(as usual this is a rambling sketch just now. hard to write, my computer's been stolen!)
how does
science knowledge satisfy what we seek in god? Creator, comforter, listens in time of prayer, answers prayers,
metes out justice, forgives, comforter and gives out justice. How can science address that or should it? When we suffer there are some responses. Compassion
surely. That we can give one another.
And if one
is alone? is that a good state for
humans? maybe not and is why we create
god! and why cant earth, the moss, the giving ecosystem be comfort enough? the ecosystem is kali giving AND taking.
where else
is comfort? knowing we are PARTS of this creation that it is happening THROUGH
us. chemically, ecologically, evolutionarily... but that creator is not the
most comforting! the raging tearing
apart and putting together mother creating out of risk and death and rampant
experimenting with genes and embryos! (is y we created comforting myth of
father creator)
how we learn
to comfort each other? that is appeal of jesus. he is model how to listen to
each other and empathize. but he give
LESSONS? like the buddha? dunno, wonder whats in the tradition.
certainly somewhere is meditation but it’s not the same. so some form of buddhist/science practice is
required to learn to get beyond our fear and desires and general head chatter
so that we can truly be present to one who is suffering and be able to listen,
empathize and accept.
the other
response to suffering is to work on releasing one from attachment to ego which
is cause of suffering. realize that this majestic historical creative drama of
life is bigger than our petty ideas of ego! but that is personal choice: value attachments
to self and fellow humans in the now or value the grand billions year sweep of
evolutionary creativity?
see...
christians want it both ways they want an infantile version of reality, they
want to cheat. they want to worship the
creator and at same time worship the individual soul in eternal heaven. sorry, watch your mom. she IS kal,i playing trial and error with
genes to make and destroy children higgledy piggledy in the grand drama of
creative evolution. THAT is how we got here! yes god created us in her own image and she is
KALI! to not accept this is to
disrespect our mothers. so what i gotta
preach is how to comfort and then teach to accept the frightening aspect of the
way we are part of this grand evolutionary drama. even to come to be in awe and thanks of it as
horrifying as it can be sometime.
take even
this tack. so i have the image of evo
toying with me, creating in me many quirks, some very difficult to live with
bit at same time, in the evolutionary drama ANY of these quirks can come to be
an act of creativity if *I* can find or MAKE an ecological niche for them to
thrive in.
AHA. in evo
there is just as much creativity on TWO scales. there is the variation and selection across
generations but at same time it works because ORGANISMS THEMSELVES ARE
CREATIVE. EVERY organism we know of is
creative, can explore its environment by trial and error, try out new niches to live in, and of
course is free to mix diploid genes into haphazard haploid gametes AND many
options to choose mates either higgledy piggledy or with many creative
strategies or quirky tastes! look at
female birds desiring showy males or bower birds and song birds creating to
attract mates!
but at any
rate through it all we have to accept the possibility of personal failure. there is no creativity without it.
but bar,
there are plenty who do not care about creativity or art or risk. who might
think it a risky frivolity we cannot afford, as we struggle to just make ends
meet or to keep rigid order in society to curb frightening chaos. how do you
respond?
well? why
are we struggling? what kind of safe society do we want? how CAN we keep it
safe? apart from retreating into some
fantasy that the father god will always watch over or we can retreat to eternal
blissful static heaven, we must realize that this universe IS IN FACT CHAOTIC. It’s in our genes, in our behavior, its in the
very mathematics when even 3 or more perfectly predictable automotons interact.
to create an
orderly society to thrive in this world requires creative trial and error. but
lets not create a cult of GENIUS about creativity that it is only the ability
of the few who have been gifted by some ultimate god source! creativity does NOT come
from on high down through us. Creativity
comes from the ground up! even the lowly
bacteria is creative, then SO MUCH MORE are each of you! if you are alive you
are creative! it is not such a mystery
anymore. i teach it when i teach math. JUST
TRY SOMETHING! Yes, your first few tries
might fail, and so you keep trying. eventually
you will find something that works. something you uniquely find for your situation.
to be willing to fail requires that we are supportive and accepting of one
another.
this is of
course something the society of science teaches and practices. to be supportive
of each other in our failures because we value this creative quest.
buddhist
practice unnatach from ego reduce suffering, or dive into cause of suffering
that it is part of this chaotic rich fragrant creative universe and love THAT
more than hate suffering. learn to accept
suffering, it is not the worst fate! numbness
is, stasis is. A boring universe full of nothing is.
suffering is
from error and error is the flip side of exploratory play, integral parts of creativity.
learn that creativity is REQUIRED to thrive in this crazy universe and we CAN
ALL BE CREATIVE, do not fear it
why do we
say god can comfort and forgive and mete out justice? because we say he is the creator of this
universe. well… what if i said that we
are ALL creators in this universe? then
maybe we too can have power to comfort!
because we
can practice meditation, and accept our role as creative, we don’t have to lash
out in always predictable responses to hurt and we have the capacity to turn situations
on their heads and create an open space of possibility and forgive!
and justice?
vengeance? punishment? what is all that? Ah so now i must bring in our radical
acceptance of creativity. We cannot be creative unless we are susceptible to
failure AT ALL LEVELS.
these levels
include:
genetic
mutations leading to differences like male, female, homosexual, transgenders,
black, white (and everything in between), ugliness (whatever that might mean),
mental illnesses of all sorts, radical
genetic defects of horrible birth, even spontaneous abortion (between 25% and 50%
of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortion the mother is not even aware
of!).
and even
while our adult bodies are growing, the genetic EXPLORATION of cancer, its hard
to watch, yes, i know, but if we weren’t susceptible to it our ancestors would
not have even evolved, we’d still be a planet of lowly bacteria or even no life
at all.
and all
sorts of horrible genetic diseases. and even infectious diseases the most
intimate attempts at organisms to join ecologically. the reality is that life
must eat life to live. that is what life is, cycles of birth and death, growth
and destruction. Growth without destruction would quickly USE UP the entire
universe and then HALT! there must be
cycles.
and human
failure due to us trying things out in our own ways and even willful disobedience
and the fact that we are vulnerable so we hurt and are weak so we take the easy
path and lash out in anger and violence...
it is not
our own FAULTS that evolution gave us this peculiar propensity to join in
ecstatic mobs following single leaders or ideologies and warring with one
another… Not our own faults that we don’t immediately have the strength to find that
meditative calm to accept suffering while we seek out equitable solutions, so we instead lash out immediately to take from others to
satisfy our needs.
So here I need
to dive into a very difficult topic.
Human will power. What ARE
we? Are we robots destined to act out
the programs in our genes? If we have
mental illness or have moments of weakness, laziness (humans are some of the
laziest species I’ve ever met), does that mean that we have morally failed some
great battle? For sure I cannot by pure
power of will grow a new arm. I cannot
by pure power of will memorize a 1000 digit number. Not without practice. What ARE the boundaries of our strength of
will, our moral responsibilities?
In many
cultures we have ideas that all men are equal (and women less equal etc..) and
that all men have been CREATED equal by the perfect God, and therefore that
those of us who do not show the Calvinistic behavior of succeeding by focused
strength of will, must have instead chosen to reject this God, and therefore
must be reformed, punished or even done away with.
Alas, we
just cannot assume we now understand just what humans are yet. We really don’t know. For sure we know there is a combination of
some mind activity and certain genetic constraints which tangle in a
complicated way. And each of us as a
very different genetic mix. We are NOT
EQUAL.
And that is
the beauty of it. That ongoing
exploratory variation is what this creation is all about. Not about some done deal created by a perfect
creator god in the infinite past for some crazy cooked up purpose born out of
our hellish awakenings when we were first becoming human long ago.
IT IS
DIFFICULT to be human.
the first
step in accepting all this horror about each of us is to wake up from the
fantasy of heaven, that a perfect eternal god created us perfect with a plan,
but to realize that we are one of evolution's GRAND EXPERIMENTS! this is a
frightening thing to have been born a human with our higgledy piggledy mix (and
each of us has a different mix) of wondrous capacities and horrifying failures.
when we
realize this reality we realize we must truly have compassion for ourselves and
others. and it is ONLY each of us who can offer this compassion and
forgiveness. we are hypersocial and we are on this
wild creative
journey together.
and if there
is no one who can listen to us pray? what kind of prayer do we want? to grant our wishes? thats just infantile! go
out and seek. maybe there ARE people who will help us achieve our goals!
to feel listened to? why on earth are we expending monumental
effort to build a god for this instead of helping EACH OTHER learn to listen? most
of us can learn to do it!
a prayer in
which we are listening? for what? for wonder? for new ideas insights about our predicament?
the important thing here is to realize that if we go into prayer with
preconceived notions about who we are 'praying TO', we are limiting what we may
be open to hearing. merely meditation to get out of our head chatter? this
requires no one to pray to.
But even if another
human listens to us, we come to realize that ULTIMATELY they cannot share our
unique experience of our self and that at heart we FEEL RADICALLY ALONE!
being human
WAS NOT AN EASY GIFT! being born into
this MONSTROUS labyrinth of neural nets capable of imagining infinite cosmos
can be horrifying! in truth because we wire ourselves from the time we are embryos
so stochastically and into such a large network of neurons... we ARE each SO DIFFERENT
FROM EACH OTHER! Possibly at root, ALIEN to each other. We don’t tend to think this is so, I believe,
because our facility with language and our amazing abilities to mimic and
imagine… it may be truly impossible for
each of us to comprehend what it is like for the other to have their experience
of
self!
so then
what? maybe a first step is to accept this! so many religions so many political
systems, medical systems, education systems want to imagine that we are created
equal (American fantasy) or that at our core souls we are the same (christian
fantasy) and CAN experience each other’s reality (Buddhist fantasy). but what
if this is not correct? then we are barking up the wrong tree and have to find
a different way?
so what can
we do when faced with this radical state of unknowable complex difference of
hundred trillion connection neural net that is our selves? what god can we
commune with? where the comfort?
this
universe is radically creative! we certainly have only BEGUN to explore that!
only recently have we discovered 2 to 100 million species (we still dont know
how many, but alas we DO know that we are erasing significant numbers of them
through our economic growth). Dug out 4 billion
years of history during which wild trial and error have created these myriads
of species and during which 99% of all them have passed away. We’ve opened our eyes and discovered a
hundred billion galaxies of a hundred billion stars each with their own
planetary systems that might or might not be playing out their own billion year
long evolutionary dramas (funny it took brains of a 100billion neurons to count
those 100billions!). Opened our own skulls and counted our nets of 100billion
stochastically wired neural nets. We are even beginning to explore the mathematics
of how pattern, creativity can evolve out of simple rules of physics and math
played out in systems of all these billions of interacting parts.
why IS the
universe SO MANY PARTS?
maybe
complex intelligent life COULD happen because there are 100 thousand billion billion
planets to try it out on over billions of years! Each planet surface composed
of 10^37 (now the numbers get TRULY big and I have to resort to mathematical
notation. 10^37 means 1 followed by 37
zeros, that’s 10 billion billion billion billion! At this point one must practice doing lots of
math to truly appreciate what’s going on here!!!) interacting molecules (and a billion years
means particles nudge each other 10^24 times. They are bounce into each other
VERY fast!). That compounds to a mindboggling
10^84 operations in which to fiddle around with and invent life!
See, after
spending so many years learning how creative math can be when played over such
huge numbers... maybe god can simply be 10^84 interactions! You may laugh at such a simplistic notion…
but until you spend years learning the craft of mathematical and physics
complexity… don’t be so fast!
but now that
ive taken you to such horrifying dizzying heights can i bring you back down to
a comforting human scale? the question was, how can we commune with such
mindboggling mechanics when we are feeling at our most achingly human?
[probly go
look at how the bhagavad gita does it!]
