“Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?” < Back From Socrates to Silicon Valley David Cowles Apr 1, 2025 “Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?” In April, 2009, during the Obama Honeymoon , when all the nation’s problems seemed to be behind us, an obscure billionaire, Peter Thiel, wrote a little noticed, but revolutionary, article for the Cato Institute. Safe to say, Mr. Thiel is obscure no more! Let’s sample: “I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes , totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual…” Hold on, Death and Taxes! Abolish both ? If I’m not mistaken, the last sane person to promote such an agenda in earnest went by the name of Jesus . “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Bomb shell! From Kindergarten on, American children are taught that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are synonymous. Of course, they’re not! A popular assembly can be just as repressive as any hereditary monarch…more so according to Hegel. Athens c. 400 BC was the paradigm of Western democracy; how did that work out for Socrates? Was France really better off under the National Convention (1792 – 1795) and the Reign of Terror than it was under the Bourbons and the Bonapartes? Remember too that both Germany and Italy were functioning democracies c. 1930. And when democratic institutions resurfaced in Eastern Europe (c. 1990), many countries ‘democratically elected’ freedom-phobic regimes. This scenario is playing out right now in the states of the former GDR. Look at our own history. If the United States were a ‘direct democracy’ (rather than a ‘representative republic’), would slavery have ever been abolished? Civil Rights legislation enacted? Would homosexuality still be a crime? To victims, the tyranny of the majority is just as loathsome as that of a lone dictator. From Pericles to POTUS, democracy has obviously ‘underdelivered’ on its promise. Still, there is a difference between saying that democracy does not guarantee freedom and saying that it is incompatible with freedom. Peter has made quite a leap! But perhaps he was not wrong. Does anybody remember Mikail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022)? He was a democrat who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, when he was forced out of office by a demagogue (Boris Yeltsin). Domestically, Gorbachev attempted to implement two seemingly parallel reforms: Glasnost (openness) introduced government transparency, freedom of speech, and multiparty democracy . Perestroika (restructuring) injected Soviet socialism with elements of Western capitalism and free enterprise. Unexpectedly, the two worked at cross purposes. Russians’ long pent-up desire for prosperity overwhelmed the social appeal of democracy and New Russia ended up with neither. Gorbachev ran again in 1996, his last hurrah, receiving less than 1% of the popular vote and finishing 7th in a field of 10 candidates. Sic semper democraticus ! “As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means… As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college…Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking…” Been there, done that! “The notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ (has become)…an oxymoron…(but) I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms…The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.” Local politics can be engaging. Real issues, real candidates with real policy suggestions, and real voters choosing sides based on what’s best for them, their neighbors, and their community as a whole. I grew up in Boston in the 1950’s and 60’s, when boys were expected to be priests, politicians, or police and ‘citizenship’ consisted of rooting for the Celtics and engaging in local politics. I had my first formal ‘campaign position’ at age 13 though I was informally campaigning from the age of 9; and of course I still root for the Celtics! Politics today, local or national, bears no resemblance to my boyhood experience. As a profession, it no longer attracts ‘the best and the brightest’, and the campaign itself comes down to a ‘beauty contest’ conducted via high cost, high tech media. There is little hope that ‘any government so assembled’ will assiduously protect social and economic freedom (Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). Thiel goes on to discuss the Internet and Space Exploration. Social media, though isolating in some respects, also allows the creation of new spaces where people can interact, perhaps through avatars, ideally without interference from government. Space is ‘the final frontier’. Just as 16th century explorers and 19th century pioneers led to the establishment of new communities and new forms of community, so space travel. In 50 years, self-sustaining human civilizations will exist on multiple planets and moons in our solar system – more opportunity to experiment with consensual forms of social coordination. Remember, Thiel wrote his essay in 2009. If rewritten today, it would most likely be expanded to include at least two other technologies with the potential to open up depoliticized social spaces: Blockchain and Computing 2.0 (AI and QC). Thiel-ism , if I can call it that, is the belief that the inevitably tyrannical state, democratic or otherwise, will become irrelevant as a consequence of technology. Perhaps it already has. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Karl Marx! As the means of production (technology) evolve and as the proletariat gains access and then control over that technology, the state will become superfluous and wither away. For the first time in human history, “we have the technology” to make this happen. So who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist? Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Death of Socrates. 1787. By Jacques Louis David. Oil on canvas. 51 x 77 1/4 in. (129.5 x 196.2 cm). Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1931. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 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 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 Meaning of Music David Cowles We pray the Psalms hoping to conform our minds, our values, our wills to God’s. Remember, God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. (This essay is dedicated to Gary Crispell, who taught me everything I know about music.) “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet) Shakespeare doesn’t give us many details, but we may infer from the context that Horatio was a naïve realist. Were he alive today, his vanity license plate might read ‘WYSIWYG:’ What you see is what you get! The ‘linearity’ of Horatio’s world view is undoubtedly a product of the vocabulary and syntax of his native language: objects, qualities, and actions, i.e., nouns, adjectives, and active/passive voice verbs. Combining these elements allows Horatio to say a whole lot. In Horatio’s mind (like A. J. Ayer’s), by ‘using his words’ he can say anything that there is to say. Anything he can’t say that way isn’t worth saying: it’s either meaningless, trivial, or false. Horatio lives his entire life between the initial capital letter and the final period of every sentence. Does that make Horatio the first Logical Positivist? The first Ordinary Language Philosopher? Perhaps it does, although Horatio doesn’t claim this title for himself; Hamlet awards it to him! Hamlet, of course, knows better! He knows that there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than Horatio has dreamt of. Verbal language, while it enables meaning, also functions as a kind of intellectual and emotional straight jacket; it severely limits Horatio’s universe of discourse. (Of course, he doesn’t realize that…but Hamlet does!) All that has been said, is being said, will be said or could be said in ‘ordinary language’ only scratches the surface of what might be said if we somehow had access to ‘a broader palette.’ Music is just such a palette. It is a window on exactly those things that are not dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy – things that are non-linear by nature, things that cannot be expressed easily, if at all, using nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Meaning is the relationship between a set of ‘signifiers’ and a set of "signifieds." We say that the signifier means what it signifies. The signifier and the signified are mutually exclusive; they cannot have any elements in common. Each must utterly transcend the other. Of course, the same item may be a signifier in one context and signified in another, but it cannot properly be both in the same context. Therefore, nothing can ‘be its own meaning’ (nothing can ‘mean itself’). To suggest otherwise would be to misuse the word ‘meaning.’ ‘To Mean,’ by definition, refers to something beyond the signifier itself. Otherwise, it would not be ‘meaning’ but ‘being.’ Archibald MacLeish famously wrote, “A poem should not mean but be.” Taking MacLeish at his word, poems, at least his poems, do not refer to anything outside themselves. They are ‘self-referential;’ therefore, they mean nothing, but they are something: they are what they are, period! But this is not the case with most uses of language. When we speak, we usually want our speech to refer to something in real life (IRL) and, perhaps, influence it. “Take out the trash” has a clear ‘meaning,’ but its ‘being’ is trivial. A set of signifiers ‘means’ a set of “signifieds.” Language is a set of signifiers; it is often used to describe patterns that occur IRL. We say that such language is meaningful to the extent that it elucidates real-world patterns in a way that resonates with us as true. (If a particular sentence appears to refer to something IRL but does not resonate with us as ‘true,’ it has no meaning beyond itself. Without a ‘truth function,’ it cannot refer to anything IRL. Following MacLeish, it ‘is,’ but it does not ‘mean.’) Le degree zero of meaning is denotation: words strung together in well-formed formulae (WFF), such as sentences, to indicate some specific real-world feature. Sadly, for most of us, this is all we ‘mean’ when we talk about ‘meaning.’ Fortunately, however, such spare communication is the exception rather than the rule IRL, at least outside the realm of science and engineering. In ordinary speech, the connotation of words and phrases is often at least as important as their denotation, but even that only scratches the surface of how words can mean what we mean them to mean. In the hands of creative writers, especially poets, the sounds of words and the images they conjure up may be more meaningful than their denotations, or even their connotations. Combined with gesture in drama or tone in song, words can convey meanings far beyond anything found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Of course, we’re still in the realm of words, but why stop there? Words are not the only ‘signifiers;’ what about the visual image in a painting? What about the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms in a piece of polyphonic music? Metaphor is meaning and mythology is metaphor writ large…but music is metaphor writ even larger. The patterns of sounds in a piece of music are metaphors for various internal states of mind (thoughts, emotions, etc.) and for various patterns that lie beneath the surface of what we call “real life.” Any pattern that elucidates another pattern and resonates with us as true is a signifier. We are immersed in a sea of signifieds and signifiers. It has even been suggested that this state of immersion is what human life, or at least, human culture, is. Yet, for most of us most of the time, language is simply a tool we use to get by in the world. We use it to convey how we feel and what we think; we use it to get done what we want done: “Take out the trash!” In our hands, language is just a species of technology. Yet, many of us are not satisfied with this. Like Hamlet, we feel that there is more to life than ordinary language can uncover. In fact, the ancient Greek word usually translated as ‘truth’ (aletheia) literally means ‘uncovering.’ We sense that the vocabulary and syntax of our language only scrapes the surface of patterns IRL. We sense that there are deeper, more complex patterns at play in the world. For the most part, these deeper patterns lie below the level of sense perception – but not below the level of intuition or feeling. Those of us who find ourselves in this dilemma look outside the limits of ordinary language to satisfy our hunger. Narrative, poetry, drama, song, all make use of language but strive to transcend language’s inherently linear structure to elucidate the non-linear patterns we experience IRL. But we also need to look beyond verbal language entirely. I am reminded of the Beatles’ song “Yellow Submarine” and the eponymous movie that followed. One of the song’s verses is particularly relevant to this article: “And we lived beneath the waves...” At first encounter, nothing seems especially exciting about this line; but its true significance takes center stage in the movie. The world ‘beneath the waves’ is the noumenal world that underlies the phenomenal world of sense perception. “Yellow Submarine”, the film, combines visual imagery, song lyrics, and a bit of dialog to make manifest this world beneath the waves, i.e., the deep structure of Being. This is what the movie is about! The Beatles present the world as a hierarchy of ‘branes’ (or ‘seas’ as they call them) that connect the phenomenal world of Liverpool, England, with a utopian paradise called Pepperland. Spoiler Alert: Toward the end of the movie, we realize that Pepperland and Liverpool are one and the same place, seen from different perspectives. (Check out Science and the Yellow Submarine, a feature article found elsewhere in this Issue of AT Magazine.) But back to music! Polyphonic music is inherently non-linear; it is ideally suited to the exploration and expression of those aspects of reality that, like the Nile in springtime, necessarily overflow their banks, in this case the banks of ordinary language. Of course, from pop tunes to operas, music often incorporates language and further extends the expressive power of that language. But then there is music that does not intersect with language at all, non-choral, instrumental music, and especially that music we call ‘classical music.’ Like language, music has a kind of vocabulary (e.g., tones) and a sort of syntax (e.g., musical keys). But most, and certainly the best, classical music does not use those tones or keys to represent any object, action, or quality IRL. In the best non-choral music, there is no denotation at all. So, then, how can there be meaning? When I say that a sentence has meaning, I mean that it refers to some state-of-affairs IRL and expresses that state-of-affairs using a pattern that elucidates the ‘target pattern’ and resonates with it in a way that strikes me as ‘true.’ This is exactly what music does! Music consists of patterns of sounds (melodies, harmonies, rhythms); a musical composition is an uber-pattern, a pattern of such patterns. Music reflects on the ‘real world’ (but not necessarily just on the phenomenal world) and makes a model of that world based purely on sound. For the most part, it is not about theory, perception, experience, or narrative. Rather, it is about the deep structure of Being, what lies below what can be perceived by the senses and expressed in ordinary language. As mentioned above, elements of this ‘deep structure,’ while inaccessible to sense perception, may yet be accessible to intuition, to feeling. This is the wellspring of the composer’s inspiration. Compare music with mythology. Metaphor is meaning, and mythology is metaphor writ large. All great mythology aims to tell the complete story of Being, it aims to be a Theory of Everything (TOE). Likewise, every major musical score attempts to tell the story of Being. Like a comprehensive myth, it, too, strives to be a TOE. Why then so many scores (so many TOEs)? Not all TOEs are created equal. Some TOEs seem accurate and comprehensive, but most fall far short. Yet, composers and performers never give up their pursuit of this Holy Grail. A Theory of Everything has been the goal of science from Einstein on; it has been the goal of non-choral music from Bach on. Plus, every TOE must model the real world from a particular perspective. When we approach Being, we are like the blind monks who touched an elephant. Each of us touches a different part of the elephant (ear, trunk, leg, tail, etc.) and each of us comes away with a different image of what an elephant is – all correct, all consistent with one another…but each is incomplete by itself. Unlike us, God only needs one TOE (his sophia, his logos) to exhaustively comprehend Being and everything that exists or could exist through it. His sophia (wisdom), his logos (word), does nicely. We’re not so lucky! We may need an unlimited number of TOEs and still not reach God’s level of comprehension. Or maybe we are lucky after all! God doesn’t need Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms to comprehend the universe. Fortunately, we do. O happy fault! We need the entire canon of classical music, and then some, to get anywhere near God’s ‘uber, uber-pattern.’ There is always something new to be discovered about an elephant and, likewise, there is always something new to be discovered about Being. We cannot translate music into philosophy. If we could, the music itself would be a superfluous diversion. Instead, the best music utterly transcends the expressive power of language. So, what do I mean when I talk about patterns IRL that music may have the power to elucidate? One such pattern might be the nature of identity and diversity; another, the process of change. These are deep structures IRL that ordinary language has struggled to express. Music to the rescue! When and how does one melodic theme become another, when does one rhythmic pattern morph into another? How far can something (i.e., a pattern) be stretched before it becomes something else? How do musical patterns relate to one another within a single work? Sequentially as melody, hierarchically as harmony, cyclically as rhythm, all simultaneously. Music is perhaps the medium best suited to the exploration of the deeper dimensions of Being. Through music, we may get a glimpse, dare I say it, of the mind of God. Earlier, we said that ‘meaning’ occurs when a set of signifiers elucidates and resonates with a set of signifieds. When does that happen? It happens when, and to the extent that, the signifier is beautiful (resonant) and true (elucidatory) with respect to that which is signified. Beauty and Truth (along with Justice) are God’s primary values (at least according to most Western theologies); and God’s values, i.e., his essence, constitute what we sometimes call “the mind of God.” 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, had just such an understanding. He assigned God’s values to his Primordial (conceptual) Nature rather than to his Consequent (physical) Nature. Recall that self-proclaimed atheist Jean-Paul Sartre, said insightfully: “God is the being whose essence precedes his existence.” In other words, God is his essence; God is Beauty, Truth, and Justice, even before (logically before, not temporally prior) God is. We pray the Psalms hoping to conform our minds, our values, our wills to God’s. Remember, God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. As Keats famously wrote, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” When we listen to a gorgeous composition, we are not just entertained, we are enlightened. We have a ‘meaning-full’ experience. And when the beauty of a particular performance or a particular score utterly overwhelms us, is it too much to hope that we are experiencing the world as God experiences it, i.e., that we are glimpsing the mind of God? *Editor's Note: For the role of music in the life of one artist, be sure to read Drumming to Inner Peace in this Issue of AT Magazine. 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 I Wasn't Anything David Cowles Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? When my world was still magical (ages 6 through 11?), Halloween was the most important day of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas were great fun, and we benefited handsomely from each, but Halloween was our holiday. We got to make our own fun! Plus, it was the only night of the year when we were allowed out after dark, with friends, and, in those days, without any adult supervision. By the time I was eight years old, Halloween season stretched from October 1 through November 2 (All Souls' Day in the Roman Catholic Church and the day the candy ran out in our house). There was no time to spare. The logistics were daunting. Who’s in my wolf pack this year (for Trick-or-Treating)? What streets will we hit and in what order? And, most importantly, what will we be ? Now I am a grandfather 10 times over, and one day I made the mistake (sadly, one of many) of saying to a grandson, “I hear you’re dressing up as Captain America this year.” Crestfallen, he managed, “No Grandpa, I am Captain America.” I had forgotten! Choosing our Halloween ‘character’ (‘avatar’ today) was not a matter of putting on a costume for a few hours or experimenting with an alternate identity for a day. It was more like choosing, or being chosen by, a totem animal. Your Halloween character is ‘who you are’…until the next Halloween rolls around. “Who should I be?” That is the question! “And how should I be it?” Store-bought costumes are sleek and shiny, but they are usually made from some sort of plastic material that makes noise when you walk and has a faint chemical odor. A home-made costume, on the other hand, could be much better…or much worse. It affords more room for novelty, but that is tricky. How ‘novel’ do you want to be at eight years old? Plus, you’ll need Mom’s help, and that means surrendering some creative control. You’re eight; you’re not used to making life or death identity-determining decisions, and this is the most important decision you’ve made in a year; and it will be another year before you have a chance to do it again. There is no margin for error. And yet, I erred. The decision was of such monumental significance that I simply couldn’t pull the trigger; I procrastinated. Sure enough, Halloween morning came, and I was still not settled. Over breakfast, Mom nudged, “Do you know what you’re going to be yet?” And again, after school. Finally, around 4 o’clock I turned to her in desperation, “Mom, what can I be?” “Well, you could be a mummy. I could wrap toilet paper all over you and tape it.” I wasn’t happy, but it was too late to be anything else. “Mummy me up please, Mommy!” It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as you’re imagining. In fact, it was ‘kinda good.’ I hit the streets in high spirits, and everything would have turned out ok, except for one thing: after about an hour, it started to rain, not hard enough to disrupt our mission but enough to soak us to the skin. I’ll let you put two and two together. Suffice to say, I returned home at the end of the evening, a rain-drenched child with wet toilet paper hanging all over him. I couldn’t hold back my tears, “Mommy, I wasn’t anything!” I didn’t get over this disappointment quickly, and it was many years before I appreciated the momentous lesson of these events. The words still ring in my ears today, “I wasn’t anything!” and that realization, that experience ended up forming the cornerstone of my later adult thinking. (Freudians welcome!) “I wasn’t anything!” Of course, I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything on Halloween night; I wasn’t anything six months later, and I’m still not anything today. Neither are you, neither is anyone. The day I become something , is the day I no longer am . But it goes even deeper. What I am is precisely that I am not anything. Neti, neti – not this, not that! For human beings, being is a matter of not being what we’re not. Is this surprising? How could it be otherwise? If I truly was Captain America, then I wouldn’t be me, would I? And if I am me, how can I be anything else? I am neither Captain America, nor a Pirate, nor a Mummy. Neither am I an eight-year-old boy…nor an 80-year-old man! I am what nothing is and what nothing is. So… So…everything! On the one hand, I don’t have to waste time “finding myself” because there is quite literally nothing to find. But that reprieve comes at a great price. I am nothing, but I am nothing in the context of the world. In myself, I can be nothing, but I cannot be nothing in the world. If I were, then I wouldn’t be in the world at all, would I? So, it’s back to Halloween night after all. Because I am nothing, I am free to make myself anything I choose. My identity is not dictated by my genes, by my socioeconomic class (sorry Karl), by my upbringing, or by my education. “I know who I am, and I know that I can be whatever I want to be.” But with such freedom comes an awesome responsibility. I don’t have the luxury of living life on the sidelines. I cannot pass through life as a spectator. I see the world as it is, and I must decide who I wish to be in this world. I might choose to be a recluse, but that, too, is a choice, and being a recluse is still being something vis a vis the world. At eight years of age, there are three sentences that you long to hear:  “Daddy’s bringing home a puppy (or a pony).  “School’s out…forever.”  “Every day is Halloween.” Well, I never got a pony or a dog (strike one), and I did get a college education (strike two), but, good news, every day is Halloween. Home run! Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? 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. Previous Next

Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! < Back Ectaban David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out. The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, city of patterned streets; again the vision:” – Ezra Pound, Canto V Is it possible to present a fully formed Eschatology in just four lines of verse? After all, great works like Revelation require half a thousand verses to tell their tale. But surprisingly, the answer is, “Yes!” And we’ll see that Ezra Pound has done it (above)…once we unpack all the allusions and references contained in those four lines. Ecbatan (‘Ecbatana’) is an ancient city on the Silk Road, located in modern-day Iran. It was the capital city of the Empire of the Medes. In Canto LXXIV, Pound refers to Ecbatan as “the city of Dioce,” the first ruler of the Medes. It is at least remotely possible that this is also the city that the authors of Genesis attributed to Cain and his sons when Cain became a ‘wanderer’ and ‘settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden’ and ‘became the founder of a city’. But what makes Ecbatan so important is not primarily its great age, nor its role in history and mythology; what makes Ecbatan important is its layout. It is the apex of City Planning. Ecbatan consists of seven concentric rings, demarcated by walls. Moving inward, each wall is higher than the next and each a different color. The penultimate wall is silver, the final wall gold, and within that wall, the palace. Inside these walls run those “patterned streets.” The seven rings of Ecbatan call to mind the seven rings of the then known solar system. In Canto LXXIV, the first of the so-called Pisan Cantos, Pound confirms that association when he sets forth in a single line his entire cosmo-political platform: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” Ezra Pound’s Cantos are at least ab initio modeled after the 100 cantos that form Dante’s Divine Comedy. To understand Pound’s project, it is essential to understand Dante’s. Unlike Pound, Dante is the hero of his own epic. His ‘odyssey’ begins “in the middle of the journey of our life…within a dark wood where the straightway was lost.” He is then conducted by a series of ‘guides’ through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally Heaven (Paradiso). Along the way, Dante encounters persons from early Renaissance Italy, the classical world, salvation history, and the Church. Their life stories supply the stuff of his epic. Pound, likewise, weaves cultural and historical events on an eschatological loom. But compared to Dante, Pound casts a much, much wider net. There is hardly a region of the globe or a period of history that does not contribute content to Pound’s epic. While Dante tells the story of ‘Earth as it is in Heaven,’ Pound tells the story of ‘Heaven as it is on Earth.’ For Dante, the seven rings of the solar system were patterned after the seven rings of Paradise; but Pound turns that relationship upside down…and inside out: Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! If Ecbatan is ‘Enoch,’ the city of Cain, that would make Cain the world’s first urban planner. But even if there is no such association, being the first ‘founder of a city’ makes Cain responsible for developing and introducing the technology that would ultimately have made Ecbatan possible. Either way, Ecbatan (like all cities) traces back to Cain. The theological implications of this are enormous. In Genesis, Cain is presented as committing the first great sin in historical time (i.e., post-Eden). How fitting then, from the perspective of Judeo-Christian eschatology, that Cain be responsible, directly or indirectly, for building a post-historical Eden, Ecbatan! Ecbatan is the Judeo-Christian message of salvation in a nutshell. God does not just passively forgive the sinner; God empowers the sinner to become a co-creator of Paradise. We partner with God in the redemption of the world, and we are led in this venture by Jesus, aka the Christ, our Redeemer. This is the essence of the theological virtue of hope: not only that our sins will be wiped away, but also that our lives will be redeemed. With Job, we affirm, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust…(and) I will see God.” (Job 19: 25 – 26) In this context, it is useful to compare Cantos to another great work of literature, the New Testament Book of Revelation. Paul tells us that only three things will last: faith, hope, and love. Literature is full of books about faith and love, but hope sometimes gets short-shrift. What it lacks in quantity, it makes up in quality; hope is the central theme of three of Western civilization’s greatest works: the Book of Revelation, The Divine Comedy, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The Judeo-Christian tradition (including Dante) understands God as “the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). Pound joins Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps Carl Jung, and a very few others in reversing that process. For these visionaries, the world in some sense ‘creates God;’ or, at least, there is a mutually creative relationship between the two! Ecbatan of the Cantos is Pound’s version of Dante’s Paradise. It is not a model for Paradise, it IS Paradise. There are no ‘models’ in Pound! The concept of a model necessarily introduces the notion of an ontological hierarchy (“the map is not the territory”). Pound rejects that idea categorically. In Cantos the mythological, the historical, the fictional, the experiential, the theological and the eschatological share a common ontological status. Anthropologists report that many aboriginal societies do not distinguish what happens in history from what happens in dreams or in spiritual experiences. (Read “Speaking Piraha” for reference.) Like Pound, they are ontological democrats! Of course, Ecbatan is Paradise seen from an eschatological perspective. Pity the lowly camel driver resting on the star-colored terraces of the Median capital, not understanding that he is living in Paradise; pity the frenzied investment banker racing across Manhattan in a cab, still not understanding. Christians are fond of saying, “Repent and hear the Good News!” Perhaps we might rephrase, “Read Pound and live the Good News!” Of course, Ecbatan is a once and future city, a once and future Paradise. Throughout Cantos, Pound rhymes the historical Ecbatan with other cities; for example, Wagadu, capital of the Ghanian Empire, four times rebuilt. The message is clear and consistent: Ecbatan is not just a place, it is a mission. Ultimately, we all share a common eschatological imperative, “To build the city of Dioce…” (Not ‘rebuild’ but ‘build!’) The city of Dioce (the Kingdom of Heaven) is only built once, for all time and eternity. Pound’s ‘Paradiso’ begins in earnest with the first Pisan Canto (Canto LXXIV). We now see Canto V (above) as the Cliff’s Notes version of Pound’s later cantos. Note that the map (Canto V) precedes the territory (Canto LXXIV & ff). But is it the case, stated above, that four lines from Canto V constitute a complete and fully developed eschatology? To make that case, we’ll need to unpack each line, beginning with: “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus.” Parmenides, the first Western philosopher to leave extant a significant body of work, presented reality under two aspects: the aspect of Truth (Aletheia) and the aspect of Appearance (Doxa). These two complementary, but mutually exclusive aspects are both required in order to build a viable model of reality. Aletheia is Parmenides’ Eschaton; Doxa, his history. Parmenides describes Aletheia as follows: “It is not divisible…but it is full of what is…it is not lacking but if it were, it would lack everything…It is completed from every direction like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere from the center equally matched…equal to itself from every direction.” The mini-Paradiso found in Canto V immediately links Pound to the philosophical tradition of Parmenides. Like Aletheia, Ecbatan is massive and symmetrical. Parmenides says that Aletheia lacks nothing because, if it lacked anything, it would lack everything. The same may be said of Ecbatan; above all else, it is complete! But while Aletheia is changeless, things according to the “way of appearance” (Doxa) “come to be and perish, be and not be, shift place and exchange bright color” (aka attributes). This behavior is at the root of all the dissonance and conflict in our everyday experience, but that conflict is the raw material of contrast, which is the source of all intensity. In the ‘Doxa fragments’ of On Nature, Parmenides dwells on the role that “naming” plays in shattering the homogeneity of ‘Truth’ into the seemingly endless variety of ‘Appearances.’ For example: “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.” Certain African and Australasian cultures believe that the process of naming (Namo) can actually make things come to be. Pound cites the story of “Wanjina” (Wondjina) whose father sewed up his mouth because he was ‘making too many things’. Parmenides would agree wholeheartedly. The “thrusting forth” of things that “come to be” (Fragment 11) is either caused by or chronicled by the development of the dictionary. The size of a dictionary is a good measure of the immersion of its readers in Doxa. Hence, thesaurus! Thesaurus is the antonym of dictionary. A dictionary records distinctions; a thesaurus, on the other hand, resolves those distinctions by finding common ground. On the one hand, dictionary smashes the crystal vase of Aletheia against the rocks of English Empiricism and American Pragmatism, reducing it to so many shards of glass (Doxa). Thesaurus, on the other hand, painstakingly matches those shards with one another until the vase is whole again (Aletheia). But the reconstructed vase is not quite the same as the original vase. While the shape and volume are still the same, and while the vase can still hold water, now you can see the outline of each and every shard that makes it up. The new vase is vastly more beautiful and interesting…and much, much more valuable; it is the product of negentropy. Reality requires both Aletheia and Doxa to optimize coherence and maximize intensity. Compare this with the creation narrative in Genesis. Words play an important role in God’s creative process: “Let there be light…God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’…God called the dome ‘sky’…God called the dry land ‘earth,’ and the basin of water he called ‘sea’.” Creation is the process of distinction; it is the living dictionary. Salvation reverses that process; it is a way of harmonizing apparent conflicts into mere contrasts. Salvation is the living thesaurus. “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out” In Paradise there is no time; everything is atemporal (eternal). When the clock ticks for the final time, it fades out and eternity begins. Ecbatan, city of patterned streets, is that ‘final tick;’ it is the membrane between history and eternity. The pattern of its streets and terraces replaces the historical flow of events. A vertical architecture replaces a horizontal flow. Ecbatan is proof that process is not dependent on time. When we speak of Ecbatan, we are not just talking about an historical city or some ‘kingdom (to) come;’ Ecbatan is what it is, what there is, all there is, now and forever. Process is bi-directional. On one axis, process is change (Heraclitus), growth, evolution; on the other, process is harmonization (Whitehead), pattern building. Today, we rely heavily on clocks to help us get where we’re supposed to be, when we were supposed to be there. But when I was growing up, kids didn’t always have ready access to clocks (or watches). No matter, you were still expected to be home on time. So, without thinking about it, we built our own clocks: the progress of the sun in the sky, the changing colors on the horizon, the ‘gas man’ (sic) lighting the streetlamps every afternoon, the corporeal sense of time passing. For all the hours we spent each week in church, we were nothing but a bunch of pagans. These organic clocks worked just as well as any Timex, often better. Through all this, it never occurred to us that time might be nothing other than the clocks (natural or man-made) that we use to measure it. We took it for granted that time was something objective, that it formed the background of all things, that events occur in time. In recent years, however, cosmologists have suggested that this might not be the case. Roger Penrose, for example, suggests that when we are no longer able to construct a ‘clock’ to measure time, time will cease to exist. Others have suggested that objective time is nothing other than an abstraction from the variable organic ‘durations’ of events superimposed on one another. Pound predates Penrose by decades. Yet, he uses Penrose’s imagery. When the last clock ticks its last tick, time folds into eternity. “The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan…” This evokes the image of Mary being touched by the Holy Spirit at the moment of Incarnation and of the Church as the “Bride of Christ”. Ecbatan is Mater Dei (mother of God); Ecbatan is Church. Ecbatan is the physical substructure of Paradise. Over and over again, Pound writes, “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel.” It must be physical and historical…it’s Mary’s womb, Christ’s Church, Ecbatan. While no Marxist, Pound wholeheartedly embraced materialism. “City of patterned streets; again, the vision:” The ‘vision’ Pound refers to is Dante’s vision in Canto XXXIII, the final canto, of his Paradiso: “O abounding grace by which I dared to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I spent all my sight upon it. In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light.” Dante rejects the Heraclitan model of continuous process. In Dante’s vision, all of the events, entities and aspects of the world are organized as “leaves.” Pound’s Cantos recapitulate Dante’s vision using Pound’s own seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove. Cantos consists entirely of such ‘leaves,’ ‘fused together’ into ‘a simple light.’ Rare among authors, Pound avoids the temptation to add personal commentary, emotional shading, ‘mere ideas,’ spin; instead, he literally lets the thing speak for itself (ipse loquitur). In the visual arts, the 19th century saw objects dissolve into impressions. Starting with Cezanne, progressing through the Cubists and culminating in Surrealism and Dada, the 20th century reversed that process. It focused on the thing itself, releasing the object from its utilitarian context and allowing it to tell its own story. Pound performed a parallel function in the literary arena. Ideally, to read the Cantos would be to have the ‘vision,’ Dante’s vision. Both Dante and Pound fixed their looks on the eternal light and saw that it contained that which is scattered in leaves; both Dante and Pound attempt to bind these leaves “by love in one volume…in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light”. Pound confirms: “I have tried to write Paradise.” (Canto CXX) To write Paradise, to ‘create’ light, to build the City of Dioce, that’s everyone’s highest calling. But it is the nature of the human condition that no one will ever succeed, at least not completely. It is for God alone to create light (fiat lux), to build Paradise, but that does not mean that we are not all called to do everything we can do in pursuit of that elusive goal. Like Cain, we contribute what we can to the Eschaton, and we humbly beg forgiveness for what we fail to do. In this context, Canto CXX is worth reproducing in its entirety: I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak That is Paradise Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. Illustration taken from Buckingham, J.S. (1829). Travels in Assyria, Media and Persia . Page 159. London. 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 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 The Autumn of Our Own Existence Omid Safi "A lot of people celebrate fall season with pumpkin pie, sweaters, and taking in crisp mornings. I love all of those, but mostly fall is a season to meditate on colors, death, and divine presence." I’ve been blessed to live in places where the time of fall is magical. In upstate New York, North Carolina, and Iran, I’ve gotten to see streets paved gold and red, with leaves crunching under my feet. As a kid, I used to love to dive through piles of raked leaves. (OK, that was this week.) A lot of people celebrate fall season with pumpkin pie, sweaters, and taking in crisp mornings. I love all of those, but mostly fall is a season to meditate on colors, death, and divine presence. Before becoming a scholar of religion, like every Muslim student at the university, I studied medicine. I remember learning in a botany course about the reason that a deciduous tree’s leaves turn colors. The reasoning astonished me then, and I have since come to see more and more spiritual wisdom in it as I enter the autumn of my own life. Leaves are usually green because of chlorophyll. It is chlorophyll that gives leaves their distinctive green color, and it is (along with sunshine) the key ingredient in the magical, life-producing process of photosynthesis. The hidden secret of fall: the leaves don’t actually “turn” colors. With the winter season coming, and the process of photosynthesis being without the key ingredients of warmth and sunshine, trees begin to break down chlorophyll. With the “green” gone, the other colors that have been there all along — the magical reds, golds, and oranges — begin to express themselves. That’s the secret: there is no turning, no changing. There’s only the death of what has been masking the colors inside. The beauty has been there all along. And we as human beings are like this. Each one of us contains hidden jewels inside. Every breath of your life’s breathsis a jewel.Every new atomis a guide towards God. —Farid un-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds Each of us contains “colors” inside, which remain hidden by our mere humanity. I see the colors as being different divine qualities that are present inside each of one of us at all times: compassion, justice, kindness, forgiveness. Most of the time these divine qualities are masked, covered up, hidden by our ego self. Greed, lust, anger, selfishness mask these divine qualities. What masks the divines qualities (the colors) is not our humanity, something I see ultimately as a reflection of God but rather our ego, our tendency to see ourselves as a mere terrestrial creature. We see ourselves a mere flesh creature, cut off from God, cut off from one another, cut off from the natural cosmos. The hidden mystery of the fall season is that when one “life” dies, the colors inside are on display. And there is something similar that happens inside us when we let go of this ego self, of selfishness, of being cut off and isolated. To put in a religious language, we have to “die” to our ego, to our selfishness before we can become “born again” in a bigger, more interwoven, more compassionate, more divine reality. The Qur’an hints at this in a lovely, mysterious verse: (We take our) color from God,and who is better than God at coloring? —Qur’an 2:138 This fear of letting go of our notion of a limited self is real. We are all afraid of death. Any death. All death. Letting go of this earthly life is frightening. Letting go of any prejudice, any preconceived notion, any notion of identity is a form of death. As more wise sages have told us, we come into this world covered in feces, urine, and blood; we leave it naked covered in a cloth. The mere reflection on our own mortality frightens us. Most of us spend our life in denial, pretending that we are eternally immortal. What beauty there is in letting go and accepting. What wonder there is in embracing the colors inside. What loveliness there is in the death of one color, and the shining through of all the divine colors. How lovely is this human creature when the divine colors of compassion, kindness, mercy, justice, and forgiveness shine on through. It reminds me of the poem of the great, incomparable Rumi. I died as a mineraland became a plant,I died as plantand rose to animal,I died as animaland I was human.Why should I fear?When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as human,to soarWith angels blest;but even from angelhoodI must pass on:all except God doth perish.When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.Oh, let me not exist!for Non-existenceProclaims in organ tones,‘To God we shall return.’—Rumi, Masnavi 3: 3901-03 Why fear one “death” when every death has revealed something more colorful, more luminous, more beautiful. The references to “mineral” and “animal” in the poem below is a reflection of the old Islamic (also Greek) philosophical insight that each of us contains within us the souls of all the beings. There is a level in us that corresponds to the mineral soul, an animal soul, a human soul, and so on. This Islamic model of evolution is not so much the evolution from shared biological ancestors, but a mythic, poetic notion of cycles of ascension into embrace of all the Divine qualities within. Bring on the sweater. Bring on the crisp morning. Bring on the pumpkin pie. And bring on the death of that ego self that masks those glorious, divine colors within. As I enter this autumn season — and the autumn of my own existence — I am growing slowly more comfortable with the becoming less and less, so that more and more can be revealed. Bring on this Autumn of the soul. Welcome these colors shining through. This piece is republished in its entirety from One Being . Omid Safi teaches online courses on spirituality through Illuminated Courses, and leads spiritual tours every year to Turkey, Morocco, and other countries, to study the rich multiple religious traditions there. The trips are open to everyone, from every country. More information is available at Illuminated Tours. He is a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He specializes in the study of Islamic mysticism and contemporary Islam and frequently writes on liberationist traditions of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and is committed to traditions that link together love and justice. He has delivered the keynote for the annual Martin Luther King commemoration at the National Civil Rights Museum. He has written many books, including Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism; Cambridge Companion to American Islam; Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam; and Memories of Muhammad. His most recent book is Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Traditions and has a forthcoming book on the famed mystic Rumi. Omid is among the most frequently sought out speakers on Islam in popular media, appearing in The New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, NBC, CNN, BBC, and other international media. He can be reached regarding speaking engagements at omidsafi@gmail.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

“Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?” < Back Parmenides I David Cowles Sep 1, 2022 “Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?” On Nature is the oldest work of European systematic philosophy still largely extant. The verse epic was composed in the 5th century BC by Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, widely regarded as both ‘the father of Western philosophy’ and ‘the father of Western science’. On Nature divides Being into two modes: the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Seeming” ( Doxa ). Most scholars hold that the realm of Aletheia is preeminently real…but Doxa ? Not so much! Commentators holding this view tend to understand Doxa through the prism of Eastern philosophy ( Maya ) or Jewish wisdom literature ( Vanity )…both perfectly valid perspectives, but not the only possible ones. In fact, Parmenides anticipated such a heterodox interpretation and took pains to confront it head-on: “But nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.” Doxa is real, genuine, and universal…as is Aletheia ! I will argue that there can be no adequate account of reality that does not include both Aletheia and Doxa (even though, as we shall see shortly, the two models appear to be mutually exclusive). I believe that view in consistent with Parmenides’ text and verified by our personal experience. Hold on tight! We know that Al Gore invented the internet , but who invented the concept of ‘Complementarity’ - the convergence of two mutually inconsistent models to account for a single phenomenon? We’d like to think we did! We ‘invented’, or at least discovered, complementarity sometime during the first half of the 20th century; only we didn’t! Examples of complementarity, unlabeled of course, dot the landscape of Western Intellectual History. To attribute the idea of complementarity to Parmenides seems crazy because it is so radically anachronistic. According to the standard model of cultural evolution, Parmenides should not have been able to conceive such an idea 2500 years ago. But he did! Res ipsa loquitur! Despite our self-congratulatory preconceptions, the text of On Nature clearly suggests an interpretation based on Complementarity. The cognoscenti developed a rigid, linear model of intellectual progress. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny! Just as a ‘young child’ should not be expected to grasp complex or abstract ideas, neither should an ‘earlier civilization’. Resurrection theology in the Book of Job? Anarchist political theory in the Book of Judges? Complementarity in Parmenides? Impossible! Hog wash! Children are able to entertain challenging ideas better than we can – their minds have not yet ‘seized-up’ like engines deprived of oil. Likewise, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece had a much deeper appreciation of ‘what-is’ than most of their modern counterparts. The venture we call Intellectual History begins with a massively non-linear network of ideas, competing for connections. Survival of the fittest, social media on steroids! Who says there was no Facebook before Zuckerberg? It was just called ‘the Academy’. Whatever memes make the most connections wins . But unlike Hall of Fame voting in most Professional Sports, memes can keep looking for connections until the end of time. The game isn’t over until an amply proportioned individual sings (God per chance?) Occasionally, a meme that has fallen on rocky ground surprises itself and starts to make connections. In that case we often say that this is an idea whose time has come . And as soon as a meme starts to make connections within a particular network, it begins to shape that network. The result is the non-linear process we know as ‘History’! On Nature spells out what it means to exist in the mode of Doxa : “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color.” To exist in the mode of Doxa is to exist relative to other existents, to be one among many. In the mode of Doxa , all being is contingent, just as in the mode of Aletheia , what-is is…necessarily. In the realm of Doxa , entities are engaged in the perpetual process of becoming and perishing; they never really are ! Events in the mode of Doxa can be variously analyzed: subject-predicate, substance-accident, existence-essence (Sartre), actual entity-eternal object (Whitehead), Dasein-Wassein (Heidegger), etc. Parmenides’ Doxa seems to ‘borrow a page’ from Heraclitus: everything flows! Everything is in perpetual flux. As we like to say today at our ubiquitous $199 self-help seminars, complete with a complimentary boxed lunch of course, “Change is the only constant”. What we used to call ‘stability’ is now just a measure of variations in the rate of change. At first blush, this model ( Doxa ) is very attractive; it seems to correlate well with everyday experience. But there is one problem. According to this model, there is no ‘Present’ and therefore no ‘Presence’, no ‘here and now’. To be ‘present’ we need to step out of Heraclitus’ River of Time, but Doxa has no off ramp. At best, ‘here’ and ‘now’ are infinitesimal ‘points’ abstracted from the continuous flow, but that is certainly not what we mean when we speak of ‘the Present’. In the mode of Doxa , there is only ‘then and there’, ‘past and future’. When everything is in flux, nothing really is. Understood this way, Doxa accounts for absolutely nothing! We don’t experience the then and there, the past and future. We believe that they are real, but we can only experience them indirectly, as they are felt through the Present. And if there is no real Presence… Aletheia to the rescue! In the mode of Aletheia , “…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…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of.” There is no generation or corruption. There is no space (here and there), no time (past and future), no extension (dispersing and gathering). There is only Presence: “For what coming-to-be of it will you seek? In what way, and whence, did it grow? Not from what-is-not…And what need could have impelled it to grow later or sooner, if it began from nothing?” The concept of ‘the past’ implies that there was once a stable state-of-affairs different from the current state-of-affairs; and the concept of ‘the future’ implies that there will one day be another stable state-of-affairs different from what is now. But in the mode of Aletheia , nothing can ever be different from what is and what-is is eternal, now…and forever. Therefore, in the mode of Aletheia , there is only Presence. Further, if there were a past and/or a future, that past would have to differ from this present and this present from that future. That would suggest that whatever-is is not always ‘complete’. But that too is impossible: “…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” While to exist in the mode of Doxa is to be one among many, to exist in the mode of Aletheia is simply to be one. The origin of ‘becoming’ is ‘the lack’ (Sartre). Therefore, what-is must lack nothing. To be is neither to become nor to perish; it is simply to be, eternally. Understood this way, Aletheia accounts for nothing either! We don’t experience permanence, eternity, wholeness, any more than we experience past and future. We only experience in the Present and what we experience are phenomena that are not present. Wrap your head around that one! How do we account for stability in the midst of flux, and how do we account for flux in the context of stability? This is one of the core problems of philosophy. We can see, I think, that any model of reality that is all flux or all permanence won’t account for much…or anything. Things that genuinely exist must be both stable and changing; but how is that possible? How can anything be ‘both stable and changing’? Only in the mode of Complementarity! Imagine a continuum ranging from absolute flux to absolute stability. What we call Being can only manifest itself in a narrow corridor located somewhere between the two extremes. Call it the ‘Being Belt’! To make this point, 20 th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead quotes a verse from a famous Anglican hymn: Abide in me! Fast falls the even’ tide. What is Being but the juxtaposition of stability and change? Given the fact that neither Doxa nor Aletheia by itself can account for every, or any, phenomenon of everyday experience, are we not entitled at least to conjecture that Parmenides intended us to understand the world using his two models together , effectively viewing the universe stereoscopically? The wave-particle duality in Quantum Mechanics is often cited as the paradigmatic example of a Complementary relationship. According to prevailing thought, the behavior of sub-atomic particles cannot be explained unless one assumes that they are both waves and particles, even though such an assumption appears to entail a contradiction. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Emerson). Apparently, God does not have a ‘little mind’! Nor do children. Now consider the poem’s narrative content. At the beginning of the epic, when Parmenides first comes into the presence of the goddess, she greets him: “Welcome, for it is no ill fortune that sent you forth to travel this route…but right and justice. And it is right that you should learn all things …” And later, “…It is all one to me where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.” Parmenides uses language that we recognize today as characteristic of non-orientable topology, another concept supposedly inaccessible to him at that time. It suggests that Doxa and Aletheia form a reality that is locally two-sided but globally one-sided, i.e., a Mobius Strip. As you pass along the Mobius Strip that is embedded in every non-orientable space, you keep coming back to your starting point (a bit like Alice in Through the Lookingglass ), but every time you return, you find that your ‘orientation’ has reversed. This is exactly what happens in Dante’s Divine Comedy . At the lowest rung of the Inferno, Dante encounters Satan, encased in ice, but standing upright. However, as Dante begins to climb Mount Purgatory and looks back, what does he see? Satan, still encased in ice, but now, upside down! Apply this model to On Nature . For every “spot” on the “strip”, there are two potential orientations: the extensive orientation of Doxa and the eternal orientation of Aletheia . Surprise: Doxa and Aletheia , supposedly polar opposites, turn out not to be so very different from one another after all. In fact, they turn out to be the same thing , just seen in two different orientations, i.e., from two different perspectives. What then really distinguishes the Way of Seeming from the Way of Truth? “…From here onwards learn mortal beliefs…they distinguished opposites in body and established signs apart from one another (language) …all things have been named light and night...” Alfred North Whitehead, in his seminal work of systematic philosophy, Process and Reality , concluded that any ‘processional’ model of reality must include at least three ‘undefined’ terms (i.e., terms whose meaning must be taken for granted without further definition); for Whitehead those terms are: ‘One, Many and Creativity’. We might attempt an even more general formulation. Every processional model of reality must include a principal of disjunction (‘or’ in the language of logic), a principal of conjunction (‘and’), and a transformative function: ʌ, ˅, ↔ The one becomes many and the many becomes one; it is Penelope’s great loom of Being. If this model is taken as the universal substructure of all processional models, Parmenides’ model passes the test. Aletheia is ‘one’, Doxa ‘many’; but what of the ‘transformative function’? Parmenides invokes the goddess herself for this role: “In the midst of these is the goddess who steers all things; for she rules over hateful birth ( Doxa ) and the union of all things ( Aletheia )…” But ultimately, the role of the goddess is not to rule, but to create a third mode of being that can unite the other two: “…She devised Love ( Erota ), first of all the gods…” Thus, Parmenides identified the minimal conditions necessary for ‘process’ to occur, and he did it 2,500 years before Whitehead. Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and19 th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™? We have found in Parmenides an ontology that respects the reality of phenomenal events but situates those events in the broader context of Eternal Being. This has been the Holy Grail of Western philosophy for millennia. Now we find out now that we’ve had the Grail in our possession all along, from the very outset in fact. Dorothy never left Kansas…and she just needed to click her heels together to see that. Image: Bust of Parmenides discovered at Velia , thought to have been partially modeled on a Metrodorus bust. [1] 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 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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“My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” < Back I Seem to be a Membrane David Cowles Apr 15, 2023 “My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” In the beginning there is I and not-I…and not-not-I. ‘I’ only reveals itself in the context of not-I, and vice versa; like quarks, ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ only occur together, as a pair. Not-not-I only reveals itself in the context of both I and not-I. In the creedal language of Nicaea, we’d say, “Not-not-I proceeds from I and not-I.” In the dialectical language of Marxism, we’d say, “Synthesis proceeds from Thesis and Antithesis.” The ‘I’ aspect of reality never changes; it endures, one and the same, now and forever, throughout the vicissitudes of spacetime experience. This is the famous ‘enduring personal identity’ (‘soul’ in some terminologies) to which we all cling as if to a life raft. On one hand, there is only one ‘I’ which we all share. On the other hand, every ‘I’ reflects a specific not-I and every not-I is unique. Any two I’s are exactly the same…and totally different! (In fact, only things which are totally different can ever be the same. Comparability is the enemy of identity.) ‘I’ never changes; it’s not the sort of thing that changes. It can’t change; it’s simple (Aquinas), it’s inert, a ball bearing (Laplace), a Monad (Leibniz), Aletheia ( Parmenides ): “ …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…” Not-I changes continually (Heraclitus); it’s the sort of thing that changes. It’s not simple! Every not-I is composed of every not-I, i.e., everything in heaven and earth, Horatio, except of course, ‘I’. Your not-I and my not-I likely share many (most?) elements. What distinguishes ‘yours’ from ‘mine’ is the way the elements are arranged; individuality is mostly a matter of perspective. Our worlds massively overlap, but our perspectives are unique. ‘Not-I’ is Parmenides’ Doxa : “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color.” My situation (not-I) changes, gradually. These changes create the false impression that I am changing - growing-up, growing-out, growing-old - but ‘I’ never changes. Not-I changes gradually; not-not-I turns over the money changers’ tables in the temple. In my younger days, I used to like to visit Las Vegas. Most times, I’d stay at the Bellagio . After a few trips, I learned a secret. The entire casino draws off a common wine inventory. Theoretically, every bottle of wine is available at every restaurant in the casino. Want to pair a 1982 Lafite Rothchild with a bacon cheeseburger? I can make that happen for you! IRL, however, each restaurant in the casino curates its own wine list, drawing exclusively, of course, from the casino’s master inventory. As a result, the wine list at Picasso looks nothing like the wine list at Michael Mina’s . You’d never know that they draw off a common inventory…unless I told you. Oops! The universe works the same way. The master set of overlapping not-I’s constitutes the shared inventory of elements (‘multiplicity’). Each not-I is like a restaurant-specific wine list (‘nexus’); not-not-I (‘event’) is what happens when I order a specific bottle off a particular restaurant’s curated list, taste it and pair it with steak tartar …or foie gras . ‘I’ is universal, not-I is communal, not-not-I is particular . Not-I is the intersection of ‘I’ and not-not-I, the universal and the particular. Every not-not-I is sui generis ; it’s pure novelty. Not-not-I is ‘not-I’, uniquely apprehended, experienced, and appropriated. Not-not-I becomes an element in not-I and is available to all subsequent not-not-I’s. That’s how we communicate: I share my particular ‘not-not-I’ and you share your particular ‘not-not-I’, and we both share through the medium of the common ‘not-I’. We communicate like trees! Trees sink roots into the earth. Through their root systems, Tree A and Tree X exchange fairly complex messages. Subject matter includes weather forecasts, predator alerts, disease prophylaxis, and the ‘just’ allocation of scarce resources (water, minerals, even sunlight). (We have no way to know if trees also talk about philosophical concepts; do trees believe in God?) However, this arboreal communication is never direct; it occurs through the common medium of unicellular fungi that permeate and enrich the soil that separates and links the roots. In the Western philosophical tradition, ontologies habitually fall prey to The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Whitehead). They fracture the ‘I’ and pretend to create a ‘split personality’; they talk of an ‘inner world’ and an ‘outer world’. According to various versions of conventional wisdom, my so-called ‘inner world’ may include my physical body and the cells, tissues and organs that make it up, my thoughts and feelings, my hopes and desires, my plans, my dreams, my dreads, my disappointments, and my disgusts. In fact, none of these things is part of any ‘inner world’. They are all firmly located in the ‘not-I’ on their way to becoming ‘not-not-I’ for me. My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it’s simple. It admits no change. Conventional wisdom agrees that I am a membrane, but a membrane that separates my so-called inner world ( me ) from my outer world ( not-me ). This ‘inner’ world has even been mapped - by biology (cells, tissues, organs, and organic processes), by chemistry (base pairs, amino acids, RNA), and by psychology (unconscious, pre-conscious, conscious; id, ego, superego). As usual, conventional wisdom contains a grain of truth: I am a membrane! But, no surprise, it misplaces concreteness. I am not the membrane that exists between my body and its environment. We already have a word for that; it’s called ‘skin’. I am the membrane that exists between world…and no world ! I am like Janus, the Two Faced God . ‘I’ can peer in (to my so-called body/mind) or out (to my so-called environment). Either way, it’s always the same ‘I’ that’s doing the peering and always the same ‘not-I’ that is the object of my leering. There is no inner world. I am ‘I’, remember? I am simple, I am incapable of change. Everything else changes. Heraclitus was 99.99% right: Everything flows, except me (and any other ‘I’ that might happen to be ‘eddying’ around with me). The me-membrane is not an inanimate barrier; it’s not even organic tissue. It is not a physical or material reality at all. It’s the principle of reflection, an irreducible aspect of Being per se . ‘I’ reflects the world, ‘I’ projects the world, and the world becomes what I project. The world is the collective ‘not-I’, the s uperimposition of the unique reflections and projections of each ‘I’. The world is my hodological map. It indicates to me the tasks that are to be accomplished and the tools available to me to accomplish them. Space and time are simply measures of ‘priority’ and ‘on handedness’. The world includes my whole body, my whole self - brain, brawn, and blood - and it includes your body, your whole self as well. But it does not include ‘you’. You transcend the world…just as I do. Each of us is the primary substance of our own universe. What I call ‘you’ is the in-breaking of your universe into mine. I know that I am not alone because I know ‘you’ (even if I can’t prove it). In fact, “Naught is all else to me save that thou art.” (St. Dallin re: God) I am the membrane that separates world and no-world…and so are you! 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 our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, 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 Why We Must Pray Michael G. Pravica "It is our prayers that will, God willing, save the world and our souls because God will know us." At fundamental level, our universe consists of quantum particles (integral spin bosons such as photons, deuterons and gluons, and ½-integral spin fermions such as protons, neutrons and electrons). One of the most fascinating characteristics of these particles is that identical particles are indistinguishable from one another (i.e. they cannot be labeled) [1] and follow laws of quantum statistics that are dramatically different from the laws of distinguishable classical particles/entities that we are more familiar with where objects (e.g. balls, playing cards or cars) can be labeled. For bosons, Bose-Einstein statistics governs their behavior [2], and for ½ integral spin particles, Fermi-Dirac statistics determines their behavior [3]. The strange behavior of tiny quantum particles is one of the most fascinating mysteries of the quantum world and it is from these principles that our classical world is constructed. As living beings who are made from these indistinguishable particles, it is easy to argue along a similar vein that we, too, are indistinguishable. Of course, this is not true at the classical level. Yet, our constituent particles (molecules, atoms, nuclei, electrons, etc.) all return to the immense reservoir of matter in our universe and remain respective indistinguishable particles when we die. Thus, there is something more about us that makes each of us unique in the universe (i.e. we are more than just the sum of our constituent parts): our soul. I have argued before [4] that the soul is likely an infinitely dimensional or at least higher dimensional gift from God, who is likely an infinitely dimensional being who made our four-dimensional universe and likely many more. Thus, God established a special connection between humans so they could be “God-like” which has nothing to do with the constituent quantum particles that assemble our physical bodies. However, after the Original Sin, God decoupled from humanity so that humans could understand that life without God (and obedience to God) will be extremely challenging. The essence of humanity’s struggle is to reconnect with our Creator. 1 Corinthians 8:3 states: “But whoever loves God is known by God [5].” Loving God takes many forms such as helping our fellow humans in need, glorifying Him and acknowledging His ability to help us through seeking Him (prayer). I will focus on prayer in this brief essay. God gets to know us when we pray to Him. It is God’s love that gives each of us our uniqueness and removes the degeneracy of “indistinguishable souls” as God knows each and every human being who loves Him and thus has Faith in Him. Satan is jealous of us because he lost this very special connection to God. Those who do not seek God end up becoming indistinguishable souls (at least to Satan) which God does not interact with. They get lost in the quantum mechanical chaos of our universe. We maintain our connection with God (which was created at conception) by praying to and believing in Him. This special connection enables us to spiritually transcend our universe and connect with our Creator just as Michelangelo depicted Man reaching out and trying to touch the hand of God in his Sistine chapel painting. This is the essence of the connection: mutual interaction via transcendent everlasting love. Love is the most powerful force in all of God’s Creation. Just as in pre-WWII times, we are on the precipice of a devastating conflict (WWIII) which will destroy humanity. More than ever, we need to bring God back into our world to illuminate, expose and ultimately vanquish the evil that Satan is perpetrating here to destroy us. God will save us if we pray to Him and demonstrate to Him that we love Him as He loves us. Satan seeks to disrupt our unique connection between the Lord and His children in the four dimensional spacetime world that He created for us to live, enjoy and glorify Him in. Satan is trying to turn us away from our Creator by tricking us into worshipping inanimate elements inside this universe that constitute indistinguishable particles (e.g. the Golden Calf) and focusing on cold materialism instead of on our God-like essence by dissuading us from following Jesus Christ. Prayers to God are transmitted via the super dimensional transcendent Holy Spirit which not even Satan can stop as he is trapped in this four dimensional spacetime. It is these prayers to our Father that will, God willing, save the world from its self-destruction and at the least save our souls because God will know us. This is why, more than ever, we must pray. This was originally published on Medium. References: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statistics 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics 4. https://english.pravda.ru/science/129528-soul/ 5. https://biblia.com/bible/esv/1-corinthians/8/3 Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Mythology Before Marvel Comics David Cowles “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” Most of what we know about Norse Mythology comes from Wagner ( The Ring ), Tolkien ( Lord of the Rings ), and Marvel Comics. Behind these secondary sources stand the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda . The former is a collection of poems, some dating back to the 9th century CE; the latter is the work of a single man, Snorri Sturluson of Iceland (c. 1220 CE). Unfortunately, these first written records date from a time when Christianity was already beginning to make a mark in the Northlands. It is a matter of scholarship to separate the original pre-Christian content from later Christian influences…and, happy you , we will not attempt that here! Sturluson’s singular contribution was to organize varied material from the Poetic Edda into a quasi-coherent narrative, but what makes the Prose Edda so important, and therefore our focus, is its mind-bending structure. Mythic thinking expresses itself in narrative. True to form, Sturluson sews together countless short stories into one overarching tale. It is no exaggeration to describe the Prose Edda as the first Autobiography of Everything, anticipating by 700 years the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Sturluson began by situating Norse mythology in the context of Hebrew proto history: “Almighty God created heaven and earth and all things in them, and lastly, two humans from whom generations are descended, Adam and Eve…After Noah’s flood, there lived eight people who inhabited the world, and from them generations have descended… “(But) the vast majority of mankind…neglected obedience to God and…refused (even) to mention the name of God. But who was there then to tell their children of the mysteries of God?” Wait, are we talking about the 13th century CE…or the 21st? According to Christian theology, God gave human being the gift of ‘reason’ so that even the ‘unchurched’ can discover Truth. Surprisingly, the same doctrine appears in Norse mythology: “(God) gave them a portion of wisdom so that they could understand all earthly things…what it could mean that earth and animals and birds had common characteristics in some things…They reasoned that the earth was alive. It fed all creatures and took possession of everything that died.” But at the same time, Sturluson also situated his Nordic narrative in an Hellenic context. Just as the New Testament is the merger of Jewish theology with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, so Norse mythology is the intersection of the Greek myth and Christian metaphysics: “Near the middle of the world was…Troy. We call the land there Turkey…Twelve kingdoms were there and one high king…He was married to the daughter of the high king, Priam…They had a son (Hector); he was called Tror; we call him Thor…When he was ten…he was as beautiful to look at when he came among other people as when ivory is inlaid in oak. His hair is more beautiful than gold. When he was twelve, he had reached his full strength… “Then he traveled through many countries, explored all quarters of the world, and defeated unaided all the berserks and giants, one of the greatest dragons, and many wild animals. (Hercules?) In the northern part of the world, he came across a prophetess called Sibyl, whom we call Sif, and married her.” Eighteen generations later, a descendant of Thor and Sif was born: “A son whose name is Woden; it is him we call Odin. He was an outstanding person for wisdom and all sorts of accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, whom we call Frigg. Odin had the gift of prophesy and so did his wife, and from this science he discovered that his name would be remembered in the northern part of the world and honored above all kings. For this reason, he became eager to set off from Turkey…” Note that 18 generations earlier, Thor had earlier left Turkey (Troy) and migrated to “the northern part of the world” (Scandinavia); now Thor’s descendant, Odin, recapitulates his ancestor’s journey. (Just as Jesus’ Flight into Egypt recapitulates the Exodus .) This will not be the last time that our narrative recapitulates. Mythic space is fractal space: patterns repeat - repetition at scale is the meta-pattern of process. Sturluson sees Troy as the cradle of civilization and is eager to associate it with Scandinavia. In this, he is channeling Virgil, whose Aeneid connects Troy with the founding of Rome. In fact, Troy is the mythological prototype for all cities. It is the City of Cain ( Enoch ), it is the City of Dioce (Ecbatana, Pound’s ‘city of patterned streets’), it is Midgard (Tolkien’s Middle Earth). It is worth noting that the two great powers of the first millennium CE both trace their origins to the defeated party in the Trojan War. “After that, he (Odin) proceeded north to where he was faced by the sea, the one which they thought encircled all lands, and set his son over the realm which is now called Norway…their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands.” When Gylfi (King of Sweden) entered what appeared to be Val-hall (Valhalla), “He saw three thrones, one above the other, and there were three men, one sitting in each…the one that sat in the lowest throne was king and was called High; next to him the one called Just-as-high, and the one sitting at the top was called Third.” The structure of divinity in the Prose Edda parallels, of course, the Christian doctrine of Trinity. There is one God (‘All-father’), but High, Just-as-High, and Third represent the three faces or personae of this one God. It is impossible not to see parallels with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Gyfli is invited to ask any questions he wishes; what follows reads something like the 1950s RCC Baltimore Catechism …or Chapter 17 of Joyce’s Ulysses : Q: Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods? A: He is called All-father in our language… Q: Where is this god, what power has he, and what great works has he performed? A: He lives throughout all ages, rules all his kingdom, and governs all things great and small…He made heaven and earth, the skies and everything in them…But his greatest work is that he made man and gave him a soul that shall live and never perish, though the body decay to dust or burn to ashes. Q: What was he doing before heaven and earth were made? A: Then he was among the frost-giants. Whaaaat? Before heaven and earth were made, there were ‘frost giants’? Yup! In Norse mythology, the ‘created’ universe as we know it (heaven and earth, Midgard ) is embedded in a much broader reality (a Norse ‘multiverse’). Q: What was the beginning? And how did things start? And what was there before? A: It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap ( Ginnungagap ) was, but no growth. Q: What were things like before generations came to be and the human race was multiplied? In answer to this question, High, Just-as-High and Third begin to set out the fundamental doctrines of Norse cosmology. The primal (‘uncreated’) cosmos consisted of a region of great heat ( Muspell ) and a region of great cold ( Niflheim ) with a chasm ( Ginnungagap ) between them (“the mighty gap”). Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor. Again, it is impossible not to see parallels, this time with the secular ‘something from nothing’ cosmologies of the 20/21st centuries: ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’. A: There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Ymir…and from him are descended the generations of frost giants…” Ymir lived on four rivers of milk (the four rivers that flowed through Eden?) that came from a cow ( Audhumla ) who fed herself by licking the salty rime stones found in Ginnungagap. As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones. Soon, “…there was a complete man. His name was Buri…He begot a son called Bor…(and Bor) had three sons. One was called Odin, the second Vili, the third Ve…And it is my belief that this Odin and his brothers must be the rulers of heaven and earth…” So this Odin…he was the son of Bor, the brother of Vili and Ve, and the grandson of Buri, who was ‘licked’ into existence by a cow. Ok I guess, but he is also the son of Thor and Sif (above). Norse Mythology requires a level of neuroplasticity that most of us have not enjoyed since kindergarten. Then again, the Book of Genesis also presents two distinct accounts of creation which differ in focus and detail. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss this as ‘child’s play’. It is just such neuroplasticity that Jesus says is necessary for one to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (e.g. Mt. 18: 3). We’re left to wonder: Are High, Just-as-High, and Third actually Odin, Vili and Ve? But we’re not done yet! Bor’s sons killed the giant Ymir. And…they drowned all the race of frost giants, except that one escaped with his household. Giants call him Bergelmir. He went up on to his ark (!) with his wife and was preserved there, and from them are descended the families of frost giants…” Noah? “They (Bor’s sons) took Ymir and transported him to the middle of Ginnungagap, and out of him made the earth; out of his blood came the sea and the lakes. The earth was made of flesh, and the rocks of the bones…They also took his skull and made out of it the sky and set it up over the earth…Then they took molten particles and sparks that…had shot out of the world of Muspell and set them in the middle of the firmament of the sky…” We ‘the enlightened’ think of life as a late stage epiphenomenal eruption out of inert matter. The Eddas reverse the relationship. ‘The heavens and the earth’ ( Gaia/Kosmos ) are fashioned out of living matter (Ymir). Life, not matter, is substructural. The Gospel of John (1: 1-4) testifies to a similar process: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.” So in Christian ontology as well as Norse mythology, life is the substructure of universe. The Prose Edda is like a Bach fugue: themes repeat, transformed. Note the complex ecosystem in place prior to creation, ‘before’ even the beginning of time. The primal entity, Ymir, feeds off of a pre-existent cow who produces milk from nourishment she receives by licking salty rime-stones. That process of licking in turn uncovers a second primal entity, Buri, from whom Odin, Vili and Ve are descended. These grandsons of Buri in turn kill Ymir, but they recycle his body as the raw material needed to create ‘heaven and earth’, i.e. space/time, matter/energy, the mortal realm. Care to stretch the envelope? Compare this process with the evolution of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells from their prokaryotic precursors. Essentially, two independent life forms ‘merged’ to form a single, symbiotic organism that became the basis for all animal and plant life on Earth. As above, this process happened only once in the history of terrestrial evolution. Q: How was the earth arranged? A: It is circular 'round the edge, and around it lies the deep sea, and along the shore of this sea they gave lands to live in to the race of giants. But on the earth, on the inner side, they made a fortification 'round the world against the hostility of giants, and for this fortification they used the giant Ymir’s eyelashes, and they called the fortification Midgard (‘Middle Earth’). Q. And where did the people come from who inhabit this world? A: As Bor’s sons walked along the seashore, they came across two logs and created people out of them. The first gave breath and life; the second consciousness and movement; the third a face, speech, hearing, and sight… This is a sophisticated Trinitarian model, similar to but importantly different from, the Christian model. First, the manifestations of God are allocated differently among the divine personae, and second, the phenomena associated with being human are grouped and segmented differently from how we might do it today. A (cont.): The man was called Ask, the woman Embla, and from them were produced the mankind to whom the dwelling-place under Midgard ( Middle Earth ) was given. After that, they made themselves a city in the middle of the world, which is known as Asgard. We call it Troy…In the city there is a seat called Hlidskialf, and when Odin sat in that throne he saw over all worlds and every man’s activity and understood everything he saw.” Humans build a city, Troy, which becomes the homeland of the gods (Aesir), who originally created heaven and earth, and the homeland of humans. The process of creation flows both ways: gods create for humans, and humans create for gods. Ontology is a Möbius strip: events recur even as orientations reverse. We find a close parallel in Ezra Pound’s Cantos : “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out; the bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan/City of patterned streets…” Here, a city built by human hands is intended to be a home for the gods. In another article in this collection , we connect this ancient Iranian city both to Cain’s city (above) and to the ‘patterned streets’ (circles) found in Dante’s Divine Comedy . Perhaps Pound also had Troy in mind…or should I say, Asgard? But back to the Prose Edda : “He (Odin) is the father of all the gods and of men, and of everything that has been brought into being by him and his power. The earth was his daughter and his wife. Out of her he begot the first of his sons…(wait for it)…Asa-Thor.” Ok, enough already! Our story began with Thor, grandson of the proto historical king of Troy, Priam. Eighteen generations later, Odin was born. Odin married Frigg and together they migrated to Scandinavia. Now we learn that this same Odin is ‘All-father’, the father of all gods and men, that Frigg, his daughter and his wife is really ‘earth’ and that the first of their sons is the very same Thor with whom our story began. Gimme a break! What are we to make of all these apparent contradictions? Absolutely nothing! There are no contradictions in mythology. (-A) ≠ -(A). The concept of contradiction arises in systems characterized by identity, quantity, causality, extension, duration, and logic, where the transitive and commutative properties rule. None of these concepts figures in any important way in mythological thinking. Myths are the first TOEs (Theories of Everything). Hawking meets Tolkien. Like Hawking, mythology searches for universal patterns; like Tolkien, it then struggles to communicate these patterns using the limited resources of language. You , dear reader, expect your patterns to be symmetrical, continuous, and orientable, but the world we’re modeling is not like that at all. It is stochastic, discrete, and non-orientable. You expect beginnings, middles, and ends, but such things do not exist on a Mobius Strip. You are expecting events situated in spacetime; mythology replaces spacetime with a hierarchy of fractals. Scale takes the place of extension. The order of events is immaterial, and ‘time loops’ are expected, perhaps even required, perhaps even universal. Mythic thinking has only one proper subject: ‘the pattern of patterns’. In spite of the important parallels with Judeo-Christian theology and Greek proto-history, the Norse cosmos is fabulously more complex. As we have already glimpsed, in addition to humans, there are many other humanoid races: frost giants (including trolls and, unexpectedly, wolves), light elves, dark elves ( aka dwarfs), and, of course, gods (Aesir). Each of these races has its own ‘homeland’, but there are other ‘uninhabited’ homelands as well: Muspell and Niflheim (above), Hel (the land of the dead), Val-hall (Valhalla, the home of fallen warriors), and Gimle (the resting place of the righteous): “…(Gimle) shall stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and in that place shall live good and righteous people for ever and ever.” Astoundingly, all of these ‘homelands’ are connected by the trunk of a single ash tree, Yggdrasil , that has three principal roots: one in the realm of the Aesir (Asgard), one in the realm of the frost giants, and one in Niflheim. These roots, in turn, may be associated with the three Norns who weave the history of the universe (fate) from skeins of string (not heterotic string…as far as we know). We learn from Third that “Odin is the highest and most ancient of the Aesir. He rules all things…Odin is called ‘All-father’ for he is father of all gods. He is also called ‘Val-father’ (father of the slain)…Hanga-god (god of the hanged) and Hapta-god (god of prisoners), Farma-god (god of cargoes, possibly to be understood as human cargoes, i.e., travelers, or even slaves)…” One of the Aesir, “…Loki or Lopt, son of the giant Farbauti…is pleasing and handsome in appearance, evil in character, capricious in behavior…There was a giantess called Angraboda in Giantland. With her, Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Lormungand (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. “And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland…All-father sent the gods to get the children and bring them to him. And when they came to him, he threw the serpent into that deep sea that lies around all lands, and this serpent grew so that it lies in the midst of the ocean encircling all lands and bites on its own tail. “Hel he threw into Niflheim…The Aesir brought up the wolf at home…” But as the wolf grew, the Aesir felt the need to tether it securely. So they went to the dwarves and asked them to make a bond that that wolf could not break…and they did! “It was made of six ingredients: the sound of the cat’s footfall and the woman’s beard; the mountain’s roots and the bear’s sinews; the fish’s breath and the bird’s spittle…” To prove this this story is true, we are told, “…You must have seen that a woman has no beard and there is no noise from a cat’s running, and there are no roots under a mountain…” Earlier attempts to fetter Fenriswolf all failed…because the tethers were made out of ordinary materials. No matter how strong they were at the outset, they were inevitably weakened by the wolf’s incessant struggles. They were ultimately subject to the law of entropy, and eventually, the wolf escaped them all. The dwarves’ “fetter was smooth and soft like a silken ribbon,” but it acted just like the strong force binding quarks in an atomic nucleus: “…When the wolf kicked, the band grew harder, and the harder he struggled, the tougher became the band.” This is a marvelous example of mythic reasoning. The text leads us to believe that a woman has no beard, for example, because the dwarfs used it to make Fenriswolf’s fetter. But there is another possible interpretation: What if the dwarfs made something (a fetter) out of nothing, out of things that do not exist (e.g. a woman’s beard)? ‘Something made out of nothing’ is, well, something else . The laws of physics would be suspended and entropy ‘need not apply’. My nine-year-old grandson said, “The fetter was made out of the opposite of everything.” Exactly so, and therefore it behaved in a way opposite to all other materials. A mythological model of anti-matter, perhaps. No bird's-eye view of the Norse cosmos would be complete without consideration of Ragnarök, aka the Apocalypse. Admit it, this is what you’ve been waiting for since you opened this post. So…back to the catechism, and just in the nick of time: Q: What information is there to be given about Ragnarok? A: There are many important things to be told about it. First of all, that a winter will come called fimbul (‘mighty’ or ‘mysterious’) winter. Then snow will drift from all directions. There will be great frosts and keen winds. The sun will do no good. There will be three of these winters together and no summer between. …The wolf will swallow the sun…the other wolf will swallow the moon…The stars will disappear from the sky…trees will become uprooted from the earth; mountains will fall; and all fetters and bonds will snap and break . Then Fenriswolf will get free…the Midgard serpent will fly into a great rage and make its way ashore…After that, Surt (a fire demon from the race of giants) will fling fire over the earth and burn the whole world. Q. What will happen then after heaven and earth and all the world is burned…will there be any kind of earth or sky? A: The earth will shoot up out of the sea and will be green and fair. Crops will grow unsown…And in a place called Hoddmimir’s holt, two people will lie hid during Surt’s fire called Life and Leifthrasir, and their food will be the dews of the morning. And from these people will be descended such a great progeny that all the world will be inhabited. And so ends the discourse on Norse cosmology…and now comes the really interesting and totally revolutionary part: “But the Aesir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him (Gyfli), and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there (in Sweden), so that when long periods of time had passed, men should not doubt that they were all the same , those Aesir about whom stories are told above and those who were now given the same names. “So someone there was given the name Thor…and to him are attributed the exploits that Thor (Hector) performed in Troy.” Wow! What else is there to say? Simply, wow! In Ulysses , James Joyce maps a day in the life of ordinary Dubliners onto events in Homer’s Odyssey . An incredible feat! But the Prose Edda goes much further. Sturluson begins by mapping Norse mythology onto both Jewish and Greek proto-histories. Then he maps Christian theology onto Norse mythology. Finally, he maps Norse mythology onto the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes and, for his piece de resistance , he maps the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes back onto events in Greek proto-history. To borrow a Judeo-Christian concept, everyone is ‘priest, prophet and king’. What Joyce (and Pound) demonstrated brilliantly, Snorri Sturluson had demonstrated with even greater power and complexity centuries earlier: the various ontological categories that populate human thought are really just different ways of experiencing and understanding the present lives of ordinary people. Everything that happens is happening right now! The past and the future only exist to serve the present and they exist only in the present. On the one hand, the Prose Edda is a literary triumph. But on the other hand, it is exactly what Mythology is all about. Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to Odin, he found them. Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. Yggdrasil, c. 1886. Illustration for Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen by Felix and Therese Dahn. This illustration of Yggdrasil captures the essay’s core idea of mythology as an interconnected, multi-dimensional structure that links various realms—gods, humans, giants—and weaves together different times and layers of meaning, symbolizing the fractal, cyclical nature of mythic storytelling explored throughout the essay. 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 Holy Days 2024. Previous Next

< Back Teaching Physics in the 21st Century David Cowles 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. (Editor’s Note: ATM Issue #1 included a feature article, Science & The Yellow Submarine – Part I . As promised, Part II will be published in ATM Issue #3 (9/1/2022). In the meantime, 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 4 through 8, all based on the Yellow Sub.) “Physics is too hard…and it’s oh so boring! Besides, when will I ever use it?” Sound familiar? These are the same complaints we’ve heard from students for generations. Heck, I probably said the very same things myself when I was in high school. 125 years ago, lack of formal training in the ‘hard sciences’ was no obstacle to understanding, appreciating, and participating in the world. After all, science still more or less accepted the tenets of ‘naïve realism’: i.e., the world for the most part is the way it appears to be. High school dropouts and Ivy League professors shared this same basic world view. The principal task of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment (1700 – 1900) was to explain how it is that things are the way they are and to explore how those things could be put to work for our benefit. It did not ask why because the assumption from the start was that there is no why; what is just is! Although he probably didn’t realize it at the time, the physicist Enrico Fermi blew the top off this Newtonian world view in 1900 after conducting a series of rather arcane experiments. Fermi asked how so-called ‘black bodies’ emit radiation. Commonsense suggests that radiation emitted by a black body should be made up of a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Fermi’s experiments showed that commonsense was wrong. ( Side bar : At the time this conclusion was startling. Today, we would just say, oh well, commonsense is wrong again – as usual!) Fermi discovered that radiation emitted by a black body is emitted, not across a continuous spectrum of wave lengths, but at one of just a few discrete wavelengths. Radiation might be emitted with a wavelength of X or a wavelength of Y but not with a wavelength somewhere between X and Y. Of course, the scientific establishment’s initial reaction was to doubt the experimental results, and failing that, to tweak the Newtonian model as little as possible to accommodate the new data. The ‘academy’ responded in just this way to every new scientific breakthrough. First reaction, “there’s something wrong with the data”; and when that argument collapses, “how can we tweak the prevailing model as little as possible?” Prior to Galileo, and even afterwards in some quarters, each new astronomical observation was shoehorned into the Ptolemaic model, tweaking that model as little as possible to accommodate the new data points. Awful, right? Wrong! The scientific community is doing just exactly what it should be doing: responding to new data, first with healthy skepticism, and then by ‘minimally modifying’ its current models to accommodate the vetted new data. We wouldn’t have it any other way! Think of it as an extension of Occam’s Razor. But sometimes, this conservative strategy breaks down. Galileo and Copernicus, for example, realized that the new astronomical data could not be reasoned away or neatly folded into the Ptolemaic model. Sometimes, as the Cars pointed out in their hit song, Drive , “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong!” Sometimes, revolution is the only option. Who among us, sitting on his recliner, drinking a beer, and watching the game on TV, is anxious for revolution? But it happens, and when it happens, Katie bar the door: it’s open season and there are no sacred cows; the entire corpus of scientific ‘knowledge’ is opened to scrutiny. That’s just what happened, beginning in 1900. A year earlier, few scientists, if any, thought that Newtonian cosmology would ever be replaced by a different framework. Who could even imagine what such a framework might look like? The validity of Newton’s scheme seemed unassailable; today it lies in shambles! 20th century scientists painstakingly dismantled Newton’s model, unraveling the entire ball of yarn that was 19th century cosmology. First, Einstein showed that space and time, assumed to be ultimate physical constants, were in fact ‘relative’ to one other and to mass and to motion. Then another gaggle of geeks built a fresh model of the universe based on Fermi’s findings. The new model included discrete packets of energy (quanta) in lieu of a smooth spectrum of continuous values. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that pretty much everything we thought we knew in 1899 about the structure of the universe was wrong! So far, so good. It is entirely appropriate that new scientific paradigms should replace older theories and their retreads. But still, ‘something’s wrong.’ In 1899, a high school dropout had about the same view of the universe as a member of Harvard’s physics faculty. Today, only a handful of non-specialists understand the latest developments in theoretical and experimental physics, and this is a problem. Given a test, I wager that 95% of American adults would describe the universe in essentially Newtonian terms. Outside of science fiction (thank God for sci-fi), Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have for the most part not yet spilled out of the academy into the streets. As a result, we live in a world whose workings are understood by just a handful of people. “Danger, Will Robinson!” This state-of-affairs threatens the fabric of society. A tiny cadre of cognoscenti presides over the intellectual life of the planet. You might describe today’s scientifically educated as ‘Oligarchs of Information.’ In a democracy, ignorance itself can be dangerous. We ask our electorate to guide the ship of state; well and good, but are we entirely comfortable with this arrangement knowing that that guidance will likely be based on 300-year-old notions of what is real and what isn’t? For us as religious educators, the problem is even more acute. How do we teach young people about the majesty of God and the justice of his Kingdom when they are working with a mechanical model of reality? I believe the Beatles’ classic movie, Yellow Submarine (1968) can be a powerful teaching tool for students, especially for students in grades four through eight. “I know your game, Dealer! I know you’re using all this cool music and all these cool graphics just to get our kids hooked.” You’re absolutely right! That’s exactly what I’m doing. And let me tell you, if you are going to get a kid hooked on science, this is your chance! But how do we hook a kid on science if we can’t find a way to make it interesting? Not by teaching the properties of pulleys and inclined planes, that’s for sure. Fact : Science is fascinating! Young people instinctively love it. Idea : Instead of teaching science from the bottom-up (“Don’t worry, you’ll get to the interesting stuff in college”), let’s try teaching from the top down. Expose as many students as possible, as early as possible, to the mind-bending ideas of 20th century physics; then see what happens! This is the age when kids are most likely to be interested in comic books and graphic novels, and Yellow Submarine is the ultimate graphic novel (ok, film)! Are you ‘on board’ (pun intended)? Then take a look at this basic outline of a 10-unit lesson plan that turns the movie, Yellow Submarine , into a physics textbook no student can put down. ( Note : I have no preconception regarding the length or spacing of these ’10 Lessons.’ Each lesson could last an hour…or a lot longer. Each lesson could be taught in succession, one day one lesson. Or each lesson could be spaced over several class periods so that it would take 10 weeks to complete the program. The good news is, ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Any of these formats will work!) Welcome aboard! Lesson #1 : Welcome to the Yellow Submarine Introduce the Beatles, the film and the '60s culture. Watch the film together, if possible, otherwise in small groups or at home. Question: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” Question: “Ok then, do we live in Liverpool? How so, how not?” Note students’ initial responses to both questions and compare them with what they have to say at the end of the course. Lesson # 2 : The Pier Question: “How is life on the Pier different from the life we’re used to?” Introduce the basics of Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: roughly, whatever can happen does happen… somewhere (i.e., in some ‘world’). Introduce concepts from Stephen Gould’s book, It’s a Wonderful Life : roughly, species are the way they are, but they could just as well have been very different. Could there be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy? Question: “What happens to the world when we’re not looking at it?” Does it just continue on as is? Does it continue on, but not as is? Or does it simply vanish until we look again? How do we know? Lesson # 3 : The Sea of Time Question: “What is time?” Introduce the basics of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Question: “Can you imagine a world without time?” What would it be like? Would you like to live in such a world? Question: “Ok then, can you imagine a world with time but where time somehow works differently from the way it does here?” How could time be different? Can you design a world you’d like to live in? Introduce examples from Einstein’s Dreams Introduce the topic of time travel: what are the main problems? Question: “If you could travel in time , where (what year or era) would you most like to visit? Why?” Question: “If you could move back and forth in time, what age would you choose to be? Older? Younger? Or the same age you are now? Why?” Lesson # 4 : The Sea of Science (Space) Introduce basic concepts in Topology. Question: “Can you describe the topology of our world?” Question: “Can you imagine a world with a different topology? What would it be like to live in such a world? Introduce the Platonic Solids Introduce the Holographic Principle The information content of a space is proportionate to its surface area, not its volume. Lesson # 5 : The Sea of Monsters Introduce concepts from D’arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form . Revisit concepts from Stephen Gould’s It’s a Wonderful Life . Design a life form that incorporates organs from more than one species. Design a life form that incorporates both organic and mechanical features. In what ways have we already begun to break down the barriers between species and between the organic and the mechanical? Transplanting a pig’s heart into a human Installing a Pacemaker Installing an Artificial heart Lesson # 6 : The Dreaded Vacuum Monster (VM). Question: “Why is the Vacuum Monster ‘dreaded?’ Review the actions of VM: the sequence, e.g. Introduce the concept of Entropy. Question: “How is the Vacuum Monster like Entropy?” Introduce the concept of an ‘ouroboros.’ Question: “Is our universe an ouroboros? Is it fated to consume itself?” Question: “Why does VM consume itself?” Question: “Is anything left after VM does its worst? If so, what?” Question: “Why does the Submarine and its crew survive?” Introduce Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Lesson # 7 : Dr. Boob. Introduce the concept of Information: roughly, the difference between what is and what could have been. Analyze Dr. Boob’s dialog: “Do you speak English? ‘Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure.’ But do you speak English? "You know, I’m not sure.” Question: “What’s the difference between useful and useless information?” Question: “Does information need to ‘know’ itself to be useful?” Question: “Why do they call Dr. Boob, ‘the nowhere man?’” Question: “How does JHB go from being a ‘nowhere man’ to being a ‘somewhere man?’” “What makes someone be a somewhere person?” Lesson # 8 : The Foothills of the Headlands Question: “What would life be like if you had a mind but no body?” Question: “Would you rather be ‘embodied’ or ‘disembodied?’ Would you rather live in RL or in VR?” Question: “How is a mind different from a body? Can you have either one without the other?” Supplemental material: Max Headroom (TV Series), The Matrix (Films), Alice in Wonderland (The Cheshire Cat). Lesson # 9 : The Sea of Holes & the Sea of Green Introduce the concepts of ‘figure & ground,’ ‘being & nothingness.’ Introduce the concept of a ‘cosmic membrane,’ an ‘event horizon.’ Question: How is the Sea of Green like an event horizon? Question: “Why do you think the Beatles included a ‘Sea of Green’ on the way to Pepperland? What does it do? Why is it important?” Question: “Why do you think the Beatles made these two seas the last two seas on the journey?” Lesson # 10 :Pepperland at last! Question: “What are the main features of Pepperland? Question: “How is Pepperland like Liverpool? How is it different?” Question: “Would you want to live in Pepperland forever if you could? Why? Or why not?” Question: “Now that you know all about life in Pepperland, do you feel better or worse about your own life?” Repeat the questions from Lesson #1: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” “Or do we live in Liverpool? How so? How not?” “Or both? If both, how both?” Let’s talk about the trip we’ve just taken: “Did you have fun?” “Along the way, did you learn anything about the world you live in?” “Can you use anything you learned from the trip to make your life better?” Provisional thesis : Like all great works of art, there will never be a ‘definitive interpretation’ of Yellow Submarine . That’s the beauty of masterpieces: they speak to everyone in every era, but they also say different things to different people – all of them valid, all of them true. My own, personal and, and totally tentative understanding? There is only one world: Pepperland, Liverpool and wherever your classroom happens to be located. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of reality; Pepperland is the eternal aspect of the same events. The branes (seas) are layers of reality (time, space, body, mind, information, le neant ). Both Pepperland and Liverpool can be broken down into these component branes. 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. Previous Next

< Back Christ and the Cosmic Fractal David Cowles Dec 27, 2025 “A process is recursive when it applies to itself… (but) doesn’t every process apply to itself?” 1600 words, 8 minute read. Have you ever been to a Carnival? Did you visit the Hall of Mirrors ? You enter and all around you are, well you guessed it, mirrors . You shut the door behind you…and yikes, it’s another mirror! You are struck inside a polyhedron, the inside faces of which are all mirrors. Look into one mirror, any mirror, and you see yourself reflected endlessly but at ever smaller scale. The mirrors are reflecting each other’s images over and over again until the images are too faint for you to see…but know that they continue infinitely, albeit imperceptibly. They create the ‘illusion’ of adding another dimension to space. The mirrors have height, width, and thickness just as you’d expect; but now they also appear to have a 4 th dimension… depth . Adding this 4 th dimension does not increase the overall information content of the complex. The mirror images simply repeat, over and over again, what already is. They add nothing new. In the same way that all the information related to a Black Hole resides on its surface, so all the information related to a Hall of Mirrors resides in just 3 dimensions. The images are self-similar ( congruent if you’re currently sitting in a high school geometry class); only the scale changes! If you’re not too hung over after spending Saturday night at the Carnival, I’ll pick you up Sunday morning on my way to Mass (Roman Catholic Liturgy). I know you’re not into religion, but I think you’ll find this interesting. Christians believe that God (Father) made ‘the heavens and the earth’ but they also believe that God (Son) was ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ 2025 years ago. Ridiculous, you say! Who could believe that? How soon you have forgotten last night’s trip to the Carnival! ( Suggestion : Drink less next year!) May I remind you? Last night your image was incarnate in endless reflections of your reflection. ( Note : a reflection of reflection is recursive.) But you don’t need to wait for the carnival to come to town next year to be reminded. Fractals are all around us and they are a frequent subject of artists working in various media. For example, Escher’s Print Gallery (1956) depicts a city and in this city is an art gallery and on the wall of that gallery hangs a painting and, guess what, that painting is Print Gallery …a painting that depicts a city with an art gallery that has Print Gallery hanging on one of its walls. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea offers a literary example of this relationship. It chronicles a young intellectual’s anguished discovery of the principles of Existentialism, and it concludes with him deciding to write a novel based on those ideas. Of course, the intellectual is Sartre and the novel is none other than Nausea itself. Sartre’s novel is itself recursive. As such it joins a rich literary tradition stretching from Don Quixote to Neverending Story . In Volume Two of Don Quixote , our hero learns that he is the subject of an eponymous novel and he takes time to respond to critics’ comments on Volume One. The novel has become a ‘character’ in its own story. That’s recursion! When we first hear this idea, our instinctive reaction is to say, “No, that’s not possible! The whole cannot be one of its own parts. It’s illogical.” And yet, through carnivals, liturgies, paintings, and novels, we clearly see that it is not only possible but actual, perhaps even necessary… Bertrand Russell notwithstanding. We are used to vectored processes that impact things outside themselves but there is no good reason why a process shouldn’t act on itself as well, why it should not be recursive. In fact, most process is recursive. Processes directed exclusively at another, if they exist at all, are special cases of, or abstractions from, process generally. Sidebar : Does every process apply to itself? Is that the meaning of Karma ? It’s certainly the message of Judeo-Christianity’s Great Commandment: “…love your neighbor as yourself.” And of Newton: Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction. Every subject has itself for an object. There is ever increasing evidence that the cosmos itself is fractal in nature. The distribution of galactic groups in space is self-similar to the distribution of galaxies within those groups; that distribution in turn is self-similar to the distribution of stars within individual galaxies…which is self-similar to the distribution of quarks in an atomic nucleus. Many great works of literature (e.g. Joyce) and music (e.g. Bach) are structured as fractals. Fractals also have applications in math, logic, and computer science. But here we are exclusively concerned with metaphysical applications, applications in ontology, cosmology, and theology. The Christian world view suggests that Being itself has a fractal structure. Let’s start with God! Why not? The Christian idea of God is Trinitarian. God is three persons (Father, Son and Spirit). But these ‘persons’ are not ‘parts’ of God; they are God, individually and collectively. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. According to the Nicene Creed , the Son is “begotten not made, God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” The Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”, i.e. is the relationship between the Father and the Son. But the Spirit is also a ‘divine person’; the Spirit is also God. So according to Christian theology, God is ‘triple-self-similar’: Father ( est ), Son ( incarnatus est ), and Spirit ( procedit ). If we map Christian cosmology onto English syntax, God is the subject, the object, and the verb. What about the ‘world’ and God’s relationship to that world? Does the fractal structure of Trinity extend to the physical world? What are the fundamental things we can say about God’s relationship to the world? God creates the world, primordially ( Genesis ) and perpetually ( John ). God redeems the world ( I Corinthians ), immediately and eschatologically. God is incarnate in the world in the person of Jesus Christ. So the world, which God encompasses, encompasses God. The whole is part of itself. ( Colossians ). The fractal pattern we identify with Trinity extends at least one level beyond…to the relationship of God with the World. The pattern of Creation, Incarnation and Redemption is self-similar to the structure of Trinity. God incarnate (Jesus Christ) is one element of a whole (world) which in turn is encompassed by a higher order whole (God) which, of course, is also a part (Son) of the whole (world). While God “created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), it is through Christ ( Logos ) that “all things came to be…and without whom nothing came to be” (John 1:3). Christ the part ( logos ) on one scale is Christ the whole ( Logos ) on another. God and Creation are self-similar (not identical or equivalent); it is by the power of the Holy Spirit (God) that we are the image and likeness of God. While everything is ultimately subject to God, it is subjected to God through Christ. “When everything is subjected to him (Son), then the Son will be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him (Father) so that God may be all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28). Christ, an element on one scale, is Christ the whole on another: “Christ is all in all.” (Col. 3: 11) So at scale N, God creates and saves the world and is incarnate in that world in the person of Jesus. At scale N-1, all things are made through Christ and ultimately subjected to God through Christ. Christ (the whole) becomes Christ (the part) first through Incarnation and then through each of the Sacraments (especially Eucharist), i.e. reiterations of Incarnation. Christ is wholly present in every sacrament. In Eucharist, however, bread and wine (parts) are transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ (whole). We (wholes) in turn ingest that Body and Blood (whole) under the appearance of bread and wine (parts). In each of us, Jesus’ body and blood comingles with our own; Christ (whole) becomes a part of each of us so that we in turn each become the Body of Christ (whole). A part (Christ) of a part (us) is also a whole of which we are each a part. According to the theology of the Eucharist, when we (whole) ingest Jesus’ Body and Blood (part), we (part) are simultaneously uploaded into Christ’s Body (whole). St. Paul summed it up beautifully: “Now you are Christ’s body and individually parts of it.” ( I Cor. 12: 27 ) In Eucharist, Christ becomes part of us who become part of Christ who becomes part of us ad infinitum . Reminiscent of our Hall of Mirrors , wouldn’t you say? Eucharist is a special example of a fractal because it is not concerned with space (mirrors) but with time. It is a Time Crystal . Linear time is suspended and replaced by perpetual loops. Therefore, Eucharist is an indivisible quantum of time ; as such, it is the eternal now . Eucharist is a process which, fractal-like, repeats the Incarnation perpetually. So does Being itself have a fractal structure according to Christian theology? Q.E.D. *** The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (c. 1675–82) juxtaposes the Holy Family (Mary, the Christ Child, and Joseph) with the divine Trinity (God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as a dove) to visually express Christ’s dual nature as both human and divine. 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 Cosmic Crossroads David Cowles You say, "Big Bang;" we say, "Genesis." You say, "Constantine;" we say, "Ascension." 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. Previous Next