The Secret of Life

The Universe Within

Just in case the TV is getting a bit dull, I thought you might like to follow this link by way of some holiday entertainment. It's called Secret Worlds - The Universe Within and its another way of changing your perspective on things. It takes you on a journey from the Milky Way at 10 million light years from Earth, through space to the Earth itself, then down into the microscopic world of the leaf of an oak tree.

I came across this link on one of the blogs in my sidebar, Jennifer's Goodness Graciousness, an inspiring collection of short posts which I recommend you to visit if you haven't tried it already. Here's a link to another post from Jennifer's blog, an American Indian story which she quotes by Bearwalker, a story which happens to come very close to encapsulating the guiding principle of The Secret Of Life.

Taking The Lid Off - 2

When I first mentioned the idea of looking at things without mentally labeling them (back in the post Nameless) I didn't go into details of the experience I'd had with this myself because I wanted to see what people might find if they came to the practice without any preconceptions. Thanks to reader Sunflower for reporting back! She found herself paying more attention to the details of the tree, so dropping the label may have opened her up to experience more about it. On the other hand, as she pointed out, the removal of the label may simply have forced her mind to find other ways to categorize the tree. Old habits die hard! I wonder if it is worth instructing our minds to drop all labels before attempting this exercise? Perhaps that's what I was doing myself but without explicitly realizing what I was doing.

Although there was a lot of response to the post, no one else reported trying 'the tree thing'. Maybe other people tried it but didn't notice anything out of the ordinary - or perhaps something did happen and people preferred to keep it to themselves! If you haven't tried the exercise yet, you can still do so. Just look at a tree (or anything) and allow the name that we normally give it to fall away from your mind. Then see what happens. If you've read the previous post about my own experience, by all means bear that in mind as you allow the label to fall away. Perhaps that is the key you need to open up the door for you. Then perhaps you will see what I saw. Or something else entirely. Or nothing at all.

As we slowly awake from this dream we are in (if that indeed is what's happening) then the various waking glimpses which we receive are inclined to be fleeting and unpredictable. It is as though we are sitting on a moving train, looking at a curtained window. Occasionally, the curtain is blown aside by the breeze to reveal a glimpse of a vivid yet unfamiliar landscape beyond the window. We don't know when these glimpses will come and we don't always know what they mean, yet they make a very strong impression upon us.

My connection with the energy in the tree was one such glimpse for me, and it seems to me that - for whatever reason - it must have been what I needed to see on that day. On another day, I might only have seen the familiar thing we have labeled as 'a tree'. Perhaps you too will have a memorable 'tree' experience, or perhaps you may find that another technique will waft the curtain away for you. We'll talk about something else you can try very soon...

Or perhaps it may be you are not in need of any such glimpses for now. We all wake up in our different ways. But if you have stopped to read this blog for more than a few moments, then the chances are that you are waking up, whether you know it or not. And that vivid landscape beyond the window is waiting there for us all, whether or not we can see beyond the curtain.

This will probably be my final post before Christmas, so whatever your faith or none, I wish you all the very best for this holiday season. I hope you have a wonderful time, but if you have a miserable one, please remember that this is a difficult time for many - you will certainly not be alone!

Taking The Lid Off

I wrote in the post before last about an exercise I did where I looked at a tree while allowing the label (the word 'tree') to fall away in my mind. I was looking at it as a tiny child must do, without putting a name to it.

This was an idea I'd picked up on another blog - though I understand that it's also in Eckhart Tolle - and it seemed like a rather wacky idea, so I wasn't sure what, if anything, to expect from it.  But my experience was quite remarkable.

All at once, there seemed to be an energy in the tree which I hadn't noticed before.  It was as though the label had been holding it in check;  as though my preconception of the tree had been disguising its true nature.  Now, with the label gone, I became aware of the life force which had been there all along, hiding inside the tree I thought I had seen, the definable tree we know and may scarcely notice.

I remember hearing before about the idea of the labels we use putting limitations on things, but I'd never understood what this meant before. Now I see what it's all about. Removing the label in my mind had been like taking the lid off reality and allowing it into my life. I was no longer looking at the solid objects with which we think we surround ourselves but at the underlying energy of which they are comprised. I was catching a glimpse, at last, of the way things really are.

Your first reaction to this may be that it's all very airy fairy, like the next thing I'm going to ask you to do is to go out and hug a tree for Christmas or something, but the truth is that this has more to do with reality than the everyday world we perceive around us.

As I mentioned in a previous post, what we think of as solid matter is really mainly empty space. The particles which comprise atoms are extremely small, with a large proportion of empty space between them. And even these particles aren't really solid; they're more like waves of energy, which in their ceaseless commotion give everyday objects the appearance of solid matter, much as the dots on a CRT TV give the appearance of a picture. So when I talk about this strange experience of mine being 'a glimpse of the way things are', I may not be as loopy as I appear.

We think we understand the world, but such knowledge as we have is based on scientific reductionism, explaining things in terms of laws and principles which are only simplifications of the way things really are. We do not grasp reality. We only grasp a series of rules by which we believe it may operate. Perhaps the way we look at things in our everyday lives is similar. We define the objects we see for our convenience, but in doing so, are we reducing them to the lowest common denominator of our understanding? Are we closing our minds to what is really there?

It's funny - this blog is supposed to be practical and down to earth, but it keeps going all esoteric on me. I'd intended to talk about the practicalities of trying this 'unlabelling' exercise - so that's what I'll do next time...

Thinking Outside The Illusion

There have been some interesting comments on the previous post, including a bit of a therapy session for me! Click here to take a look.

I've finally had chance to read the Time Magazine article on God Vs. Science which I mentioned in the post before last. The article mainly comprises an interview between the biologist and ardent atheist Richard Dawkins, and (in the believers' corner) Francis Collins, who is Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. I find myself agreeing (and disagreeing) with Dawkins and Collins in pretty much equal measure. At the risk of seeming absurdly arrogant, as we're talking about two very clever guys here, it seems to me that both of them allow their beliefs to cloud their judgment from time to time and that both, too, sometimes fail to achieve the shift in perspective which is needed to really tackle the question of God.

I'd better give you some examples of what I mean.

Dawkins remarks: If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slighly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

I find myself kind of amazed that Dawkins should come out with something like this. He appears (from this particular quote) to be as limited in his thinking as some of the believers he so despises. His words summon up a vision of an old guy with a long beard who is watching us from on high, twiddling his thumbs till the dinosaurs die out. But doesn't the latest scientific thinking suggest that time is simply a characteristic of our universe and doesn't exist outside it? So God wouldn't really have to twiddle his thumbs (always assuming he has them, which I strongly suspect he doesn't) because from 'his' point of view, there is no such thing as time. He is in the eternal moment, where everything happens at once (as are we all, I would argue, if only we could remember!) And it seems to me that setting in motion a system which 'starts' with the big bang, then progresses through evolution to finally produce the human race - and probably on, in the fullness of time, to other, more impressive feats - is a perfectly sensible way to create a universe.

(And I feel I should mention in passing that 'worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in' are not necessarily of any special interest to God.)

Collins seems to have a much better grasp of things here.

He says: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

Apart from one glaring point of contention, I go along with that, but Collins gets distinctly dodgy, in my opinion, when it comes to the business of 'intelligent design'. He argues that if the universal constants, the six or more physical characteristics of our universe - the gravitational constant being cited as an example - had varied slightly, then life in the universe would have been impossible. Collins believes that this suggests the existence of a "designer".

Personally, I am not convinced by this argument. Dawkins provides a couple of alternative explanations, including the existence of a "multiverse": a large number of universes, in most of which the constants vary from ours and which therefore cannot contain life. Yet as there are so many of these universes, mere chance suggests that in one of them, the constants will be "correct" - which is how we may come to exist even without a god.

Collins responds that this is unlikely.

He says: I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor - Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward - leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

Though I am a 'believer', I can't go along with Collins here. The 'multiverse' seems a perfectly viable explanation to me. I think Collins just hasn't read enough science fiction. His argument sounds to me like the shellfish which inhabit a rock pool arguing that it is ridiculous to suggest that any other pools could exist. (One for fans of The Perishers there perhaps...)

So it seems to me that both of these men, from time to time, are guilty of getting trapped in the limitations of the familiar human world-view. As Neale Donald Walsch suggests in Conversations With God Book 1 (an excellent book if you haven't read it) this may well have been the origin of our traditional concepts of God, in which the divine being is confused with familiar figures such as earthly leaders and our parents, and is therefore associated with rules and retribution, rather than with the limitless abundance of infinity.

(Speaking of which, have you tried that tree thing yet?)

Nameless

The last few posts have dealt with the possible links between science and spirituality. I'm intending to return to that subject soon, but just for now - by way of a change - I'd like to suggest some things you can do to connect with the source of energy which we've been talking about.

I've already mentioned Eckhart Tolle's books, which provide some practical suggestions for making this connection. I particularly recommend Practising The Power Of Now, though if you'd like to know more about his underlying ideas, then you might prefer the longer The Power Of Now. There are some links to various Eckhart Tolle resources in the sidebar.

The next "teacher" I'm going to talk about is Nick Roach, who has a similarly straightforward approach to that of Tolle. But first, I'd like to share with you something I tried myself the other day...

I was in a conversation over at Forgetful God's blog and I brought away the idea of dropping my preconceptions about things, of looking at things as they really are without the labels we normally place upon them. I must admit that this sounded a bit too wacky to me at first, but I had to make a half hour bus journey, so I decided to put away my mp3 player and stare out of the window and give it a try instead. I was out in the country so I could choose to focus on either a sheep or a tree. I chose the tree.

I stared at the thing, thinking "that's a tree" (as you do) and then slowly allowed the label to dissolve away in my mind, so I was looking at it as a tiny child must do, without putting a name to it. I could go on and describe what happened next but I don't think I'll do that for now. Instead, I invite you to try the same thing yourself and then let me know what - if anything - happens. What did you experience?

You don't have to try it out on a tree, though I think that's a good subject. You might prefer a sheep instead, or it could be anything. Just look at it and allow its name - the label we have given it - to dissolve away in your mind. Then see what you see.

Richard Dawkins - 2

A guy over at the Way Of The Mind Forum has drawn my attention to an article in the latest edition of Time which relates to what we've been discussing here. It's called God vs. Science. I haven't had chance to read the whole article yet but my eyes were drawn to the final paragraph, a quotation from the man I've previously described as an "evangelical atheist", Richard Dawkins. Needless to say, do go and read the article or buy the magazine, but I'd like to give the quote here because I find it so heartening. Dawkins says:

"What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

Personally, I do find grandeur in Christianity if I discard some of the commonly touted ideas about it, but otherwise I find that by and large I agree with Dawkins here! Perhaps there is hope for consensus yet...

What The Bleep Do We Know?

(To see comments on previous The Secret Of Life posts, click here for The Nature of the Universe, and here to see the ongoing conversation on Let's Pretend.)

In his comment on the previous post, reader Forgetful God mentioned the movie What The Bleep Do We Know? which deals with the links between science and spirituality which I raised last time. As it happens, I'd been meaning to mention this in the post, but when I actually saw the movie I was disappointed. The issues it raises are fascinating, but I wasn't too impressed with the way in which they were presented. I've never been a fan of sound-bite journalism, and I would rather the various talking heads with which the film presents us had been given more chance to develop their arguments before we were whisked off to hear the odd sentence or two from somebody else.

I would also have liked to know who I was listening to as we went along. The usual convention is to provide captions to identify the various talking heads when they first appear, but for some reasons these captions weren't used till the end of What The Bleep...? thereby raising suspicions about who these 'experts' might be. Were these scientists who were talking or what?

As it happens, some of them were and some of them weren't, but when it turned out that one of them was actually JZ Knight, a medium who claims to channel the spirit of Ramtha, a 35,000 year-old warrior spirit from the lost continent of Lemuria, the critics started to get a bit skeptical, especially as three of the other talking heads were apparently employed at Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment". Those of us with an open mind might argue that mediums who claim to channel warriors from ancient Lemuria aren't necessarily wrong in what they say about the universe, but the circumstantial evidence was enough to convince the critics. I mentioned last time that books of this type tend to run into skepticism, and What the Bleep...? got more than its fair share.

Which is a pity really, because the potential is there for a more convincing version of What the Bleep...? and even as it is, the movie is a useful taster for anyone who is new to this sort of stuff. Though I was irritated by its failure to properly develop its arguments, I did enjoy the section on human emotions, which suggests that we might be hooked on certain emotions because of the chemicals they produce. This was a new idea to me and is certainly an interesting take on why we might keep on making the same mistakes...

The fullest - and predominantly negative - critique of the movie I could find on the net was at good old Wikipedia, though it has been interesting to discover that this review itself is not entirely convincing.

• It mentions, for instance, that one of the talking heads in the film, Amit Goswami, teaches at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment and has worked with that much maligned champion of "new age" thought, Deepak Chopra. It fails to mention his more reputable credentials of having a PhD in nuclear physics from Calcutta University and having taught at the University of Oregon for 32 years.
• It goes on to say that another taking head, Candace Pert, wrote a book called Molecules Of Emotion with a foreword by - you guessed it - Deepka Chopra, but neglects to mention that she gained her PhD by discovering endorphins, no less.
• A study, mentioned in the film, which assessed the effect of transcendental meditation in lowering the crime rate in Washington DC for two months during 1993 is dismissed by the review because the overall crime rate was particularly high that year - ignoring the fact that the two month drop is nevertheless significant and that other, similar collaborative studies have been published in reputable journals (see here and here).
• The work of Masaru Emoto in studying the effects of human emotions on the formation of water crystals (also mentioned in the film and well worth checking out if you haven't seen it) is dismissed as "unscientific" because it wasn't peer reviewed and didn't use double blind methodology. This is fair enough, perhaps, though the commentary in the review seems rather harsh and it's interesting to note that in October 2006 (more recently, one presumes, than the Wikipedia review was written) the result of a pilot test of a double blind trial of Emoto's claims was published. This reported that photographed crystals had been rated as more aesthetically pleasing when they came from samples which had been sent positive intentions.  Apparently a further, larger trial is now planned.
• And finally, the Wikipedia review mentions that the church used in the movie is not really Polish at all (as suggested in the movie) but Irish. This is a very bizarre comment. The church is used in the fictional sequence that runs alongside the talking heads. The origin of the location used is therefore irrelevant. It is like criticizing, say, the TV series Cheers! because the bar doesn't really exist.

In other words, even without going into the difficult science, I can find almost as many shortcomings in the review as the review can in the movie. We can all play picky picky.

So what does this prove exactly? The shortcomings of Wikipedia? That may not be surprising. But I guess it does show how elusive the truth can be. And perhaps we're all going about this the wrong way. Perhaps we should be looking for areas of agreement, not of dispute. Because I can't help feeling that in the midst of all the skepticism and accusations of bad science, an opportunity to establish some kind of middle ground - possibly even consensus - is being lost.