< Back Mental Health Crisis David Cowles Jun 6, 2023 “We all pretty much want the same things: a unique identity, a sense of belonging, and confidence that things we think and do make a difference.” We have a mental health emergency in America! Especially our tweens, teens, and young adults. It is fashionable to blame the pandemic, and the resulting reorganization of society, and there’s much truth in that assessment. But long before COVID-19, people had issues. In an earlier TWS , we identified four underlying causes of today’s malaise. I call them the four I’s: Identity, Isolation, Impotence, and Illness. By ‘Illness’ I mean a pre-existing psychological condition that makes an individual more vulnerable. We need not concern ourselves with this here. That leaves Identity (or lack therefore), Isolation, and Impotence as the unholy trinity underlying our present crisis. We are born with no sense of ourselves . We begin to develop such a sense as we interact with our environment and with other sentient (not necessarily human) beings. Our culture encourages us to think of ourselves as unique individuals with unique personalities and unique roles to play in the orchestra we call society . At the other end of the seesaw is Isolation, the absence of belonging. We want to be unique (Identity), but we don’t want to be alone (Isolation). We want to be unique in the context of belonging. I may be the only one playing the triangle (Identity), but I am playing it as part of an orchestra to which I belong . Finally, Impotence. I need to feel as though I make a difference to someone or something in this world. Nothing is more frustrating than repeating the same behavior over and over and never achieving an objective. I need to feel that my actions matter, that my opinions count. Driving around aimlessly makes us anxious. Driving from here to there, no matter where, gives me a sense of accomplishment. “Did it!” So, we all pretty much want the same things: a unique identity, a sense of belonging, and confidence that things we think and do make a difference. What’s wrong with that? Only everything! You cannot discover your identity…because you don’t have one! Of course, you are free to create an identity for yourself and most of us do, but that’s a prefabricated persona, not a core identity . We need to keep in mind that there’s nothing sacrosanct about the identities we create. We can change them on a whim…and you will. Identity is simply the role we choose to play. I am not a ‘triangle player’ (Identity); I am someone who plays the triangle (Choice). Such an identity certainly doesn’t answer the age-old question: “Who am I?” So, I’m no one. Bummer! Now more bad news: I don’t belong anywhere either. Society includes groups of people with whom I share, for a period of time and to a limited depth, certain experiences, values, interests, activities, etc. But I am always radically different from, and much more than, any group. I can pretend that there’s an ‘us’ but at 2:00 in the morning, there is only a ‘me.’ We’re just not the stuff of belonging! I could perhaps get past this lack of identity and belonging if I could be sure that I was making a difference, ‘leaving the world better than I found it’. Here, too, obstacles abound: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, for example. Great, so now even Nature is against me! After Big Bang, it’s all downhill. With every novel event, good or bad, order is destroyed. Q: What’s more certain than death or taxes? A: That I will leave the world a little ‘worse’ (i.e., more disordered) than I found it. Not good! But my problems are not all cosmic. We live in a Complex world near the center of a triangle with Determinism, Anarchy and Chaos as its nodes. Fun Fact : It doesn’t matter whether our world is determined, anarchic or chaotic – all three noumenal states result in the exact same phenomenal world, and fortunately, that ‘nightmare’ bears no resemblance to the ‘charmed’ world we live in. In the world as it is, actions have consequences, no doubt, but what consequences? Does a good intention guarantee a good result? Or even increase the chances of a good result? How many well-intentioned acts have done irreparable harm? How many dark plots have had unexpectedly positive consequences? In our world, there is a fundamental disconnect, philosophers call it alienation , between intention and result. And then there’s politics! Like any other ecosystem, our political organs have evolved with an eye to self-preservation. If you think, “I can’t fight city hall,” that’s because you can’t. If you think, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” that’s because they do. So if you’re looking to solve your identity crisis by fixing the world, you might need to give that strategy a second thought. We all seek a fixed identity, a sense of belonging and an experience of potency. If we’re honest with ourselves, none of us will say that we have found even one of the three, and that’s because they don’t exist! It’s hard to find something that isn’t there in the first place. Could there be a more pessimistic prognosis? The country is suffering a crisis of Impotence, Isolation, and Identity diffusion. But not to worry! We have resources to help folks find their identities, develop their sense of belonging, and experience potency in their lives. Well, maybe worry just a little bit because there is no identity, belonging or potency to be found! So now what? We need a brand new therapeutic approach, one that says, “Identity, isolation and impotence are problematic; who needs them?” We need to help people learn to live meaningful lives in the face of the three I’s, and and we’ll do that…just as soon as we learn to do it ourselves. . Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Genesis and Time Crystals David Cowles Nov 28, 2025 “Freewill survives and thrives locally in a Universe that is globally determined… Order and chaos are not incompatible; they are mutually reinforcing.” 2500 years ago, editors finished work on an anthology of Middle Eastern Mythology and Hebrew Proto History that remains a ‘best seller’ to this day. With only the flimsiest observational evidence and no scientific method to rely on, the editors somehow managed to produce a textbook quality master work on Cosmology, Paleontology and Cultural Anthropology. In 2025, scientists made a discovery that reveals yet another layer of wisdom in the Book of Genesis ; this time we’re talking about Physics. A team of scientists led by Leo Joon Il Moon, published a paper in Nature Physics (October 14, 2025) that details their discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals , a new phase of matter named for the musical form known as the round (think Bolero ). In a Crystal like salt or quartz, atoms are arranged in patterns that repeat periodically across space. But in a Time Crystal patterns repeat across time instead; they form a regular, repeating cycle that returns ‘home’, i.e. to its original position…over and over and over again…without consuming any energy or generating any heat (entropy). Their ‘stable state’ is a cycle! This much we knew already. But then Dr. Moon & Co. (Moon) focused on what happens in-between recurrent home positions. “In an ordinary time crystal, between its periodic returns to the home position, the system is evolving through its periodic cycle - it's continuously changing in a predictable, repeating pattern.” (Claude) Moon discovered a special class of time crystal, Rondeau Time Crystals , in which there is no ‘continuously predictable pattern’ between periodic home positions. Instead, the state of the crystal between home positions is random, unpredictable, i.e. chaotic. "Rondeau order shows that order and disorder don't have to be opposites—they can actually coexist in a stable, driven quantum system," said Moon. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t, not if you’ve read your Genesis and certainly not if you’re also familiar with the New Testament. Genesis makes it clear that creation amounts to the introduction of order against a chaotic background: “ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was void and without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep and wind swept across the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness…evening came and morning followed, the first day.” (Genesis 1: 5) Note that God the Creator does not obliterate the darkness (disorder) but rather separates it from the light (order). The darkness never goes away entirely but continues to intrude on us in its various guises: evil, temptation or attachment, sin, mortality (death), entropy, etc. The Gospel of John retells the Genesis account but adds some significant detail: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing that came to be came to be. In him was life and that life was the light of men (sic). The light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 5) Once again, chaos is the default state of created being while eternal order is a manifestation of God (i.e. the Eternal Present). But God’s order, while eternal, is not sterile; it is fecund without limit. Genesis recounts how the ‘primal photon’ became the ‘mustard seed’ that grew to support the large and complex network of foliage that is our world today (Mt. 13: 31-32)… all while conserving the primordial order. The Garden of Eden (Paradise) is an atemporal state of perfect harmony ( aka peace). But that order remained suspended on a sea of ontological chaos and eventually the darkness made itself felt in the form of a wriggling snake. Long story short, the ‘created world’ (symbolized by Adam and Eve) chose gnosis over nirvana and the world reverted to primordial chaos, aka your life! But cheer up, better days are coming: Paul assures us that “Christ is risen from the dead… (and) as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall live. Then comes the end…the last enemy destroyed will be death…so that God may be all in all.” (1st Corinthians 15: 23 - 28) The current chaos will end in a state of restored order exactly as Moon predicted…and demonstrated…via his Rondeau Time Crystals . It is John of Patmos, however, who provides the clearest recapitulation of the Rondeau model: “I am Alpha and Omega , the beginning and the end , says the Lord, what is, what was, and what is to come…the first and the last … I am he that lives, and was dead and, behold, I am alive for evermore…” (Revelation 1: 8 - 18) “I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem , coming down from God out of heaven…and there shall be no more death, or sorrow, or crying, nor any more pain: for the former things are passed away . And he that sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new .” (Revelation 21: 1 - 5) “And I saw no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple. And the city had no need of sun or moon for the glory of God gave light and the Lamb is that light…a nd there shall be no night there…for the Lord God gives light and they shall reign for ever and ever.” (Revelation 21: 22 – 23; 22: 5) So as Moon would have predicted, the Kingdom of Heaven is the second coming of the Garden of Eden. The ‘substance’ (order, pattern) is identical though the ‘accidents’ (concrete details) are all new: a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem. But after a long, chaotic winter, God’s primordial order is restored: (Harmony → Chaos → Harmony) = Rondeau Order . “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain. Comeday morm and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s even and, ah you’re vinegar!” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) But what of the gap between Alpha and Omega? It’s chaotic but not necessarily perfectly so. The chaos is ‘tunable’ allowing islands of local order to emerge as experience generates information which we in turn encode in the otherwise disordered elements. We call such islands ‘entities, organisms, societies, communities, events’. Doing our very best imitation of God, we create our own order. But these islands of order are continuously eroded by the inexorable vicissitudes of entropy. Our world remains chaotic. The states of perfect order that bookend the primordial chaos do not control the timing or the details of these eruptions of order . However, the Alpha and Omega points do embody certain essential Values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice), organizing principles that ‘fine tune’ everything. Value transcends chaos; by their nature values are universal and eternal so no state of being can isolate itself from them. They fine tune the chaos so that they are felt as lures that inspire the emergence of local order. Think IKEA! There’s a piece of kitchen furniture that you’ve had your eye on for sometime. You’re looking at the in-store model, the Alpha state; and you decide to order the kit. You’ve shopped IKEA before, so you’re not surprised when the box arrives with the parts in a heap. Fortunately, the box also includes a schematic suggesting how the parts might be put together to produce a second copy of the furniture item, the Omega state, in your kitchen. You do your best but somehow the finished piece does not look like the model. It’s ‘serviceable’ but you don’t expect it to last long, or to bear a heavy load. Nevertheless, congratulations are ‘in order’ (pun intended). You’ve just earned yourself a PhD in Ontology. You moved from Alpha to Chaos , but guided by a set of transcendent values (i.e. directions), you attempted to move out of Chaos to Omega ; but of course, you were only partially successful (if that). This is life, yours and mine. Thanks to ‘Adam’, we are immersed in the world’s chaotic phase. Thanks to Christ, we are resurrected in Omega . The discovery of so-called Rondeau Time Crystals demonstrates that perfect order and pure chaos are not incompatible…and the consequences are mind-blowing: Freewill survives and thrives locally in a Universe that is globally determined and ordered. Events require a trigger, a ‘subjective aim’, that points toward a transcendent Value. That’s what values are, targets, lures, sparks. Values provide the motivation necessary for a rich variety of events to emerge out of a chaotic background. Ain’t Nature grand? Turns out, we can have our cake and eat it too. In fact, we must. We are free agents in an undetermined world; but we are able to create order in our immediate environment. But unlike Ozymandias, we do not vainly imagine that that order will survive the ravages of time. However, we can be confident that the order we create, once created and to the extent that it is compatible with the global order (God’s nature?), is eternal. Order and chaos are not incompatible; they are mutually reinforcing. *** Joan Miró’s The Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–25) turns a small interior room into a teeming world of playful, dream-like creatures that seem to defy gravity and logic. Within the thinly defined walls and table—symbols of everyday structure—Miró unleashes a riot of floating symbols, musical forms, and biomorphic figures that animate the space with chaotic, subconscious energy. The result is a visual metaphor for how the orderly surface of life is constantly stirred by inner imagination, spontaneity, and the unpredictable movement of the mind. 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.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue Converge This! Jean Paul Sartre and Pope Leo “Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization!” Dante and The Beatles “If a world can or must…self-annihilate…then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist.” Theology Jericho “Some of us were waving copies of Mao’s Little Red Book; we all should have been clutching copies of the Old Testament.” Christian Anarchism "Over the course of history, however, humans have just as often sought to trade their existential liberty for the promise, always ultimately empty, of security and/or prosperity." Philosophy Particularity “The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.” Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” Science Our Inanimate Neighbors “Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location… Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks.” Past, Present, Future "So, it turns out that the universe did not have a lot of options when it came to structuring time." Culture & The Arts Educating Christians “We must teach our children a totally counter-cultural model of nature. We must teach the doctrines of our Faith, not as exceptions to natural law, but as the highest expressions of natural law.” That Time You Told a Sunrise Lie "...words are also just hollowed statements to avoid the truth. It’s far too tempting a cover-up. We love ideals, but we don’t like what they require." The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music "We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication." The Crucible Challenge Winner: Integrity vs. Life "At what point is it okay to lie? Is life more important than one’s integrity?" Spirituality How the Saints Taught Me Feminism "Finding footing in a world that appears to condone worshiping men can be incredibly hard, especially when that world extends past every aspect of your being." Escaping Dostoevsky's Polar Bear “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back Can You Make a Difference? David Cowles May 29, 2026 “You are nothing other than self-awareness…the organic unity of your constituent cells experiencing itself…” Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, concluded from his experience that humanity’s deepest hunger is for meaning. We desperately want to make a difference, to leave an indelible footprint in eternal sands. There’s a little Ozymandias in all of us: “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.” Unfortunately, the world we live in does not easily accommodate these aspirations. To grasp the extent of the disconnect, we need to step back and understand who we are in context. We need to shed any illusions about the world and our place in it. We are not ‘little less than angels’… we are ‘little more than bacteria’. In fact, we are ‘ nothing more than bacteria’… and we may even be a little less ! U R a meta-organism emerging out of the cooperating behavior of 30 trillion independent unicellular organisms (cells), each containing the primordial DNA code characteristic of all terrestrial life along with a coded IKEA instruction manual (in Swedish) for the assembly of those cells into the meta-organism we lovingly know as you . Ain’t miniaturization grand! Each of these 30 trillion cells is directly descended from the single cell that housed the primordial DNA molecule, a clone of which is now present in every organism on Planet Earth. But you are not even that : you are an epiphenomenal derivative of those cells! A 2 nd order epiphenomenon of cells that are themselves epiphenomena of DNA. *** Your cells thrive in their self-created community (your body)…until they don’t. The meta-organism has remarkable powers of self-censorship and auto-repair but once dysfunction reaches a certain level, these homeostatic forces are overwhelmed and their meta-organic ecosystem collapses. For you, being is derivative of doing . Your being is agency. I act therefore I am. And once I no longer interact holistically with my symbiotic environment, I cease to be. However, not all of my cells die as a result; some cells can live outside the body, under proper conditions, for undetermined lengths of time. There is even evidence that certain groups of cells (tissues) respond to the meta-organic catastrophe by attempting to reorganize into novel, viable structures. Bottom line : you are even more dependent on your constituent cells than they are on you. *** We see reality through an extremely powerful lens. What is proximate to us in spacetime seems huge compared to what is even slightly more distant. Given this distortion, it is almost impossible to grasp the magnitude of the universe and our own relative minuteness. Knowing that there are 25 orders of magnitude separating me from my cosmos doesn’t help. You too? Then try this instead: Right now I am sitting at my desk typing, a yoga pose I maintain for 10 hours a day. How holy! My spouse and my PCP both tell me I must move more. I borrow a meme from Woody Allen ( Annie Hall ) and tell them that I’m already moving faster than they can even imagine. I am spinning around on the Earth’s access, I am revolving around the Sun, I am moving with my Solar System through my galaxy and with that galaxy ‘across the universe’ (Beatles). All in, I travel 500 miles every second (that’s almost 2,000,000 miles/hour), not counting my occasional trips to a store. And I’m not even factoring in the rate of cosmic expansion. So it’s Boston to LA in 6 seconds . Faster than the Concorde! But to me it feels like standing still. Heck, I’m out of breath if I have to catch a bus. But like Leopold Bloom, “I have traveled”… more than a trillion miles so far and I’m still effortlessly racking up frequent flier points. *** Moving through spacetime at that speed, can I still make a difference? Maybe. Heck, if a butterfly in Borneo can trigger a tornado in Chicago, there’s hope for me. But will the universe cooperate? The cosmos came to be ex nihilo , suddenly and without explanation, and it will cease to be, albeit more gradually. So if I do leave a permanent mark, I leave it on a temporary world. I am quite literally rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . Does that constitute ‘making a difference’? Imagine the Magna Carta written with disappearing ink! Yet I cling to the illusion that events, local in space and in time, have universal and eternal implications. Some would call this ‘magical thinking’ but I continue to believe that I can leave the world a better place, that I can make a difference. But I can’t! And neither can you. Of course the things that we do have consequences. In fact, any act, however ill-defined or trivial it may be, permanently affects every quantum of spacetime. But we are trying to make a permanent mark and spacetime is a transitory medium. Worse, your acts do have consequences, albeit temporary ones, but you have absolutely no idea what those consequences are. However real, consequences cannot be controlled, directed, predicted, or even measured. We fly, but we fly blind! The truth is, everything that happens is a ‘consequence’ of everything that went before it and an ‘anticipation’ of everything that is to come. The famous butterfly triggered a tornado, but it didn’t mean to, and it doesn’t even know that it happened. In fact, once the butterfly flapped, every nook and cranny of the universe was irreversibly altered. So, did the butterfly leave a mark, and if so, is that sort of mark enough to satisfy our hunger for significance? You struggle to see even a single act from inception through to completion; then once complete, your act takes on a life of its own. It will be what it will be; it will serve as raw material for other acts with other, often irrelevant or even contrary, aims. *** The search for meaning (or significance) is more complicated than it appears at first glance. For ‘meaning’ to occur, there has to be something that means and something that is meant. And unless we’re content to chase our tails, what is meant must ‘transcend’ what means , i.e. it must be of a different ontological order. You can say that ‘box’ means ‘container’ et al. but eventually you will have to make reference to something meta-verbal, an abstract three dimensional shape called a ‘cube’ or a physical conveyance for storing and/or shipping concrete items. Cube and Conveyance are of different ontological orders than Box. The concrete object (box) is different in kind from its form (Platonic), its function (tool), or its verbal representation (word). *** Unless you are a psychopath, the difference you wish to make is not random (change for change’s sake); it reveals some notion of ‘value’, however vaguely conceived. I cannot prefer A over B unless A differs from B in a way that, for me at least, is positive. Sidebar : Even Anarchists demonstrate a concept of Good through their actions. They destroy because they believe that society, once returned to its pre-industrial state of nature, will spontaneously redevelop in ways that are likely to improve on the status quo . Anarchism is often confused with Nihilism: it’s the opposite! The Anarchist’s faith is absolute: she believes that Good is a hard-wired feature of Nature. She is less atheist than pantheist. That positive difference you’re trying to make is the beginning of a concept of Good. What we call a ‘value’ is the Good in context. Beauty, for example, is the Good in a certain context; likewise Truth and Justice. They are denotatively synonymous, connotatively distinct. What is the nature of this Good ? Is it objectively real and normative or subjective, imagined and contingent? If ‘Good’ just means ‘pleasing to me’, then it has nothing to do with reality and is merely an expression of my preferences. So we must ask: ( 1) Is anything, anywhere, ever good ? (2) If so, does ‘good’ refer to anything other than personal preference? (3) If so, what is the source of this Good and what gives it its validity? If you hold that Good is just a matter of subjective preference with no normative significance, then good on you; enjoy life! But if you cling to the notion that Good is objective and prescriptive, then it is incumbent on you, I believe, to explain how it is objective and why it is prescriptive. Traditionally, ‘objectivists’ have relied on the God Hypothesis : Either Good is good because an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent being says it’s ‘good’… or there exists a transcendent being whose essence is Good per se . But ‘God’ is not a popular concept these days. That said, popularity does not always accompany actuality. *** These analyses place our very existence in question. We need Descartes’ Cogito just to reclaim some confidence in our own actuality. Beyond the homeostatic forces that keep the meta-organism close to equilibrium, ‘you’ are nothing ( neant ), nothing other than self-awareness, how you experience the organic unity of your constituent cells…or better, how the organic unity of your constituent cells experiences itself. That self-conscious reflexivity is something you share with every other living entity in the universe. You share it with terrestrial bacteria and with their Martain counterparts; you share it with Space Aliens; you may even share it with descendants of HAL 9000. You are they in every meaningful way. We need to be clear here: the consciousness that makes ‘you’ you is not merely the same as the consciousness that makes ‘that bacterium’ that bacterium - it is that consciousness! Consciousness has no inherent content, no qualia ; it cannot be subdivided, it is impervious to change. It is pure process; it is recursion per se . ‘Consciousness’ has no plural. It exists once and for all, equally and identically, in every living organism. But you don’t know that! You only experience consciousness as it manifests on one of its nodes (the node we call ‘you’). Presumably, this manifestation also occurs at every other node, but, under normal circumstances at least, you have no access to such trans-nodal experience: you don’t read ‘other minds’. *** If you were born sometime in the past 100 years, you’ll find this conclusion extremely unsettling. We have demonstrated conclusively that our hunger for meaning can never be satisfied in a flat, self-contained universe, i.e. a universe that lacks a transcendent dimension. The standard model of Universe, spacetime bounded by a beginning and an end, does not include such transcendence. “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!” ( Nietzsche We must give up our notion that being has meaning, that actions have significance beyond themselves, that values have any objective claim on our conduct, that ‘life is worth living’ (Sheen)… unless we are willing to give up our atheism and accept the God Hypothesis (above), distasteful as that may be to our post-Enlightenment mindset. This stark conclusion elevates two sentences to the apex of Western theology. The first is at least 2500 years old and comes from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy : “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” (30: 19) The second is credited to St. Dallan (a Christian Irish poet of the early Middle Ages): “Naught is all else to me save that Thou (God) art.” Turns out, metaphysics is not as complicated as we thought. We either embrace the idea that something (call it ‘God’ or ‘Higher Power’) transcends our spatiotemporal bubble and gives meaning to events within it… or we accept that being is accidental and ephemeral, that our lives are meaningless and without significance, that our pain is real and all hope illusory. On the flip side, if there is something that gives life meaning and significance, it is only reasonable that we make it the focus of our lives, our ‘ultimate concern’ (Paul Tillich). 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 Sufi Beatles David Cowles May 30, 2026 “The Beatles give us a model for the sanctification of everyday life…saints live in Time Square too.” I don’t care about the Beatles. I don’t care about their fantastic music, their chaotic lives, their internal conflicts, their sad break-up or even John’s premature death. I only care about the work, the corpus , the lyrics they left behind and they “lead you to an overwhelming question” (Eliot): Do the Beatles’ songs and films contain coded messages with hidden meanings? The Beatles may be the most iconic cultural phenomenon of the post-WW II era. Whether their corpus is to be taken at face value as pure, mindless entertainment, or whether it should be mined for cutting edge philosophical, cosmological, and spiritual insights, is absolutely central to any Intellectual History of this period. And no one is more outspoken on this issue than the Beatles themselves. And their answer is a resounding No! Over and over again, the Beatles have told us that their music is just that, music, i.e. that ‘accidental lyrics’ are subservient to ‘essential melodies’. They repeatedly made fun of fans seeking wisdom in pop culture and they dropped ‘fake clues’ throughout their work just to further confound misguided seekers. But of course, this is exactly the behavior you’d expect from someone concealing dangerous truths. Those of you who frequently fly Air Aletheia (thank you, BTW) know that we have zero regard for the opinions of creators . The job of the creator is to create, and creation is always a blend of inspiration and perspiration. It is someone else’s job to evaluate, explain, or analyze the work. As St. Paul pointed out, there are those who speak in tongues and those who interpret tongues. They are separate charisms. (1 Cor. 12: 10b) A full exploration of this question would be book length and might easily begin life as someone’s PhD thesis. Not mine! In today’s 1750 words, I can only hit a few highpoints, but a somewhat broader treatment can be found in the essays that make up the June 2025 issue of Aletheia Today Magazine . I will not waste my ‘precious’ words on the Beatles’ spiritual odyssey or on the intellectual roots of their wisdom. Instead I will attempt a deep dive into what Lennon called a “throw away song,” Glass Onion : I told you about strawberry fields You know the place where nothing is real Well, here's another place you can go Where everything flows Looking through the bent-backed tulips To see how the other half lives Looking through a glass onion . An onion, glass or otherwise, is a powerful metaphor for human nature. Onions don't have a core in the way that apples do. Instead, an onion is made up of concentric layers of ‘leaves’ wrapped around a small, tightly packed center that is just the youngest, most tightly wound, of those leaves. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, et al., it’s leaves all the way down. Like onions, human beings have no core. We consist of concentric layers of ‘masks’, the faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet (Eliot), carefully crafted to hide our true identities… from ourselves as well as from others. Fundamentally, each of us is neant (nothingness, Sartre , pure negation, the void. “Everything flows” is the signature meme of Heraclitus of Ephesus (in Modern Turkey), the pre-Socratic precursor of Process Philosophy (Whitehead) and an early bridge between Asian mysticism and European materialism. “Nothing is real” is an implied critique of British Empiricism, perhaps inspired by the Hindu concept of maya . I told you about the walrus and me, man You know that we're as close as can be, man Well, here's another clue for you all The walrus was Paul The song appears to mock the theory, popular at the time, that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a doppelganger. That myth was in part based on lyrics contained in an earlier song, I am the Walrus . In fact, however, the citation draws our attention to the older song’s mystical core: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” This in turn reads as a reprise of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse as reported in John 13 – 16, especially “I am in my father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (14: 20) Standing on the cast iron shore, yeah Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah Looking through a glass onion Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah (yeah, yeah) Looking through a glass onion The onion is a metaphor for the many elaborate disguises that conceal the existential singularity that is our ‘core’ (or anti-core). Most onions are opaque; they do the job nicely. But the Beatles are proposing something different: a glass onion that would allow us to see through each other’s masks right down to our shared core. Just imagine! You keep your masks and I keep mine, but they are transparent now and we can see through them right down to our common core. There is a strong parallel here with the New Testament Book of Revelation . John of Patmos, the purported author, is allowed to see eschatological reality (the existential void) but only by breaking in succession the 7 seals that conceal that reality from the world ( What did John See ) . The glassification of the Beatle’s onion is the ontological equivalent of the breaking of John’s seals. In both cases the existential core is made manifest. But in John’s case, the masks (seals) must be destroyed (broken). According to the kinder, gentler Beatles, those masks may be left in place; they need not block our view of ultimate reality. In the practice of meditation, beginners often complain of incessant distractions. The tendency is to resist them, like smashing John’s seals, but a better practice is just to let them be: don’t fixate on them, don’t feed them with your attention, just let them come…and watch them go. Glass Onion suggests we adopt a similarly tolerant attitude toward our masks. ‘Mother Mary, Lady Madonna’ plays an outsized role in Roman Catholic theology and in Beatle-ology. In an earlier post on this site Mother of God , following guidance from Pope Leo XIV, we spoke of Mary’s dual role as Jesus’ mother and the first fruits of his redemptive act. Who better to be first to see through the glass leaves? The Beatles give us a model for the sanctification of everyday life. Holiness does not demand that we live ascetic lives in isolated desert huts; saints live in Time Square too. On the other hand, there remains a cosmological role for the guru, the shaman, the holy man (sic) of God. Thomas Merton wrote that a few scattered contemplatives, praying continuously, hold the universe together. Drawing on ancient Sufi tradition, reprised by Shakespeare in King Lear , the Beatles refer to their shaman as a fool . I told you about the fool on the hill I tell you man, he's living there still. The role of the fool is the most transparent part of this song. He is in every respect a traditional Sufi master and his appearance near the end should remove any lingering doubt re the Beatles’ mystical intent in Glass Onion . I mean, how else could you possibly interpret this? “Day after day, alone on a hill The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still But nobody wants to know him, they can see that he's just a fool And he never gives an answer But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down And the eyes in his head see the world spinning around …” I can’t imagine anything I’d rather have as my epitaph. Sadly, I don’t merit it. Well here's another place you can be Listen to me Fixing a hole in the ocean Trying to make a dovetail joint , yeah Looking through a glass onion. “Can God make a rock too heavy for him to lift?” Superlatives, like infinities, lead to logical contradictions. Nordic culture had a handle on this 500 to 1,000 years before its southerly neighbors (us). Tasked with fashioning an ‘unbreakable chain’ the Norse realized that they would need to use ‘exotic materials’, e.g. the sound of a cat’s footfall, a woman’s beard, a fish’s breath. Intuitively, the Norse understood that arithmetic needed to expand beyond the set of Real Numbers to include trans-finite and imaginary numbers in order to be useful in the construction of real world models. Bumper Sticker : “Real World – not Real Numbers!” Operations that are impossible according to conventional topology (above) might become possible once transparency (and permeability) is universal. It's a goal, It's a goal, It's a goal , It's a goal, It's a goal , It's a goal, It's a goal. The song’s final line recalls an enthusiastic radio announcer broadcasting a soccer match. A goal, of course, is a singularity: all play stops and resets. The fact that this meme repeats exactly 7 times may recall the 7 seals from Revelation (above). Rather than making fun of the pseudo-mystical, the climax of Glass Onion utterly trashes our secular culture. An archipelago of contemporary sporting events has taken the place of a lifelong quest for meaning and redemption. Isn’t progress grand! The cry of the sportscaster replaces the call to prayer and the sound of angels smashing the locks on the gates of knowledge. We have become a pitiful lot indeed. Of the Beatles’ many triumphs, none tops the successful hiding of the entire Sufi cannon in a string of pop songs and movies ( Yellow Submarine ). In 2200 CE, when the Intellectual History of the 20 th century is rewritten for the umpteenth time, now by colonists on Europa, the authors will marvel at how so much information could have been so successfully hidden from view in an age as sophisticated as ours. The credit does not go to the Beatles’ cryptologists. In many ways their codes are Hardy Boy transparent. But like any good magician (Magi = Sufi) they have distracted us…in this case with glorious melodies, ear catching poetry, psychedelic imagery, and their own deflecting, self-deprecatory commentary. But enough is enough! It is high time, in fact it’s long past time, to break the seals and enjoy the fantastic insights embedded in the Beatles’ corpus. Welcome! 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 Artists David Cowles Jun 27, 2021 The existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, defined “art” as anything that shows us something new about the world, ourselves, or our place in that world. Most of us think we gain new insights through expository prose (like mine). What a paltry palette that gives us! Sure, expository prose can teach us much…but not that much. The medium of expository language is extraordinarily limited. The existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, defined “art” as anything that shows us something new about the world, ourselves, or our place in that world. Most of us think we gain new insights through expository prose (like mine). What a paltry palette that gives us! Sure, expository prose can teach us much…but not that much. The medium of expository language is extraordinarily limited. Of course, “artists” can bend language to be more revelatory: consider novelists, poets and dramatists. But still, how much more range does the painter, the sculptor, the architect have! But the real winner winner chicken dinner has to be the musician (composer and/or performer). You can learn more about our world and our place in it from a single Brandenburg Concerto (or from a superlative jazz improvisation) than from all the essays of Emerson (np disrespect to that great thinker). 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 Muffy, the Junkyard Dog David Cowles Dec 7, 2023 “This is not the used car dealership I was expecting; this is a junkyard! ...But a junkyard is also a salvage yard…” According to 20 th -century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead , Universe consists entirely of events ( aka ‘entities’). Of course, there are other things in the universe besides events, but those things exist only as aspects of events and not as entities in their own right. For example, events include sensation, perception, reflection, reaction, emotion, motivation, and intention. Events are extensive; they have duration. They exhibit qualities ( qualia ): red or green, rough or smooth. Ultimately, they experience satisfaction, a sense of their own completeness. But none of these is an event in its own right, each functions only in its role as an aspect of an event. Like likes ‘like’. Related events glom together, forming the ‘enduring societies’ we know as objects. Events join together, forming the ‘enduring societies’ we know as objects . Finally, they experience (not necessarily consciously) Satisfaction (s), a sense of their own completeness. But these are all aspects of the events themselves; none of them is an event per se . Every novel event emerges out of the universal, disordered Multiplicity (M) we call ‘the past’. M is constantly growing as new ‘past events’ are added, but since M is totally disordered, there is a sense in which it never changes. It’s always a sort of tabla rasa . Me, I’m stuck in Dodge. I need to get out of town quickly (I always seem to be on the run), but for that, I’ll need a functioning automobile. Wally, the desk clerk at the flea bag where I’m staying suggests I try Hank’s Hulks , just down the road. A cheap used car? Sweet. But when I walk onto Hank’s lot, my heart sinks. This is not the used car dealership I was expecting; this is a junkyard! I was worried I’d be taken advantage of by a fast-talking, high-pressure used car salesman (sic). Now I just wish I could find one: “Please, sir, take advantage of me!” Instead, I am face to face with Hank and his ‘fierce but loveable’ dog, Muffy, that he has mercifully chained up. Hank is cheerful but unhelpful: “Feel free to take anything you see! A friend of Wally’s is a friend of mine.” I don’t correct him. At least the price is right, but all I see is an endless succession of carcasses, burnt-out relics of Detroit’s finest. What am I to do with this? But a junkyard is also a salvage yard! By carefully extracting and arranging parts from these various wrecks (M), I may yet be able to assemble a working automobile. In fact, I may be able to assemble several working automobiles, perhaps even an infinite number, but for now, I just need one car to get me out of Dodge, and there is only one selection and one arrangement of parts that will allow me to build that specific car. Assembling that car is an event, and the parts I’ve selected constitute its World (W). Similarly, every novel event begins with the extraction of ‘parts’ from M and the organization of those parts into a unique configuration (W) that allows for the concrescence of that specific event. One Event, one World, one World, one Event. Life is like a trip to IKEA. When I get home, I have a carefully curated box of parts and a schematic showing me how they should be assembled; that’s W, the World from the perspective of my new bookshelves. And speaking of home, yes, I made it out of Dodge. I appreciate your encouragement…and Hank’s generosity…and, of course, Wally’s ‘friendship’. But what about you? It’s Tuesday morning, and after a long, long weekend, you’ve just walked into your company’s bullpen on the 30 th floor of the Chrysler Building. Your co-workers are gathered in small groups; the air is humming with buzz from multiple indecipherable conversations. “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…” (Bob Dylan) But ‘something’ per se is nothing. It’s mere potentiality. It’s chaos in search of order, void in search of content, bedlam in search of meaning. No event begins until M is injected with an ordering logos – the inventory of parts at Hank’s, the collection of pieces from IKEA, or, in this case, a narrative to explain what you’re experiencing. Suddenly, the hum breaks down into decipherable conversations, and the way your colleagues are grouped and spaced seems susceptible to a particular story line; you have injected M with an ordering logos . Of course, as you get more data, you may find it expedient to adjust your logos , but the ‘game’ begins when you first impose a tentative order (W) onto the chaos (M). Inverting the Bhagavad-Gita (and Robert Oppenheimer), “Now you have become God, the creator of worlds.” And speaking of God, the first 3 verses of the Book of Genesis give a perfect description of M: “In the beginning…the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” Creation ( aka ‘Big Bang’) is an event like any other event, but it is also the locus of every spatiotemporal event in Universe . After M (above), the next 27 verses describe in some detail God’s ordering logos ( aka the 6 days of Creation). Then, “God looked at everything he had made and found it very good. Evening came and morning followed – the sixth day.” (v. 31) Houston, we have ignition; we have our World (W). The text then jumps directly to the Satisfaction , God’s peace, the Kingdom of Heaven: “Thus the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. On the seventh day, God completed the work he had been doing; he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation.” (Genesis 2:1–3) So, we have experienced the prehistory of Creation and its Satisfaction , but what about the concrescence of the event itself? Ah, that’s what the rest of the Bible (all 30,000 verses) is for! 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 Hide and Seek David Cowles Apr 25, 2024 “Being is a game of hide-and-seek…Enjoy it now but know that no one will ever find you.” It looks like an auto salvage yard. Our effort to prove the existence of things has littered the logical landscape with wrecks, now mercifully stored more or less out of sight in junk yards like this one. Proving that something exists should be easy. “Hello, I’m here!” But not so fast! “Hello, I’m here,” is exactly what I would expect to hear from you if you didn’t exist. Huh? Point is, claiming to be is not the same as actually being . Sidebar : You’re 10 years old (now…or again) and you’re playing hide-and-seek with your friends, as usual. This time, however, your friends aren’t able to find you. Bored, you come out of hiding, “Here I am.” But to your surprise, you get no reaction. It’s like they don’t see you…or hear you. Then you overhear one of your friends say, “He’s not here, he must have gone home,” and they leave you standing all alone in the forest. Being is like that; it’s a game of hide-and-seek. We hide, but no one ever comes looking. Enjoy it now but know that no one will ever find you. It’s scary… and lonely! “Claiming to be is not the same as being,” or is it? According to Rene Descartes, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). Well, that might work for Rene, but does it work for anyone else? Rene might be convinced that he exists but that won’t get him a grande at Starbucks…unless he can conjure up $3.49 as well. He says he thinks - who am I to judge? But that’s just the point: who am I to judge? I can either blindly accept Rene’s word for things (faith?)…or I can remain agnostic. Rene may have convinced himself that he exists, but he hasn’t convinced me. Come to think of it, neither have you! Nor has God; nor has the so-called External World (aka, the Cosmos). Turns out, nothing has ever been able to prove to anyone that it exists; and nothing ever will. No wonder “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour” when the final (7th) seal was opened ( John of Patmos, Revelation, 8:1 ). No wonder Kierkegaard had bouts of fear and trembling. Only followers of Douglas Adams enjoy the luxury of a quiet meal at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe . But better book now, I hear the wait list is insane; and don’t leave home without it, because I’ve also heard that the bill alone can be heart stopping. What about me? Well, like Rene, I may (or may not) have satisfied myself that I exist, but I can’t prove it to you, or to anyone else, any more than Rene could. If all this sounds weird, it isn’t! The idea that existential facts lie ‘below’ the level of sensation, perception, observation, logic, and language runs throughout Western philosophy: Parmenides’ Aletheia , Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s Potentia , John’s Logos , Kant’s Noumena , Heidegger’s Dasein , Sartre’s Neant - all fundamental constituents of reality, all well-hidden, none of them accessible to ‘existential proof’. So, to be clear, we can reason logically about relations, appearances, behaviors, etc., but we cannot use logic to determine the existence of any entity underlying those phenomena. To put it more formally, we cannot prove a proposition on one ontological level using premises from a different ontological level. Math and logic deal with structure that is necessarily the same, always and everywhere; the goal is universality. Science, for its part, deals with contingent but reproducible events; the goal is repeatability. But Being consists of one-offs; its goal is novelty. Analogy : Math/logic : Real numbers :: Science : Even numbers :: Being : Prime numbers. ‘To be’ is to be , not to be like . In fact, to the extent that anything is ‘like something else’, it is not entirely novel and therefore gives up a bit of its own being. It subcontracts out part of itself. What is is what’s novel; the rest is just scaffolding. Consider the sentence, “it is!” The subject (it) is always the entirety, the cosmos, the universal; a particular person, place, or thing often ‘stands in’ for that entirety. The predicate (is) refers only to that aspect of the subject (it) that is unique, i.e. particular: “What’s new?” The function of language, the function of every symbolic system, is to confirm the relationship between the universal and the particular. The subject of every sentence is the entirety. The predicate of every sentence is a unique configuration of qualia. Paradigm : the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. The universal, God, is a quantum of being, Christ. ‘To be’ is always a scandal, ‘the scandal of particularity’: Why this and not that, why now and not then, why here and not there? For this reason alone, ‘to be or not to be’ will always be the question , the only question. What about causality and other patterns that seem to connect events? They exist only in the world of relations; they are not part of being per se . They give you a sense of balance and stability in this crazy world; they are an antidote to fear, trembling, angst, and nausea. They function as a fixed horizon for sailors made seasick by the fickle undulation of Being . The truth value of an existential proposition, on the other hand, remains oblivious to observation, experimentation, induction, or deduction. Being is always solitary: “One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.” 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 Kaleidoscope David Cowles Jul 23, 2024 “For under $20, I have placed CERN at your fingertips.” For a few of my pre-tween years, my father had a habit of bringing home a small gift at the end of the work week – “A Friday Night Surprise”. One of my favorite recurring items was a kaleidoscope. As far back as the 1950s, I was a budding Hippie in love with bright colors and intriguing designs, but also a budding philosopher. I loved the ability to create new order out of chaotic elements. While other kids played with Erector Sets, I played with Kaleidoscopes. I think even then, I had an idea that something important was afoot here. Fast forward 15 years. Now I’m living the Hippie lifestyle, agitating for political change in the morning, reading philosophy at night. A handful of friends and I formed a sort of informal commune. Within strict limits, we shared what little wealth there was. For example, I had more ‘political responsibilities’ than others; therefore, I was not expected to contribute as much $$$ as my comrades. That said, we were always on the lookout for new revenue opportunities. We espoused socialism but practiced capitalism. Buy a working farm in New Brunswick ($10,000); buy a crowded neighborhood tavern (also $10,000), but who had $10,000 in those days? So no bar, no barn! And still no income. So, how about $1,000? Could we manage that? Maybe. But for what? $1,000 was the estimated cost going into the Kaleidoscope trade. The model was simple: buy a boat load of wholesale scopes, private label them and peddle them on street corners and parks throughout the City (Boston). I don’t remember the 1970 price points, but I do remember that ‘the numbers worked’. Then we learned that we would need a costly and hard to obtain peddler’s license. So much for that idea! Now, 50 years on, I’m back to promoting scopes! For under $20 you can buy a scope through Amazon that includes a metal cylinder with one moving (rotating) part. In this ‘nose cone’ are a collection of brightly colored, translucent bits of glass. The cylinder is lined with mirrors (usually 3). That’s it! For under $20, I have placed CERN (1954) at your fingertips. (They say the price of technology comes down with time…but this is ridiculous.) Take the scope in one hand and look through the eyepiece located at the far end of the cylinder. What do you see? A gorgeous pattern of shapes and colors. If your scope consists of 3 mirrors installed at a 60 degree angle relative to one another, your pattern will display hexagonal symmetry. Am I peering into Dr. Who’s TARDIS? Or am I perhaps looking at an image of the Universe at the moment immediately following Big Bang? Now slowly rotate the ‘nose cone’. The initial pattern morphs gradually, and then, a sudden ‘phase’ change! An entirely new pattern emerges which does not appear to relate in any way to the previous pattern, or to any earlier pattern for that matter, other than sharing the same material substructure of beads and mirrors. While I have not subjected this idea to rigorous mathematical scrutiny or empirical testing, I have the impression that every pattern is novel, that no pattern recurs. In addition, I see no way to predict Pattern N+1 from Pattern N. Now reverse the nose cone’s direction of rotation: clockwise vs. counterclockwise. I had expected the patterns to reappear in reverse order. I thought I could recreate the past. But apparently, I’m no Proust . Stephen Hawking believed that entropy was bound up with the expansion of the cosmos. However, he also believed that entropy would continue to increase even if the direction of cosmic inflation were reversed. Playing with a kaleidoscope suggests that Hawking was right. The same sort of novel patterns occur, regardless of the direction of rotation. The patterns I passively generate are not created ex nihilo ; I am neither Proust nor God! But a bunch of translucent pieces of glass and a mirror are about as close to nihil as we can hope to get in our spatiotemporal world. Only children (or children at heart) could imagine that it might be possible to create a universe with just a bunch of glass beads and a couple of mirrors. That’s why those of us at Aletheia Today say, “Your children are better than you. They’re smarter…MUCH smarter.” Deal with it! You might not be God. You might not even want the awesome responsibility that being God would entail. And you wouldn’t relish being blamed for every earthquake or tornado. But who would not appreciate the opportunity to play God for an hour or two. For less than $20, that experience can be yours! 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 Pope Leo XIV David Cowles May 11, 2025 “As it was then, so it is now, the future of the Church, and the World, seems to hang in the balance.” The decision by Cardinal Prevost to take the name ‘Leo XIV’ draws our attention to the striking parallels between Continental Europe (c. 1875) and Planet Earth (c. 2025). As it was then, so it is now, the future of the Church, and the World, seems to hang in the balance. Leo XIII (1878) faced the scourge of communism and the inhumane socio-economic conditions that led to its rise. Like his eponymous predecessor, Leo XIV must also juggle a dual mandate. He must confront the ideology of militant secularism rampant in the world today and even more importantly, he must shift the intellectual paradigm that breeds many of our contemporary ‘ism’s’: economic materialism, philosophical nihilism, radical skepticism, de facto solipsism, political anarchism, and scientific pragmatism. It is said that the teachings of the Church never change…and on important matters of doctrine, that is true. 17 centuries later we are still rooted in Nicaea (325 CE) which in turn is rooted in the Scripture and Tradition of the early Church. That said, these never changing doctrines of Roman Catholicism need to be updated continuously to reflect the idiom of the day. 4 th century formulae, which express something that is forever true, struggle to be inspiring, or even understood, in our scientific age. There is no shame in this. The Greek Bible had to be translated into Latin and then into hundreds of languages worldwide. The essential content remains unchanged, hopefully, but without ongoing linguistic updates, it risks becoming a litany of rote incantations. Leo XIV is uniquely called, and uniquely qualified, to update the idiom…not from Latin to English, Spanish, or Italian…but from linear to non-linear models of reality. Pope Sylvester II (c.1000 CE) was widely considered to be the preeminent scientist and mathematician of his day. How many other second millennium popes could have made the same claim? Now, Leo XIV, armed with a degree in Mathematics from Villanova, is positioned to reclaim the Sylvesterian tradition. The intellectual foundations of our civilization need to undergo a radical reformulation and Christianity, with its unique Gospel message, is well positioned to lead that process. It all begins, you guessed it, with mathematics. Most of us, dear readers, were raised on arithmetic, linear algebra, Euclidean geometry…and calculus, i.e. the reduction of non linear phenomena to linear algorithms. These ‘hacks’ have taken us to the Moon and back, but they are still just hacks; they tell us nothing about the real structure of the world. That’s a problem…a big problem! We have come to regard the flat map (math) as if it were the territory (world) and so we have come to believe, once again, that the world too is flat. We are like ancient mariners, staring at our charts and expecting to sail off the edge. We need a new Galileo to say, “It’s round!” If Leo XIV is to be the new Sylvester, the new Galileo, who are we then in this mock drama? We are the Inquisitors of course. We are the defenders of all things flat. We are happy to ignore all empirical evidence in order to defend our linear presuppositions. As children of the Enlightenment we are mesmerized by cause and effect: A → B, a straight line (actually a vector). But in nature, nothing is flat, no lines are straight, and no space is strictly Platonic. Even more alarming for every A and B in the real world, A ↔ B and A ↔ A. A ll process is reciprocal and recursive. The linear is an abstraction, a degenerate case of the non-linear, useful for calculation, useless for any deeper understanding. Christian cosmology is non-linear at its core. Just a few examples: ➢ The creator of ‘heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible’ is incarnate as one quantum (Jesus of Nazareth) in that sea of beings. ➢ The author of eternal life and the savior of the world was executed for treason and blasphemy by political and religious opponents. ➢ “Love your neighbor as (not like) yourself.” (Mt. 22: 40) ➢ “Take and eat; this is my body…this is my blood.” (Mt. 26: 26 - 30) ➢ “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.” (Jn: 6: 56) ➢ “Blessed are the merciful for they will obtain mercy.” (Mt. 5: 7) ➢ “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” (Mt. 6: 12) ➢ “I am in my father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14: 20) In fact, non-linearity permeates the Bible and the Liturgy of the Church but these citations should be enough to convince you that Christianity cannot be understood or fully appreciated from a purely linear mindset…and for 500 years we have trained ourselves only to think in straight lines. When we were kids (before Vatican II), it was commonplace to criticize the church for its reliance on Latin. “How is anyone supposed to understand this stuff?” Little did we realize, Latin was not the problem; linearity was. How is anyone with a linear mindset supposed to understand a non-linear universe? From this perspective, the current state of the Church should surprise no one. We are witnessing the final stages of Christendom’s 500 year fall from a universal ideology to a quirky artefact of intellectual history. “The wonder is, (it) has endured so long!” ( King Lear ) Fortunately, there are indications from his initial papal greeting that our new Peter understands the problem: “Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.” – Leo XIV Your mission, Leo, should you choose to accept it, is to fix it! Buena Fortuna! God speed you on your way. Image: Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (Vocazione di San Matteo), painted between 1599 and 1600 in oil on canvas, measures 322 by 340 centimeters and is housed in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. 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 No Kids and No Curiosity David Cowles Dec 5, 2025 “Worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…for as long that is as you can stand them.” 1000 words, 5 minute read No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. In a recent study ( Psychological Science ) Radhika Santhanagopalan, Ph.D., discovered that as children aged, the tendency to avoid information grows stronger. Though 5- and 6-year-olds still actively seek information for its own sake, 7- to 10-year-olds are much more likely avoid learning something if it elicits a negative emotion. We learn to filter the truth from a very early age and apparently we were doing so even before the onset of Century 21. Recent findings ( Nature Communications ) reveal that central nervous system hubs grow and reorganize on a timeline that doesn’t map neatly onto the milestones we typically celebrate (e.g. ages 6, 16, 21, etc.). For this study, scientists compared MRI diffusion scans of more than 3,800 people, ranging from newborns to 90-year-olds; they found that our brains ‘molt’, i.e. shed one skin for another, at 9, 32, 66, and 83. The human brain experiences five distinct eras as we age, and each is defined by changes in our neural architecture that influence how we process information. What this means, according to the researchers, is that our brain’s connections wire themselves in pretty much the same way from birth to nine years of age. Then our neural architecture starts to organize differently as we enter adolescence, continuing through age 32. At this point, the brain’s structural development appears to peak, according to the study. “What we find suggests that the journey from childlike brain development (through age 9) to this peak in the early 30s is distinct from other phases in the lifespan,” says Alexa Mousley, the study’s lead author and a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. At age 32, the brain’s longest rewiring era begins, marking the opening of the adult years. It’s at this point that brain architecture starts to stabilize compared with the previous phases, and Mousley says this corresponds to past research that found that there is also a “plateau in intelligence and personality around this time.” By the time of our first ‘molt’, we have begun to understand some things about information: (1) Knowledge is power. (2) Information is a tool. (3) Tools (e.g. information) can be weaponized. Between a 50 year old and a 5 year old, I’d choose to spend time with a 5 year old any day…I would that is if I could keep up. I can hang with my 50 somethings for months on end and never hear a fresh idea; I’m sure they would say the same of the time they spend with me. We sub-out our thinking to academia and the media. After all, creative thinking is a lot of work, and we have lost confidence in our ability and in our results. We are more than happy to let those ‘more qualified’ think for us. On the other hand, I can’t spend an afternoon with a 5 year old and not hear at least 3 fresh ideas. Not all of them will turn out to be Nobel worthy; but they do make me think. They show me the world in a new way, and isn’t that the point of it all after all? Sidebar : I’ve watched videos of incredible adults interacting creatively with groups of children. They’re awesome! But tellingly, none lasts more than 20 minutes; adults cannot hold their own with kids for longer. We see the world as a collection of symbols; we confront nothing on its own terms, we see nothing as it is in itself. Everything we experience is carefully protected by its semantic packaging. Adults understand how things are used , where they fit in , but they have no idea what things are . Jean-Paul Sartre focused his most successful novel, Nausea , on this phenomenon. In one scene, his hero encounters the roots of a tree as they are, in and for themselves alone, for the first time. As adults we apply a complex ontological grid to our perception of the world. We impose our own Great Chain of Being: adults > kids > pets > other animals > plants > ‘ stuffies ’. Children are born Hasidim – they perceive the same divine spark at the core of everything they encounter (animate or otherwise). What we call playing , they’d call ‘releasing the Shekinah ’…if only they could pronounce it. Ludo = Laudo . Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and their members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function though no two of them are identical. Children know no classes. They learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object, every person is its own class. Ab initio , every noun is a proper noun. But as they ‘grow up’, they gradually internalize the Platonic categories of the adults around them. Children routinely nominalize adjectives. To the extent that we internalize Plato’s categorical scheme, we lose contact with ‘things in themselves’. Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless ‘being cute’ qualifies). Each is an independent entity immersed in a sea of independent entities. The way our contemporary languages are structured, children must learn about classes in order to communicate. They must learn to identify ‘ a chair’ rather than just ‘ that chair’. Seniority offers us a chance to rediscover ourselves, but of course we no longer have any idea where to begin. Perhaps the best you can do is to worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…for as long that is as you can stand them. *** Norman Rockwell’s Grandpa Listening in on the Wireless (1920) shows a young boy demonstrating an early radio set while his grandfather, dressed formally, leans in with a mixture of amusement and genuine wonder. The grandfather’s tentative posture and wide-eyed expression reveal an older man momentarily returning to childlike curiosity as he engages with new technology. Rockwell uses this intimate, intergenerational moment to highlight how learning—and delight—can flow from child to adult just as naturally as the reverse. 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 Book of Job David Cowles Jan 24, 2022 Continuing with the Book of Job theme, Job is arguably the most important work in the entire Old Testament, possibly the second most important book in the whole Bible – behind the Gospel of John. Some Jewish commentators claim that it is the 5th book of Moses and rightfully belongs as part of the Torah. It is frequently quoted in the works of the Church Fathers (100 – 500 AD), perhaps more than any other single book of the Bible, and it has inspired a number of modern adaptations (e.g., Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.). Continuing with the Book of Job theme, Job is arguably the most important work in the entire Old Testament, possibly the second most important book in the whole Bible – behind the Gospel of John. Some Jewish commentators claim that it is the 5th book of Moses and rightfully belongs as part of the Torah. It is frequently quoted in the works of the Church Fathers (100 – 500 AD), perhaps more than any other single book of the Bible, and it has inspired a number of modern adaptations (e.g., Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.). And yet, nobody has the slightest idea what it means! Job is the Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce) of Scripture. Historically, reading and interpreting Job has been a bit like taking a Rorschach Test: it tells you more about the reader than it does about the text itself. Two quick examples: In most translations, Job’s wife is quoted as telling Job, “Curse God and die!” But the Hebrew verb ‘to curse’ is also the Hebrew verb ‘to bless’, so she could just as well be saying, “Bless God and die!” Quite a difference. Second, we are told initially that 3 of Job’s old friends have come from great distances to ‘comfort’ him. However, toward the end of the book, a 4th so-called comforter, Elihu, appears and addresses Job and his friends. Some commentators view Elihu as ‘God’s Advocate’; they see his remarks as an introduction, a helpful transition, to the speeches of God that come afterwards. But others view Elihu as ‘Satan in disguise’, contradicting and undermining both God and man (Job). Under these circumstances, how can anyone hope to understand this work? If it’s so difficult to interpret, why is it so important? First, because of the magnificence of the poetic language, arguably unsurpassed even by works like Homer’s Odyssey, Beowulf or Milton’s Paradise Lost. Second, because of the urgency and centrality of the subjects it treats…and the depths to which it explores those subjects: the nature of God, the nature of God’s relationship with the universe in general and with humanity in particular, mortality (death), evil, morality (sin) and justice. Then why so difficult? First, it is widely believed that the story of Job long preceded (perhaps by more than a millennium) the assembly of the Hebrew Bible (c. 500 BC). Some scholars even believe that major parts of the book were originally written in a language other than Hebrew and then translated – with no loss of poetic beauty – but with considerable loss of clarity. Others believe the Hebrew text has been corrupted over centuries of copying and recopying. Still others believe that some verses were added by commentators long after the Hebrew original was composed. In all likelihood, all of these theories are correct! Fortunately, a recent translation (2019) by Edward Greenstein offers us a glimpse of daylight. Without fudging over any of the interpretive hurdles embedded in this ancient text, Greenstein succeeds in giving us a thorough and internally consistent reading. New to Job – or just returning – this might be the place to start! 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.