Blog post number two
Before starting my blog, I want to express my appreciation to everyone who took the time to check out my first post, especially those who left comments. It has been such a busy time of the year in the studio that I haven’t had time to respond to everyone, but I still want to say, thank you.
Tom McMahon referred me to an article that I found most interesting along with a recommendation to read a book by Crick. I’ve purchased the books, but haven’t had time to read it yet. No doubt it will help my thinking on these subjects.
I also appreciate Ed Walsh’s comments. Some years ago I remember when Ed pointed out why Rev. Wright was wrong. Wright was blasting away at the American people who have strayed from the eternal word of God in the scriptures. Ed comments opened my thinking on this subject. I hope that this can be the subject of a future blog posting.
One visitor was frank and told me that my first blog was too intellectual for him. I think that he is right, even though I tried to avoid big words. Without stories, this subject matter is quite abstract. That’s why I begin this blog with a story:
In his book, “Ishmael”, Daniel Quinn tells of an experience of the sacred that was important in is life. During his short-term training as a Trappist monk, he stepped outside one morning to work in the monastaery garden and was struck by a fresh vision of the world.
“I turned and faced the sunshine and the breath went out of me as if someone had punched me in the stomach. That was the effect of receiving this sight, of seeing the world as it is, I was astonished, bowled over, dumbfounded.
I could say that the world was transformed before by eyes, but that wasn’t it. The world hadn’t transformed at all; I was simply being allowed to see it the way that it is all the time. I, not the world, was transformed.
Everything was burning. Every blade of grass, every single leaf of every tree was radiant, was blazing–incandescent with a raging power that was immistakably divine.”
My point is neither to place too much nor too little importance on Daniel Quinn’s experience. It was life changing enough for him that he wrote a novel about it for which he won a million dollar literary prize. But that’s not my point. My point is that ordinary people like me–and most others I assume–don’t have experiences with radiant grass and blazing leaves. But such experiences are not necessary to see the miracles around us.
It isn’t hard to see that there is more to life than just what we can see and touch — that there is a meaning beyond the material, that there is some essential and eternal basis for boundless hope and joy.
That’s why one of my favorite quotes in all the literature is from Willa Cather’s “Death Comes to the Archbishop”: “Miracles…rest not so much upon the faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
William James in his “Varieties of religious experience” attempts to extract what is common to all religions. He calls these insights, “the reality of the unseen”. He also calls it the sense of the “more”. The more is what is always there, but becomes more real at the time of religious experience.
But are these religious experiences, or miracles, nebulous, or rare, or hard-to-reach?
It’s really simple and more available than generally supposed. It is simple reality — the visible and invisible, the interior and the exterior two aspects of reality.
Consciousness and what goes with consciousness, like the ability to observe, to analyze, to think about, to draw conclusions, to see the humor life, to laugh and cry are all part of the interior component of reality.
But more fundamentally, there is the exterior — the very laws of nature — laws beyond understanding — are available to us all the time. For example the law of inertia, of momentum, of gravity, are all measurable, all usable; but just where these laws come from, are beyond science, beyond religion. The who, what, and why of gravity, of electro-magnetism, and some of the other forces of nature are mysteries. They bring up questions that just can’t be answered. .They just are the way they are.
Life and so many things in life are miracles.
It’s a miracle that we just are.
It’s miracle that we are alive.
It’s a miracle that we can love—love ourselves, love others, relate to others.
It’s a miracle that we can enjoy—enjoy peace, enjoy a breath of fresh air, enjoy good food, a cup of coffee, a child’s laughter, a friend’s smile, a good joke.
It’s a miracle that we can be aware or conscious of what is going on in ourselves and around us at this very moment.
The world around us is a miracle—the air, the earth, a breeze, plants, animals, stars, the sun, the moon, atoms, molecules, — the beauty — the variety
If we could be fully aware of the beauty and wonder of it all, it would be too much for our consciousness to handle all at once. We have to back off and take it piece by piece.
If we could see fully the wonder and potential in ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to take it all in.
If we could see the inner beauty, variety, and potential for love, rapture, and fulfillment in other people, when we see them in the street, they would look like angels combined with rock stars, combined with super heroes in the spotlight.
Yes, there is another kind of miracle, which is a suspension of natural laws. This is the kind of miracle that scientists, I think correctly, reject. An example of a suspension of natural laws would be someone rising from the dead. It makes sense that in their studies and research, good scientists reject these kinds of miracles which go against natural laws. I am not writing about those kinds of miracles. I leave that discussion up to others. For this discussion I point out that the natural laws, the laws of science, are themselves, miracles.
A couple of the important ideas not well understood are these:
1. Just being or existing is a miracle. It is so simple. It is something that is true for all of us. But we go through life as good students, good scientists, saying that there are no miracles. Why marvel at anything. There are no miracles. But the simple fact is that we are all miracles. We are. That is something beyond understanding. You say — so what? Big deal — why dwell on it? We all are – we’re here — what’s new or different about that? Well, it is the biggest deal. Where did we come from? Where are we going? What are we? Why are we? Who are we? These are all mysteries. They are beyond anything that we can fully explain with words.
2. We are conscious — we can observe and feel ourselves and others. We have a level of consciousness that allows us to observe and study ourselves, study others, study our surroundings, modify our behavior, modify the world we live in, relate to others, relate to ourselves, love ourselves, love others, experience joy, laughter, sorrow, hope, longing
Other creatures have consciousness too, but not at the same level as we as human beings possess it. They say that humans are the only creatures that laugh and cry — probably because we can look at things and see the way they should or could be to a greater degree than other creatures.
Scientists are studying consciousness, looking at it more and more closely, measuring what happens in our brains when we think different thoughts and experience different emotions. It is amazing to see how the brain and the body reflect our thoughts with the observable changes.
Does that mean that scientists now know what consciousness is because they can observe the physical effects of thought? Does all of what consciousness is consist only of the movement of cells, molecules, electric impulses — all the physical changes that occur when we think, or laugh, or cry, or analyze etc.?
Wouldn’t that be like saying all that life is the movement of cells? Or that all literature is ink spots on pages?
The part of us that is interior, not seen, the part we refer to as “I”, uses thoughts which produces electrical blips and measureable changes in the brain, but, they are like the ink spots that carry the message of the Shakespeare’s immortal writings or the electromagnetic pulses that transmit the super bowl game, that keeps millions glued to their TV’s, or the sound waves the carried Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to his listeners. The important reality isn’t the electromagnetic pulses, the sound waves, or the ink spots forming letters on the pages, but the meaning that consciousness imparts and takes from these sound waves and specks of ink.
Consciousness and being:
Consciousness and being are both beyond what can be described with words. We see directly what they are and that’s it. It’s the most effortless exercise possible. If we make it hard, we miss the point. If we try to look someplace for an answer we miss the point. Being is here, it’s now, it’s always. It’s that easy. It’s that beautiful. Our consciousness simply is here and now. It is through consciousness that we live, love, laugh, cry, enjoy, share, and understand. Maybe we don’t understand that fully, but we do understand it well enough to appreciate the beauty and wonder of it all.
Does any of this prove that there is a God? No. Do it prove that science is the only source of knowledge? No. But I contend that it does show that this world is so full of mystery that it doesn’t take a religious experience to see mysteries.
Living with gravity makes up our daily life.
Beyond the unchanging laws of gravity, momentum, nuclear energy and magnetism, there are the incredibly beautiful patterns of light, of matter, of still life, of plant life, of animal life, and of human life.
And beyond the patterns there is incredible and wonderful variety resulting from the laws of chance interacting with the unchanging laws, leading to the beautiful system of evolution — so complex that it never ceases to cause wonder, yet occurring within the context of the constant fixed laws or constraints of natural laws, imposing an over all order.
Seeing this can only be what Mircea Eliade refers to as a “hierophany” experience.– an event when the sacred shows itself or errupts into consciousness–something that words cannot describe.
It happens all the time in every person’s life. We just need to open our eyes, become aware, something that too many of us seldom do. We go through life pretty much like a blind, deaf persons attending a great rock concert — a concert where the Beatles, U2, Boston Pops, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis are all having a career night, and we don’t even know it.
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