< Back The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music Magesh "We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication." I have had a blessed career as a musician, performing with many renowned artists like Lionel Richie, Ricky Martin, and Nelly Fertado. I remember playing a sold-out concert to 10 thousand people. My band was opening for Justin Timberlake. As I was playing the drums, I noticed a sea of people jumping up and down to my funky beat. This gave me a tremendous feeling of pride. It was overwhelming seeing that many people having a good time in unison. How has this music given people from all different walks of life a sense of joy and freedom? I was eager to explore the profound influence music has on all of us, especially how it can break down barriers and bring people together. I was still elated a week after playing the concert, my mind trying to decipher what had happened that caused the people to escape their everyday lives and disappear into the music. Afterward, I received many compliments. A father told his children that I got to be an outstanding musician through years of practice, but that was only part of the equation. I never felt my musical talent was mine; rather, it is a talent that passed through me. It is probably summed up best in James 1:17: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” I especially like the second part of this verse about changing like shifting shadows. I interpret this as using my musical abilities to spread positivity and not getting caught up in negative vices. My 25-year career as a musician has given me the ability to witness how powerful music can be. How it can reach beyond race, creed, and even language. I remember going to a rehearsal studio with a local band. A drummer is always the first to the rehearsal studio, simply because of the amount of equipment they need to set up. As I prepared my hi-hat cymbals, I heard this phenomenal-sounding bass guitar coming from the next room. I immediately followed the sound, which led me to a young musician from Senegal. I immediately told him how funky he sounded, expecting him to replay thank you for the compliment; but, to my surprise, he said nothing at all. He just looked at me blankly and then sheepishly said, “Not much English.” I signaled for him to follow me into the next room with his bass guitar and launched into the drumbeat of James Brown's "Funky Drummer." He immediately played the bass line, and I felt the earth shake. We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication. This must have been divine intervention. As we were playing, the musical director walked in to hear us jamming. He was so impressed he hired that unknown, young musician on the spot to do a major tour. This never would have happened if we hadn’t played together. The energy we created was palpable. It didn't matter that we were from different backgrounds or even different countries. The music connected all the missing pieces, like in 1 Corinthians 12: “As a body is one, though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” The young musician told me he had been praying for golden opportunities. He had just moved from Senegal and didn't know any other musicians. His incredible ability to play music led him to become an in-demand session musician. Although the odds were stacked against him of becoming a successful musician, his faith created a literal miracle. This wasn't the first time I had experienced music breaking down barriers. Once, I was traveling in Japan with a friend who was also a professional musician. We stopped by a famous jazz club to see some local musicians. I remember the club being sold out; everyone there to see a great jazz singer. As we didn't speak Japanese, my buddy and I used Google Translate to get by. Just as the show was about to start, the club owner took the stage with a disconcerting look on his face. He told the crowd that the piano player had suddenly fallen ill and was unable to perform. They tried to call another local piano player to see if he could fill in, but his phone was off. I used this opportunity to walk forward in faith, not in fear. I introduced myself to the club owner and told him that my friend was a famous piano player and could play with the band. At first, he was skeptical, until I showed him a YouTube clip of him performing. Suddenly, he announced the show will go on due to a miracle! The best thing about jazz music is it's open to interpretation. A piano player from Texas might play a C major 7 chord in a different inversion than a piano player from Tokyo, although they are the same chord that will make the song work. This isn't the case with classical music, where it must be played note for note. That's why, in my not-so-humble opinion, jazz is better than Bach! The drummer counted in the first song, the classic jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.” I immediately saw the faces in the audience light up. They knew the piano player didn’t speak Japanese and had limited knowledge of local customs, but this doesn't seem to bother them as the music fills their bodies and minds. In between songs, the singer spoke to the audience in Japanese. I could tell my friend playing the piano had no idea what he was saying; all he understood was that everyone in the room was smiling. Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Previous Next

“I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.” < Back I Seem To Be a Klein Bottle David Cowles Jan 15, 2024 “I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.” A Unicorn could exist in our world…but it doesn’t. A Klein Bottle (KB), on the other hand, cannot exist in our familiar 3-dimensional space, and yet… I seem to be a Klein Bottle . To exist in our 3-D world, KB would have to pass through itself, which is topologically impossible. A Klein Bottle is an example of a ‘non-orientable’ object. That’s a 3-D object with a 2-D Möbius strip embedded in it. And in English? It’s a bottle that won’t hold water. (Note to self: DO NOT USE when decanting wine, especially if the wine is red, and you’re standing on a priceless oriental.) KB can’t hold water, or wine, because it has no inside . That would be a problem for any ‘bottle’, wouldn’t it? A Möbius strip is a ‘strip’ that has no obverse/reverse sides. i.e., no front or back. If it were a coin, it would always come up ‘heads’ (because it doesn’t have a ‘tail’.) So, non-orientable objects, be they strips of paper or glass bottles, have no ‘sides’ - no inside, no outside, no upside, no downside. But what does that have to do with me? Clearly, I do have an inside and an outside. Clearly? Well, it’s hot outside; I’m anxious inside. While the ‘heat’ may be a product of global warming, I experience that heat internally via my subdural nervous system. My skin is a membrane that separates the internal from the external for me, right? Well, sort of. Skin is a membrane, but it is also part of a dissipative system: it does not so much wall off the inside from the outside as it regulates the traffic – the way Customs is supposed to operate on a national border. The defining characteristic of a Klein Bottle is that it cannot hold water…or wine. Certainly, that’s me! Pour a 1982 Lafitte down my gullet…please, and then watch: soon it will emerge from my other end…with no notes of tobacco or cassis. But this still leaves one apparently insurmountable problem: a Klein Bottle can’t exist in 3-D space. But do we really live in three dimensions? Didn’t Einstein show that we actually live in 4-D spacetime? And didn’t Aquinas (and Hawking?) argue that ‘time’ is another name for ‘motion’? And what is motion other than a measure of the discontinuity between some figure (e.g., me) and some ground (the world)? 100 years ago, a biologist by the name of D’Arcy Thompson ( On Growth and Form ) suggested that an organism could be regarded as a Klein Bottle if its perpetual motions were taken into consideration. For him, motion is a 3-D analog of time . Jean-Paul Sartre’s signature contribution to Western philosophy was his recognition that ‘everything ( etre ) is outside ( hors )’, always; literally, ‘nothing ( neant ) is inside ( dedans )’, ever! The sun is shining; I feel the sun’s heat on my skin, and I feel my internal body temperature rising. I am becoming feverish. I am beginning to hallucinate. Does it help to know that all this is external to ‘me’? My body, its temperature, my fever, even my hallucinations…all ‘outside’. Or is this a time when I’d trade the wisdom of the ages for a cup of water? (Sorry, Job!) So if the sun, its heat, my skin, nerves, and brain are all ‘outside’, what’s ‘inside’? If they’re not me, what is? Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you already know the answer: ‘Nothing’ ( neant )! Nothing’s inside. In the words of Odysseus, I am Nemo , ‘nothing’. In fact, I am the active negation of whatever is ( etre ). To paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, “I am Death, the destroyer (and creator) of worlds.” My role as Neant is to destroy worlds, but only so that new worlds may emerge. I am (or I am a reflection or manifestation of) the primal unrest at the core of Being. I am aware of X, which means that I am aware of X not being me. Everything I am aware of, I am not…by definition, or I wouldn’t be aware of it. Awareness implies separation. So does self-awareness ( aka consciousness). I am self-conscious to the extent that I make myself an ‘other’, i.e., to the extent that I view myself from the outside-in. When I view myself from outside, I effectively turn the universe inside out. What was in is now out and what was out is now in. That’s the essence of the Christian doctrine of incarnation: incarnation turns the universe inside out. The whole becomes its own quantum element. To borrow an idea from Jacques Derrida, consciousness inserts differance between the knower and the known, even if the known is the self. So I can be both the knower and the known, separated by ‘differance’, which Derrida defines as a quantum of ‘difference’. Derrida bravely fights a war on two fronts: on one side, Zeno, arguing that all motion is impossible; on the other side, Newton and Leibniz, arguing that spacetime is continuous. Zeno throws ‘pussy’ (arithmetic) down a proverbial well, while Newton assumes the role of ‘Little Tommy Stout who pulled pussy out’ (with calculus ). For Zeno, spacetime is granular. He understood Planck long before Planck was born. For Newton, spacetime is continuous; for him, a quantum of difference is infinitesimal (infinitely small). Derrida marries the two: ‘Differance’ is minimally small but not infinitely small. Here, Derrida recalls Sartre. Being is existence without essence. ‘To be’ is pure; it is unadulterated by any qualifiers. Differance is what comes from abstracting existence from essence. Remember the Real Number Line? Take any two points on the line, call them A and B; between A and B there will always be an intermediate term, C, right? Not according to Zeno! And not according to Derrida. For Derrida, B > A (or A > B) but there is ‘nothing’ separating them: A ≠ B but A – B = 0. In the Odyssey , Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name. Our hero replies, “ Outis ” ( Nemo in Latin), meaning ‘nobody’. Cyclops is a nominalist; he mistakes the name ‘No One’ for the reality of ‘no one being there’. Like many of us today, he fails to draw a straight line: “if someone is saying ‘no one’ to me, then someone must be here, saying it.” Does this remind you of the physicists who clearly hear Fiat Lux but deny there is ‘anyone’ saying it? But this is not the end of our story. Outis has a secondary meaning: ‘everyone’. Being ‘no one’ means that I am also ‘everyone’. (Math analogy: the null set ø is a subset of every other set.) If I were ‘someone’, then I could not be ‘anyone’. I could not be ‘anyone’ because I’d already be ‘someone’, and I could not even be myself since I am ‘no one’. Confusing enough for you? Because I am ‘no one’, nothing, I can be ‘anyone’, anything (consistent with the physical limitations imposed by the universe): “I know who I am, and I know that I can be whoever I want to be.” (Mae Jemison, Astronaut) If I can be anyone, then I am everyone. Odysseus is everyone, as is Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s reprise. Because I am not actually any thing, I am potentially every thing. I am a bottle that is ‘no bottle’. I am in the form of a bottle, but I lack the functionality of a bottle. I am made in the image of ‘bottle’ but not in its likeness. I ‘look’ like a bottle, but I don’t ‘act’ like a bottle. Is this separation of form from function what’s called ‘crisis’ in psychology, spirituality, and philosophy? When you are a baby and trying to figure out the world around you, nothing is more baffling than a mirror. There are people in the mirror who look like Mommy and Daddy but aren’t; there’s a baby in the mirror who might be you but isn’t. If you’re on track for Oxbridge, you might notice that the mirror is like a ‘window on the world’ but a window that looks inward rather than outward. If you’re really clever, you might even think to call it an ‘indow’. So, next time your little niece points to the mirror and shouts, “indow, indow,” don’t correct her. She knows the difference between an indow and a window; she’s just smarter than you. Deal with it! While a mirror is not itself a non-orientable object, you and the mirror together form a system that functions like one. Right and left are ‘reversed’ in a mirror. In your ‘orientable’ world, objects display 360° symmetry: what goes around comes around. In my ‘non-orientable’ world, what goes around still comes around…only in reverse. But don’t give up! What comes around needs to go once more around to get us back to ‘the way we were’, i.e., how things were at the get-go. Non-orientable systems display 720° symmetry (vs. 360°symmetry). The image of my image is myself. So I am a Klein Bottle; like a mirror, I reflect everything but contain nothing. I am a topological twist...a knot in the fabric of being. Through me, the Universe gazes back upon itself; through me, Universe is conscious of itself. I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror. 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 above to return to Winter 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. 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< Back The Algorithm Challenge! David Cowles May 17, 2022 …We do not experience ‘objective time’, we only experience ‘subjective time’. In subjective time, a minute never ends but entire years go by in a flash. How does time fly? “…We do not experience ‘objective time’, we only experience ‘subjective time’. In subjective time, a minute never ends but entire years go by in a flash. Tempus fugit , time flies! Who among us has not made that observation (even without the Latin); and who has not gone on to note that time seems to be ‘flying’ ever faster (i.e., the ‘speed of time’ seems to be increasing, and it seems to be increasing at an increasing rate)? When I was in grade school, a year seemed like a lifetime; now the years race by and I barely notice them. As soon as one Thanksgiving’s leftovers have been eaten (or tossed), it’s time to begin thinking about the next year’s celebration. Now in my 70’s, it seems as though a week has about the same duration that a day did years ago; a month is like a week, and a year is like a month. Of course, we take it for granted that the units of time itself have not changed. Ignoring the marginal effects of relativity and quantum mechanics, ‘a kiss is just a kiss’ and a second is just a second. Objective time flies, but it flies at a steady pace. Then why don’t we experience it that way? Because we do not experience ‘objective time’, we only experience ‘subjective time’. In subjective time, a minute never ends but entire years go by in a flash. Like the Tardis in Doctor Who , the inside (minute) can seem bigger than the outside (year). We have generated many mathematical models to illustrate the properties of objective time. Could we develop a mathematical model to illustrate subjective time? Let’s oversimplify! Suppose I live from my birth to my 85th birthday. In my first year, the life I’m living is all the life there is: subjective time and objective time are nearly the same. But at the start of year 2, I have year 1 in the bank. I can compare my year two experience with my year one experience. Subjectively, my year 2 experience is only half as long as my year one experience. By my first birthday, I have lived 1 year, both objectively and subjectively, but by my second birthday, I have lived 2 years objectively only 1.5 years subjectively. Applying this algorithm 84 times will give us a smooth distribution of points; we should be able to write an equation that will include (approximately at least) each of those points. If we carry out this function through my 84th year of life, we get some surprising results. Here are just a few of the necessary conclusions: By the time I reach my 85 birthday I will have lived, subjectively, the equivalent of only 5 ‘objective years’. I lived 20% of my ‘subjective life’ in my first year. I lived 60% in my first 10 years. 70% in my first 20 years, 80% by age 30. So, at age 30, I only have 20% of my life left to live No, this is not an ad for ‘Universal Pre-K’, though it does make you think; but if our algorithm is correct, we all have a heck of a lot less time left to live (subjectively) than we had imagined. The years from 70 to 85 account for almost 20% of my objective life span but only 3% of my subjective life. Conclusion: Memento mori! “…Pray for us now - at the hour of our death - Amen.” But is our algorithm correct? The results seem too extreme. So, if my algorithm wrong, where is it wrong? And if it’s wrong, can we come up with a superior alternative, one that generates a more intuitively satisfying result? (If so, the nuts and bolts of that algorithm could tell us a whole lot about how human consciousness works.) Challenge #1 : See if you can develop a better algorithm! Then submit your solution to Aletheia Today ( editor@aletheiatoday.com ) . No need to get bogged down in the math; just tell us how you would approach the problem. The best submission (in the judgement of our editorial board) will win a $100 cash card and will be reprinted (with permission and attribution of course) as a future ‘Thought While Shaving”. The deadline for all submissions is midnight, 5/31/22. 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 Where'd You Get That Spark? David Cowles Mar 8, 2022 Is the spark of the Hasidim the same thing as Whitehead’s Primordial Nature of God? In my last “Thought”, I pointed out that our mental apparatus is attuned to finding differences more readily than similarities. But similarities abound! Every entity – any thing with a distinct and independent existence – is both similar to and different from every other entity. No two entities are exactly the same as each other, but also, no two entities are entirely different either. In the real world, there are no absolute synonyms…or antonyms. Every entity is both alike and unlike every other entity. British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called these complementary facts of life the Ontological Principle (no entity is exactly like me) and the Solidarity Principle (no entity is entirely different from me). All entities have a past, and all pasts overlap, but no two entities have exactly the same past. The actual world of an entity consists of the multiplicity of other actual entities that lie in its past plus the unique perspective from which that entity takes hold of its past. (According to Whitehead, the Primordial Nature of God – “the perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature” – lies in the inherited past of all actual entities.) In other words, at the core of everything is God’s perfect intent. Plus, each novel entity puts its own stamp on “the process of becoming” (something Whitehead called ‘creativity’), so every actual entity also makes a unique contribution to a common future. (According to Whitehead, the Consequent Nature of God lies in the shared future of all actual entities, but each entity makes a unique contribution to that Consequent Nature.) So we are all siblings – not just of one another, not just of all humans, not just of all animals, not just of everything living. Saint Francis of Assisi was on to something, and possibly aware of such a conception of thought, when he wrote, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” According to the teachings of Hasidic Judaism, a divine spark (the portion of God in exile within all things) is present in everything that is – in every actual entity, animate or otherwise. Is the spark of the Hasidim the same thing as Whitehead’s Primordial Nature of God? According to the Hasidim, the divine spark that lies at the core of each and every actual entity will ultimately be reunited with all sparks to form the Shekinah, our common future…the Consequent Nature of God. 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 Two New Articles Added to Aletheia Today Summer Issue David Cowles Jun 2, 2022 We were thrilled when the opportunity arose to add these additional articles to our first issue. As you know, Aletheia Today published Issue #1 of AT Magazine (ATM) yesterday (6/1). As a regular reader of TWS, we sent you a link to Issue #1 on Tuesday (5/31). We assumed that this Issue had been ‘put to bed,’ and we wanted to give you a chance to peek at the content ahead of the June 1 publication date. Unexpectedly, we were able to ‘green light’ two additional articles just in time for the June 1 Issue. I could not be more excited about these last minute additions! First, we’ve added Parshat Emor , a reflection by Rabbi Dr. Jon Kelsen on the 50 days between Pesach and Shavuot. The parallel in the Christian tradition is the 50-day period between Easter and Pentecost, but the scope of Dr. Kelsen’s analysis transcends any particular religious tradition. It is a life lesson for all of us. Plus, we added Mary Poppins: Sufi Master . One of our hopes for ATM is that it will help to uncover the deeply spiritual themes that are often encoded in artifacts of contemporary, popular culture. We do not separate the sacred from the profane, simply because nothing in itself is profane. Everything is sacred, but sometimes it takes some effort on our part to locate (and liberate) the divine spark within every ‘actual entity,” every event. If you haven’t read AT Magazine yet, let this be an invitation. If you have, let me suggest you return to check out our two new additions. Thanks for following TWS…and now, ATM as well! We’ll see you soon at www.aletheiatoday.com - David 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.

Dive into the Yuletide issue of Aletheia Today! Explore the intersection of faith and science through reflections on the Christmas season, stories of hope, and timeless traditions reimagined. Celebrate the birth of the messiah, the meaning of Bethlehem shepherds, and how to deal with grief at Christmas. Inside Yuletide 2024 Philosophy After Parmenides What? "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." Life on Mars “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy”. Theology Beholding the Gift of Messiah "Fully beholding the gift of the Messiah enables me to see Him in the daily moments not only of Advent, but each and every day of the year." Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Jesus Gets Us! “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” R U Body, Soul or Spirit? “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Culture & The Arts Pando and Me “Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!” The Secret of the Bethlehem Shepherds "In my research, I discovered that the shepherds were important to St. Luke for a simple reason: They were the primary eyewitnesses of the events in Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth, and they passed down the story through established methods of oral transmission." Spirituality Bending With Angels, Resting in the Wait of Christmas "In the silence of time, God's chosen ones fervently pray "Messiah" on their lips as it was in olden times and is now. "Come, Lord Jesus!" "Come again, Lord Jesus!" When All Is Not So Merry and Bright "Hidden grief whispers loud among us, especially at Christmas, as we navigate losses too often dismissed or unacknowledged—but even in the pain, there’s a gift waiting to be unwrapped." 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.

< Back Things Are Not Always the Way They Seem to Appear David Cowles Jul 19, 2022 This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation into a four-stroke process of alignment. How so? "Things are not always what they seem ,” you’ve heard it a million times, and it certainly is true…as far as it goes. It captures the separation of Being and Appearing, traditional in Western philosophy from Parmenides ( Aletheia vs. Doxa ) through Heidegger ( Dasein vs. Wassein ). But it also suggests that there is an almost primordial conflict between being (‘thing’) and appearing (‘experience’). Many years ago, I heard this same basic concept formulated in a way I like much better: “Things are not always the way they seem to appear.” This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation (above) into a four-stroke process of alignment (below). How so? We start with things as they are , not as they seem to be to each other, not as they appear to be to an outside observer, but things as they are to each other, islands in the stream . Groups of things can form; call them ‘multiplicities.' Things in a multiplicity don’t necessarily have to fit together and very often they don’t. It would be more accurate to say that things in a multiplicity have a habit of frequently bumping into one another. Things are , they seem , and as we shall soon see, they appear . But before they can do any of this, things need to transform from mere multiplicities into nexus (pl.). Things cannot ‘seem’ on their own. ‘Seeming’ lies between ‘being’ and ‘not-being’ or between ‘being’ and ‘appearing.' ( Side bar : does that mean that ‘non-being’ and ‘appearing’ are the same thing? Check out Shakespeare’s Tempest for some ideas on this.) Seeming can be a bit, well, for want of a better word, ‘unseemly.' Seeming is a social act and, therefore, requires a collective subject (i.e., a nexus). Seeming connects the solidary act of being with the communal act of appearing. Seeming is fundamental to nexus. How a nexus ‘seems’ defines what that nexus ‘is.' Likewise, only a nexus can ‘seem’ so whatever ‘seems’ is a nexus. This is what is meant by ‘the way they seem:' it is a single act but with two opposite aspects. The ‘way’ is how things come together to form nexus (pl.) while the ‘seem’ is how the fully formed nexus projects itself in the world. Finally, things ‘appear.' Whew! It’s been a long ride, but yes, you can finally say it, “We’re there now.” Appearing implies an audience: ‘Tom Jones is now appearing in Las Vegas.’ He wouldn’t be ‘appearing’ if there wasn’t at least the expectation of one tapped out gambler as an audience. So, yes, we’re home now. The fat (sic) lady has sung! A ‘bud of experience’ (William James) has emerged from an undifferentiated background pool of potentiality. We have what Alfred North Whitehead would call, ‘an actual entity.' Let’s retrace our steps. We started with things in themselves, solitary things, strangers in the night. Then we looked at the way those things come together to form a nexus. A nexus is the first step in seeming . The process climaxes in what we call an experience . The experiencing agent interacts with the nexus in question thereby transforming the nexus’ seeming into appearing , the contribution of the nexus to the experience. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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 The Worst Book Ever Read David Cowles Jul 31, 2025 “In just over 300 pages, this book manages to recycle just about every bad idea since stale bread...” “What is the best book you've ever read?” From the dorm room to the senior center, I love to play this game. You can learn a ton about a person from their answer, or answers. And you can tell a lot about ‘the person you’ve made yourself to be’ (there’s a hint) by noting how your own answers morph over time. For me, the two titles that consistently emerge are The Gospel of John and James Joyce’s Ulysses , often joined by Whitehead’s Process and Reality and/or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness . I own hundreds of books (yes, I have read most of them) but these 4 stand out. But what about the worst book ever ? OMG…so much trash, so little time! Let’s exclude books that are just badly written, counter factual, morally repugnant, or boring as dried paint. (We only have 85 years after all!) I might change my mind next month but right now I have a clear winner in mind; it’s a book written by Anders Indset, a wonderful person I’m sure, and published in 2020: The Quantum Economy . In just over 300 pages, this book manages to recycle just about every bad idea since stale bread, panzanella notwithstanding. No, I didn’t read it all…I couldn’t do that to my poor Pooh brain! But I’ll step aside now, for the most part at least, and let the book speak for itself. Prepare yourself…now let the adventure begin: “The Old Economy is dead. So is the New Economy…and 2019 might go down in human history as the high water mark.” See what I mean. Who in his right mind could imagine 2019 as the apex of human civilization? But, in the immortal words of the Carpenters , “We’ve only just begun!” “We must move toward the unification of the natural and social sciences to create a society of understanding …We need a new enlightenment. But how do you enlighten people who don’t know they need enlightenment?” He means you , Muggle! Be grateful for small graces: the worst ideas often come wrapped in elitist packaging. Elitists just can’t help themselves; they tell you who they are…right up front and in your face. So it turns out, sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. “…Maybe we will succeed in creating a digital direct democracy, in which every voice can be heard without the sclerotic structures of party politics.” What a great idea! Put everyone in individual, hermetically sealed booths and ask them to govern. That ensures that public policy will enshrine the special interests of the ideological class, i.e. the media, the educational establishment, etc. Why didn’t Uncle Joe Stalin think of this…or did he? Human beings do not function in isolation. We only thrive in society with others: family members, neighbors, classmates, work colleagues, drinking buddies, monastic communities, etc. We form our opinions in dialog with others. Otherwise, we just recycle memes created en masse and promulgated for us by others. ‘Disempower the People!’ is not my definition of democracy. Brace yourself (if you’re not teetotal this might be a good time to pour): “How can we repeat the political masterpiece of European reconciliation and confidence building at a global scale?” Surely this must be a misprint. Perhaps he meant Tolkien’s Middle Earth , a label sometimes applied to Europe on ancient maps. He can’t mean the ‘Europe’ from which the UK recently seceded? Or the ‘Europe’ that voters are rejecting in droves in favor of right wing, nationalist parties? Or the ‘Europe’ that continues to suffer from decades of stagflation? Surely not that Europe! Like a ‘60s idealist, Indset sees the increasing prominence of ‘women’ in the workplace and the coming of age of ‘a (depopulated) younger generation’ as drivers of a future Quantopia ( aka Quantum Utopia). Kill everyone over 30? Intriguingly, he predicts, offering no supporting evidence or argument, the demise of the nation state replaced by ‘the unstoppable rise of cities’ and ‘a new kind of regional tribal society’. Is Indset nostalgic for the warring independent city states that pock marked Northern Italy during the Renaissance? Although claiming to embrace a technology-rich future, there is more than a whiff of the Luddite in The Quantum Economy : “…Can we achieve freedom if our genes are altered by AI and biotech?” Wow! There’s a lot to unpack here. “Achieve freedom?” So we’re not free now. How will we know we are free when we are free and what will it take to get us there? A victory by the Social Democrats in the next round of national elections? Is Indset really saying that our existential freedom is a function of our genetic code? If so, where does he think that code came from in the first place? (I doubt he thinks that God typed it out on his cosmic super computer.) Or did human freedom emerge out of whole cloth only to be extinguished by the process of evolution, i.e. natural selection? To borrow from Edwin Starr, “Freedom – what is it good for?” Earlier I mentioned books by John, Joyce, Whitehead and Sartre. Those books have one theme in common: Freedom! - it’s an inalienable feature of the human condition. Sorry Anders! “We don’t just need IQ, we need to harness WeQ : the potential of collective cognition …methods that serve both the individual and the collective.” No better word characterizes Indset’s vision than ‘collectivization’. We know what that looks like: Stalin’s ‘collective farms’, Star Trek ’s ‘Borg Collective’. We don’t need collectives, we need ‘Q’ (the Q Continuum), rescuer of Capt. Picard, sworn enemy of the Borg, Trekkies’ antidote for the poison of the collective. Toward the end of the book, Indset spells out his view of the human person. He does so in bold type, thank you, Anders…and it’s not pretty: “Every single one of us has a much greater potential to influence our career, our path in life, our personal development, and our emotions than most of us are aware of.” Potential? Influence? Where does Indset think our career, our path, our person, our emotions come from? From Marxist ‘history’, from our ‘class identity’? How quintessentially European! How utterly wrong! Let’s get this straight, once and for all. We are not born into a career. Our path is not handed to us at birth like a map. We fashion our own career, we choose our own life path, we create our own person, we live our own emotions. We are solely responsible for who we are, who we become, and what we do. Sure, we inherit an Actual World (Whitehead). We are a product of a specific genetic code. We begin life at a certain starting gate. But this is all just raw material. What we do with that raw material is entirely up to us, it is solely our own responsibility. We don’t ‘influence’ it, we create it! And so, the judges (me) are unanimous! The award for The Worst Book Ever Read goes to… The Quantum Economy . Read it yourself, draw your own conclusion…but only if you have a very strong stomach. *** Klein, Yves. The Phenomenon of Floating in Space. 1960, photograph by Harry Shunk, Yves Klein Archives, Paris. This work satirizes the illusion of control in a spectacle-driven, science-wrapped world — echoing Indset’s lofty but ungrounded vision in The Quantum Economy. 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 Masks David Cowles Jul 14, 2026 “I talk only to my masks and only my masks talk to you.” 1200 words, 6 minute read Imagine I am one of those modern men who love to bake; I’m not. But if I were, I’d bake to relieve stress, to satisfy my own sweet tooth, to create gifts for friends and donations to local bake sales; but I would not call myself a ‘baker’. Baking is something I’d do by choice, not something I’d be . I am not a baker, I am not even someone who bakes, I just bake. To do is a verb, not a noun, nor an adjective. I could bake every day of my life and still not ‘be a baker’. On the other hand, when I was in my 20’s I had a job one night a week making donuts for the Sunday AM after church crowd. Then I was a baker! There is a differance (Jacques Derrida) between baking and being a baker. The differance is infinitesimal, imperceptible to the world, and yet it makes all the difference to me (є → ∞, the smallest possible perturbation may trigger the largest possible consequence). Baking is the free act of an intentional agent; ‘being a baker’ is a reduction of one’s identity, at least in part, to a series of repetitive motions and a static social role. So what? What’s the big deal? Well, baking , I confirm my identity as one made in the image and likeness of God, a co-creator, being a baker reduces me to the status of a cog in a machine, along with a butcher and a candlestick maker. *** Dressed for Halloween, my three year old grandson objected to my use of the word ‘costume’; he insisted that he was Captain America. Pretending was not in his arsenal yet. To his credit, he was never other than himself, no matter what form that self might take. Doing and being had not yet decohered for him. Although he was wearing a mask, he hadn’t learned to mask-up; he had not learned to prepare a face for the faces that he meets. (Eliot) I am not like him at all, quelle domage . I am a veritable museum of masks. I don’t remember a life that did not consist of playing roles, beginning with the role of ‘well behaved, precocious little boy’. (I must say I played that one with aplomb.) But even through the mists of early childhood, I sensed that I was not who I was pretending to be. Not that I was someone or something else; rather, I was no-thing (without the negative connotation that has for adults). Sidebar : When someone says to an adult, “You’re nothing,” it’s heard as a cruel insult. The implication is that you’ve tried a number of roles and failed at all of them. But to a toddler, the sense of ‘being nothing’ is strangely comforting: I get to watch myself! Adults spend years with gurus and fortunes on self-help hucksters just to relearn the art of mindfulness that is natural to under 6’s. Mindful, I don’t have to be any of the roles I assume (thank God) but neither do I have to hide behind a mask. I am free to be ‘me’, which is no thing being any thing I choose to be. *** Although masks are one-ply, the obverse image (objective, world-facing) is almost always different, sometimes massively so, from the reverse image (subjective, self-facing). Extreme example : Subjectively, I am the 2 nd coming of Christ; objectively, I am a lunatic. More Typical : Subjectively, I was a high school athlete; objectively… well, you get the picture. Here folks will object: “How can the reverse image (smooth athlete) be so different from the obverse (awkward nerd)? Don’t they have to form a perfect template? Isn’t that what ‘inside/outside’ means?” Yes, that is what ‘inside/outside’ means…to Archimedeans! But have you ever seen an episode of Dr. Who, the long-running BBC Syfy series? The co-star of this show is an ordinary public phone box (exterior) that happens to house a gigantic, hexagonal, command center (interior). (Parrot’s Beak,1970?) The phone booth is a mask. We are deeply indebted to Archimedes and his predecessor, Euclid, for insights that made modern science possible; but now we have to crawl out from under their shadow. The world is only sometimes, and then only approximately, Euclidean. Non-Euclidean and non-Archimedean geometries open the door to profoundly different models which can help explain many of life’s perceived paradoxes. In a non-Archimedean framework, there is no fixed connection between the interior and exterior volumes of a space. For example, there is no algorithm that would allow you to deduce interior dimensions by measuring exterior ones. Two-faced masks pose no problem, as long as you’re not an Archimedean. So I am essentially neant (Sartre), accidentally identifying with various well defined roles. Each role is a mask, of course, but my private subjective image of that role (who I am for me), the inside contour of my mask, is very different from the public objective image (who I am for you), the outside surface. And contrary to Bobby Burns, I say, “Thanks be to God/ That he has hidden/ My outer visage from my inner.” I have no desire to see myself as others see me! Analogy : the intricate observe pattern of an oriental rug with its multiple axes of symmetry cannot be intuited by examining the chaotic jumble of knots that constitute its underside. *** I will not bore you with a list of the masks I’ve worn. Nor will I belabor the obvious differences between the reverse and obverse images of each. But I will throw just a few at you to give you a hint of the breadth of things I’ve pretended to be: Educator, community organizer, politician, revolutionary, hippie, monk, retail clerk, salesman, entrepreneur, homme d’affairs , retiree, arm chair philosopher and on-line publisher. And this is not even to mention my roles as lover, spouse, parent (grand), friend - in addition to my previously confessed roles of child, nerd, and donut maker. Typically, a living organism is separated from its environment by a permeable membrane, like skin. Molecules, ions, energy and information flow back and forth as mediated and regulated by the membrane. This is not that! A mask is not a permeable membrane. It is a Markov Blanket (MB). Nothing interior to the mask can communicate with anything exterior and vice versa. We would appear to have created a solipsistic self…but that fails to take full account of MB’s unusual properties. To repeat, my mask is a Markov Blanket. My ‘interior self’ communicates with MB and MB communicates with ‘exterior world’ on my behalf. Unlike my grandson, I prepare a face for every face I meet. It is said that in Boston, Lowels talk only to Cabots and Cabots talk only to God. True to my home town heritage, I talk only to my masks and only my masks talk to you. Sorry. 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 Love Thy Neighbor David Cowles Aug 16, 2021 A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following: “This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours. If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole. A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following: “This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours. If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole. But if you take the opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, to take care of yourself and others, you will go through the door. Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself, you take care of others at the same time. Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Adopt the perspective of an eagle that sees everything from above with a broader vision. There is a social demand in this crisis, but also a spiritual demand. The two go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and futility.” (Hopi Indian Chief White Eagle) There is a lot of wisdom here. But I would offer one additional perspective re: – – When you take care of others you take care of yourself at the same time. Christian doctrine centers on, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ‘As yourself’, not ‘like yourself’. Note the difference. Your neighbor is not a copy of yourself; your neighbor IS yourself. Christian cosmology is a cosmology of reciprocity. Unlike the active/passive verb forms hard wired in most Indo-European languages, Christianity contends that whatever you do to another, you do to yourself. So, taking “care of yourself” can only occur in the context of taking care of others. With Christianity, there is always only one world and whatever you do modifies all of Creation. 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 Playing with Blocks David Cowles “Everything I needed to know about cosmology, I learned watching my grandchildren play with blocks.” One day, I was watching two of my grandchildren play with blocks on the living room floor. One was building a train, the other a tower. It occurred to me that they were acting out two very different models of Reality based on contrasting conceptions of time: serial time (train) vs. cumulative time (tower). Serial time is like box cars in a train. Properly arranged, the boxcars exhibit a certain order. Depending on your model, that order either (1) remains fixed, regardless of the number of cars in the train, or (2) increases by a fixed amount (a constant) with each car added, or (3) increases arithmetically as the train grows. In the serial model, order is relatively resilient; when disorder does (inevitably) increase, the change is gradual (over time) and local (in space). The subtraction of one car shortens the train, but only by one unit; it has no impact on the train’s ‘structure’ or identity as a train. Cumulative time is something else entirely. It’s more like the tower that my older grandchild is building. Each newly placed block recapitulates every block before it. Block (N+1) = (Block N) + 1. Each new block ‘contains’ in some way all previous blocks. Block N ‘stands on the shoulders of giants’, beginning with Block One, and giants will stand on the shoulders of Block N. Block N also contains Block (N + X)…but as a potentiality rather than actuality. Prior to the addition of Block N, the Tower is already stressed (gravity). The addition Block N increases that stress. Here order increases geometrically with the size of the tower…as does the risk of collapse. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Remember the Tower of Babel. Eventually, with the addition of Block (N + X) the structure will collapse. The ‘malfunction’ of a single block (present) eliminates the future as well as the past. Collapse it must. The tower constitutes an island of locally increasing order in a universe that is incurably entropic. The Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees that the tower will fall, and that catastrophe becomes more imminent as the tower assumes an ever more ordered state ( aka height). If the block last placed on the stack, (Block N + 1) malfunctions, it tumbles to the ground, but the removal of Block (N + 1) does not threaten Block N or any Block (N – X). However, with the removal of Block N = 1, all the blocks fall. In that event, everything that went before (i.e. all prior states of order) is destroyed. All that is left is scattered blocks on the living room floor, a state of maximal disorder. Notice that the relationship between the blocks and the structure differs in the two examples. In one case, the structure (train) is independent of any particular block. In the other case, the structure (tower) is entirely dependent on each and every block. Notice also the radically different ways in which order and disorder play out. In the cumulative model, each increase in order increases both the likelihood and the median impact of incipient disorder; and when disorder does come, when the tipping point is reached, it is instantaneous and catastrophic. On the other hand, in the serial model, the likelihood and impact of a disordering event is only marginally related to the size of the train. Now consider real life…like TV, for example: I’m watching the 1,000th episode of Law & Order . Each episode is a self-contained story. However, the characters and the mise-en-scène have evolved gradually over the seasons so that the 1000th episode is fully meaningful only in the contest of the 999th episode. Likewise, the 1001st… So what about the time we know (and normally don’t love)? Is your experience of time serial or cumulative? Is it independent of the events that make it up, or is it an epiphenomenon of those events? Which model corresponds to your experience? I propose that all time behaves cumulatively, and that the notion of serial time is a special, degenerate, case of cumulative time (like a series of one-block ‘towers’). No actual span of time is ever completely serial. A de minimus amount of novelty must creep in, creating an ever so slight asymmetry. Real blocks are never perfectly interchangeable (just ask identical twins). But does each moment of time truly recapitulate all the moments that went before it? When we consider our own lives, there is a certain order to events and the relationship between a present event and a past one is very different from the relationship between a present event and a future one. Events cannot be shunted around like box cars on the Isle of Sodor. IRL, the commutative property does not hold. In arithmetic, we say that x R y = y R x; example: x + y = y + x. Where the commutative property applies, these relations hold for all values of x and y. If the commutative property does not apply, then there are values of x and y for which the relation (R) does not reciprocate. Life is ‘radically non-commutative’. There are precisely NO values of x and y for which x R y is commutative. The order of events in the real world (if not their content) is apparently immutable. Counter intuitively, that means that the order of events is substructural to their content and meaning. When > What + Why! This is true because every event is a recapitulation of whatever went before it. What + Why are subsets of When. I’m not talking just about human experience here. Even inanimate objects undergo a sequence of modifications, each modification building on the ones that went before it. Nature carved out the Grand Canyon over eons of time; it will not refill itself in an instant. Every ‘actual entity’ (event) is a recapitulation (and modification) of its history. So what happens when an entity ceases to exist? Entity (N + 1) = Entity (N) + 1. N is an ordered subset of (N + 1). So if (N + 1) is removed from the tower, the order represented by ‘N’ is removed in the process. Of course, Block N remains in place, but ‘the copy’ of N that resides in (N + 1), and was modified by (N + 1) is erased and that version of N is lost forever. Why? If (N + 1) is removed from the tower, why can’t the tower simply revert to its status @ N? Because you can’t go home again, Tom: (N + 1) – 1 ≠ N. (N + 1) ≠ N + 1. Per Jacques Derrida, every iteration of N, every copy, every application is differant (French with no English equivalent) from every other copy - infinitesimally different but different nonetheless. Evolution tells the story. A species evolves over time through a seemingly endless series of genetic modifications. Each successful modification builds on the modifications before it. But when a species becomes extinct, the latest behavioral adaptations fail, and the entire sequence of modifications is wiped out. It’s like the bumper sticker says, “Extinction is forever.” But as above, earlier evolutionary branches may survive. There is hope that bonobos may endure long after humans have vanished, but those bonobos are not the same bonobos that evolved into humans. Bonobos evolve too! According to virtually all contemporary cosmological theories, all islands of order in our universe will ultimately be overcome by entropy. The universe as a whole will ultimately end in Heath Death (Big Freeze or Big Crunch). In any event, all present and prior states of order will be erased. ‘Cumulative time’ turns out to be another name for ‘universal eraser’; it wipes out everything. Consider my grandchild’s tower. At some point, some block will malfunction. Over time, every block will malfunction. When the Base Block (N = 1) malfunctions, all vestiges of order are destroyed. The fate of the tower is sealed, from Block One. According to the mechanical model of serial time, time is pre-existent, and events just fill available slots. The train is logically precedent to the individual box cars that make it up. According to the organic theory of cumulative time, time is a function of events as they occur. Events by nature are not normally commutative, and therefore time itself must be fundamentally asymmetric. So the paradox of time comes down to this: to the extent that you believe in the reality of events, you can’t believe in the reality of time; and to the extent that you believe in the reality of time, you can’t believe in the reality of events. We must be missing something. But what? What if there was an aspect of events that lies outside of time entirely? In fact, our considerations suggest that to be real, an event must have an a-temporal (eternal) aspect to it. While events certainly do occur in time, those same events must also exist outside of time, or they are doomed to be erased. Spacetime can be thought of as a geometric construction (‘vector equilibrium’ per Buckminster Fuller) in which events come to be and come to interact with one another. Time lets events be what they are; but once that process is complete, time is no longer relevant. Time relates to becoming , not being . To be is to be beyond time. Ultimately, temporal events and the spacetime that births them vanish; we are left only with ‘the thing itself’, the eternal aspect of the event, its ‘objective immortality’, its footprint in the sand. Since events occurring in time will always be retroactively destroyed (erased) by gentle entropy or cosmic catastrophe, it turns out that it is only the eternal aspect of events that ultimately matters. So in the end, the value (trace) of a quantum of experience is time independent. Life is just what it is, regardless of when you live it because in the end all of our experiences are eternal …or they are not ! 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 . Return to Summer 2024 Previous Next

< Back What Is Time? Sten Odenwald An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... St. Augustine said of time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I don’t know.” Time is an elusive concept: We all experience it, and yet, the challenge of defining it has tested philosophers and scientists for millennia. This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue of Astronomy . Read the rest of the article here . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Previous Next