to just so happen to believe in something beyond the cold facts of Reality, then they know not to share this with the world at large, but only with the select few who also share, like any kind of extreme fetish, your secret love.  As Caspar Melville comments:

"“The ‘religious revival’,” writes Roy, “is primarily about the believer’s refusal to see his world reduced to the private sphere.” The new fundamentalisms look with shock at a culture where there is no longer any evidence of their faith. They become isolated and begin to brandish the religious markers of their faith – crucifix, headscarf, Bible, faith accessories – as a demand for public recognition. In this context religion, for so long part of everyday culture, becomes strange. For the secular, people with faith are looked on as weird. Roy points to the case of the Pope – he has been wearing the same sort of garb for centuries, but is suddenly publically lampooned as a man in a dress with funny shoes."

So, it turns out that "faith" no longer means (as I took it to) a bespoke smorgasbord of your beliefs - the part of you that reacts with other than cold objectivity when a million fish dies, for example - infused with whatever else you've understood from the world of waking.  It is apparently now a wholesale rejection of everything that is rational and correct and consensually upheld.  This is why believers are idiots and must be ridiculed. 

And I'm not necessarily saying that they're not - both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in particular are back-of-the-classroom-style sniggering culprits in this.  There is nothing more uplifting than wandering out onto Market Street in Manchester and watching the preaching Christian nutjobs (who all seem to be wearing brand new branded sweatshirts recently, and singing from expensive looking tannoy systems - it's easy to see how you gain impetus as the alternative when the other side is so bleak) getting into heated exchanges with Muslim nutjobs on the street and knowing that, whatever else might be true, their bullshit isn't. 

But what I am saying is that idiocy comes from all sides, because it comes from ignorance.  Reading some of the readers' letters in the New Humanist made my fists ball up into tiny white socks, especially when several enlightened subscribers had written in to bemoan all the Dawkins bashing that has been going on recently - "I mean, if they'd actually read The God Delusion they would know they were wrong."  Oh really?  How many of you judgmental fuckwits have read the Bible, cover to cover? The Qur'an? The Upanishads, the Rig Veda, the various Books of the Dead?  Nope, didn't think so.  Unless you have some basis to your judgements, have the good decency to keep them to yourselves, and certainly not to dismiss every person who believes not as you do as being a moron, because then, I'm afraid, you're just as bad as the shoutiest of explosiviest of rantiest of religious nuts. If St Paul's Cathedral can chair a series of debates on the existence of God, then you can all eat some non-leavened humble pie.  

Man Ray, Dust Breeding (Detail from the Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp), 1920, showing how dust accumulated on Duchamp's work.

As I have said before, and will probably say many more times, if you have in any way understood the facts of the universe as incontrovertibly proven by science, then there is no need and no time for all of this callous points-scoring.  You try your best to learn as much as you can and do with it what you can, but don't, please, start shitting on anyone else while you do it. 

What I Said Before Plus Dead Sardines

It is rare that a horrific fish disaster sorts your head out.  But it can happen.

Last week over 1 million sardines were found one morning, dead, in Redondo Beach marina in California.  You can watch the report here or here: http://bbc.in/gf9p4h

Current apparent apocalypse notwithstanding (is it just me or does it seem like a succession of End of Days scenarios are playing out all across the world right now, or is it just that I watch too much news and it skews my perspective as in Gerbner's Mean World Syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_World_Syndrome)
these natural events do happen.

We have understood the science about them - we know that when fish come into harbour to shelter from the storm in huge numbers then they will starve themselves of oxygen.  However, my initial reaction to this, as perhaps your was, was "Oh Jesus and Mary Chain, no, not like this, who is doing this, is it the final judgement?" and so on.  I felt similarly when I looked up at the weekend and saw the ginormously big Super Moon looming like a harbinger of doom in the skies (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16mar_supermoon/). 

Whenever we see events like this, our initial and uncontrollable reaction is that of unthinking, panic-drive, reptilian fear.  We assuage the terror with understanding, but that does not in any way take away from the fact that we, as humans, have to reconcile those two aspects of our comprehension of the world around us. 

Joseph Campbell draws the beautiful analogy of sleep to explain wildly different levels of unerstanding humans experience at one and the same time - similarly expressed by the Hindu symbol 'AUM' or :

A - waking consciousness
U - dream consciousness
M- deep sleep

"The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross, facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all.

The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle, forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. 

The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful."

As far as I can understand it, that first quivering of fear we all experience when we see harbours full of dead fish and accidentally think it is the Second Coming, is the same feeling we get when something from the dream state (the "second plane") enters into our normal experiential realm of sensory perception and logic and reason.  It is the same disquieting invasion of our accepted reality that makes David Lynch or Richard Linklater films so unsettling, for example (http://flimgeeks.com/blog/twin-peaks-throwing-rocks-dreams/). 



In the same way that we soothe our panic about the dead fish disaster by understanding the science behind it, the domain of science is exclusively that of the first plane - Science as Wakefulness.  Science is a mutually upheld human endeavour, stripped of individual foibles, and it needs to be in order to express the closest approximation of What Is Going On.  If it weren't for Platonian misconceptions of scientific method, based on theory over observation, we may have had a 2,000 year headstart on ourselves in terms of what we experience in our waking life. 



Looks quite a lot like the images of entropy within stars, doesn't it?

On the other hand, Religion in all its guises belongs steadfastly to the second plane - Religion as Dreaming.  This is the internalised, private world of our own interpretations of the world, best expressed by the empirical, waking world that is shown by science.  The danger comes when religion purports to belong to the first realm and describe things literally:

"Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favourite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.  These images are to be regarded as no more than shadows from the unfathomable reach beyond, where the eye goeth not, speech goeth not, nor the mind, nor even piety. 

Like the trivialities of dream, those of myth are big with meaning."

It is possible and correct that all stages of the sleep-of-life are experienced and equally valid.  In the same way, science, religion and all that is in between are also equally valid, but only as long as they don't encroach on a realm that isn't theirs. 

Meaning of Life May Not Be Basket of Roses Shocker

After my last (and admittedly rather excited) post about the meaning of life being that of constant change and death and rebirth, I have had feedback from quite a few people which seems to suggest that people may have found this a bit dry and bleak.  After all, if all we are here to do is exist then be blown away to become something else, then our Nectar points and our children and our insurance premiums and, y'know, the whole of our lives, may well look a bit pointless and shit. 

But I think this chronically misses the point.  I think human beings have, on the whole, missed the point on this for the entirety of their existence. 

Why should your life be special and different and imbued with the traces of Gods?  Who ever promised that it would be?  Your parents? Your teachers? Ah, wait, no, the Bible did.  The Qur'an did.  The Talmud and, in fact, almost every religious text reassures, soothes and cajoles us that we are here for a reason.  The coincidence of consciousness is too great, too important, to have spontaneously occured as a quirk of evolution (best tell everyone that's not real either).  All the other frissons of fate that reality gave birth to are less important than the fact that we are aware that we are thinking. 

My point was that there is something special about this - we are starstuff contemplating starstuff - as Carl Sagan used to say.  But I don't see how that is incompatible with what I have been saying.  If anything, our awareness of our own mortality gives the exquisite shudder of tragedy to our lives.  Religion (particularly but not exclusively Western religion) caters to a deep-seated, primal fear of death.  They proffer a bunch of plastic flowers - beautiful, yes, but not alive.

The religions that promise everlasting life are essentially death cults, shushing our anxieties with pictures of clouds and virgins.  Why would anyone want that?  At some point would it not be a much bigger adventure to be something else?  Are we so vainly wedded to our personalities that to imagine not being us for a second is enough to propel us churchwards?  I don't see that this is a necessarily nihilistic, heavily-kohled, purple velvet, angsty statement.  I see it as part of a Cosmic Bargain, really.  Even if the codified forms of reincarnation don't exist (which I don't think they do, I don't believe that if I steal someone's chips that will contribute to an Eternal Karmic Scorecard where my points will be totted up at the end of class and I will be assigned a body based on my behaviour - a bit like Boots Advantage points, or the perennial "No Pudding If You Don't Eat All Your Greens" maxim) then we will become the air, the trees, the bits of pavement and the cup you drink from...eventually.

We have to die in order for other things to live, that's all there is to it:

If we have welled up from the morass of non-sentient beings to be able to experience this most noble of realities, even for this blinkiest of seconds, then I am happy to have been part of that, before dribbling back down from whence I came.  In that time we can conceive of an entire Universe in our minds, we can meet people, create people, learn and wonder and jizz and fight and live all the life that's coming to us.  Is that really so horrible an idea?  Does our common heritage with everything single object around us not create a feeling of peace and oneness (and more than anything else, a bit of perspective on all the mundane shite that we wear about our necks as emblems of having lived, mediocre medals to a life we think we cherish) rather than a pompous sense of disgust that we might have more in common with the world around us than we like to think about?

It baffles me that specialness has been equated with difference for so long.  Has that ever really been a policy that has worked for humanity?

Death is an inevitability, but it is up to each and every one of us to decide how to deal with that fact.  There are many cultures who deal very well with death - just look at the Mexicans - because they realise that to confront death is to make it less scary:

To accept the incontrovertible scientific truths that are out there, that we as a species have worked out, that we are elemental beings, just as subject to the Laws of Nature as everything else, from the amoeba to the supernova, lessens the clamour of the bullshit, lessens the import to be given to meaningless things (bearing in mind at all times that, so mired in debt am I that my corpse will belong to Bob Diamond and the loan companies. I'll never buy a house, learn to drive or do any of the things which I fully acknowledge are nice and convenient to do as an apparently fully-fledged grown-up and taxable citizen) but instead allows freedom where it really counts, in the fucking mind.  That is why it is our duty to learn as much as possible about everything in the world, more, to live as much of everything in the world as possible.

I'd rather be a bunch of real flowers that blossom and twist to get at the sun, rather than cling to the dusty permanence of plastic ones.

A Level RE, Television and Thermodynamics Combine Forces to Reveal Meaning of Life

I'm really sorry to do this, but you best stop what you are doing.  Please, just put that down, put it...there you go...listen to this.  Don't pick it up again when you think I'm not looking, just cross your arms and concentrate.

It appears, without too much of a fanfare, that the meaning of life has been revealed.

I'm going to walk you through it, but take your shoes off.

I'm sure you've all seen the work of Professor Brian Cox, his enigmatic billion year stare and his uncanny knack of making extraordinarily diffuse astrophysical topics seem as easy as pie (I myself got caught up in the Stargazing Live zeitgeist at New Year and went to a lecture by the Manchester Astronomical Society about the birth, life and death of stars.  There was a distinct cooling in the room when everyone realised that these topics are much more difficult to understand than watching three TV shows would have us believe, and that it isn't in fact possible to somehow absorb a PHd thesis while eating pickled onions on the sofa.  They do sterling work, though: http://www.manastro.co.uk/).  His new series, Wonders of the Universe, commenced apocalyptically with the nature of time itself.  (And you should watch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/zf9dh/)

In this dimension at least, it seems the entirety of creation is bound in a Sisyphean work - to move forward, to change, to live and then to die.  From the tiniest bubble of the quantum foam to the vastest nebulous juggernaut of deep space, on every level, there is only change.  Time is a real thing, it exists (although no-one really knows in what form, see Cox's documentary "What Time Is It?" for a clearer introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgzCMmaVLM&NR=1), and it compels us more than any other force of nature.

entropy at the core of a galaxy

But, inasmuch as we can understand it, this Universe is flinging itself headfirst into the future, and only that.  We are moving from a state of low entropy (complex, structured objects like galaxies, planets and skyscrapers) or order to states of high entropy or disorder, where line and form and shape and definition is sacrificed to the uniformity of chaos (no outlines, just an amorphous ooze of sameness).  This logic, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the Universe aches for balance everything out, so eventually all concentrations or lumps of stuff - matter, heat, etc. - will be dissembled and spread out, ashes to ashes) is applied by Cox to explain that this will also happen to everything within the Universe.  Its death is when all is balanced out, all is obliterated, all is smoothed out.

What strikes me as most glorious about this idea is that it is very similar to what many human civilisations have concluded about the meaning of life throughout history.  It seems that our constant exposure to death has led to an innate understanding of this "permanent change" of existence, from the Great Nothing at the beginning, leading us inexorably to the Great Nothing at the end.  The earliest gods were the sun and the moon, and these are extinguished every day, to be reborn.  I mentioned a while ago that it is as if we carry the most ancient memory of our existence before, and very occasionally we manage to communicate it.

The Maori explain it thus:

Tane raising the sky with his feet in the Maori creation myth

From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness, 
From the consciousness the desire. 


The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night, 
The lowest night, the loftiest night, 
The thick night, to be felt, 
The night to be touched, 
The night not to be seen, 
The night ending in death. 


From the nothing the begetting, 
From the nothing the increase, 
From the nothing the abundance, 
The power of increasing, 
The living breath.  

The Three Marks of Existence at
everydayink.blogspot.com

The most profoundly succinct of all these understandings of this now scientifically proven reality, was that of the Buddha.  His Three Marks of Existence are as follows, and they managed, 2000 years before, to express the same beautifully bleak reality:

1. All things are impermanent, always changing (anicca)
2. All existence is suffering, caused by attachment to impermanent things (dukkha)
3. There is nothing everlasting, no essence, no soul, no self (anatma)


So there, the meaning of life seems to be nothing more than an acceptance of this impermanence, a realisation that all will change and die, and the realisation that life is infused with the special, most tragic beauty of a rainbow, most elegant because it is fleeting, but we are part of it.