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.
Dan Hemesath's Blog 
May 13, 2010 at 9:13 pm |
Hi Dan,
I enjoyed this posting much more than your first… I won’t embarrass myself by trying to analyze and/or create a discussion about your blog but I would like to say that your quote below is quite beautiful. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
“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.”
May 14, 2010 at 1:14 am |
Hi Dan,
Wow, your’re ambitious. Great work. It will be a while for me to digest it and comment. I just wanted to check in about your plans for your East Coast foray. You can answer to my email. Best to Charito and the family.
Frank
May 14, 2010 at 4:39 pm |
Thanks Dan!
This is wonderful writing about the beauty and joy of reflecting on our human consciousness than enables us to see, hear and feel the wonders of the universe around us.
Tom
May 16, 2010 at 8:58 pm |
Dan,
Richard Dawkins’s wrote a book Unweaving the Rainbow. He spends the whole book refuting Keats’s opinion that scientists don’t appreciate the Mysteries of life. The title of the book is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. He states that Keats could hardly have been more wrong. Science, Dawkins says, is or ought to be the inspiration for great poetry.
Although I don’t like his writing style, his first chapter is poetic prose. Following are a few excerpts from the first chapter.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sands of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous.
There is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ‘the present century’. Time moves like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler from the past to the future. The odds of this being your century are miniscule. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.
In spite of theses odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact alive. People whom the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight has not reached, are in no position to read this book. I am equally lucky to be in a position to write one, although I may not be when you read these words. Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. But what I see as I write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.
We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life. Yes, there are slums, starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.
As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t that what has happened to each on of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds.
We arrived by being born, and accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.
More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why the see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.
At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers’ money on the arts. It is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings.
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?”
THE VENERABLE BEDE wrote the following in A History of the English Church and People circa 731.
When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us O king, the present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moment, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing from your sight. Man’s life is similar; and of what follows it, or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.
Jim Born
May 17, 2010 at 6:10 pm |
Thanks for you comments and quote I agree. Dawkins’ thoughts move me profoundly.
May 16, 2010 at 8:59 pm |
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Dan,
Thanks for your blog – getting us in touch with the transcendent.
Much if not all of life is a mystery. Try to explain sight to a blind person. Yes, there is a scientific explanation, but does this really explain ‘seeing’? How do you explain color or motion? Sunsets, mountains, and forests can only be apprehended by seeing them. Hearing is another mystery.
A deaf person can never truly understand Mozart or Beethoven. Music, to those of us who can hear, makes life better than it is.
It has been man’s innate curiosity and perennial asking of questions that has brought him from a creature in a bearskin wielding a club to the world of the Internet, cyberspace, and cloning. Some of the first questions to which man wanted answers were, how did the world begin, how did we get there and why? And one of the reasons that religions came into being was to answer them by saying that some god or gods, later ‘God’, made it and us. That would now seem an inadequate answer, so the question is asked afresh; and this time in truth we have to say we do not know and do not think we will ever know. Whether it came about as the result of a purposeful act, a physical evolvement or something accidental must remain a mystery beyond human comprehension.
Today most people are probably content to accept the world as it is. It is less the distant past that exercises most people’s imaginations than the future; the problems that should unite us all are those that threaten the survival of life on the planet; the destruction of the rainforests and global warming leading to a rise in sea levels and unpredictable changes in climate; the population explosion; where energy is to be found and harnessed after the oil has run out; the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons; terrorist-inspired planting of bubonic plague, anthrax, or exploding a nuclear device; assault by a meteorite of the force that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago; an out-of-control virus. The solutions to those problems, not where we came from but where we may be going, are the problems facing us now and require our urgent attention. And should we fail in any of our endeavors to avert disaster, decimation or even extinction face us.
Jim Born
May 17, 2010 at 7:15 pm |
Thanks also for you personal comments. I think that you and I are definitely on the same page. I recall meeting you briefly many years ago–probably at the Noll, but I’m not even sure of that. Are you coming to the July gathering?
May 20, 2010 at 4:57 pm |
Dan, that’s a marvelous blog- what struck me the most is the idea that our perceptions are what limit the miracles we live with. It reminds me of Thomas Merton’s experience in a Louisville shopping mall when he had a profound insight that we are all one. Also Teilhard’s thought that the human race is still evolving as our consciousness continues to evolve.
Thanks so much, Dan
May 23, 2010 at 8:09 pm |
Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings. I always feel good when a responsive chord seems to have be hit. I like Teilhard too.
May 22, 2010 at 1:43 am |
You have had some time to sit and peruse your thoughts and the universe, I suspect. It brings me back to the 70s when people sat in coffeehouses (not shops), smoked and talked about philosophy. Now it seems that doing something about your beliefs would be the next step. I just finished a fascinating book called Into the Light by Dr Lerma. It’s about people’s experience of teaching angels appearing to them just before people in hospice died. It’s so very interesting. And has some pertinence to your thoughts. Thanks for letting me in on your thoughts.
June 21, 2010 at 3:45 am |
I quite enjoyed this. Having Nora has helped me see the daily miracles you talk about. It is in that sense that she is a miracle for our family. I like your thoughts and agree many people overlook the everyday beauty that exists in ourselves and in our world.
June 21, 2010 at 7:16 pm |
Molly,
Thanks for taking the time to check my blog and share your thoughts. It gives me an incentive to keep at it. Your example in caring for Nora also inspires me. I know that it must be difficult at times. But you are doing an excellent job and I’m certain that you will continue, come what may.