< Back Antonyms David Cowles Oct 21, 2021 In school we were taught to recognize homonyms, synonyms and antonyms. But there are no antonyms! Cold is not the antonym of hot; they are both relative measures of molecular motion. Likewise, ugly is not the antonym of beauty. Everything, no matter how ‘ugly’, contains an element of beauty; otherwise, it would neither be ugly nor beautiful…it would simply not ‘be’ at all! “Everything is beautiful…in its own way!” ‘Ugly’ is somewhere on the aesthetic scale just as cold is somewhere on the scale of molecular notion (aka ‘temperature’). All of which leads us to a surprising conclusion: there are no antonyms (plural), but there is an antonym (singular). One, single, universal antonym! One word is the antonym of all other words; and that one word is ‘evil’ and its many synonyms (different word, same meaning): non-being, nothingness, etc. In school we were taught to recognize homonyms, synonyms and antonyms. But there are no antonyms! Cold is not the antonym of hot; they are both relative measures of molecular motion. Likewise, ugly is not the antonym of beauty. Everything, no matter how ‘ugly’, contains an element of beauty; otherwise, it would neither be ugly nor beautiful…it would simply not ‘be’ at all! “Everything is beautiful…in its own way!” ‘Ugly’ is somewhere on the aesthetic scale just as cold is somewhere on the scale of molecular notion (aka ‘temperature’). All of which leads us to a surprising conclusion: there are no antonyms (plural), but there is an antonym (singular). One, single, universal antonym! One word is the antonym of all other words; and that one word is ‘evil’ and its many synonyms (different word, same meaning): non-being, nothingness, etc. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Is the Universe Real David Cowles “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” What must it have been like to stare up at the stars c. 2000 BCE? The Universe is your patch! You have qualified dominion over the animals and plants, and you can imagine setting sail on that great whale rode ( Beowulf ) we now know as the Milky Way. It is easy to see how we might have fallen prey to hubris . “I’m the king of this castle!” Things look a bit different now, don’t they? We know so much more, and the most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew. Of course, in absolute terms we have exponentially more data points; but relative to what is available to be known , our noosphere is shrinking. For one thing, much of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong; for another, each new, hard-won kernel of gnosis has shone a spotlight on vast new regions of ignorance. Once upon a time I knew nowt about arithmetic. Then someone showed me that 1 + 1 = 2. Cool beans! Then what about 1 + 1 + 1? Or 2 + 1? Or 2 + 2? In a couple of years I’ll give you Principia Mathematica. Imagine that X stands for everything there is to know, and Y stands for what we do know. In 2000 BCE, Y might have been 10% of X. Wow! But 4,000 years later, things have changed. What we know now is more like 1% of what is available to be known. We are learning what we don’t know faster than we’re learning in the first place. As fast as we learn more about our universe, the faster we learn how much more we don’t know. Sidebar : If this process continues unabated, we may reach the coveted mystic state of absolute unknowing. In 1900 CE, we were like 4-year-olds. We knew everything there was to know. By 1950, we’d learned that there was a lot more to be known than we’d imagined. To make matters worse, we realized that much of what we thought we knew in 1900 wasn’t what we thought it was. By 1950 we’d begun playing with computers; 75 years later, our computers are playing with us. For 50 years, we programed our computers; now computers program themselves. How long before those same computers program us? “What is man (sic) that God should be mindful of him?” Good question, but it was easier to answer when homo sapiens was top dog in a Universe we imagined to be less than half the size of our solar system. Not so easy to answer in the context of a Universe that is 14 billion years old and contains a trillion galaxies. Or in the context of a body that is made up of nothing but 30 trillion independent life forms (cells). Now what is ‘man’ again…? We have absolutely no right to expect our tiny lives to matter. But if that’s so, then all the agony of living has been for naught. In the cosmic context, we are sparks. What is just is. It’s not good, or bad; it just is. It came to be without regard to values of any sort. Even ‘order’, a prerequisite of Value, is in ever dwindling supply. In fact, order max’d out at Big Bang. Like a well wound watch, our universe is slowly running downhill. By some estimates we’re already about 15% of the way to Heat Death. To the extent that order is related to Value, the high point was 14 billion years ago, and every moment thereafter is a step in the ‘wrong’ direction. Look at it another way. The primary values - Beauty, Truth, and Justice – can all be appreciated as different manifestations of ‘order’. Without an ordered background to draw from, none of these values could be operative. Therefore, if they are at all, they must be gradually disappearing. Not much to look forward to, is it? A world which will necessarily become uglier, less truthful, and more unjust over time. (Hmm, sound like somebody’s political system?) Such a Universe is simply a process of self-annihilation. If Being = Good, then Entropy = Evil; and so Jesus taught us to pray, “Deliver us from evil”. And consciousness? According to this model, consciousness is the accidental consequence of increasing entropy (Hawking). It is a trace left behind by the order that is vanishing. Living consciously in this world is like watching your uninsured McMansion burn to the ground. No wonder folks are depressed. Unless none of this is true! Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that consciousness (self-awareness, recursion) is coincident with life itself. Like love and marriage pre-1950, you apparently can’t have one without the other. As far as we know, all life is cellular. It is apparently the minimal condition required for DNA to be expressed, conserved and replicated. According to this model, the DNA molecule evolved only once on Earth, and it evolved in tandem with a cellular superstructure. If and when we discover non-terrestrial life, we may find phenomena that we want to classify as ‘living’ but that has nothing like DNA and/or no such cellular structure; but all that is mere conjecture now. As soon as the Earth had sufficiently cooled, the first DNA molecule was synthesized…and expressed as a conscious cell. As far as we know, in the 4 billion years since that momentous event, not a single new DNA molecule and not a single new cell has formed. Remarkable! That means, as far as we can say with any certainty, life and consciousness are one-offs. But of course, we’ve only surveyed a tiny corner of this vast universe. If Universe came to be accidentally and spontaneously and if it will ultimately self-annihilate, then what is it anyway? Here our academic overlords are split: either (1) the universe is real but has no meaning, no value, no purpose, or (2) what we call ‘universe’ is not real but only virtual. According to this later interpretation, the Universe ‘exists’ in same way virtual particles ‘exist’…it doesn’t. A virtual particle is a particle still born; it has no being . It is a sub-momentary dispensation from the great Neant that ultimately comes to nothing. Turns out though, the two models are identical, one framed in the vocabulary of Idealism, the other in the language of materialism. Gregory Bateson’s seminal contribution to Western philosophy is his insight that ‘being’ applies only to entities that ‘make a difference’. To be is to be different and to make a difference; an actual entity is “a difference that makes a difference”. Whatever is not distinguished from its inherited world and/or does not make a distinguishable contribution to the inheritable worlds of other entities…is not! Camus and Sartre applied such a test to the existence of ‘God’. For them, God is an entity whose existence, or non-existence, makes no difference. Therefore, whether God exists theoretically or not, God does not exist. In the language of symbolic notation (A υ ~A) = ~A. We might say the same of Universe. Whether it’s fully virtual or merely meaningless, it cannot ‘be’ because either way, the events that constitute it make no difference. Alternatively, the Universe is a locus of events, real events because each event is a difference that makes a difference. According to the ‘Standard Model’, events within Universe are actual entities because they are differences that make a difference, but not so Universe per se . That won’t wash! If Universe is annihilated at Heat Death, so are all its constituent events. Therefore, the great chain of difference is broken. In that case events are real only in the context of each other but not in any objective sense. So then, what of Universe itself? Events within Universe are real because they are differences that make a difference. Does Universe? Yes, but if and only if Universe is ‘different’ from the mere collection of events that make it up, and if there is something to which Universe can matter. If so, that ‘something’ must transcend the universe itself. Yet Universe must remain true to its name ( uni ). Only, Universe itself can meet this test. The Universe is a massively non-linear ‘perpetual recursion machine’. Every event shapes the whole as the whole shapes every event. Is this paganism? Or pantheism? Neither. The Universal process of perpetual recursion transcends the Universe itself. It is a manifestation of the Trinitarian God, the paradigm of recursion. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to our 2024 Beach Read Previous Next

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Yesterday, the Very Tomorrow Sometimes the very words we need to hear come from the most unlikely sources. Wisdom isn’t reserved for great philosophers, theologians, or grandparents alone. At the Beginning of the World: Dinosaurs, Genesis, and the Gift of Science The Bible isn’t a science textbook. And we shouldn’t expect it to operate as one. Theology Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Philosophy Nihilism in Shakespeare (Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first!) Transubstantiation for the Rest of Us For many, though, this term is no help: the technical philosophical explanations are just as head-scratch-inducing as the claim itself. Yet once some of the finer points are made clearer, this explanation can be quite helpful. Culture & The Arts How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team If football is nothing else, it is a metaphor for life. The values of determination, responsibility, teamwork, flexibility, and focus apply to every aspect of life, not just football. This is a formula for success on a football field, but it is also a formula for success in life. Again And at the top of the stairs, we watched it again, the sunset. And that changed everything. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults The Sultan and the Sea One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. Jesus is Badass At this point, Jesus could probably have saved himself a lot of trouble with a simple, “I’m really, really sorry for what I’ve done, and I promise I won’t ever do it again," but that’s not what happened! Education, Evangelization, & Prayer The People's Creed But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine . Haiku Corner Challenges The Sultan and the Sea Challenge Take the Sultan and the Sea Challenge to win $100! Winner of The Haiku Challenge Which 17-syllable poem won our editors over? Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine. Haiku Check out this issue's haiku collection. ATM Renga Cycle 1 What's a renga? Find out and join the fun!

< Back Dr. Martin Luther King David Cowles Feb 7, 2022 “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.” “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.” These are the words of Dr. Martin Luther King from one of his final Sunday Sermons, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”. The words of Dr. King, yes, but also the message of many great philosophers before him: Anaximander, Aristotle, Buber and Whitehead to name just a few. Sometimes called the father of Western philosophy, Anaximander taught that I come to be only in the context of my ‘making space’ for you to be (and your ‘making space’ for me). According to Aristotle, it is ‘mutuality’ that allows ‘actuality’ to emerge from ‘potentiality’, potentiality that Aristotle regarded as the ‘substance’ of the universe. Jumping ahead a mere 2500 years, we find this same sentiment in the writings of Martin Buber and Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead, the titular father of ‘Process Philosophy’, substituted ‘creativity’ for Aristotle’s ‘potentiality’. Buber reprised Anaximander in his best-known work, I and Thou, writing, “In the beginning is the relation.” We think of the world in terms of subjects and objects (nouns), accidentally connected through relationships (verbs). But according to our 4 philosophers (above), and Dr. King, that is not how the world works. Relatedness is primary. Verbs come before nouns. We imagine that my ‘I’ and your ‘you’ are constants, connected over time by a hodgepodge of accidental events. We are so well trained by the language we inherited from our parents that it is almost impossible for us to think of the world any other way. Yet Western philosophy offers an alternative perspective: there are no ‘nouns’ until there is a ‘verb’ connecting them. “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.” – St. Paul, First Letter to Corinthians. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Of Mice and Mirrors “On a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor.” David Cowles Do I know who I am? Only if I know who you are! And so a new ‘mouse test’ solves a three millennia-old conundrum: How do I even know that I am ? Bet you haven’t thought much about that since college! Fortunately, others have. René Descartes (d. 1650 CE) claimed to have discovered being in the process of thinking: cogito ergo sum . As self-absorbed adolescents, most of us found Descartes’ naval gazing attractive and convincing for a time. But Descartes had his critics—some before he was born. The grandfather of Western philosophy, Anaximander (c. 550 BCE), believed that each of us comes to be only by relating (‘granting reck’) to an ontological equal, e.g., another person. 2500 years later, a Jewish existentialist, Martin Buber, picked up the baton: “In the beginning is the relation.” In between, there was a guy named Jesus (c. 30 CE), aka the Christ, who picked out one of the 613 mitzvahs found in Torah and made it the cornerstone of his philosophy: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is not the standard Sunday School ‘do unto others’ – this is radical ontology: Regard your neighbor as yourself because, on a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor. This Jesus inspired a cadre of followers that included two of the world’s greatest philosophers, Paul of Tarsus and John of Ephesus. Together, the three created a stir that lasted a few hundred years. Then Jesus went out of fashion, and we had to ‘make do’ with the acrid ideas of Machiavelli and his heirs. So began the real Dark Ages (1500 – 1900 CE). But now we know, Jesus was right after all (along with Buber, Anaximander, et al.). “And how do I know? A mouse test tells me so!” Here’s how: At birth, a ‘mischief of mice’ is divided into two teams; call them Team Jesus and Team Descartes . Cartesian mice are raised in a mouse-free, mirror-free environment, aka isolation. Christian mice grow up in the company of other members of their species and in the vicinity of mirrors. It’s Game Day! Experimenters first select a Cartesian mouse. They put a dollop of white ink on the mouse’s black fur, and then they place that mouse in front of a mirror. Nothing happens. (What’d you expect, fireworks?) But then they repeat the experiment, this time selecting a good, church-going Christian mouse. As soon as the Christian mouse catches sight of itself in the mirror, it begins to engage in heightened grooming activity, apparently attempting to wipe off the white ink. Our Christian mouse (1) knows what she is supposed to look like (through experience with other mice), (2) realizes that the mouse-in-the-mirror is she, (3) recognizes that she does not look as she should, and (4) initiates remediation, aka self-grooming, to correct the problem. This is an intellectual tour de force . But it may come with a dark side! Jun Yokose, study author, University of Texas, writes: “Using gene expression mapping, the researchers identified a subset of neurons in the ventral hippocampus that were activated when the mice ‘recognized’ themselves in the mirror. When the researchers selectively rendered these neurons non-functional, the mice no longer displayed the mirror-and-ink-induced grooming behavior. “A subset of these self-responding neurons also became activated when the mice observed other mice of the same strain (and therefore similar physical appearance and fur color), but not when they observed a different strain of mouse that had white fur.” “The gene expression analysis also showed that socially isolated mice did not develop self-responding neuron activity in the hippocampus, and neither did the black-furred mice that were reared by white-furred mice, suggesting that mice need to have social experiences alongside other similar-looking mice in order to develop the neural circuits required for self-recognition.” Does this mean that incipient racism is hard-wired into the mammalian genome? Or, much worse, that it is inherent in the process of thinking itself? In that dire case, do we need to be concerned that racism will be an emergent property of AI? How would you recognize a racist bot? Are we about to unleash a new generation of Klansmen? Moving beyond ‘race’, if that were even possible, the research suggests that self-awareness ( aka consciousness) may require us to see ourselves from outside-in, reflected either in other, similar-looking members of our community or in an external image (e.g., reflection in a mirror) of ourselves. Would art, e.g. a cave painting, serve the same function? Writing this in December 2023, I am struck by how quickly Hamas’ recent invasion of Israel triggered an eruption of antisemitism across the globe. With little apparent thought, folks’ opposition to the specific policies of the current government of Israel turned into violence against anyone of Jewish descent, anywhere, without provocation of any sort. Many Jews oppose both the objectives and the tactics of Israel’s military offensive, but that reality seems lost on the knee-jerk antisemites. You can hardly escape the feeling that this was simmering just below the surface, waiting for the slightest crack in the crust of civilization to erupt geyser-like into the air. You will not be surprised to hear that the 21 st century may be when we finally learn that we’re not alone. You’ve been expecting little green men on your front lawn for years now. But I’m not talking about extraterrestrials; I’m talking about the myriad of species with whom we share our planet, most of whom were here long before we were. Who’s the alien now? The fact is, we live surrounded by sentient, self-aware organisms that we have shamelessly treated as if they were pet rocks . Now, as we push back the fog of anthropo-exclusivity, perhaps we will also discover our own common humanity. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Share Previous Next

< Back Entropy The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. David Cowles The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. Share Previous Next

< Back Mary Poppins, Sufi Master David Cowles The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! How does one come to know the mind of God? From reading children’s stories? Maybe! In 1934, P.L. Travers, an Australian, wrote one of the most famous children’s books of all time, Mary Poppins . But this is no ordinary nursery fable. Mary Poppins is a tale steeped in tradition and rich in the lore of Sufi mysticism. Sufism is a spiritual tradition with deep roots in Islam, but it is not bound to any one religion’s traditions, any one geographic region, any one ethnic group or any one historical period. Sufism is synonymous with certain mystical and spiritual traditions and practices that span cultures. The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! Upon Mary’s arrival at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, Michael peers into her luggage, a carpet bag, and is “more than surprised to find it was completely empty.” When Michael’s older sister Jane articulates this discovery (“Why…there’s nothing in it!”), Mary responds by systematically extracting a host of personal items, including “a small folding armchair.” Michael in turn whispers to Jane, “But I saw…it was empty.” (Later, at the climax of the story, Michael will ‘see again’…but this time he sees ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing.’) And so, Michael and Mary quickly establish the philosophical framework for the dialog…and adventures…to come: When is seeing believing…and when isn’t it? (epistemology); What is real…and what isn’t? (ontology). Take the matter of the carpet bag, for instance. Is it empty, or isn’t it? From one perspective, it is: peering in, Michael sees nothing. That’s epistemology! But from another perspective, it is not: it contains all the items needed to furnish a small apartment. That’s ontology! In a sense, every systematic philosophy turns on the relationship between epistemology and ontology: ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ according to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Parmenides. But back to Mary Poppins ! Is there really a conflict between what Michael sees (epistemology) and what Mary does (ontology)? Only if you subscribe to the underlying premise that one cannot extract large objects from an empty bag! Consider the long-running TV series, “Doctor Who.” The central ‘character’ in this story is something called ‘The Tardis.’ From the outside, The Tardis is a typical English phone booth. But on the inside, The Tardis is a vast hexagonal space that accommodates multiple characters and events. And that is precisely that sort of commonsense tenet that Mary Poppins challenges! There is no effort here to challenge the reality of Michael’s perceptions or of Mary’s actions; the challenge here is strictly to the appearance of contradiction between the two. This is not a book about magic (at least not in the usual sense of that word) nor illusion, delusion, or fantasy. This is a book about epistemology and ontology. Mary Poppins consists of a series of tales, adventures told or orchestrated by Mary, designed to wean Michael from the mother’s milk of commonsense and replace it with something much stronger: a willing recognition and acceptance of mystical reality! By the final chapter (West Wind), Mary has achieved her goal and is free to move on. It is the first day of spring, and the east wind that blew Mary to Cherry Tree Lane in the first place has finally given way. Westerly weather is the signal for Mary Poppins to depart. As she prepares to leave, Mary presents Michael with her compass. In an earlier chapter (“Bad Tuesday”), Mary used this compass to travel instantaneously to the four corners of earth with Jane and Michael at her side. Later in that same chapter, Michael’s misuse of the same compass summons menacing creatures from those same four corners. But now, as the story ends, Mary feels able to trust Michael with that compass. Her mission on Cherry Tree Lane has been accomplished. The passing of the compass from Mary Poppins to Michael Banks signals that the central conflict of the story has been resolved. Sufism lives on, its torch passed to a new generation. Michael has been initiated. He has transcended his (our) childish commitment to naïve realism and can now be trusted to understand the power of the compass and to use it judiciously. A good story? Yes! Just a story? No way! Michael Banks’ initiation into Sufism is more than just a story; it is a sacrament. According to the Roman Catholic Church, a sacrament must be both symbolic and efficacious. Mary Poppins is about the conversion of Michael Banks (symbolic), but it is potentially about the conversion of everyone who reads it (efficacious). I am reminded of a 1984 movie, The Never-Ending Story . The hero, a young boy named Bastian, hides in an attic, reading a book. (The book he’s reading, by the way, is entitled, The Never-Ending Story.) First clue! Bastian is also a character in that book. Second clue! And, final clue, that book is about the real-life adventures of a real-life hero who, of course, also turns out to be none other than Bastian, the very same. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore! If we read Mary Poppins in the proper spirit, we will gradually realize that each one of us is also Michael Banks! And like Michael, we may come to see reality, at least to some extent, as God sees it. Some background is in order. Sufism is a family of spiritual doctrines and practices that vary widely across geographical, cultural, and historical landscapes. Mary Poppins reflects a particular school of Sufism associated with a Euro-centric group known as the Carbonari. If you’re thinking ‘pasta carbonara’ right now, and getting a wee bit hungry, you’re on the right track. Pasta Carbonara is the pasta of the ‘charcoal workers,’ i.e., the pasta of the Carbonari, the Sufis. While many Sufi schools focus on meditative practices and ‘inner awakening,’ the Carbonari believe that Sufism can and should be a transformative factor in everyday life. They embrace an ethic that has been compared to primitive Christianity, and they can even become politically active when devotion to that ethic so dictates. The Carbonari influence in Mary Poppins is immediately evident. As early as Chapter 2 (The Day Out), we are introduced to Bert (played by Dick Van Dyke in the movie), a “Match-Man” in the book, a “chimney sweep” in the movie, both charcoal workers, both Carbonari. Carbon workers of all kinds represent Sufism throughout the literature and practices of the eponymous Carbonari. The prominent role of Bert in Mary’s Sufi community explicitly identifies the Carbonari ideology that underlies this work. On her first day at 17 Cherry Tree Lane (East Wind), Mary changes “a dark crimson fluid” (wine like?) variously into strawberry ice, lime juice cordial, milk, and rum punch. From our knowledge of Christianity (Roman Catholic doctrine in particular), we recognize this as Transubstantiation: during the celebration of the Roman Catholic Mass, bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Mary does the same thing on Cherry Tree Lane. Of course, a skeptic might object that the dark crimson fluid merely appears to be various things to various people, according to their personal tastes and desires (idealism?). P.L. Travers is too smart to fall for that trap. She anticipated this objection. Long before J.K. Rowlings, Travers knew well the hardness of a muggle’s heart, and so, she met the skeptics’ objection head-on. Jane Banks (who tasted the lime juice cordial) entreats Mary Poppins not to give it to the twin babies in the nursery: “Oh, no, please. They’re too young. It wouldn’t be good for them. Please!” Mary ignores Jane’s well-intended plea, of course, and “…tipped the spoon toward John’s (baby’s) mouth…and by the few drops that were spilled on his bib, Jane and Michael could tell that the substance in the spoon this time was milk.” I wonder how many Roman Catholics receiving Holy Communion on a Sunday have as much faith in the reality of Transubstantiation as Jane and Michael did that day on Cherry Tree Lane! But back to Chapter 2 (The Day Out). Bert, the match-man we met earlier, is drawing two-dimensional chalk pictures on a sidewalk. One of his panels depicts a particularly idyllic country scene. “Why don’t we go there – right now – this very day? Both, together, into the picture. Eh, Mary?” And so, they do! What follows is a fabulous ‘country day’ experience, complete with afternoon tea and a ride on a merry-go-round. This section deserves a special note. Throughout her book, Travers leaves clues to let us know that what Jane and Michael are experiencing is real, not an illusion, fantasy, or dream. The first example of this is the drops of milk on John’s bib; later, encounters with gingerbread, paper stars, and snakeskin will serve the same function. “The Day Out” contains a similar, but totally unintended, clue – this time not for Jane and Michael but for us, the readers! Long after Travers wrote Mary Poppins , mathematicians confirmed that Travers’ account of dimensionality is accurate. Information, it seems, is a two-dimensional quantity; all the information contained in a three-dimensional space can actually be mapped onto two dimensions. Think hologram; think black hole. A two-dimensional chalk drawing can, in fact, encode all the information needed to generate a three-dimensional space and a four-dimensional experience (time added). In Chapter 3 (Laughing Gas), Mary and the children pay a visit to her uncle, Albert Wigg. Imagine their consternation when they find Uncle Wigg, not with his feet on the floor, but rather floating in air! Mary is not surprised. She’s seen this before. Whenever Uncle Albert laughs on his birthday, he fills up with what he calls “laughing gas” and overcomes the force of gravity. Of course, Jane and Michael are astonished…but not for long. Soon something strikes them as funny, and they too leave their feet and join Uncle Albert “on the ceiling”. “‘Well!’ said Mr. Wigg, looking very surprised indeed. ‘Don’t tell me it’s your birthday, too?’ Jane shook her head.” Mr. Wigg can only transcend gravity once a year. Jane and Michael are not so restricted. It seems that even by Chapter 3 Jane and Michael are farther up the Sufi hierarchy than Mary’s uncle. But what of Mary herself? “‘Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins, do come up,’ interrupted Michael. ‘Think of something funny…’“ “‘Ah, she doesn’t need to,’ said Mr. Wigg, sighing. ‘She can come up if she wants to, even without laughing – and she knows it.’“ In Chapter 8 (“Mrs. Corry”), Mary takes the children to a gingerbread shop. There, they purchase “a baker’s dozen” of gingerbread slabs, each of which comes with a “gilt paper star.” As they leave the shop, Jane and Michael “turned and looked behind them”. The shop had disappeared…but not the gingerbread. This is another example of that important teaching technique employed by Mary (and Travers). Just as in Chapter One, the drops of milk on John’s bid prove that the apparent metamorphosis is actual trans-substantial, so now in Chapter 8 it is the gingerbread (and gilt paper stars) that prove that the gingerbread shop was real and not an illusion or a dream. But back to the story. Jane and Michael carefully put their gilt paper stars in safe places in their room. Later that night, as they pretend to sleep, they see Mary, rummaging through their belongings. She leaves the house “…carrying a market basket, and in the basket was something that seemed to give out a faint, mysterious light”. Shortly, we learn that the basket contains the children’s paper stars. Mary meets Mrs. Corry and her helpers from the shop, and together they climb a pair of ladders and begin gluing these paper stars to the sky, where they “began to twinkle furiously”. Astrogenesis? Jane and Michael get out of bed, look through their belongings, and find that their stars are indeed gone. (In this case, it is the absence of the stars that proves the reality of the experience: the empty tomb.) Mary and Mrs. Corry have affixed them to the sky, where they twinkle like every other star in the night. Jane asks, “What I want to know…is this: Are the stars gold paper, or are the gold paper stars?” Jane’s question is the lesson of this chapter. She assumes that either stars are gold paper or that the gold paper is stars. Her thinking is linear. If stars and gold paper are the same, then either one is the origin of the other. Jane doesn’t consider the possibility that both propositions could be true simultaneously. The same logic is at work in the Christian doctrine of Eucharist. The communicant incorporates the body and blood of Christ in the form of a wafer of bread and a sip of wine, and by that, every act the communicant is incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ. Likewise, Tanya, a foundational work of Hasidic Judaism, states: When you think a thought, you are greater than that thought. But when that thought is of Torah, which is rooted in God (and is God), that thought is greater than you, and you become absorbed into the thought, and in this way you and God are one. There is another lesson encoded in this episode. An implicit commonsense assumption underlies Jane’s inquiry: a “thing” must consist of an immutable substance and a function (attribute?) consistent with that substance. By extension, everything in the world can be analyzed into “x” and “not x”: stars and not stars, paper and not paper. Though Jane does not realize it, her question is really a reductio ad absurdum for any such logical dualism. Her question proves that the notion of an underlying substance with a self-consistent function is nonsensical. The world is indefinitely mutable. Anything, made of any substance, can fulfill any function. As we learn from modern-day Structuralism, the totality determines the function of each of its parts, and any “thing” can perform any function within that totality. We are discovering that the same might be true of the animal (human) body, but that is a topic for another essay at another time. Finally, several chapters involve dialog between animals and humans. In Chapter 4, (“Miss Lark’s Andrew”) Mary speaks at length with Andrew, Miss Lark’s dog, but Jane and Michael cannot understand their conversation. Later, however, in Chapter 10 (Full Moon), Jane and Michael converse freely with the animals. These strange phenomena are explained in Chapter 9 (John and Barbara’s Story). John and Barbara are infant twins…and they are entirely conversant in the language of animals and even of nature (e.g., sunbeams and wind). P.L. Travers explains that all babies are omniglots, speaking and understanding the language of all creatures, animate and inanimate (if indeed that is even a valid distinction). All babies are natural (uninitiated) Sufis, sharing from birth in God’s knowledge. Unfortunately, by about the age of one, almost all children forget their universal knowledge of language and struggle now to learn just a single language, their parents.’ Mary is helping Jane and Michael relearn the language of creation. Here we have a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. According to Genesis, early humans enjoyed a universal language and the very first humans apparently communicated with animals as well. There may also be a suggestion here that from God’s perspective, we still live in Eden. Perhaps it is not that Eden vanished or that we were driven out; perhaps we have always been in Eden all the time but, like Jane and Michael, we have just forgotten how to see it. C.S. Lewis suggests something similar in The Great Divorce. Chapter 10 (Full Moon) is the critical turning point in the story. Jane and Michael are now able to dialog with animals (at the zoo). And at the end of this chapter, they finally come to accept without reservation that the experiences they’ve had with Mary are real, not products of a dream or a fantasy or an illusion. While at the zoo, they are introduced to a great King Cobra, Hamadryad, “the Lord of the Jungle.” For the first time in Mary Poppins , we meet a creature who is apparently further advanced in the Sufi hierarchy than Mary. For the first time in the entire story, Jane and Michael are formally instructed in Sufi doctrine…but not by Mary Poppins, rather by the great teacher himself, Hamadryad: “Tonight, the small are free from the great and the great protect the small (the lion and the lamb in Isaiah)... It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end (Eucharist)… We are all made of the same stuff…the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star – we are all one, all moving to the same end.” “Remember that when you no longer remember me… Bird and beast and stone and star – we are all one, all one… Child and serpent, star and stone – all one.” Hamadryad presents Mary with one of his shed skins as a birthday present, and he writes on it an inscription: “A Present from the Zoo.” The next morning over breakfast, Jane and Michael tell each other about the marvelous “dream” each one had the night before. Soon they realize that they both had the same dream. Jane immediately grasps the enormous import of this discovery: “We can’t both have dreamed the same thing… Then it couldn’t have been a dream at all… It must have been true.” But the power of commonsense (naïve realism) is overwhelming, especially when you’re older than 7. Jane, frightened by her own thought, walks back her profound insight; she concludes, “Then it must have been a dream…after all.” But not so fast! Only now is it time for the climax! Michael Banks, “staring, open-mouthed at Mary Poppins…pointed, and Jane also saw what he was looking at. Round her waist, Mary Poppins was wearing a belt made of golden scaly snakeskin, and on it was written…’A Present from the Zoo.’” There is no longer a shred of doubt in Michael’s mind that the experiences he has had with Mary have been real…no matter how much those experiences violate the canon of “commonsense”. The conversion of Michael Banks is complete. But what about us? Are we converted too? Was this beautifully symbolic sacrament efficacious as promised? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next

< Back Holy Moments David Cowles Nov 28, 2023 “You were made in the image of God; act accordingly!” In an earlier edition of Thoughts While Shaving , we contrasted Matthew Kelly’s concept of a ‘Holy Moment’ with Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Perfect Moment’. A perfect moment is an effort to create (or recreate) Paradise, using artifacts from the material world. Utopian political systems are examples of perfect moments. But laws are required only where humanity fails…law turns out to be a poor substitute for love. Memo to Marx: Love is the ‘withering away of the state’. A holy moment , on the other hand, is an action we undertake to project God’s values into the world. The ‘anti-political’ system that ‘governed’ Israel for c. 250 years between the death of Joshua and the coronation of Saul was ideally suited to facilitate such moments. The Book of Judges can be read as a compendium of holy moments that occurred during that period. How can we create our own holy moments ? There’s no definitive list, but here are a few ideas: Treat every person we meet as if they were Jesus in disguise. Ask yourself, ‘what would Jesus do (WWJD) in this situation’. Honor Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works (holy moments?) that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them .” Do what you prayerfully believe God is calling you to do. “Here I am, Lord!” Take life one holy moment at a time. Always ask yourself, “What is possible in this moment?” Always ask yourself, “Is this the best version of myself?” When I was but a wisp, The Baltimore Catechism taught that ‘God made us to know him, love him and serve him…' What else is a holy moment but a way to know, love, and serve God? Now, if these 300 words have convinced you to make Holy Moments your new life’s work, here are some things you would do well to keep top of mind: Our hunger for Goodness comes from God; it is God: ‘God with us’ - Emmanuel . “Character is destiny” (Heraclitus) and virtues are the building blocks of character; in fact, virtues are reflections of God’s character, his essence. What matters is what you do next: ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life’. Holy Moments are not something you do (active voice) or something that is done to you (passive voice); they are collaborations ( middle voice ). One seemingly insignificant holy moment may generate a tidal wave of goodness. Moments are plastic. You have the power to deflect them toward the Holy…or not. The Holy Moments campaign is the stepchild of Matthew Kelly, but its ‘biological’ father is none other than Jesus himself. What are the Beatitudes but an anthology of holy moments? Plus, every holy moment is a transfiguration ; it opens a window onto what’s possible. Bobby Kennedy: “I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert talk of two hungers: ‘the little hunger’ (for food) and ‘the great hunger’ (for meaning). Job preferred knowledge/meaning to wealth, health, and life itself. Jesus counseled us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (little hunger) and “Forgive us our trespasses…lead us not into temptation…deliver us from evil” (great hunger). Victor Frankl, writing after the Holocaust, echoes Job: Meaning is more important than Happiness! Or perhaps you are not yet convinced. You say, for example, “I don’t have time for this Holy Moments nonsense; I’m out to change the world.” Well, God bless you; “we’d all love to change the world” (Beatles); you have a lot of deck chairs to rearrange, so best get to it. In reality, Holy Moments are the solution to the world’s problems…Unholy Moments got us into this mess, and only Holy Moments will get us out. Matthew Kelly offers a single meme to summarize Holy Moments Spirituality: “You were made in the image of God; act accordingly!” Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Dante and The Beatles David Cowles “If a world can or must…self-annihilate…then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist.” “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense…So bitter is it that death is hardly more.” (Dante, Inferno , Canto I) “Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night… and this is only Thursday morning.” (Ringo Starr, Yellow Submarine ) 650 years after Dante Alighieri completed his Divine Comedy , a rock and roll band from Liverpool, England, none other than the world-famous Beatles, retraced his steps. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s great epic, a movie called Yellow Submarine . Not that the Beatles necessarily knew that they were following in Dante’s footsteps – it probably never even crossed their minds. But inspired by intellectual and spiritual forces in their own lives, they ended up exploring many of the same themes that Dante had explored centuries earlier. After spending a night isolated in the dark wood, unable to escape, Dante meets Virgil: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place…and I shall be thy guide and lead thee hence.” ( Inferno , Canto I). The road Virgil has in mind is not through the spatio-temporal world of Tuscany but through a perpendicular world normally traveled only by the dead. Nor does he counsel flight. Instead, he leads Dante into and through the ‘belly of the beast’. “Abandon all hope, ye that enter here,” reads the sign posted over the gate of Hell. Once inside, Dante comes to the shore of Acheron, the river of death. The souls gathered on the bank, awaiting Charon’s transport, “blasphemed God and their parents, the humankind, the place, the time, and the seed of their begetting and of their birth;” and yet “they are eager to cross the river for divine justice so spurs them that fear turns to desire.” ( Inferno , Canto III) The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent, and they cannot influence events in the spatio-temporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins forever. The sign atop the gate also reads, “Divine power made me…and I endure eternally.” In Hell, all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. As Dante and Virgil descend, Hell becomes colder and colder. At the very bottom, they find Satan encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a foretaste perhaps of the ‘heat death’ awaiting the cosmos. But this is not the end of Dante’s journey. He and Virgil walk on and discover that the direction of their motion has changed. They are no longer descending, they are starting the ascent of Mount Purgatory: “…without caring to have any rest, we climbed up…so far that I saw through a round opening some of the fair things that Heaven bears; and thence we came forth to see again the stars.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Dante’s Purgatory is very different from his Hell. Unlike Hell and Paradise, in many ways Purgatory is reminiscent of life on Earth, except that the souls there are immaterial: “O empty shades, except in semblance! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my own breast.” (Dante, Purgatorio , Canto II) Dante ascends Purgatory Mountain and at last crosses into Paradise. Dante’s Paradise is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, but it encompasses the entire universe. The first and last verses of Paradiso sum it up: “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe…the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Let’s return now to England (c. 1968) and rejoin the Beatles as they prepare to embark on their own mystical journey. Trapped in the loneliness of Liverpool, Ringo meets the Beatles’ version of Virgil, Young Fred, the newly appointed Lord Admiral who has just escaped from Pepperland in a yellow submarine. Pepperland has succumbed to an attack by a race of giants (from Norse Mythology?) known as “Blue Meanies”. The idyllic tranquility of this land has been shattered, its population “bonked” into a state of suspended animation and the land itself laid waste (as in the Grail Legends?). The once rainbow-colored countryside is now monochrome gray, all music silent, dancers frozen in place. Just as Eden was lost but later regained, so Pepperland has been lost and now must be regained. Back in Liverpool, Ringo and Young Fred proceed through a gate of their own. The sign atop this gate reads “The Pier”, fitting because this will be the launch site for the Beatles’ journey to Pepperland. The Gate of Hell ushered Dante and Virgil into a land beyond imagination; so the Pier for the Beatles. We enter a long, narrow corridor with doors every few feet on either side. Behind each door some event is unfolding, some apparently from ‘real life’, others obviously not. Plus, whenever our travelers’ attention is distracted, the corridor itself comes alive with all sorts of fantastic creatures, some of whom we will meet later in the “Sea of Monsters." The journey to Pepperland runs through a series of “seas” (branes?) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of being. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into three basic elements: time, space, and objects or events. Each of these elements in turn will undergo its own deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time: “What time is it? …It’s time for time! …Look, the hands (of a clock) are slowing down…Maybe time’s gone on strike…” Here time flows at a variable rate…and it flows backwards as well as forwards. It is ‘time for time’. Therefore, it is the womb of all possible versions of time, not just the ho-hum 9 to 5 time (or 7 to 7 these days) that we experience in our everyday lives. “I don’t want to alarm you, but the years are going backwards. If we slip back through time at this rate, we’ll all disappear up out of our own existence,” Young Fred warns. To ‘disappear up out of our own existence’ is very different from what people normally call ‘dying’. If time is reversible (even just theoretically), then existence can be erased…retroactively. And since nothing can come from nothing (certain contemporary physicists notwithstanding), nothing is, ever was, or ever will be. If our existence can be erased (even theoretically), how can we claim to have ever ‘been’ at all? If my existence is not a settled matter of fact (“I am”), if it can be annulled at any time – and if it can be annulled, it will be annulled - then at best I enjoy a sort of ‘virtual existence’. John is undaunted. “Can’t we do something to the clock?… Move the hands forward, see what happens.” Outrageously, Yellow Submarine proposes that time is a function of the clocks that measure it, not the other way around as we had commonly supposed. Surprisingly, many 21st century cosmologists would agree. The second sea, the Sea of Science, deconstructs space, showing that it can be represented just as well in 2 dimensions as in 3. Yellow Submarine suggests that a specific dimensionality is not an essential element of spatial extension. As with time, human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. The Beatles’ insight has been confirmed by Black Hole physics, String Theory, etc. The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs objects and events. It shows that what we accept as ‘normal’ is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the combinations of structures and qualities that spacetime could contain…and does . Here, the Beatles anticipate Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life . Just before Yellow Submarine was released, Hugh Everett published his famous “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”. According to Everett, everything that can happen does happen, but we can only be aware of one string of events out of innumerable actual strings. A bit like blockchain. In the Sea of Monsters, all possible forms flourish. There is no distinction between organic structures and mechanical ones. Shape and form are indefinitely mutable. As in the seas of time and space, the stuff that appears to make up our world, i.e., objects and events, is an artifact of imagination. This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures in this sea are indeed ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave. Without exception, they are involved in activity destructive to themselves and to others. These monsters act exactly like the souls in Dante’s Inferno . Their natures are hard-wired, and they don’t have the capacity to overcome their ‘programming’. They are outside the state of grace. Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands-out: the Vacuum Monster. As its name suggests, it is the nature of this creature to suck up everything it encounters. In this “monstrous sea”, every creature threatens other creatures, but the vacuum monster threatens them all…himself included. The vacuum monster is the Beatles’ version of Dante’s Satan, the agent of ‘nothingness’. Sure enough, the Vacuum Monster sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no other monsters to suck, it sucks up the fabric of spacetime. Finally, it sucks itself, tail first, “into oblivion…or even further”. Like the souls in Hell, the monsters in Yellow Submarine are compelled to act out destructive patterns, even when that activity dooms them, both individually and collectively. The first three seas en route to Pepperland closely resemble Dante’s Hell. Yellow Submarine suggests that all possible worlds must include an extensive continuum (e.g., spacetime) populated by actual entities (e.g., events), and it goes on to propose that any such world must necessarily be self-annihilating. Why? First, there is no inherent reason why processes in the ‘extensive continuum’, the medium of evolution, should not flow backwards as well as forwards, inwards as well as outwards (i.e., why space should not be curled up into a point like the ‘rolled up’ dimensions posited in some versions of String Theory.) Second, since the ‘actual entities’ are cannibalistic by nature, the incessant loom of combinations and permutations would inevitably give rise to a Vacuum Monster, a Satan, with the power to consume all things, itself included. Atomic scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, misquoted the Bhagavad Gita : “Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." If a world can or must (‘can’ and ‘must’ both mean ‘will’) self-annihilate, retroactively as well as proactively, then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist. If being can be annihilated, it really isn’t ‘being’ at all, is it? Things can come and go but being itself either is…or isn’t. If being is actual, well then it is; but if it’s not…it’s not. According to this model, without some reference point beyond itself, it is inevitable that any possible world would annihilate itself; and if all possible worlds are doomed to self-annihilation, then no such world can possibly exist. Yellow Submarine begins ostensibly as a secular ontology, but it ultimately proves that no consistent secular ontology is possible, other than hardcore nihilism. Remember, Dante’s Hell is only possible because “Divine power made me…and I endure eternally.” The ontology of the Divine Comedy is not secular. The story of the Yellow Submarine builds on Dante’s insight and, as we shall see, forces the conclusion that all possible secular theories of Being are necessarily inconsistent; but back to our story… Of course, the Vacuum Monster does his worst, and predictably we are left with no time, no space, no anything. Like Dante, our ‘lads’ have reached the nadir of being, an empty state which the Beatles appropriately call, “Nowhere Land”. This would seem to be the end of our voyage…and of our adventure...and of us. But not so! It turns out to be just the beginning. As Mary Tudor said, “My end is my beginning.” Nowhere Land may be located at the nadir of Hell but, as Dante discovered, your very next step takes you in a different direction, up Mount Purgatory toward Paradise. Plus, it also turns out that Nowhere Land is not entirely empty after all. It is not a void. It is more like the world, as the Book of Genesis describes it, just before creation: "…The earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Not much of a vacation destination to be sure (though I’ve been to worse), but not quite empty either. In Nowhere Land, there is a proto-being by the name of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. The Beatles aptly call him “Nowhere Man”. Dr. Boob (‘JHB’) is quite literally what’s left of a world after its total destruction. JHB is pure information; but the information is so totally disorganized that it cannot know what it knows, and so it cannot be harnessed to do any ‘work’. It does not have the power to make a difference, so neither does Jeremy. If the criterion for existence is “a difference that makes a difference” (to misapply a phrase stolen from Gregory Bateson), then JHB does not exist in any true sense of the word. He is being’s ghost. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes have the power to annihilate everything that falls through their event horizons; but he also showed that these same holes radiate the information they consume back into the cosmos. Jeremy is that information; in Hawking’s terms, he is the black hole’s “hair." According to the oldest-known Western philosopher, Anaximander, ‘actual being’ comes about only when two or more ‘potential beings’ grant each other “reck”. Unlike the souls in Dante’s Hell and the creatures in the Sea of Monsters, Anaximander’s proto-beings avoid the allure of mutual self-destruction and decide, independently of one another , to let each other be ( Let it Be – Beatles). They do not do this out of any hope of personal gain or out of any expectation of reciprocity; they do it out of Love. This is a decision that all of us in the living world have the opportunity to make every day. Every time we treat another as we would want to be treated, we co-create the universe with God. The souls in Hell do not have this opportunity; by their unrepented sins they have forfeited it. Neither do the creatures in Sea of Monsters; they are destined to destroy themselves and everything around them. There is no Love in Hell, or in the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters. So, where does this totally selfless Love come from? What is its origin? In a universe powered by mutually assured destruction, the decision to let an adversary survive, risking your own doom in the process, is utterly ‘unnatural’. Therefore, it has to originate outside the ‘natural’ (spatio-temporal and material) world. The Love that drives the universe must be transcendent. For Dante, that means Paradise; for the Beatles, Pepperland. Take your pick! JHB does not (actually) exist, but he does have the potential to exist. He needs someone (or something) to grant him reck and for him to grant reck to. Enter the Beatles! They choose to befriend the Nowhere Man: “Mr. Boob, you can come with us if you like.” “You mean you’d take a nowhere man?” “Come on, we’ll take you somewhere.” As a member of the crew, the Boob finds purpose and with that purpose, he begins to organize his information, so he can use it to ‘make a difference’…which, ultimately, he does. He becomes a full-fledged ‘person’ after all, a Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’. The Beatles and the Boob grant each other reck and, as Anaximander predicted, ontogenesis results! But to be born out of mutual reck, out of Love, is not to exist merely in the spatio-temporal, material realm; it is also to exist in an eternal realm. To be is necessarily to transcend the limitations of space, time and matter/energy. It is our thesis that a cosmos limited to space, time and materiality, i.e., a secular universe, could not exist. From Nowhere Land, the Beatles’ journey is now upwards toward Pepperland, just as Dante’s journey was upwards toward Paradise. Next stop: the “Foothills of the Headlands”. This is the land of disembodied thought. Its inhabitants desire to help the Beatles on their journey, but they cannot. Like Dante’s souls in Purgatory, these creatures are immaterial and powerless to bring their goals to fruition. After the Headlands comes the Sea of Holes. Here we pass into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relations of figure and ground are reversed. The sea itself is the ground, and the holes in that ground constitute the figure. Nothingness has become concrete, so concrete that Ringo is actually able to put a ‘hole’ into his pocket. The topology of this sea is radically non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. But if the Sea of Holes is evidently non-orientable, then the entire universe in which it is embedded, including Liverpool and Pepperland, must also be non-orientable, albeit less obviously so. We may say that the universe is locally orientable but globally non-orientable because it has the Sea of Holes embedded in it. Think of the world we live in: earth appears flat (locally) but it is round (globally). In the words of the Paradiso, “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.” Here, Yellow Submarine diverges slightly from the Divine Comedy . Dante has the experience of non-orientability when he is on the threshold of Purgatory. “I raised my eyes and thought to see Lucifer as I had left him; and I saw his legs held upward.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Just as Dante and Virgil turn to leave Hell, Dante looks back and is surprised to see Satan upside down, a reversal of directionality that is the trademark of non-orientable spaces. Passing through the Sea of Holes, the Beatles experience that same signature reversal of orientation. The Sea of Holes leads to Pepperland…but not so fast! You may only enter through an infinitely thin membrane (an event horizon?) called the “Sea of Green”… and only one of the holes in the Sea connects to the Sea of Green. There are innumerable holes to choose from. Conceivably, one could spend ‘a lifetime plus’ searching for the one hole that connects with the Sea of Green, then on to Pepperland…and never find it. Neither Dante nor the Beatles can reach their goal without the intervention of grace . Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the Sea of Green, and when they do, they immediately find themselves in Pepperland. Remarkably, Pepperland looks a lot like Liverpool, i.e., it’s drab…and lonely. But the Beatles quickly “unbonk” the Lord Mayor with “a snatch of a tune” and “ready the land to rebellion”. It is now that they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of Pepperland’s permanent residents, the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s band! They are Beatles under the aspect of spacetime, but they are Sergeant Pepper under the aspect of eternity. Together, the historical Beatles and the eternal Pepper Band use music to restore Pepperland to its former glory. Their battle hymn: All you need is Love! The Blue Meanies are routed. But in the spirit of Love, the Beatles offer reconciliation: “Hello there, blue people. Won’t you join us?” And of course, they do: “Yes, let’s mix, Max!” It is said that the fundamental question of philosophy is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The myriad answers proposed seem to fall into three categories: Chance. Being is an accident. There might just as well not be Being, but it just so happens that there is. Necessity. Being is a necessity. It is in the nature of Being that it must be . (Ontological Argument) Choice. Here one is reminded of the great words from Deuteronomy : “I set before you Life and Death…therefore choose Life.” (Deut. 30: 19) Dante and the souls in Paradise choose Life; so do the Beatles and the Boob. Choice is not the same thing as chance. Choice can only be motivated by values, and all value ultimately boils down to Love: All you need is Love! For Anaximander, Love is mutual ‘reck’; for the Beatles, that Love is embodied in music; for Dante, Love is Paradise itself, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” In his master work ( Process and Reality ), British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead combines these views. All values come from the “Primordial Nature of God”, i.e., God’s eternal valuations, outside of space and time; but those values in turn are only fully realized in the “Consequent Nature of God”, which includes spatio-temporal, material events. The Consequent Nature of God reconciles all things to each other and with God’s primordial values (I Cor. 15: 24 – 28). Welcome to Paradise! And a special thanks to Dante and the Beatles for showing us the way. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . 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< Back Kill Everyone Over 30? David Cowles Aug 22, 2023 “…There was once a time (ah, the ‘60s) when such a proposition was a serious topic of conversation…” No, AT doesn’t advocate Geronticide, the culling of the herd. We don’t have to! As we’ll see shortly, nature has taken care of that for us. But what’s intriguing is that there was once a time (ah, the ‘60s) when such a proposition was a serious topic of conversation among a certain segment of Western society. I know, I was there, and I participated in that conversation. The origin of this infamous idea is somewhat obscure. It has been variously attributed to factions within SDS, the Weather Underground, and the Youth International Party (Yippies!). Abbie Hoffman claimed, I think correctly, that the slogan came from an ultra-left group of German youth associated with Rudy Bahro ( Red to Green ). Geronticide is ‘term limits’ on steroids. It is rooted in the belief that our culture and/or our genetic blueprint impose a ‘cognitive shift’ (not to say ‘decline’) on all of us around that ominous but momentous 30 th birthday. The ideology of geronticide is rooted in the idea that once a person has suffered a ‘cognitive shift’, that person can no longer understand ‘youth culture’ and therefore can no longer make any constructive contribution to the new world that is being born. Lest you think that this is just plain nuts , let me remind you that at about this same time geronticide was being practiced, routinely and somewhat successfully, albeit brutally, by Pol Pot in Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) and by Chairman Mao in China (Cultural Revolution). Much as we hate to admit it, 30 does mark an inflection point in many of our lives. It is when we begin to build our families, launch our careers, amass our fortunes. Ralph Pred (ironically, over 30 at the time) used to say that prior to age 30 we are free to focus on ‘the poetic and the philosophical’; after 30 it’s all about ‘the political and the pragmatic’. Of course, he was right! At the time, few understood that drifting lazily across the event horizon of a black hole would change one’s quality of life forever. That a 30 th birthday constitutes such an event horizon was understood by even fewer. However ham-handedly, the ‘60s counterculture focused a sorely needed spotlight on this existential phenomenon. As society would have it, youth is one long rehearsal for adulthood. The classic question, “ What will you be when you grow up”, is iconic. Being is reification! You will be when you have grown, and you will be a what , not a who . “Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be a machine.” “Well that’s good, Jane, because you will grow up to be a machine, whether you want to or not. I’m very glad to see that you’re already comfortable with the idea.” Prior to age 30, our protests notwithstanding, we ‘belong’ to our parents, teachers, mentors, and drill sergeants; after age 30 we willingly indenture ourselves to the world, society, the economy. I apologize for this, but I can’t resist: “After age 30, it’s no longer about changing the world; it’s about changing diapers.” Sorry, I warned you…but oh, the stench! Can you tolerate another malapropism? “Prior to age 30, we become who we will be; after age 30, we make ourselves what we have become.” Paul’s Letter to Ephesians reminds us: “For we are…created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” (2: 10) Of course, we’re all enthusiastic followers of St. Paul, but we’ve misinterpreted his message. Instead of living in the good works that God has prepared for us, we choose to live in ‘the mundane works that society has prepared’ – it called a job ! It’s not as though we weren’t warned. Those of us fortunate enough to receive a decent education encountered Wordsworth somewhere in our academic careers: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” You maybe, not me! That won’t happen to me. And you’re right, it won’t “happen” to you because it already has happened. You got, you spent, you laid waste! You’ve already slipped across the event horizon, and we all know what that means, don’t we? As usual, though, it’s Stephen Hawking to the rescue. “Wait, black holes have hair!” And so they do. A lucky few of us will one day reemerge from our self-imposed cosmic prison to roam the universe again as superannuated ‘virtual particles’. It’s a second chance at life! It’s called Retirement . The word is misleading. Retirement is anything but ‘retiring’; it’s a violent process by which we are ripped away from our virtual anti-twin. We are like siblings ‘taken into care’, then separated by DCF…or boarder patrol agents. Retirement’s clearly not for everyone. “Not me! I’ll never retire. I plan to die with my boots on.” But I was lucky. Nature intervened, and a reluctant retirement was more or less forced upon me. Thank God! Suddenly, I am no longer indentured to the world nor enslaved by others. Armed with 40 years of real-world experience, I am finally free to take back up the ‘poetic and the philosophical’ and you, dear reader, if you’ve read this far, are the victim. Geronticide might be justified after all – except that it robs us of the possibility of resurrection ( aka retirement), and that is a price we should never be willing to pay. Image: ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ features a star-studded cast, including Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen. Credit: NETFLIX Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” < Back Life is a Movie David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” Have you ever been to the movies? Nothing’s better than a high-speed car chase projected on the big screen ( French Connection )…unless you prefer, like me, to watch Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory eating dinner in a fancy Manhattan restaurant for two hours ( My Dinner with Andre ). Either way, you experience motion as continuous…just like in real life. But that’s an illusion. In fact, you are seeing 2,000,000 static ‘frames’, uniquely ordered and sequentially displayed at a pace that creates the impression of continuous motion. You’ve just paid $18 for the privilege of being fooled. Real life isn’t like that at all… …Is it? What if the ‘continuous motion’ we seem to experience IRL is itself a cinematic illusion? What if the world actually consists of discrete events, somehow ‘edited’ into the unique order that we call spacetime? 2,000,000 distinct frames can be ordered in an unimaginable variety of sequences, only one of which corresponds perfectly to what we recognize as RL. According to Stephen Hawking, RL tracks the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it arranges events along a scale that reflects a steady increase in entropy. The events themselves are sui generis , free; the arrangement of those events in spacetime is not. So, life’s not a beach after all; it’s a movie ! And a ‘film’ is nothing but its 2,000,000 frames, presented at standard speed, in a unique order. The writing, acting, directing, staging, etc. are only relevant in so far as they are manifest in the frames. The director breaks up the continuous motion of ‘real life’ into discrete frames; the projectionist reintegrates those frames to generate the illusion of continuous motion on the screen. Over the millennia, a handful of philosophers have questioned this ‘spacetime centric’ model of reality: Parmenides, Zeno, Democritus, Whitehead, and Severino come to mind. According to them, it is…or it is not! If it is, it’s a matter of fact, an ‘actual entity’. If it’s not, it’s not. Seems straightforward enough, yet almost no one believes it. Instead, we sign on to the Heraclitan fallacy that everything is in the process of becoming, i.e., coming to be…and coming not to be. Unlike Hamlet, Heraclitans say, “To be is not to be.” Everything that is…also is not. But they do not hold that everything that is not…is. Therefore, there will come a time when the universe will be empty and once empty, always empty. This too is Nihilism. Alessandro Carrera (b. 1954), writes about “the pervasive nihilism of a civilization embracing the unquestioned belief that ‘all things must pass’.” Emanuele Severino (b. 1929), adds: “Being is, while Nothing is not…Being is that which is opposed to Nothing, it is this very opposing.” If Severino is right, Being itself is sui generis : Bootstrapping! It creates itself by not being not-being. A = ~(~A). We think of ‘nothing’ as the negation of ‘being’, but Severino suggests that we have things upside down: Etre is the negation of Neant . The poet and theologian, John Donne (d. 1631), reflected: “I am re-begot of absence, darkness, death: things that are not…” He anticipated Sartre (d. 1980): “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.” Since all Being is good (Augustine et al.), not-being is the absence of good, i.e., evil. Then “deliver us from evil” is a primal scream…for Being! Nihilism is the worship of time and, synonymously (Hawking), of entropy, disorder. “Now I am become time, the destroyer of worlds. ( Bhagavad-Gita ) Now I am become death...” (Robert Oppenheimer) Time = entropy = death. Et voilà , the true identity of ‘Satan’ is revealed; he is entropy, he is death, he is disorder, he is time itself. Nihilism and Satanism are one and the same! We live with the fear of death, of nothingness. In Carrera’s view, Nihilism is despair and therefore the ultimate, unforgivable sin, a sin against the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’ ( Nicene Creed ): “Greek philosophy (after Parmenides)…engenders the most dreadful and terrifying meaning of death, that of going into nothingness.” Sometimes Christianity can seem convoluted. I get that! But not this time. This is a case of Christianity being crystal: non-being = evil → despair = sin…a vicious cycle. We are mesmerized by time. Generation and decay link Past and Future: what’s ‘not still’ and what’s ‘still not’. But we’re missing what-is, we’re missing Presence. In the immortal words of Walter Mondale (and Wendy’s ), “Where’s the beef?” Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping. Neither Past nor Future exist. Only the Present is. So what of generation and decay? Well, can you construct a model of generation or decay that does not include a reference to the non-existent Past or Future? Then to base an ontology, like Heraclitus, on generation and decay would be to ground what is on what is not. Generation and decay are spatiotemporal concepts; they have no meaning in the context of the eternal Present. The thing itself, on the other hand, exists only in the Present. What is, is…period! The Past and the Future, by definition, both consist solely of what is not: not yet, not still. The Present does not exist ‘between’ Past and Future; it does not exist on the timeline at all. Instead, it exists entirely outside of time. It is a-temporal…‘eternal’. ‘Eternity’ and ‘Presence’ are denotatively synonymous and entirely different from Immortality. In fact, eternity (no time) and immortality (infinite time) are antonyms, even though they are often used interchangeably in ordinary discourse. The Present is where the thing itself lives. In Kant’s terms, noumena are Present, phenomena are traces of the Past, images of the Future. Qualia are ways in which the Present ‘feels’ the past and ‘projects’ the future. Qualia are inherited; they are never created. Our job is, quite literally, to rearrange the deck chairs (qualia) on The Titanic . Alessandro Carrera: “Every slice of reality is , and therefore is permanently, since whatever is cannot come into being or cease to be.” “Go ask Alice!” There is the World and then there is the Looking-glass World. That’s space. The mirror is the limit of both worlds, but it is part of neither world. Now rotate 90° off of the real number line. That’s time, represented mathematically as an ‘imaginary number’ (i). The Present is the mirror (membrane) separating and connecting the Past and the Future. But as Alice knows, everything that happens, happens in the mirror. Therefore, a thing either is – or is not. It does not come to be or cease to be. It either is, whole and entire, or it isn’t. Coming to be and ceasing to be happened in time but have nothing to do with the thing-itself which happens only in the Present. This is not to say that actual entities are static. In fact, they are pure processes; it’s just that the process is a-temporal, outside of time. Along with Yahweh (Exodus 3:14), every actual entity ‘asserts’ “I am”. Mark 12: 26 – 27: “…‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living…” From God’s perspective, there are only ‘actual entities’, and all actual entities are Present. Unfortunately, we have come to accept the coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of entities as reality rather than projection/abstraction. We view the thing itself as a ‘projection of’ or an ‘abstraction from’ the process of becoming and decaying, not the other way around. In our ‘philosophy’, what is not is what is. No wonder; we live in the age of Nihilism. While understanding Being in terms of Presence rather than Spacetime has not been popular in recent centuries, it is not at all new. 2500 years ago, Parmenides of Elea, often called both the ‘father of Western science’ and the ‘father of Western philosophy’, wrote an enigmatic poem called On Nature . The poem consists of three parts: a brief Prologue, the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Appearance” ( Doxa ). Regarding the Way of Truth, he wrote: “ What-is is ungenerated and imperishable, whole, single-limbed, steadfast and complete. Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one continuous...Whence did it grow? Not from what is not…It must be completely, or not at all… How could what-is be in the future, and how could it come to be? For if it came to be, it is not… Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of… Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike…it is full of what-is … It is not right for what-is to be incomplete. For it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything.” Regarding the Way of Appearance: “It has been named all things that mortals have established, trusting them to be true: to come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color. Thus, according to belief, these things were born and now are, and hereafter, having grown from this, they will come to an end. And for each of these, did men establish a distinctive name?" The simplest, and probably least accurate, analogy is the mirror (above). A better metaphor treats Doxa (Spacetime) as a holographic projection of Aletheia (Presence). Perhaps even better, we might think of Doxa as the rainbow projected from an apparently featureless prism. Plato and Aristotle moved philosophy away from Parmenides’ vision, but Christianity restored it. We find a familiar affirmation of the Christian rediscovery of Parmenides and the other Eleatic philosophers (e.g., Zeno) in the Lord’s Prayer: “…on earth as it is in heaven.” Our true being is not in spacetime, but in Eternity. To be (earth) is to be eternal (heaven). A movie passes before our eyes; it is an illusion. Each of the 2,000,000 frames is eternal in the sense that it lives forever in the medium in a way that is not dependent on the projector. Likewise, we live our lives in spacetime; it is an illusion. Each event is eternal in a way that is not dependent on Past or Future. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Nihilism David Cowles Oct 8, 2021 Nihilism comes in two flavors: Ontological Nihilism (“Nihilism of Being”) and Ethical Nihilism (“Nihilism of Value”). Shakespeare (anticipating post-Enlightenment science: bootstrapping, heat death, entropy, etc.) would be an example of an ontological nihilist: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (The Tempest) Nihilism comes in two flavors: Ontological Nihilism (“Nihilism of Being”) and Ethical Nihilism (“Nihilism of Value”). Shakespeare (anticipating post-Enlightenment science: bootstrapping, heat death, entropy, etc.) would be an example of an ontological nihilist: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (The Tempest) Nietzsche (anticipating much of 20th century philosophy: Camus, Ayer, et al.), would be an example of an ethical nihilist: “There exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Gods) For the Scholastic Philosophers of the Middle Ages (Aquinas, Maimonides, et al.), this dichotomy posed no problem because they regarded Being and Value (Good) as synonymous. Since ‘to be’ is self-evidently ‘good’ (as opposed to ‘not to be’ – sorry Hamlet), Being and Value were understood simply as different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Today, however, this view has few adherents. Modern philosophers do not regard ‘being’ (or existing) as a ‘quality’ of that which is. Heidegger spoke for all of modernism when he separated his world into two elements: Dasein (that it is) and Wassein (what it is). Out of an entirely different philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead anticipated Heidegger when he divided his cosmos into ‘eternal objects’ (what it is) and ‘actual entities’ (that what-it-is is). Yet Ontological and Ethical Nihilists end up in the very same place…which is ‘no place’ and ‘no thing’. Connecting Ontological Nihilism to ‘nothing’ is easy; connecting Ethical Nihilism requires an intermediate step. The Ethical Nihilist does not preclude the existence of ‘something’ per se. However, that something has no origin and no destiny. It has no purpose or meaning; and it reveals no necessary connections, no pre-ordained order. Whatever appears as ‘order’ is entirely subjective and merely accidental. It is chaos, pure and simple, and parallels the state of things prior to “Fiat Lux” (Genesis): “…without form or shape with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind.” So perhaps we should reevaluate the views of the Scholastic philosophers. We may at least say that Value is a pre-requisite for Being. Being per se discloses Value and Value per se necessitates Being. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.