< Back Messiah Redux David Cowles “Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries?... It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces.” Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) Issue #5, our Holiday Issue , included a performance of Handel’s most famous oratorio … minus the soloists, the chorus, and the orchestra, of course. Some performance! But the critics loved it. In this, our Holy Days Issue , we dig deeper into the political (vs. the theological) message of this masterpiece. To understand Messiah , it is helpful to view it in historical context. The House of Stuart ruled England, more or less continuously, from 1603 to 1714. The first two kings of this dynasty, James I and Charles I, were ideological royalists. They believed in the divine right of kings . Philosophical nominalists, they believed that God and his royal avatars were free to act however they wished. Le loi c’est moi! George Frideric Handel wrote his Messiah in 1741, and it was first performed in Dublin in 1742 during the Easter season. ( Messiah was intended, not to celebrate Christmas, but Easter.) Easter is resurrection, spring, the celebration of new life. But first, ‘the winter of our discontent’, leading to crucifixion and burial in an unmarked grave. Messiah ‘opens’ sometime between sundown on Good Friday and sunrise on Easter Sunday. Dante’s Divine Comedy does the same. This is the time, according to Roman Catholic theology, when Christ himself ‘descended into hell’ to liberate the souls trapped in Hades. In other words, Messiah begins in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’, but it begins with a whisper of hope : Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. These verses from Isaiah meet all of us, from Jesus’ apostles to today’s ATMers, right where we stand, even if that’s in the pit of despair. For centuries it was believed that revolution took root in and sprung-up out of the depths of human misery. Not so! We learned in the 20 th century that revolution is ignited by ‘a spark of hope’, and it was just such a spark that Handel and his librettist, Jennens, hoped their Messiah might light. The libretto comes almost exclusively from Old and New Testament texts. The selection and arrangement of these texts rest squarely with the composer and his librettist. The oratorio consists of an interwoven series of flashbacks and flash-forwards. As you move through the narrative, notice how an 18th century political message has been woven into historical and spiritual details from the Bible. Building on the message of hope, Messiah proceeds to present its ‘revolutionary program’. It’s not a political platform (like the Communist Manifesto ). It’s not a utopian wish list. It’s a ‘How To’ manual, Jennens’ version of V.I. Lenin’s What is to be Done? (I am tempted to compare it to the famous Anarchists’ Cookbook from the 1960s – but that might be a stretch.) The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway to our God. What is revolution but turning society upside-down like an hourglass a nd inside-out, like a sock? What was peripheral becomes central, and vice versa. The stone rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Thus, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts: Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come. The Lord shakes all nations? This is very different from the expectations of James and Charles. But more importantly, the result will satisfy the ‘desire of all nations’. This is a brand-new test of political legitimacy, and it presages the eruption of democratic movements later in the 18 th century. According to Locke, Rousseau, et al., secular government evolved to secure peace, justice, and prosperity for its people. According to Messiah , those values will only be fully realized once the Kingdom of God replaces the kingdoms of men (sic), but in the meantime they may be reflected to varying degrees in various secular states. The scene is set. Now…”Action!” (P.S. Please don’t shoot anyone.) Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel, God with us. If we didn’t already know the story by heart, this line would be a real ‘cart-tipper’: A virgin conceive? A baby be God? God be with us ? Say unto the cities of Judah: Behold your God! Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the ‘government’ shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Messiah makes it clear that the legitimacy and sovereignty of all government is rooted in Christ. Its sovereignty is just a reflection of his sovereignty. Christ is the foundation of all political authority, including that of the British monarchy.At this juncture, we can imagine the royal party being quite pleased with itself. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be God’s ‘avatar’ on Earth. But grounding temporal authority in Christology can lead to unintended consequences for secular rulers. Remember, we’re less than 50 years from the Bastille and the bloody guillotine. There were shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night… And the angel said unto them, “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, thy King cometh unto thee; he is the righteous Savior, and he shall speak peace to the heathen. Then shall ‘the eyes of the blind be opened’ and ‘the ears of the deaf unstopped’. Then shall ‘the lame leap’ as a hart, and ’the tongue of the dumb shall sing’. These are the traditional marks of divine favor, an indication that God is ‘well pleased’ with his temporal rulers. End Part One, Begin Part Two . What an auspicious beginning! Shepherds were the first to acknowledge Christ’s kingship. Magi notwithstanding, this was to be a revolution led by the proletariat (shepherds and fishermen). Jesus welcomed support from elements of the elite ( fellow travelers like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea) , but he never lost sight of his roots: he was the red-headed stepchild of a displaced carpenter, born in an ox’s stable and swaddled in its manger . And from there, it was all downhill. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off his hair: he hid not His face from shame and spitting. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way. Handel and Jennens are no anarchists. In a vague reference to the Book of Judges (21: 25), our ‘Sacco & Vanzetti’ make it clear that they are not prepared to entrust social order to the conscience of individuals. Authority is necessary, but that authority must reflect the sovereignty of Christ. The exercise of secular authority must reflect Jesus’ values (‘WWJD’). The final triumph of the Kingdom of God will not happen suddenly or spontaneously. We have a role to play as well, and that roll requires full-on effort on our part: The Lord gave the word; great was the company of the preachers. How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things . Their sound is gone out into all lands, and their words unto the ends of the world. We are the preachers! How beautiful are our feet! We are charged to bring ‘glad tidings of good things…unto the ends of the world’. Now, appropriately, Handel and Jennens double back. We have our marching orders. Now we need to refocus on the task at hand: Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise-up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed. Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us… Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. The oratorio has built to this moment: an overt call to revolution! Break bonds asunder, cast away yokes, break them with a rod of iron, dash them like so many shards of pottery. Not the language of constitutional debate.The message is clear: it is the kings of the earth who are responsible for these bonds and yokes, and it is we, the people, working with the Lord, who must break them. Thought experiment : it’s March 1752, and you have a small printing press in your basement. You’ve printed these very same words (above) onto flyers which you are now distributing outside London’s Covent Garden Theater, scene of the Messiah’s London debut. Would you escape imprisonment…or worse? But lifted from scripture and embedded in the middle of a musical masterwork, the political import of the Messiah’s message can escape notice. Is this an early version of subliminal messaging? Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries? All of which brings us to the famous Hallelujah Chorus , perhaps the best-known chorus in all of Western music, save only the Ode to Joy : Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. ‘The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ’; and he shall reign for ever and ever. ‘King of kings’, and Lord of lords. Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent ‘reigneth’. If Handel had been playing in the NFL, he would have been called for a personal foul: “taunting.” It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces. But it quite another thing altogether to celebrate prospectively the obliteration of the secular order. According to Handel and Jennens, the secular state (per Marx) has already withered away ! The essence of Christian social teaching is that that state withered away at the birth of Christ. (Is the Adoration of the Magi symbolic of this event?) Now we just have to wait for history to catch up to theology. End Part Two, Begin Part III, the Celebration. Here we can take off the training wheels. From here on, let Jennens’ libretto speak for itself. No more intrusions from the Peanut Gallery (you’re welcome): Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen! 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

< Back Is 65 the New 45? David Cowles That’s conventional wisdom…and in this rare case, conventional wisdom is not wrong…but neither is it perfectly right. At 65, we do feel about the same as we did at 45…maybe a step slower on the basketball court, but otherwise pretty much the same. So, does that mean that 75 is now the new 55? No way! I’m not sure 75 is even the new 65. 75 might just be the new 75! So, what’s going on here? Gertrude Stein wrote, “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” Ms. Stein points out that subjective time is very different from objective time. Objectively, we age one year, every year. Subjectively, we don’t! Suppose I’m 65, objectively. According to conventional wisdom my subjective age is 45. But why 45? Why not 35 or 25 or even 15 or 5 for that matter? Ms. Stein anticipated this question…and answered it. At 65 I can be 55 or 45 or 35 or 25…because all of them are really ‘25’ (young men and young women). But 65 can’t be the new 15 or the new 5. Why? Because 15-year-olds are not 15, nor are 5-year-olds 5. Both are ‘25’ too: “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” How would you graph your age? As a straight line running at a 45 degree angle from birth (0,0) to death? That’s time all right, but it is objective time: y = x. However, subjectively, time is mostly a flat line segment, parallel to the x-axis, running from x = 25 to x = 65. From birth to 25 and from 65 on, subjective age follows a curvilinear track, convex before 25, concave after 65. Is it possible to do an equation for that? In the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine , John, Paul, George, and Ringo find themselves in ‘the sea of time’. Objectively, they regress to infancy and then advance to old age, all in the space of just a few minutes. But through it all they remain “young men”, i.e., circa 25. They live in ‘Stein-time’. To explore further the wisdom of the Yellow Submarine , stay tuned for Issue #1 of AT Magazine, scheduled for publication on 6/1/22, and check out the feature article, Science and the Yellow Submarine . Bookmark aletheiatoday.com . Society never tires of telling us to ‘act our age’. But which age? We are our own age only three times in our lives: once at birth (or before), once when the two temporal trajectories (subjective & objective) intersect, and finally at the moment of our death. Otherwise, our subjective age is always different from our objective age. How can I act my age if I don’t know how old I am? I’ve always admired children who could accept being children and old folks who could accept being old. Trouble is, I’ve met very few of either! I can’t remember a time when I thought of myself as a ‘child’. My childhood was an unbroken struggle to escape - escape from parents, escape from school, escape from childhood itself! I can’t remember a time when I did not want to be 25, and did not think of myself as 25, until now. I am 75, like it or not, and I’m starting to think of myself as 75, or close to it. My trajectories are converging…for the last time. Previous Next

< Back Nothing David Cowles Jun 4, 2024 “Nothing is the ‘space’ that allows something to occur. If it weren’t for nothing, there’d be nothing at all!” We are in love with the idea of nothing ; and why not? Something requires explanation: What is it? What’s it made of? Where did it come from…and when? How did it get here…and why? It’s an exhausting piece of work and at the end of day, we can’t be sure we’re any further along than we were when we started. Nothing on the other hand requires nothing, and we love everything that requires nothing. We love weekends, we love vacations, we love snow days…because those are the times when nothing is required of us. Genesis tells us that God created the world ex nihilo – out of nothing. Contemporary physicists agree: the universe sprang into being spontaneously, and it will return to nothing (at ‘Heat Death’ aka ‘Big Freeze’). Theologians might say that the spatiotemporal world must become nothing so that the eternal world can be all-in-all . Others say that the universe is already nothing , the energy of expansion being precisely balanced and therefore canceled by the force of gravity. We imagine nothing as though it were Plato’s Receptacle, the womb of the world. We imagine it as a vast empty space – a night sky without stars. When we think about nothing , we see ourselves standing on our back porch, drawing in a deep breath of pre-industrial air on a chilly, starless night. Nice! Nope! Nothing could be further from the truth. Astronaut-poet Michael Collins has attempted to disabuse us of our space camp fantasies. His description of a vacuum, free even of light itself, is terrifying. Imagine you are encased, alive, in a medium that is both infinitely dense and infinitely permeable. No forlorn gazes, there’s nothing to see; no deep breaths, there’s nothing to breathe; and, of course, no back porch. Tell me now, what’s to love about that? So what? Who cares? Well, we might care. Love of nothing isn’t nothing; it can have real life consequences. For example, if we love nothing , we may at some point wish to be nothing. Suicidal ideation may follow. Also, nothing is a defense-of-convenience against all forms of gnosis or ethos . Nothing is an acceptable response to any positive proposition. It offers a conceptual foundation for Nihilism, Skepticism and even Solipsism. Of course, nothing has its bright side: “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” Yes, nothing has a lot in common with the last day of school: “Free at last, free at last! OMG, we’re free at last?” Free to do what exactly? The euphoria of summer vacation fades quickly. It is soon replaced by the steady chant of a Tibetan monk: “I’m bored…I’m bored.” Still, nothing frees me to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Cool beans! No rules! Now I just need to come up with something I want to do, not to mention a reason why I, or anyone else, would ever want to do it. So nothing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! Yet, we can’t live without it! Nothing is the ‘space’ that allows something to occur. If it weren’t for nothing , there’d be nothing at all! ‘Something’ is a one word oxymoron; something can only exist in the context of nothing. Nothing and something are the ultimate dialectical pair. Nothing is what something isn’t. Literally. Therefore, whatever comes to be comes to be out of nothing . What comes to be comes to be out of what is not. Suppose there was something, just something , no nothing . It is , but it reveals no origin, no destiny, no composition, no trajectory, and no relations. Naked something is a degenerate case of Heisenberg Uncertainty. We’d know everything about its position (where it is) and therefore we’d know nothing about its momentum (where it came from, where it’s going). IRL, we know a bit about the position of things ( something ), things as they are, and a bit about the trajectory of things ( nothing ), things as they are not, but we can never know everything about both. Like quarks in a proton, something and nothing do not exist independently of one another. Something is the negation of nothing ; nothing is the negation of something . You can’t have one without the other. They are dialectic and symbiotic. Christian cosmology anticipated this state of affairs with its Trinitarian theology. According to Christian doctrine, God is process. God is the relationship between the Father (God) and the Son (God); that relationship is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is God. Jean-Paul Sartre talked about entities that are not what they are and are what they are not. It is generally thought that he was talking exclusively about human beings. But in the cosmology outlined in this post, Sartre’s meme would apply equally to everything that is . To be is not to be what you are and to be what you are not! Being is the process of Becoming. Being is inherently restless. In an earlier TWS , we pointed out that every being includes its own negation. But that negation does not annul what is, it preserves it in a subsequent synthesis. Negation is the foundation of faith, not fear, hope, not despair. Thanks to nothing, the Universe is a perpetual process of self-preservation and improvement. When ‘my reach exceeds my grasp’ (Burns), I am reaching into nothing . Nothing creates the space for something to happen. As Being hurtles toward the Kingdom of God, spatiotemporal imperfection must give way to eternal perfection. The progression of Being from ‘spatiotemporal and imperfect’ to ‘perfect and eternal’ requires nothing , i.e. space…for growth and change. As kids in the 1950’s, whenever we were disappointed or disgusted, we would say, “Thanks for nothing!” Now, I repeat that every night in my prayers: “Thanks for nothing, God!” No, really, thanks! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Why I Am Not a Humanist? David Cowles Jul 15, 2025 “Theists are the true empiricists. Atheism…is dogmatism.” “Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.” - The Minimum Statement on Humanism from Humanists International. (Italics mine) So what could possibly be wrong with this…besides everything? Well, maybe not everything . I can agree that ‘human beings have the right and responsibility to…shape their own lives’, I’m on board with the goal of ‘building a more humane society’ and I embrace ‘an ethic based…on natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry…’, but that’s as far as I can go. For example, what does it mean for a ‘life stance’ to be ‘democratic’? To be a citizen of a nation that holds elections periodically? Like Russia? To live in a country that has the word Democratic in its name? Like the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea? The fact is, defining what it means for a society to be ‘democratic’ is a life’s work in itself and would need to include contributions from Pericles, Aquinas, Luther, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, Jefferson, Prudhomme, Kant, Hegel, Bakunin, Marx, Leo XIII, Lenin, and Abbie Hoffman, to name just a few. We throw around the word ‘democratic’ as if we had some shared idea of its meaning. We don’t; and more often than not, the more we talk about democracy, the less we practice it. ‘Meaning’ is an essential component of a worthwhile life but no one can give ‘meaning’ to herself any more than anyone can give their own meaning to the words in a dictionary. The word ‘meaning’ includes the verb ‘to mean’ and nothing can mean itself. The idea that it can has no meaning ! Archibald MacLeish made the dichotomy clear when he wrote, “A poem should not mean but be .” Meaning transcends being and vice versa; they are mutually exclusive. You cannot mean something and be that thing at the same time. B can mean A only if B ≠ A. “Man’s search for meaning” (Viktor Frankl) is precisely why we cannot give meaning to our own lives. ‘Meaning’ must transcend the thing that means . If our lives are to have meaning, that meaning cannot come from our own imaginations. It cannot be purely subjective; it must have an objective component, or it is meaningless . Nietzsche weighed in on this: “…It is absurd to want to hand over his (our) nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality, purpose is lacking… There exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) The ‘God is Dead’ philosopher is clear: without the Transcendent, value and purpose are impossible. I side with Nietzsche on this! So then, “an ethic based on human values” must be a product of circular reasoning…at best. We are engaged precisely in the quest to define those ‘human values’ – that is the end, not the means! To suggest that we adopt an ethic based on values we have not yet identified or defined is nonsensical. On the other hand, I can embrace ‘natural values’. Although we are part of Nature, we are not equivalent to it. We can ‘read nature’ as we would a book; we can identify the values that seem to guide natural processes and, if we choose, we can embrace those values. The ‘spirit of reason and free inquiry’ is part of the human condition and I celebrate that; but I am not willing to wall myself off from ideas that might originate beyond our merely human capabilities . Natural values (above), for example, refer to the world outside us, and I am willing to accept ideas from AI Bots, from ‘little green men’ (if there are any), and from non-human, terrestrial life forms (my cat). More controversially, I am open to the idea that humanity’s highest achievements may not be the mere products of our own nature and nurture. Who can listen to Bach or Beethoven and not believe that something transcendent is working through them? Who can believe that that some guy down the street created the Brandenburg Concertos out of whole cloth? I take special issue, of course, with the final statement. To my ear, it reads like a confession – a confession that this whole elaborate edifice has been constructed merely to rid the world of God. We cannot accept the possibility that homo sapiens might not be ‘Queen of the Hill’. We find the idea of God demeaning. We have come full circle. Once upon a time, being made in the image and likeness of God was humanity’s proudest boast. Now we resent the idea. Listen to the language: “It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality”… even if they turn out to be true? The presence or absence of God should be something we arrive at as a consequence of ‘reason and free inquiry’ but here the absence of God is elevated to the status of an axiom. It has been said that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (Samuel Johnson – 1775) During the early days of the Vietnam War, such ‘patriotism’ was embodied in the slogan: “My country right or wrong!” Has ‘atheism’ become the new ‘patriotism’? To my ear, the Humanist Statement (above) proclaims, “My atheism, right or wrong! I’d rather be wrong than worship.” One is reminded of Milton ( Paradise Lost ): “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Now don’t get me wrong. I’m only on board with the God Hypothesis as long as it best fits the data. If you have a better idea, bring it! (But spoiler alert: that ‘better idea’ is not Humanism .) For me, ‘God exists’ is not a premise but a conclusion. Therefore, theists are the true empiricists. Atheism, at least as stated above, is dogmatism. Finally, the Humanist Statement (above) reads a lot like a schematic for a new configuration of deck chairs on the Titanic . The universe came to be ‘accidentally’ and it will cease to be… ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. (Eliot) Likewise, you came to be through the accidental union of two sex cells, and you will someday come to decorate someone’s mantle…if you’re lucky. Time is the great eraser! There are no more footprints in the sand once the tide has come in…and out again. It is as if the world had never been. So that’s why I’m not a humanist! I cannot find value or purpose under such conditions. But, humanists of the world, unite with us; put side your hubris , your prejudices, your dogmas and join in the universal search for truth. “Let’s mix, Max!” ( Yellow Submarine ) Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1820–1823), a mixed media mural transferred to canvas and now housed in the Museo del Prado, serves as a stark visual metaphor for the self-consuming nature of humanism: just as Saturn, in a desperate attempt to maintain control, devours his own offspring, so too does humanism, in rejecting transcendence, undermine the very foundations it claims to uphold, resulting in a worldview that ultimately consumes itself. 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 Consciousness & Panpsychism David Cowles Dec 14, 2023 “Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness.” ‘Consciousness’ has been called the ‘hard problem’. It may be the last remaining piece of the ontological puzzle. But it’s a doozie. Over the past 150 years, we’ve ‘discovered’ evolution, relativity, quanta, the big bang, DNA, the human genome, etc. But "consciousness"—how we know these things and how we know that we know them – not so much. Traditionally, the ‘problem of consciousness’ has been focused exclusively on Homo sapiens , but recently, that’s had to change. Strong evidence has emerged suggesting that members of many other species could pass a modified Turing Test . And don’t get me started on AI! Bonobos and chimpanzees are ‘no-brainers’, pardon the pun. Marine animals as well (e.g., dolphins). Corvids (crows and ravens), Parrots, and Cephalopoda (e.g., octopus), very likely. Recent exploration has detected intriguing signs of self-awareness in multiple species of fish, insects, and plants. Now, Nature (11/1/23) has published a study suggesting that the presumably ‘headless starfish’ is actually ‘bodiless’; Max Headroom! Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness. Recent efforts to reduce consciousness to a ‘neural network’ have failed, both scientifically and philosophically, and recent discoveries make that hypothesis less and less defensible. Today, mechanism is on the run! The imputed connection between physiology and consciousness is growing ever thinner. Vastly different versions of ‘sensory processing apparatus’ seem to support very similar mental phenomena. For centuries, science has focused on removing all traces of ‘spirituality’ from biology. No more ‘soul’, no more élan vital . Consciousness was to be mechanism’s final frontier . The locker room was decorated, caterers on site, champagne on ice, but, as it turns out, there’s nothing to celebrate. Just as people were confidently predicting the final coup, things began ‘slip sliding away’. It’s becoming clear that ‘something’s happening here, and we don’t know what it is’ (Bob Dylan). In a recent issue of Thoughts While Shaving , we outlined our own theory of reflection, self-awareness, and consciousness . We hypothesized that such phenomena are a hard-wired feature of being itself. We imagine we live in an ‘orientable’ world with 360° symmetry: up is up and down is down and never the twain shall meet. Likewise, we imagine an insuperable barrier separating any two sides: obverse from reverse. But what if these things are true only locally? Or approximately? What if the orientable world we know and usually love is a degenerate case, an abstraction, or an approximation of a wider, non-orientable reality? Take this earth, for example: from here to my horizon (locally), it looks flat, but we know it isn’t (globally). We proposed the possibility that our orientable world is embedded in a more general, non-orientable topology with 720° symmetry, where ‘up is up’ only once, at t = 0, and the obverse/reverse distinction does not exist at all. In such a world, after a 360° rotation, ‘up is down’. ‘Up is up’ again only after we complete a full 720° circuit, i.e., after our system returns to its initial state. Superficially, this model looks appealing, but it has a huge unanticipated consequence: according to this model, all living organisms must be self-aware – not just primates and bees, but sponges and trees…even unicellular organisms like bacteria. Objection #1 : “How can we ever know what it’s like, subjectively, to be a unicellular organism?” Answer #1 : We can’t! But neither can I know what it’s like to be you . I presume you’d like to be considered ‘conscious,' but if I grant you that courtesy, I have no justification for denying the same courtesy to my ‘brother paramecium’. Answer #2 : We can! We can just ask: “What’s it like in there? What’s it like to be you?” But tragically, we don’t yet know how to question the unicellular organisms that make up our bodies…and much of our environment. Fortunately, though, we do know how to question human beings…like you, for example. So why not just ask yourself? After all, you were once a unicellular organism! Have you forgotten that you were a single cell, the convergence of a maternal and a paternal sex cell? Assuming a normal lifespan, more than 100 trillion cells, each an approximate copy of your single-celled self, will participate in ‘your body’. So just ask any one of ‘you’! Objection #2 : The single cell that was me at conception and has now gone viral is not me. ‘I’ am an emergent phenomenon. So you can’t ask my cells because they’re not conscious, and you can’t ask me because I am something other than those cells, whether taken individually or collectively. Answer : Attractive answer! Wouldn’t most of us be only too eager to sign on to this resolution? In fact, it’s hard to see how you could not agree with it, and yet… This solution may generate more problems than it solves. If I emerge from my cells, not as some sort of social superstructure but as an entirely novel ontological entity…well, bully for me, but how is that possible? And then, who am ‘I’? At what point in time did I become ‘I’? Did I become ‘I’ gradually (if so, how so) or was there a ‘quantum leap’ (and if so, how…and when)? We are on the horns of a dilemma. We face three entirely unacceptable options: (1) Nihilism (there is no such thing as consciousness – it’s a ‘conceptual illusion’); (2) Mechanism (consciousness can be reduced to chemistry); (3) Mysticism (the phenomenon of consciousness is the discontinuous in-breaking of something ‘transcendental’). I see only one way out of this dilemma: (4) Panpsychism (self-reflection is a fundamental feature of Being – it extends to everything that is). So you suit yourself, but as for me and my tribe, we choose #4 . 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.

Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson < Back Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson Contributor Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Why Land is Different

< Back B.J. Yudelson Contributor B.J. is an explorer who loves both the comfort of the familiar and the challenge of the unknown. As a child growing up in Atlanta, she knew the size and position of every tree in the wooded ravine behind her house as well as the best rocks for crossing the creek at the bottom. When she passes a street repeatedly, she may suddenly turn onto it just to find out where it goes, making the unknown familiar. World religions, her own beloved Judaism, a foreign country, or a local park all bring out the explorer in her. She writes to make sense of the inner landscapes of family and friends, the ins and outs of her community (currently, Rochester, New York), and the beauty of loon-filled lakes. Her writings—published in a variety of literary journals, websites, and anthologies —explore family, Judaism, nature, and overcoming obstacles. She invites you to join her on her adventures. Matzah of Hope--Passover Part One

< Back The End of History “Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with a celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate!” David Cowles In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, in a famous essay of the same title, proclaimed the ‘end of history’. He wrote in the halcyon days immediately following the Cold War. But he was only the latest in a long line of self-proclaimed social prophets, including Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and yes, Jesus, to proclaim the end of our familiar social dynamics. History! I’d rather study it than live through its perpetual cycle of war, conquest, subjugation, exile, slavery, genocide (‘ethnic cleansing’), and only finally…Revolution – you can keep it, thanks! Of course, the ‘end of history’ implies arrival at a relatively stable state-of-affairs in contrast to the vicissitudes of the historical process. For Jesus the end of history was the coming of the Kingdom of God, inaugurated in the first century CE but only ‘fully realized’ at the Eschaton. For Judeo-Christians, history ends where it began, in Paradise ( aka The Garden of Eden). Ironically, the social contradictions inherent in Paradise, as it was created, gave rise to the historical process in the first place: malevolent snakes, forbidden fruit, secret knowledge, and a naïve citizenry – what could possibly go wrong? Eden is recreated at the Eschaton…with important changes: Satan has been vanquished, bans have been lifted, knowledge is shared, and we see God face to face. The contradictions have been resolved, once and for all. Like it or not, Reconstructed Eden is the dominant model of Paradise in Western thinking. For Marx, history ends with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, followed by the withering away of the state and the advent of pure communism. Marx looked forward to a permanent resolution of the contradictions inherent in capitalism. In other words, What Jesus Said . For Hegel, history ended in 1806 (Napoleon defeated) with the ‘proper state’ now governed by the principles that inspired the American and French revolutions. He must have drunk Rousseau’s Kool-Aid! Did he really imagine that Liberalism was the moral equivalent of the State of Nature? Apparently! Like Jesus before him and Marx to follow, Hegel saw lumpy history dissolving into smooth harmonies. Fukuyama seems to agree with Hegel on this…except for the date. He prefers 1989 to 1806. He recognized that nationalism, fascism, and communism still had to be thoroughly vanquished before the world could do its ‘happy dance’ in the end zone. For Fukuyama, tearing down the Berlin Wall is what defeating Napoleon was for Hegel. Unfortunately, Hegel and Fukuyama were willing to settle for a lot ‘less’ than Jesus…or even Marx. For Fukuyama, society’s ‘end state’ is Democratic Capitalism, not an ‘end’ in the sense of utopia but in the sense of stability. For better or worse, the Liberal state sufficiently, if not perfectly, resolves the socio-economic contradictions that inspired periodic upheavals over the prior 10,000 years. As presented (above), this is an attractive theory, but Fukuyama goes overboard: “But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West… the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx…” Really, this is the ‘classless society envisioned by Marx’? For Fukuyama, “the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist…” On the contrary, he blames society’s ongoing socio-economic conflicts on “the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up…” “But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” “…The People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia's future, became an anachronism.” Especially in China itself! Fukuyama might be excused for his bit of excessive euphoria. It was 1992 after all! Politicians were seriously talking about a peace dividend , i.e. the redirection of funds from defense to infrastructure and social welfare. How has that worked out? The notion that historical conflict ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall is contradicted by the Nightly News . Conflict in the world has not subsided…not the least bit. If anything, the lack of super power balance has created additional breathing room allowing regional conflicts to intensify and expand. I can’t resist the superfluous urge to do some scrap-booking here: The new 30 years’ war over the Fertile Crescent, the rise of militant Islam (Jihad), 9/11 (Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, ISIS), the chaos that was Palestine, the proliferation of ‘failed states’ (e.g. Somalia, Haiti), often replaced by narco-terrorist gangs, the reemergence of an Axis of Evil , the tragedy of Ukraine, the collapse of the U.S. border, and the supply driven Fentanyl epidemic. There, done! What happened to the Golden Age? Where’s the peace dividend ? And yet, one could also ask, “Where is the revolutionary spirit?” These days, however much someone might want change, they are unlikely to risk their lives, and the welfare of their families, to effect that change. How different this is from 1776, 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968 or 1989! How come? Has socio-economic conflict, if not yet resolved, at least been defanged? Has Liberalism led to a society where there is just enough popular input into social policy and just enough economic opportunity to keep folks coloring between the lines? In fact, no modicum of actual popular input or real economic opportunity is required – the mere perception will do fine – and today we are masters of our collective perceptions. ( Propaganda , Jacques Ellul) Given the level of injustice in the World today, it is a bit surprising that ‘revolution’ is not on the tip of every tongue. Well, not all that surprising. A successful revolution requires 4 elements: A sober analysis (critique) of the status quo. A concrete notion (image) of how things could be different. A practical program ( What is to be Done? – V.I. Lenin) to get us from A to Z. A ‘revolutionary’ ideology that explains the injustice of the present, grounds our vision for the future, and justifies the less palatable aspects of the program . I would argue that none of these conditions is present today, at least not in the First World. Our analysis is cock-eyed. In the place of an in-depth reflection on society and its contradictions, we have bumper stickers: “Down with Halliburton, Crush the 1%, Bush lied/people died, MAGA.” Our concrete image of ‘better days’ is just “More, please” ( Oliver Twist ): more democracy, more prosperity, an even bigger Big Mac! So were Hegal and Fukuyama right after all? If so, they were right for reasons they did not fully understand. For the most part we live in a world where things move. Everything flows! (Heraclitus) Unimpeded, things tend to move in straight lines. (Newton) We frantically build structures designed to limit that flow and protect the status quo: The Great Wall of China for example, or Constitutional Government . Now imagine a subatomic particle. Normally, it speeds through space at close to the speed of light; but we can put an end to its cosmic wandering; we can trap that particle in an EM lattice, effectively converting its linear motion to oscillation within a narrow range. Once ‘captured’, our particle cannot leave the lattice unless energy is injected from outside. It does not have enough native energy to overcome the restraints. Unliberated, it will persist in its current state ‘until the 12th of never’. It is trapped in a so-called energy sink . Fukuyama’s eschatology could be understood in these terms. While most people are not satisfied with today’s status quo, we may well be satisficed . Imperfect as things are, it is not worth the energy (or risk) required to change them in any significant way. The devil we know… Once upon a time we were addicted to progress: our children will always be better and do better than us. No more. Now we are content not to go backwards. We are happy to oscillate within a fixed range. Doubt me? Just look at the electoral history of the United States since 1988. Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate! Might we be left with all of history’s horrors, without the balm of revolutionary hope? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Summer 2024 Previous Next

< Back Turing, Searle, & Penrose David Cowles Feb 10, 2022 According to Alan Turing of ‘Turing Test’ fame (1950), we can have no privileged insight into the state of another entity’s consciousness. Turing taught that we can only evaluate the consciousness of another entity by experiencing the behavior of that entity. If a machine interacts with you in a way that is indistinguishable from the way another human being would interact with you, then you have no logical grounds for regarding the machine’s thinking process as different in any meaningful way from your own. Who knows, as we subject a machine to the Turing Test, that same machine may very well be conducting a Turing Test on us! According to Alan Turing of ‘Turing Test’ fame (1950), we can have no privileged insight into the state of another entity’s consciousness. Turing taught that we can only evaluate the consciousness of another entity by experiencing the behavior of that entity. If a machine interacts with you in a way that is indistinguishable from the way another human being would interact with you, then you have no logical grounds for regarding the machine’s thinking process as different in any meaningful way from your own. Who knows, as we subject a machine to the Turing Test, that same machine may very well be conducting a Turing Test on us! John Searle (1980) granted that a machine could conceivably pass a Turing Test, but he argued that that would not prove that the machine had a ‘mind’ in the same sense that we have minds. Searle believed that ‘mind’ requires a recursive loop of the sort that we call ‘intentionality’ or ‘understanding’ – the ability of an entity to reflect on itself as well as on its environment. Searle argued that no machine could be self-aware in this sense. Roger Penrose (1989) went even further. Essentially, he questioned whether any machine could ever pass a Turing Test (provided the tester knew the right questions to ask). According to Penrose, the human mind is capable of certain mental feats that cannot be duplicated by any ‘program’. He cites Kurt Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness Theorem’ as a prime example. According to Gödel’s theorem, which is proven, mathematics contains certain self-evidently true statements which can never be proved. 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 Everybody's Autobiography David Cowles Is it possible to write an autobiography of everyone, to somehow incorporate the wildly varying events of different people’s lives into a single story? Absurd, right? But not so fast! Gertrude Stein once wrote, “Anyway, autobiography is easy. Like it or not, autobiography is easy for any one, and so this is to be everybody’s autobiography.” ( Everybody’s Autobiography ) Is it possible to write an autobiography of everyone, to somehow incorporate the wildly varying events of different people’s lives into a single story? Absurd, right? But not so fast! When we talk about ‘wildly varying events’ we implicitly admit that there must be a common substructure upon which these ‘variations’ occur. Ok, if not absurd, then at least impossible. You will grant me that much, right? Sorry, no again! Compared to what Joyce and Pound were attempting, Stein’s project is child’s play. When Stein wrote Everybody’s Autobiography , Joyce had already written and published his Ulysses and Pound was well into his Cantos . (In fact, some of the early Cantos had already been published.) These works are very different from each other and both are very different from Everybody’s Autobiography . Joyce and Pound did not share a common style or even a common medium ( Ulysses is prose, Cantos poetry) but both wanted to write a ‘universal history’ – a history of tout le monde , the whole world. But they approached their project very differently. Joyce chose to telescope the world’s history into a single place (Dublin) and a single time (June 16, 1904, now called Bloomsday after the book’s hero, Leopold Bloom). Like all of us, Stephen Hawking included, Joyce stood on the shoulders of giants. He recognized two previous attempts to write a universal history: Homer’s Odyssey and the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church ( Mass ), and he incorporated both into Ulysses . Joyce meticulously mapped the world’s events (historical, mythological, and liturgical) onto the imagined events of Dublin on Bloomsday. Joyce discovered what today we would call ‘the fractal nature of reality’…long before Benoit Mandelbrot. Pound took a radically different course. He attempted to catalog all the world’s events, but he used a different device to avoid writing a 'million volume novel’. He picked only those events that he judged to be richly emblematic of other events. All the events described in Cantos are paradigms. Stein takes a third direction. She records the minute details of her life with Alice B. Toklas, but she chooses to include only those life events that Gertrude and Alice had in common with everybody else. They got up; they went places; they saw things; they engaged in conversations; they ate food; and they drank wine, etc. In this, their lives were no different from my life or your life or anyone’s life. Stein discovered the common substructure of all human life. Previous Next

Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist. < Back Systematic Philosophy David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist. "Systematic Philosophy," makes you think of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre... The urge to understand the world we live in persists, but is academic philosophy the only approach? Or even the best approach? And what does it mean to understand ? We understand something in terms of something else . In other words, we find the relevant 'pattern' to explain the 'event.’ The cosmos is our 'territory' (event); we spend our lives searching for, or inventing, the best possible 'map' (pattern) of that territory. The collected works of each of the philosophers mentioned above constitutes 'maps,’ but are we limited in our search to such 'weighty tomes?’ (No, I am not speaking metaphorically. I mean 'weighty' - I challenge you to pick up all eight volumes mentioned above with one arm! Try it on TikTok or YouTube.) The Homeric epics, for example, also constitute a map. So does the fictional prose of James Joyce ( Ulysses ) and the epic poetry of Ezra Pound ( Cantos ). The music of Bach is a spectacular map ( Brandenburg Concenti ) ( Read ATM’s “The Meaning of Music.” ), as are the paintings of Kandinsky ( Read ATM’s “Is This Really All There Is?” ) The list goes on...and on. According to the Book of Job , the greatest tragedy that can befall a human being is to die 'without knowledge,’ i.e. without a satisfying map; but since by definition no map can ever perfectly reconstruct its territory, the search is never-ending. That said, I did not expect my search would take me to my dentist's office. (Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist.) It is often said, "No one ever wants to go to the dentist." I can confirm that by my own experience...except for now. I cannot not wait for my next cleaning, filling, extraction, etc. A trip to the dentist means a chance to get another look at the tapestry art pictured above. Ok, it's 'pretty,’ I guess, but that's not what attracts me. For me, it's part of the great quest (above). It's a map of the cosmos, every bit as compelling as anything Plato ever wrote, more detailed than anything we're likely to get from the Hubble. How so? It is both varied and uniform, dynamic and stable, undulating and rectilinear. It embodies the same paradoxes that make all of reality so difficult to decipher. Alfred North Whitehead, the last of the great systematic philosophers (not listed above...but just as unhoistable), illustrated this paradox when he quoted a traditional Anglican hymn: Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide. It is impossible, of course, to capture in mere words what is compelling about this quilted fabric. If it were possible, we wouldn't need the fabric, would we? On the other hand, I have never seen a piece of fabric that tells the story of The Timaeus . Reality is a mighty citadel. It takes all the weapons at our disposal to breech its towering walls. The verbal, the visual and the tonal - we need them all, and none can take the place of any other. That said, I feel compelled to try to tell you what it is that I find so compelling in this piece. The right thing for me to do would be to point and cry out, "Ecce rem' - Behold the thing! But of course, I have no intention of doing the right thing. So, caveats in place, here we go: The substructure of the piece is uniform but dynamic. We see it 'at the border' (on the 'frontier' so to speak), and we catch glimpses of it 'between the rain drops.’ Of course, it's a matter of gestalt . The ubiquitous pattern I'm seeing as background could just as easily be seen as the figure. What's figure, what's ground? That's in the eye of the beholder! Proceeding as if the pattern were background, our attention is drawn to the monochrome figures that sit atop it: white triangles and blue parallelograms (diamonds). They are organized into an alternating sequence of undulating and pulsating ribbons, a dynamic version of the red and white stripes on the American flag. Is this a New England quilt...or some Big Easy jazz? One thing for sure, the piece has both melody ('undulating') and rhythm ('pulsating'); but for me, the most interesting aspect of the work is its architecture. The disparate elements are not arranged sequentially or in monochromatic layers; rather, they are 'put together' in a distinctive and infinitely repeating pattern. This is how I imagine brains work, not as tiny lumps of neurons with hardwired functions, but rather as vast neural networks, capable of all sorts of mental gymnastics: factual memory, communication, counter-factual dreams. etc. This is more or less how information is stored in a computer (or on a hard drive or disk). On vinyl, the placement of the needle determines the output; on a CD, it is the address of the data. Also, the pattern of shapes on the quilt is fractal-like. It repeats with changes of scale as well as position. Plus, it has a focus, a great mystical rest, a Sabbath of the Land. Do you see it? Once you do, it's almost impossible to move your eye off from it. A recent breakthrough in mathematics may be helpful here. Imagine a three-dimensional lattice consisting of 100,000 points (or nodes). Now imagine injecting electricity into the lattice. Your job is to model the state of each node, n, at each moment of time, t. It had been assumed that it would take 100,000 equations to accomplish this task. Recently, a team of mathematicians demonstrated that it only takes four equations to do the job. Would you rather owe me $4 or $100,000? How can four equations describe 100,000 data points? Easy: it’s just a matter of seeing the patterns. At Aletheia Today, patterns are what we're all about. 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

Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? < Back I Wasn't Anything David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 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. 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