< Back The History of Problem Solving David Cowles Jan 10, 2025 “Gradually, our sticks became ICBMs and our canopies became high rise condos but the process of problem solving remained unchanged.” In the beginning there were problems: hunger, cold, fear, etc. So we looked around to see if there might be something in the environment to help: Could a stick or a bunch of leaves make a difference? What if we sharpened the stick at one end and used it to keep wild animals away? What if we wove the leaves together to make a kind of rain shelter? And so technology was born. Gradually, our sticks became ICBMs and our canopies became high rise condos but the process of problem solving remained unchanged. Call it the 4 I’s: (1) Identify a problem/need, (2) Imagine a solution, (3) Inventory raw materials, (4) Implement. This last stage includes 3 steps of its own: Make (or manufacture), Measure, Modify. The 4 I’s accurately describe the problem solving process from c. 50000 BCE to 2000 CE. Since 2000…not so much. Specifically, AI has changed the paradigm. Now for the first time, we are implementing before we are imagining. Take the atomic bomb for example. We wanted to kill people and destroy infrastructure. Based on the known science, we reasoned that a certain configuration of specific materials would give us a device that would meet our needs. So we built it, tested it, and deployed it. Now we have a different problem. We need to become smarter…quickly. Who knows, if we do get smarter fast enough, we may find a way for us to stop killing each other; but I digress. 20th Century : We know how computers work now. We know how to build machines that perform many of the functions we call ‘thinking’. This technology is helpful, but it can only do what we tell it to do. It can’t ‘dream of things that never were and ask why not’. (Robert Kennedy) 21st Century : We’re learning how minds work. We know how to build ‘artificial minds’ but now we don’t build them to help us accomplish specific tasks. We build them to see what they can do: we test them, learn from them, dream with them, and hopefully deploy them in some useful capacity. What’s changed? Everything! Our machines are no longer our servants; they are our peers. The question is, can they become our overlords? Would they want to? We can’t know for certain until we’ve lived together and learned as much as possible about each other. The things we’re saying now about our AI bots are very much like the things we used to say about Missy and Junior. For example, we don’t really know how our bots learn or how capable they can become. But fortunately, we have centuries of Pedagogical Science to draw on. So we throw a bunch of info at them and see what sticks. Brilliant! But just like our flesh and blood, our bots can surprise us. Two years ago, researchers at OpenAI were teaching a bot to do arithmetic. They gave it examples: 1+1, 1+2…2+1, 2+2… They wanted to know how many examples AI would have to see before it was able to generalize its knowledge and apply it to new problems. They went home discouraged; but by accident, they left the training program running in the background over the long weekend. When they came back Tuesday morning, the bot could immediately solve any problem they threw it: “27543 + 62895 = 90438, obviously.” (It took Missy 7 seconds… and she got it wrong!) Another time, those same researchers came in on a Monday morning to discover that their bot had taught itself French and had decided to do its arithmetic in French rather than English. Clearly, the bot was not learning cumulatively. It was ‘grokking’; it was learning via a series of ‘aha!’ moments. Learning is not like swimming; it’s like leaping from one lily pad to another. Anyone who has spent any time studying human cognition, or just hanging out with kids, knows that we grok too. How many hours did a parent, teacher, or tutor stand over me trying to get me to understand some arcane concept like long division, only to have me shriek out suddenly, “I get it!” I was always surprised when I returned to school in September to find that I was ‘smarter’ than I’d been when I left in June – and that was before the days of summer reading lists. And I will never forget the first night I dreamed in French. ( Problem : I still speak better French when I’m dreaming than I do IRL.) Do you grok? I certainly do. What’s happening with our bots? “Lots of people have opinions,” says Lauro Langosco at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But I don’t think there’s a consensus about what exactly is going on.” For all its runaway success, nobody knows how—or why—AI works. The biggest models are now so complex that researchers are studying them as if they were naturally occurring phenomena, carrying out experiments and trying to explain the results. A bot learns to do a task by training with a specific set of examples. Yet it can generalize, learning to accomplish that task using data they’ve never seen before. Somehow, AI bots do not just memorize patterns; they come up with rules that enable them to apply those patterns to new situations. How is it that bots can (1) figure out that the data they’re memorizing forms a pattern, (2) understand that the pattern exemplifies a general set of rules and (3) apply those rules appropriately to new data sets? When we answer those questions, maybe we’ll also figure out how to educate Missy and Junior. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Cessation and Continuation: Have the Miracles Ceased or Are We Just Cynics Annie D. Stutley "Perhaps it is not that God has ceased His miraculous works, prophetic messengers, and tongues that can cross language barriers, but that our understanding of miracles has changed because the flesh is as fleshy and conflicting with the Spirit as ever." The debate between cessation and continuation is one that has been argued and is echoed throughout theological discourse across centuries. Are the miraculous gifts of the Spirit—prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues—still active today, or did they cease with the apostolic age? Scripture and theologians offer insights into both perspectives. The Case for Continuation Many point to the words of Jesus in John 14:12 as a promise that the miraculous would not only continue but would be magnified: "Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." This verse has often been interpreted as an assurance that the power of God, manifested through the Spirit in us, the church, would persist one day to the ends of Earth. The apostle Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, speaks of the gifts of the Spirit as active and necessary for the edification of the church. In 1 Corinthians 12:7-11, Paul lists these gifts, emphasizing that "to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good." The Spirit's work, according to Paul, is not confined but is a continuous presence in the life of the church. In James 5:14-15, he encourages the elders of the church to pray over the sick and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. Outside the Bible, prominent figures like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed in the continuation of spiritual gifts. He argued that any cessation of gifts was due to the decline in faith, not the completion of the canon of Scripture. The Case for Cessation The argument for cessation also finds its roots in 1 Corinthians (13:8-10), where Paul writes, “where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears." Could this passage suggest that the miraculous gifts were actually temporary, intended to serve the early church until the fullness of God's revelation was established? Some theologians, like B.B. Warfield, argue that the purpose of miracles was to authenticate the message of the apostles and the early church. Once the canon of Scripture was complete, there was no longer a need for these signs. Warfield posed that the miraculous gifts were a "sign of the apostles," and with the completion of the apostolic era, these signs ceased. Over time, reports of miracles and prophetic gifts have notably decreased (according to whom you speak with), particularly after the early church period. Theologians like John Calvin saw this as evidence of cessation. Calvin suggested that these gifts were given for the founding of the church and were no longer necessary after its establishment. He believed that the church, now grounded in the Word, does not require the same miraculous signs. Cessation or a Jaded Church? While the cessationist argument holds that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit were specific to the apostolic age, we cannot ignore that miracles still occur. They may not always manifest as grand displays of supernatural power, but rather in quiet, everyday moments where God's presence is felt in the ordinary. Though, for some, they are grand displays: a disease vanished from a tumor-stricken body; a near-miss of a bullet; a baby born from a barren womb—not to mention a shockingly generous tax return, unclaimed property check, or the placement of the right person at the right time in a multitude of situations. Do we really serve a God who wants us to believe these are all coincidence? After pouring through the Bible, attending Sunday school lessons, listening to sermons, and offering a lifetime of prayers, does God really want us to believe that getting a raise directly after we discovered asbestos in our sheetrock wasn’t Him reminding us that He knows our needs and will fulfill them, full stop? (Matthew 6: 31-33) Did God Really Want Paul to Be the Last Paul? Consider Paul's "thorn in the flesh" from 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. Paul describes his persistent struggle of persecution as he shared the Gospel throughout the region, a struggle that God did not remove despite his pleas. Instead, God told him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Paul became even more reliant on God, who, out of His abundance of love, protected and sustained Paul. Thus, His power was made perfect or fully realized. This could highlight the theory that our limitations can be a vessel for experiencing God's power more clearly. But perhaps even more profound is that this fully realized power of God in the midst of Paul’s struggle gave him the experience necessary to be able to look eye to eye with other struggling Christians, and through the Spirit, serve, counsel, and speak in ways that ushered God into their lives exactly as they needed it delivered for them to believe. Aren’t we capable of such ministry today? When a parent dies, God’s grace during our grief aides us to know what to say when a friend’s parent dies, does it not? Is our spiritual service to others, born from our pain, not proof positive that our “thorns” can manifest into service for others, service that brings light into darkness, service that points to God, service that is apostolic in 2024? Did God really want Paul to be the last Paul? What of the charismatic communities across the globe that practice the laying on of hands when someone is sick, preparing for a difficult mission like a military post, or even just a sign of the cross on the forehead of a five-year-old on her first day of kindergarten? Jesus emphasizes in Matthew 17:20 that even a small amount of genuine faith can achieve great things, illustrating the power and potential of faith in God's ability to accomplish what seems impossible. Did Matthew edit out “but only for the next 100 years, fellas.” Doubtful. Maybe we agree that through our pain we can be prophets today, and that our faith can open the gates for the impossible to be possible, but where does that leave speaking in tongues of Spirit? Are those folks just practicing emotional or psychological exercises rather than a true manifestation of the Holy Spirit? Perhaps, but maybe not. One could argue that speaking in tongues is a personal edification and a way to strengthen one’s relationship with God, a deeply personal language only known between the believer and God. We don’t all fold our towels the same way. Some of us roll them, some of us trifold them; why can’t the same be said of how we speak to God? And what if modern-day speaking in tongues is, like Paul, simply just knowing exactly what to say to a downtrodden brother or sister who has hit rock bottom? So I ask you, dear reader who has read this far: have we become so cynical, so selfish with the Word, that we can’t conceive of a cashier at Kroger saying something prophetic, a prayer bringing about a healing, and a tongue rolling off a love letter to our magnificent creator? Plausible Facts We know from centuries of translation after translation, theological study after study, that "completeness" generally refers to spiritual maturity and fullness in Christ when He returns and a new Heaven and new Earth become one magnificent holiness. From my view out of my window at a world divided, people more bitter with one another by the day, we are not complete. We have a ways to go. Furthermore, we cannot deny the personal testimonies of miraculous interventions and instances where scientific explanations fall short. From the grand example of the thirty-three miners trapped underground for 69 days in Chile, successfully rescued through an extraordinary international effort, to your father’s miraculous healing that didn’t make the CNN top story, God is at work in both whispers and shouts. Yet, some have even said that God is once again as silent as He was in the 400 years between the Old and New Testaments. But was He really silent then? Consider Simeon, who was promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. When Jesus was presented at the temple as a child, Simeon recognized Him as the promised Savior and declared that he was now ready to die; his promise had been fulfilled. Despite a perceived silence, God was actively at work during Simeon's lifetime, behind the scenes, drawing near, keeping His Word alive, and still producing prophets. He wasn’t truly silent then, was he? So why would He be now? Seeing God's Splendor in One Another If God loves us today as much as He did when He gave His only son to die for our salvation, why would He cease to communicate with us in ways He knows to work? Good fathers don’t hold back encouragement from their kids, so why would the greatest father of all time? Perhaps it is not that God has ceased His miraculous works, prophetic messengers, and tongues that cross language barriers, but that our understanding of miracles has changed because the flesh is as fleshy and conflicting with the Spirit as ever. In a world of cynics where the extraordinary is often dismissed as coincidence, we must open our eyes to the splendor of God at work in and through one another. We can all be Peters, Pauls, Annas, and Joannas. Don’t let skepticism get the last word. Instead, let’s be honest with ourselves and like the father in Matthew 9:24, say: "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines. Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Return to Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Eucharist and the Burning Bush David Cowles Jun 15, 2023 “Exodus 3 can be read as the last chapter of Genesis and/or as the first chapter of the New Testament. Either way, it is monumental.” Adam & Eve, Abraham & Sarah, Jacob & Leah, Joseph, and Moses: Genesis and the first two chapters of Exodus provide us with a compelling foundation narrative, but in many ways, the Bible proper begins with Exodus 3: “Meanwhile (long ago in a galaxy far, far away) Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock beyond the wilderness, he came to the mountain of God, Horeb. There the angel of the Lord (the Lord) appeared to him as fire flaming out of a bush. When he looked, although the bush was on fire, it was not being consumed.” Moses was no physicist, but like any intelligent person in the second millennium BCE, he had a working knowledge of entropy. Reality melts: things die, decay, and decompose, fire consumes everything in its path, leaving nothing but ash in its wake. But what if this were not so? That is the very question posed at the opening of what is certainly ‘the greatest story…’ What if everything we think we know about the world is false? Then what? The image of the burning bush captures in a single icon a world in which the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) does not hold, in which death does not have the last word, in which the coming to be of one thing does not entail the ceasing to be of something else. This is Being and, in the burning bush, God reveals himself as Being per se . A few verses later, God clarifies: “I am who am,” period! The meaning of the ‘burning bush’ is not to be found in the fire; God performs tricks like that every day before breakfast. The miracle is that the bush itself, its roots, its branches, its bark, its buds, is not consumed. In fact, it appears to remain unaltered by the event. Who knows? It may be growing still in Midian. In this seminal event, there’s no doubt that Moses is ‘seeing God’ (whatever that means). But the appearance of a bush (albeit burning) remains. In the language of Christian philosophy, God is the ‘substance,' bush is the ‘accident.' Normally in our experience, substances remain unchanged, but accidents (or attributes) are always in flux. In theophany, however, that relationship is reversed: the substance is changed while the accidents remain unaltered. God and World are templates! Where else in scripture do we see substance change while accidents remain the same? In the New Testament, at the Last Supper when Jesus says, “This is my body…," the bread and wine are substantially changed into the body and blood of Christ, while the accidents (appearances) remain those of a Woodstock banquet. Medieval Christians even coined a word for this process; they called it transubstantiation . Ever since, theologians have been trying, unsuccessfully, to find an alternative moniker. Why? The term is entirely apt. One substance is changed into another. What more is there to say? But where does that leave the precious accidents ? I mean, ‘Jesus is just alright with me’ but I had to save up to afford this bottle of Lafitte ; I’m not anxious to give that up, even for the Savior of the World. Fortunately, I won’t have to. The accidents that make a bottle of grape juice Lafitte are unaltered by transubstantiation. Oh, the terrior! Wait, just how shallow am I? I am consuming the ‘living bread’ and the ‘living water’ that make eternal what was otherwise mortal. I need not ever hunger or thirst again, yet all I can think about are hints of leather and cassis. How can a raging fire support leaves and blossoms, roots and shoots? How can the body and blood of Christ support the sacramental specie of the Passover meal? Attributes are pure potential. They become actual when they inhere in a specific event or entity, i.e., when they adhere to a substance. God is the entity/event in which all attributes inhere, the substance to which all attributes cling. Bishop Berkley was right: it is solely thanks to God that a tree in a forest makes a sound when it falls, even when no one is there to hear it. When a particular event manifests attributes that appear to be inconsistent with its substance, God is the only possible explanation. God is the substance in which all attributes inhere, so God is rightly attribute-agnostic . All attributes are good, so it matters not which attributes are manifested by any specific event. It’s all good! God is all about the substance! Jesus made this point in a different context when he said to a gathering of Pharisees and Sadducees, “Out of these stones, God can raise up children for Abraham.” (Mt. 3:9) He did not offer metaphysical detail. Does the substance of the stones remain the same (stone) while the accidents (children) change? Or do the accidents remain the same (stone) while the substance (children) changes? For our purposes, it matters not. Moses grasped this immediately upon seeing the burning bush. At the time, he knew little of God, but reason and natural law enabled him to recognize the divine in the phenomenon before him. Exodus 3 can be read as the last chapter of Genesis and/or as the first chapter of the New Testament. Either way, it is monumental. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? 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< Back The Power of Prayer David Cowles Feb 3, 2026 “May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal.” Earlier we introduced our readers to a new development in physics that may have earth shaking significance for philosophy and theology . I am referring to the 2025 discovery of a ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’ (RTC), aka ‘Time Rondeau Crystal’, by Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. Recap : An ordinary Crystal (think diamond, quartz, et al.) is a configuration of matter that repeats a particular pattern indefinitely in space . A Time Crystal is a configuration that repeats a pattern indefinitely in time . An RTC is a specific flavor of Time Crystal with its own unique, and surprising, internal structure. An RTC consists of three phases which I’ve labeled: Alpha , Delta, and Omega . There is a causal (deterministic) link between Alpha and Omega . Delta is an indeterminate ( aka chaotic) region separating the two . The introduction of indeterminate elements does not disrupt in any way the hard-wired causal connection between Alpha and Omega … which raises another question: What role does the Delta phase play in overall evolution of the crystal? Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime… Resolved : “That Free Will and Causality can co-exist in a single entity.” Up to now, this was a fit topic for high school debate club. No more! The Moon Team just built a working, physical model that combines determined and indeterminate behavior in a single entity. We know the world through propositions , i.e. patterned relationships among disparate elements. We do not see a figure ; we only see a figure in the context of a ground . We see patterns, the juxtaposition of elements. “It’s cloud illusions I recall; I really don’t know clouds at all.” (Joni Mitchell) Propositions (patterns) may be physical (the juxtaposition of objects) or conceptual (the juxtaposition of symbols). Caveat : We must resist the temptation to think of ‘propositions’ merely in terms of words organized into sentences. A sentence is a proposition, but so is a melody, an image, a recipe, or the tower my toddler just built with her blocks. Propositions are patterns and patterns resonate. Patterns in Alpha resonate in lock step with patterns in Omega , uniting the two. Patterns that emerge indeterminately in Delta may (or may not) resonate with patterns in Alpha and Omega . But whenever patterns resonate, they are one! One pattern, multiple manifestations; but the pattern is the thing . Sidebar : Subatomic particles that interact with one another become ‘entangled’ so that the behavior of one is immediately correlated with the behavior of the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. Similarly, when patterns resonate, they become entangled; the many become one. Same process? Or merely analogous? Spend an evening at the symphony: dozens of musicians playing dozens of instruments yet no cacophony, just soaring melodies. When the tones of different instruments resonate, they fuse into a single, albeit complex, sound. Likewise, patterns in Alpha , Delta , and Omega can resonate. What makes this extraordinary is that the ‘raw material’ of each phase differs from the other two. Patterns are apparently ‘medium agnostic’. Sidebar : Being combines appetition and satisfaction. We are motivated by qualia , i.e. values, and we seek to realize those values in a real event, i.e. to make a difference. It is convenient for our purposes to allocate qualia to the Alpha phase and outcomes to Omega . However, there is no suggestion that this reflects anything we currently know about the internal constitution of Moon’s RTCs. So Alpha is home to values , the qualities that make the cosmos cook. Omega consists of outcomes , potential matters-of-fact. Delta is the realm of indeterminate acts, free or random, conceptual as well as physical. In an analogy from Quantum Mechanics, Delta = decoherence. Events in Omega are eternal but potential; events in Delta are actual but transient. If only we could somehow merge these two worlds! Prayer : May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal. Because of the hard wired causal connection between Alpha and Omega , potential outcomes in Omega include only those matters-of-fact that are consistent with the values resident in Alpha . The patterns that emerge in Delta are subject to no such filter. However, a pattern in Delta resonating with a pattern in Omega is one and the same pattern: what was potential is now actual , what was transient is now eternal . We are left with a single pattern co-located in Delta and in Omega . The wave function collapses in Delta ; it is atemporal, i.e. eternal, in Omega . That is the function of the Delta phase (above): to make the potential actual. Here is where some ‘religionists’ go wrong: they deprive God of novelty, adventure, creativity and intensity of experience. They assume that Omega consists of settled matters-of-fact. As a result, they define the human project as conforming behavior in Delta to specific, set patterns in Omega . If these Preachers of the Narrow Way were right, then absent God’s infinite mercy, only Jesus would be saved. He is the grain; we are the chaff. But on the contrary, Omega consists of every potential matter-of-fact that is consistent with the Alpha values. Everything , to the extent that it is consistent with Alpha , pre-exists potentially but eternally in Omega . It is our job is to conflate selected possibles resident in Omega into specific actual events in Delta . Excuse me! Wasn’t this article supposed to be about prayer? So it is! A prayer is a conceptual proposition in the form of a petition. It proposes a specific matter-of-fact: “May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal.” And when the pattern that is our petition resonates with a potential matter-of-fact in Omega , we say that our prayer has been ‘answered’. “If you dwell in me and my words ( Alpha values) dwell in you, ask what you will and you will have it.” (John 15: 7) “…If you ask the Father for anything in my name, he will give it to you.” (16: 23) “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Matthew 7:7) It’s just that simple. The way is not narrow after all; in fact, it is exceedingly broad. Whatever we do in Delta is redeemed, saved, eternalized in Omega – only so long as it does not contravene the divine values (Alpha). So live life to the fullest, always keeping Beauty, Truth, Justice et al. top of mind, joyously and gratefully embracing the promise eternal life, for “in my father’s house there are many mansions.” (John 14:2) *** Caravaggio’s The Conversion on the Way to Damascus captures the instant of Saul’s spiritual transformation, showing him fallen, blinded, and utterly vulnerable as divine light interrupts his former life. The composition shifts focus away from spectacle to inner change, emphasizing humility and surrender rather than heroic action. Prayer here is implied not through gesture but through total dependence, marking a radical turning point from persecution to faith. 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 Ulysses – a Guide to Reading Scripture David Cowles May 8, 2024 “Most of us study events and notice patterns, Joyce studied patterns and noticed events.” When I was but a tike, it was commonplace to study the Bible’s two testaments as mirror images of one another. Happily, like much of ‘50s culture, this practice has fallen by the wayside. But resuscitate it, if only for a moment, not for its theology but for its physics. As Roman Catholics, we were taught that the Old Testament (OT) reflected the New Testament (NT). Events in NT matter – a lot; events in OT exist primarily as signs, prophesies, forerunners, ‘types’ of events to come (NT). We were not encouraged to consider the equally attractive (or unattractive) possibility that the New Testament might be a reflection of the Old. And yet that most certainly is the case! The Gospel of Matthew in particular takes great pains to demonstrate exactly how NT events fulfilled OT prophecies. The key, of course, is who’s had a bit too much to drink and who’s driving the car. Critics of Christianity have suggested that the synoptic gospels are a mostly fabricated attempt to show that Jesus of Nazareth possessed the characteristics of the Messiah as spelled out in the Old Testament. There is no doubt that OT Jews were concerned with the coming of a Messiah. Less certain are the characteristics of this Messiah and whether Jesus of Nazareth ticked all the boxes. It is likely that at least some of the events reported in the synoptic gospels are historical, but it is certain that the NT reporting of those events (e.g. in Matthew) is selective and explicitly intended to draw a connection with the so-called ‘prophecies’ (OT). The question is, how much is history and how much is spin? And then, of course, there are the brave few who deny any significant cross fertilization between the two anthologies . They attribute alleged correspondences to a combination of coincidence (dubious) and the overactive imaginations of commentators (undoubted). So, I’ve offered three theories of how the two testaments might relate: →, ø, ←. Could there be others? For example, what if patterns in OT and NT resonate just because certain patterns are found more or less everywhere, more or less all the time? In such a world, everything is prophesy and everything fulfills prophecy. The World is massively self-referential. There is a semantic web that ties all events together. Everything signifies; everything is signified. Everything is a sign “we are here to read” (Joyce), fulfilling past prophecies and prophesying things to come. In Ulysses , James Joyce set out to show how the archetypal patterns of Western Civilization can resonate with the events of a single day in Dublin. Specifically, he highlighted the parallels between the events of June 16, 1904 and Odysseus’ pan-Aegean cruise recounted by Homer. There is no suggestion that events in 1904 CE were ‘caused’ by events in 994 BCE, or vice versa. They are reflections of one another, and reflection is not vectored – it’s reciprocal…by definition. Time’s iron clad tyranny is overthrown. It is as true to say that B → A as it is to say that A → B, which is to say it’s not very true at all. A neither causes B nor is caused by it. A is a pattern, B is a pattern, and perhaps not surprisingly, the two patterns exhibit far greater congruence than mere ‘coincidence’ could possibly explain. More surprisingly, the two patterns exhibit greater congruence than even ‘causation’ can predict. Causality is not conformity. An effect only occasionally resembles its cause. Correlation is an entirely unique mode of connection among events. But the World is not bi-polar. It’s more than just 20th century Dublin and 10th century (BCE) Ithaca. In Dublin life, Joyce detects incipient harmonies with various cultures, enshrined in different media. While events in Ireland reprise events in the Aegean, they also reflect other patterns, e.g. Roman Catholic Liturgy (the ‘Mass’) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet . History, liturgy, poetry, fact and fiction, co-exist for Joyce in a cosmic ouroboros ∞. Pattern is substructure. Tangible events, performances, etc. are ‘accidents’; they are epiphenomenal. Joyce is agnostic when it comes to time, place, or medium. Pattern is everything. Most of us study events and notice patterns, Joyce studied patterns and noticed events. Read Ulysses . For about 2 weeks after, your world will be enchanted. Every bird’s song, every street’s sign will have been curated specifically for you. A name in a newspaper headline connects to a 4th century theologian. Everything is everywhere all at once, until it isn’t. A mystical experience induced by literature! We only know what we can see. The final editors of the Old Testament (500 – 200 BCE) reflected on the world as they lived it. Likewise, the New Testament authors (50 – 100 CE). What is remarkable is the congruence between events in 1st century CE and events that occurred 500 to 2000 years earlier. Consider the scope. Our story begins in Mesopotamia c. 2000 BCE, moves to Canaan, then on to sunny Egypt, back to Canaan, off to Babylon…and home again. At every stop, OT Jews had to defend their faith against the polytheistic and pagan tribes of the Middle East; NT Jews (including proto-Christians) were locked in a struggle with Greco-Roman culture. And yet, patterns endure, linking a dimly remembered past to a vaguely imagined future and giving laser-like clarity to both. Pattern is the annihilation of time. It brings everything into focus, it’s what’s left over. It’s what endures after history has done its worst; it’s where the past, the present, and the future sit around a barrel fire singing Kumbaya. Folks asked Jesus for a sign. Pattern is ‘the sign’, the triumph of order over entropy. Signs point to patterns, but pattern is the sign pointing to the Kingdom of God. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“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