DELUSIONS — Pragmatic Realism

by Stanislaw Kapuscinski (aka Stan I. S. Law)

  Of course, the unconscious manifests only through its creation, the conscious, according to the capacity of the individualized creation to receive the influx from the unconscious. It was well expressed by Thomas Aquinas: Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.

  This is certainly true not only of human nature, but of the rest of fauna and flora; however, it appears that only humans are capable of appreciating the indivisibility of their own consciousness from the unconscious—although very few humans, at that. Most have no idea who they are, and if they believe in a god, then it is usually a god with their own traits magnified and assigned to him or her. The Greeks illustrated this thesis extremely well in their Pantheon, the Romans copied it quite faithfully, and other religions compromised the system by pretending to create monotheism, and then dividing it into 3 or more parts. The scientists, often unbeknownst to them, often come up with new ideas first thing in the morning, most probably as a result of immersing themselves in the unconscious during their sleep. Whether they believe in it or not is of absolutely no consequence. To repeat the words of Yeshûa, “the father (the unconscious) judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the son.” In you and me, that’s our conscious awareness.

  Now, a word about ‘things’ just as invisible as atoms, yet, to vast number of people, just as real.

  For many years, a number of institutions of higher learning have been busy researching PK and ESP. Those magic letters stand for Pure or Psychokinesis, sometimes referred to as telekinesis, and Extra Sensory Perception. There is nothing supernatural about any of these, and we all know that magic is the science of the future. No group of fundamentalists among the scientists will stop human progress. I am not talking about the devolving masses. I am talking about the select few. Do you remember? Many are called, but few are chosen. Once again the ominous words seem to apply to our present situation.

  The research in matters reaching beyond our physical senses is carried out, among other places, in Princeton, Harvard and Duke Universities in the US; the University of Northampton and Cambridge, in the UK; in Moscow and Odessa State Universities; and many other, similar groups have been formed in such countries as Holland, Sweden, France, and Greece. I’m sure more research would yield even more results.

  All this research is conducted by scientists, usually with Ph.D.s added to their names. Should ‘other’ scientists of both pure and applied sciences take them seriously? Or should the fundamentalists among them lump them together with theologians and dismiss them as… as what, superior beings, or inferior intellects?

  Dogmatic fundamentalism is a terrible disease. Often it affects most excellent intellects.

  Once again the phrase, “I make all things new”, comes to mind, only now we must search much deeper. This is what Krishnamurti had to say about turning over a new page. “You can renounce a few cows, a house, but to renounce your heredity, your tradition, the burden of your conditioning, that demands an enormous inquiry”.

  That is what the future NOW is for. To make all things new. To find new means for crossing bridges that had not been built as yet. To dare to walk, where others do not dare. It means reaching out where others fear to tread. Like Captain James Tiberius Kirk, and his band of merry men—just like in the Sherwood Forrest. Or in a laboratory where people are not afraid for their ego.

  Usually, inventions are the products and achievements of lazy people. Technology of the future will enable man to delegate 90% of his efforts to computerized machines. Man, en masse, swamped by excessive leisure time will grow progressively more lazy, stupid and useless.

  So much for evolution as conceived by scientists. Perhaps what matters is the evolution of our mind, of spirit—the existence of which they often deny. Esoteric Buddhism foretold the future with uncompromising honesty. Perhaps, we should heed its admonitions.

  Finally it is time to introduce a concept that seems strange to the world of science, although it is relatively simple. Let us pretend (or accept) that the world really is virtually empty space. Let us pretend, just this once, that the scientists are right. That Sir Arthur Eddington wasn’t drunk when he declared that matter is essentially empty space.

  Instead, let us fill this seemingly empty space with something.

  With what, you might well ask?

  The easy answer would be with intelligence, with imagination, with thoughts; let us flood the universe with love. Unfortunately the mystics will tell us that this has already been done, by their version of God. So how can we reconcile the divine with the material? There is only one grain of hope left.

  How about with energy? What energy? With light.

  With photons.

  With particles that having no mass they appear to us, to our scientists and most probably to people steeped in religion, as empty space. If you like the idea, read on.

  POSTSCRIPTUM

  Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

  Niccolo Machiavelli (1469—15270) a Florentine political philosopher, historian, musician, and poet.

  There is only one thing that separates us from all the other life forms, and that is our ability to choose. The rest of life forms are reactive. We, and we alone, can say no. We can, if we choose, be proactive. But this entails consequences. It was fun Climbing Mount Improbable, but the time may be coming to say goodbye to being biological robots designed to feed our DNA. The future sounds fascinating—an infinity of unknowns. And one of them, as I’m sure Kurzweil would agree, is that we might soon be replaced by thinking, mobile computers. Mr. Ray Kurzweil, to quote the jacket of his book The Singularity is Near, is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers and futurists with a twenty-year track record of accurate predictions. Where will biology be then?

  And although Frank Tippler (Physics of Immortality) might wish to reduce us to exact copies of ourselves in digital form, I still think that the mystics of the past should be given a chance. Not, I repeat, not religions. Just the mystics, if we ever learn how to decipher the symbolic meaning of their teaching. Until we succeed, we’ll probably remain, for the next few million years, as ignorant as we are now. After all, to quote another eminent British broadcaster and science historian James Burke, “evolution advances at somewhere between dead slow and dead slow.” Some of us are still fairly primitive. Some of us still seem to enjoy killing just for fun. That second part about killing is my own contribution to the definition of human species. We are killers.

  Now I need a dozen imaginary deep bathtubs, with a dozen volunteers, preferably theoretical physicists, who will submerge themselves in the imaginary warm water, relax, and dream up a new universe, which makes sense. The new universe, imaginary or not, would have a reality based on quanta of light. With the incredible diversity of waves at their disposal, they could build our bodies, in their imagination, spanning light-years, or shrinking us to enter and examine an atom from the inside, dodging a cloud of electrons whirling all around us. Wouldn’t that be fun?

  Just give them a chance. I rather think, that for the theoretical physicist anything is possible, given enough time and enough hot water. Even imaginary time and imaginary water. With the photons, which permeate the whole of even the present universe, imaginary or not, this should be easy.

  And the biologists needn’t worry. They’ll just change their titles to photonlogists, and carry on with their selective process of evolution.

  Magic, you say? Nah, child’s play.

  Just wait and see.

  And now for a moment of folly, or… a word about electromagnetic spectrum. With the scientists assuring us that the universe consists principally of empty space, let us examine the range of energy that inhabits this abysmal emptiness.

  The electromagnetic spectrum is traditionally divided into regions of radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet rays, x-rays, and gamma rays.

  The entire range of radiation
extending in frequency from approximately 1023 hertz to 0 hertz or, in corresponding wavelengths, from 10-13 centimeters to infinity and including, in order of decreasing frequency, cosmic-ray photons, gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, and radio waves. I am offering the abundance of numbers only to illustrate how much more flexibility we would have than we have, at present, with atoms.

  Visible light has a wavelength shorter than the size of a bacterium. Radio waves can be as short as a millimeter, or be many, say 30,000, kilometers long. Really! They are very long compared to the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. The radio spectrum is divided up into a number of ‘bands’ based on their wavelength and usability for communication purposes. They extend from the Very Low Frequency portion of the spectrum through the Low, Medium, High, Very High, Ultra High, and Super High to the Extra High Frequency range. Above the EHF band comes infrared radiation and only then visible light. I think I’d like to have my body constructed from quanta of radio waves. The whole range. Why not? I’d be detectible, and be able to detect my surroundings, for miles, so to speak, as well as squeeze my prongs into very tiny spots.

  There are other options, of course. Gamma rays are generated by nuclear reactions (e.g., radioactive decay). At first sight, not much use for those in my photonology, yet, they do exhibit some interesting aspects.

  Astronomers have spotted gamma ray emissions coming from the Crab Pulsar at far higher energies than expected. Within the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar—a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star that sprays highly energetic electromagnetic rays out at its poles like a lighthouse beam, sweeping past the Earth 30 times a second. The pulsar's enormous magnetic field is known to gather up particles and accelerate them—in a process much like particle accelerators here on Earth. As those particles move in curved paths, they emit the gamma rays that we can measure. OK. Maybe we could use some of them. We could give them a spin. Being made up of gamma rays would give us enormous power. The scientists found emissions at more than 100 gigaelectronvolts—100 billion times more energetic than visible light.

  Now, that’s quite a range of characteristics to choose from. You can confirm some of the data at http://www.sciencemag.org and other Internet sources. Some I researched elsewhere. As Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage—my stage. Think of a theater where actors are made up of photons. All sorts of photons. A little like holographic projections, only real.

  Why all this data? To stimulate the minds of the theoretical astrophysicists in their bathtubs. Or anyone who takes regular baths.

  I will leave you with a poser.

  Since we know that neither we, nor the universe is ‘solid’, and the incredibly diverse spectrum of energy inhabits the whole of the universe, and that energy has characteristics of both, waves and quanta, what if our true nature were to be made up of light? Perhaps it already is, only we can’t see most of it.

  We could be made up of quanta (not subatomic particles that are essentially empty space, but units or quanta of photons) with wavelength spanning from submicroscopic all the way to infinity. A little like gods. A lot like gods? To quote Sir Isaac Newton, “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, ...and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?”

  Was Isaac Newton a scientist or a prophet?

  Both, you say?

  You may be right!

  As for the atheists, it is a matter of unparallel indifference to me whether they are theists, deists, agnostics or atheists. What matters to me is what effect their personal beliefs have on their behaviour and relationship to other people, animals, all living matter and reality in general. There are ample examples of animals acting towards members of other species with compassion comparative to that which we, humans, do when seeing our own species in trouble. We tend to ignore those needing our help. Other species don’t. Well, those more advanced amongst them. Those not endowed with the selfish gene to the exclusion of all other. Nevertheless, members of various species have been observed helping members of other species, not just those with which they share their a little less-selfish gene.

  However, if I understand the evolutionary biologists correctly, they contrive to assign all the goodness, morality, decency, empathy, pity, and of course altruism, exclusively to the “selfish gene”, with possible fringe assistance from the memes. They also introduce a concept new to me: that of “reciprocal altruism”. Now that’s as good an oxymoron as any I’ve ever heard—although I have heard it said that altruism is not a quality but an act of self-preservation. Nevertheless an act performed with the sole purpose of what one might receive in return, is not altruism at all. It is trade, often selfish, at that.

  But to confuse the behaviour known as the Potlatch Effect—wherein one gives only to exhibit one’s superiority over the recipient of ones gift—with altruism, as anything by an aberration of ego, is truly a perversion in itself. I am sure there are such humans around, and not just rival chieftains in the Pacific Northwest; but they are as low on the evolutionary scale as a university professor who expects to be accorded respect for having awarded his or her student an undeservedly high mark to raise his own reputation of achievement. Yes, I met such people. Such ‘professors’. Edgar Cayce, the late American psychic (a trait dismissed by most biologists), once said that there is only one sin, and that is self. And I suspect he intended the word sin in its original sense, i.e. missing the mark of being human. Or was it of being constructed in the image of god?

  Now, I do not object to biologists deifying the gene as the exclusive source of all goodness and altruistic impulses in us, animals, providing they will allot equal measure to our propensity towards murder and mayhem, and to the joy we derive from killing just for fun (as all the hunters will affirm), and to the distinguished scientists who spend half their lives attempting to design and build weapons of mass destruction. I can only assume that the highly altruistic gene is no longer just selfish and, indeed, evolved into a seed of evil, whatever the biologists understand by this word.

  I am not sure how such untrammeled biological diversity fits into Pragmatic Realism but, it seems to me, it makes as much sense as being made up of empty space. If so, then the scientists don’t really have to make up any of their theories. Perhaps they, too, are filled with empty space—both the scientists and their theories. We seem to make up reality as we go along. Beauty, common sense, even truth, as well as the characteristics of a gene, are in the eyes of the beholder. As for the diverse energies, they continue to exist without our conscious assistance and, after all, as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 1:1-3, affirms, “There is nothing new under the sun.” This same Preacher also proclaims, emphatically, that all actions of man are inherently vain, futile, empty, meaningless, temporary, transitory, fleeting or mere breath. Perhaps we inherited all these traits and abilities from the selfish gene?

  On the other hand, the mystics of yore proposed millennia ago that we are all beings of light. Perhaps their time has come.

  Light! Isn’t this exactly what String Theory proposes? Does it not affirm that at the fundamental level everything consist of light and electricity? On the other hand, String Theory is already passé. What we now have is 5 String Theories. At least we had five, until Edward Witte, an American theoretical physicist compared by many to be today’s Einstein, insisted that it’s all just One Theory, only we are looking at it from 5 different points of view. And he called it the M Theory. Only no one knows what the M stands for.

  You might well ask, “Who cares?”

  Well, the scientists are deluding themselves again. Until they’ll be able to test the theory, any theory, in a laboratory, even if it’s the size of CERN—in part a ring 27 kilometers in circumference and employing some 4000 physicists worldwide—it, the M or any other theory, remains philosophy not science.

  In the meantime, the scientists at CERN continue to waste our money. They are looking for the Higgs
boson which, they say, is a ‘fundamental’ particle. If we ignore the 'strings' and the ensuing theories, the Higgs boson is expected to be one of the basic building blocks of the Universe. It is also the last missing piece in the leading theory of particle physics—known as the Standard Model—which describes how particles and forces interact. Finding the Higgs was a key goal for the $10bn particle smasher. Now, on the verge of the discovery Prof. Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a senior scientist at CERN had this to say:

  “The Higgs particle would, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn't exist where theory predicts it to be.”

  Just think. Something that no one ever saw, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted, with our five senses made up of mostly empty space, nor detected with the multibillion-dollar technology actually doesn’t exist. Wonders will never cease.

  So much for the $10 billion. Scientists would finally prove that something isn't there. Ain't we got fun?

  Back to the drawing board.

  On yet another hand, with the exception of the horrendous waste of money, theoretical physicists are much closer to my heart than many other ‘all-knowing’ scientists. I always said that Einstein was my favourite philosopher. But trust me, at the fundamental level, you and I are just light. And the infinite number of ‘strings’ all around us is playing an indescribable celestial symphony. Some call it Musica Universalis. When you’ll hear it—you’ll know. God will be the conductor. And then, when you look closer at Maestro’s features, you’ll recognize your own face.