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Interactions & Comments

1. Hold the line and keep the faith. This is, ironically, no different than the irrational religious faith that science was meant to save us from: if we trust in the existence of that Ultimate Truth, brothers and sisters, and follow the technocratic priests who commune with it, we’ll eventually make it through this desert of uncertainty and into the Promised Land. This requires us to spend much of our lives reciting the catechisms of modernity, persecuting heretics, and studying the ever-expanding canon of sacred texts, so that we might better understand the natural laws that Science has laid down for the righteous to observe. Only then can we bring the utopian Kingdom of Heaven down to Earth. Amen.

2. Cultivate a Zen-like detachment in the face of uncertainty. Buddhism has a perfectly coherent answer to epistemological crisis: recognize the fundamental unknowability of reality, and the ephemeral nature of all forms. Greet the end of the world and your own existence with equanimity. The challenge with Buddhism is always to balance the transcendence of seeing through reality while continuing to live in a physical body; with practice, it can be done. The detachment that Buddhism offers can be a great relief to the emotional strain of epistemological crisis—but it does have its pitfalls.

3. Take an epistemological stance that allows for something like what Dr. Jack Hunter refers to as “ontological flooding”: the perspective that many different claims about the nature of reality–beyond the dominant Western ontology of material-reductionism–can be simultaneously valid. This allows us to treat a variety of different possibilities as potentially true, or true enough, and permits the type of applied metaphysics I’ve been describing in this series.

Miga is advocating for option three–and I’m posting about it here because it seems to be the way my mind works. To be clear, I am definitely not commending my own idiosyncrasies; what I describe below is offered only as an illustration of a possible way of being.

Rachel and I have been together since 1995, married since 1998. Over that time, like other couples in long-term relationships, we’ve become a lot alike. We do, however, have very different approaches to new ideas that I think are each rooted in our experience in a strict, fundamentalist Christianity. Her experience of it was much more personally oppressive, since women were the targets of the strictest rules as well as treated with deep mistrust as the ultimate source of sin in men. While my experience (as a man) was not quite so personally oppressive, I did experience the churches as pervasively anti-intellectual and opposed to curiosity. It was limiting. When we finally left in our mid-twenties, we both experienced that departure as profoundly liberating–even though it resulted in being utterly rejected by a large, close-knit social network.

(By the way, I believe that is why we were never even tempted to return. We weren’t the usual “backsliders”, who quit going because of hurt feelings or some besetting sin but who never truly stop believing what those churches teach. Those folks almost always end up going back. In that way, I believe we were something of a puzzle for those we left behind: very few people left, not because of sin or hurt feelings, but because they came to truly reject the entirety of what the churches teach. The typical backslider is earnestly sought after by their friends and families. We got a sum total of two letters asking us to come back. And not because they didn’t like us; I think it’s fair to say we were regarded as up-and-comers.)

For Rachel, this experience instilled in her a “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” approach. Unsurprisingly, she moved pretty quickly to atheism, though she’s dialed that back a bit over the past year. At this point, I’d say she’s less full-on atheist, and more skeptical-but-curious. Because her experience in the Holiness churches was more personally oppressive, she has refined her bullshit detector in order to avoid such a situation again.

For me, the liberation from Holiness churches allowed me to fully engage my curiosity. I gradually–it took a while–stopped worrying about being “wrong.” Sometime not long after leaving Holiness, I read in a Canon Press book a statement about how we could judge the truth of something by whether it was beautiful. (I’m not bothering to look up the reference because those books are emphatically not worth your time, despite a few bits having a salutary effect on my life.) I am quite sure the writer would be horrified about the uses to which I have put his idea. Nevertheless, my approach to ideas is less logical, more aesthetic. Frankly, I get bored with details pretty quickly. I look for how ideas inspire me and enlarge my world. (I was Hitchens-Harris type atheist for a while but it didn’t stick precisely because it made–for me–a dull world.)

To change the metaphor, I treat my mind like a huge soup pot. I throw in a little of this, a little of that, and then taste to see what I like. If I don’t like the taste of something, it doesn’t go back into the pot. If I do, I add more. Mostly I let it simmer for a while before making any decisions. I don’t test ingredients first before throwing them in. My rule is that I must always add more, not less, and that time and patience will bring clarity.

So when I come across an idea like “ontological flooding”–break down the barriers to damned/dammed facts (see that Jack Hunter presentation) and let them flood in–I am drawn to it. Are stories of the paranormal or miraculous or High Weirdness “true”? I don’t know–and nothing will bore me quicker than a presentation of arguments for or against. The question I’m more interested in is the one with which R.G. Miga ends parts two and three of his series: “Which world do you want to live in?” This is perfect. Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t believe. Don’t present me with logical arguments. Tell me a story. Map out an idea–not in intricate details but like a map of Middle Earth, so I can orient myself within it.

And now this man is gone. He existed on the earth so briefly. His life was happening, an ongoing event, concurrent with mine and yours and billions of others. Now it isn’t. Our little threads keep going, twisting and turning, overlapping and knotting, twining and wrapping all around each other. But we are less, collectively. One thread, this man’s life, cut off by a combination of factors I don’t know. But I do know one of them, perhaps the main one, was despair.

Death is in the room with us. Death is sitting next to us. Death is walking in and out of the door. Death is on the corner. Death is in the car. Death is in the silence and in the laughter and in the meeting of eyes and in the looking away.

I don’t know what the lesson is, or if there is one. I’ve watched death happen, seen the moment when the lungs empty and don’t fill again. It’s not really a moment, though. It’s moments, strung together, breaths becoming shallower, blood pressure dropping, heart slowing. It took longer than I expected. The body letting go even as the consciousness holds on.

Death seems insurmountable and abrupt. A swift end, a slammed door. Maybe that’s how it is, sometimes.

But sometimes it is looming and silent, padding in soft, a slowly expanding shadow.

And sometimes it’s the mind that betrays us, hands us over. The body fights. The body clings to life. The body may be full of the possibility of days and years, but the mind has already laid down under that shadow.

We are strong, as a species. Adaptable and clever. Quick with our hands, quick with learning, with tools, with patterns, with communication. Quick to puzzle out answers, quick to imagine possibilities.

But despair, a disease, creeps in below the level of our quickness.

I don’t know what the lesson is. I don’t think there is one. Perhaps just a reminder to myself, written here. Death is in the room. Try not to look away.

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Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!

(You’ll note I’ve added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all <link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)

I have my doubts a ton of people will start building personal websites again, but I sure wish they would. I’ll read it.

So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted.

About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.

Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)

Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most.