by Guy Murchie
And still we are the morning of the earth, the "Sun" of Spirit having just come up and our eyes barely begun to open to the growing light. Slowly a sense of creaturehood is leading to a feeling of brotherhood. It takes time more which more than anything time which may be a greater barrier than space. For many mysteries are hidden in this world whose visible surface, after all, yields us only an elementary semblance of reality. Admittedly the planet, as a superorganism, is still nearly blind and numb, despite its having long since evolved eyes for itself and more recently begun to learn (through seismology) how to take its own pulse.
It also continues to harbor unknown numbers of stone-age tribes, like the gentle group called Tasaday, discovered only in 1971 in a Philippine jungle, whose people do not fight or hunt, but eat berries, fruit, worms, crabs and eggs, and possess neither a word for "anger" nor a desire for civilization. Which makes me suspect it was their kind Mark Twain was thinking of when he remarked that "soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but more deadly in the long run."
Even with soap, however, educated man on the average is learning to control his social aggression, at least as compared with hyenas, lions and langur monkeys, who, according to recent statistics from the field, engage in lethal fighting, infanticide and cannibalism at a much higher rate, leaving humans "well down the list of aggressive creatures." Man also can claim a conscious and rapidly evolving moral code which, in his peculiarly erratic way, he uses to preserve a semitolerable level of inconsistent harmony. I think it was Voltaire who cynically pointed out that "murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers to the sound of trumpets," to which General Robert E. Lee countered a century later that "it is fortunate war is so terrible: otherwise men would love it too much." And, extending Lee's logic one step farther, we today might call ourselves more fortunate still to have invented nuclear war that is so much more terrible than ordinary war that no sane man could possibly love it. Indeed our present nuclear stand-off (which, I pray, will stay off) may be considered a mystic projection of the proverbial warning to tyrants that they are most liable to be assassinated by their own lieutenants. And that means that evil, in its very nature, is self-defeating.
MYSTIC RELATIVITY
The signs of mystic potency in this universe appear not only in genes, seeds and eggs but in nearly everything, including such super organisms as flocks of flying birds, gestating galaxies and even the unexplainable outpourings of the human mind. One sort of mind I am thinking of particularly here is that of the number prodigy, the child who can calculate at almost the speed of an electronic computer yet without knowing how or why. A six-year-old boy in Vermont named Zerah Colburn, for instance, was found able to factorize any number up to a million instantly. Given 171,395 he immediately knew it was the product of 5, 7, 59 and 83. For 247,483 he correctly blurted out 941 and 263. But he couldn't begin to explain his gift. He would only hold out his pudgy little hands, mumbling, "God does it." And the mysterious power soon started to fade and was completely gone by the time he finished school.
Even though modem computers are not yet comparable to human minds, except in regard to the speed and reliability of the particular calculations they're programmed for, they have begun to take On a certain mystique. For not only do they come down with undiagnosable ailments the engineers call glitches but they find themselves increasingly involved in weird warfare with a new type of human criminal specializing in getting around their protective codes and making secret unauthorized telephone calls to steal highly valuable informatIon directly from their brains. The computers (conservative by nature) so far have nearly always managed to apprehend the crooks by signaling their owners when they sensed something irregular (therefore probably improper) going on, so investigators could check and see that matters were put right. But if ever in future a computer is found to be victimized not by a human but rather by another computer, that will call for new and serious rethinking in cybernetics and possibly some drastic evolutionary corrective measures. Surely any kind of automated competition involving morality would appear dangerous. For even the old traditional peer rivalry has long been a thorn in the side of spiritual progress, since, as I recall, it was not the peasants who refused to look through Galileo's telescope but the scholars with their learning from Aristotle. And it was not the laity who rejected Harvey's discovery of blood circulation so much as the almost unanimous consensus of doctors over forty.
Even in humble everyday matters, our spiritual struggle continues and evolves. I read a few years ago of a water pipe crossing a ravine in California that had been broken several times by the neighborhood children swinging on it. Because water is precious in that dry area, an indignation meeting was called in which angry men vowed to end the mischief by wrapping the pipe with barbed wire or, if need be, rigging it to give an electric shock. But in the midst of the wrangling, one man quietly arose with a suggestion. "Why don't we fix the pipe strong enough," he said, "so the kids can swing on it?"
Every now and then someone asks, "Who owns the tree that stands on the other side of your neighbor's fence?" Legally of course it is his. But it shades your lawn and beautifies your view - and you may well benefit from it more than he does. And what of the oriole who nests in it, the vine that clings to it and the wind that sways it? Truly it belongs in spirit to everyone and everything that touches or passes it. So really are all things owned by the world, or at least by any part of the world capable of owning them. And all things are yours as you are parcel of creation.
This realization, which may come late (if at all) to the ambitious property owner, is a broad equalizer of wealth as well as a great liberator from poverty. Indeed it makes everyone who sees a sunset or hears the song of a bird feel and be as rich as Croesus. It makes us all as free as thistledown or a puff of smoke whose freedom derives from having surrendered its will to a power greater than its own. And although King Croesus may have thought he inherited the earth, it must be a lot truer to say the earth inherited King Croesus among other things. For Croesus' little kingdom of Lydia was a drop in the bucket compared to the earth, then still largely unknown even if already rich enough in living forms to be considered lavishly extravagant from a human standpoint. I mean it was and is (as we have seen) a planet on which each individual of its trillions of creatures produces thousands of times more seeds and eggs than can possibly ever grow up - a world in which millions of people die of plague and war and starvation for no very obvious reason, yet which somehow grows and evolves and creates.
THE LOGIC OF MYSTICISM
All in all we humans, who have made so much technological progress in recent centuries through our efforts to be practical, economical and efficient, find it very hard to understand such seeming wantonness. Perhaps that is because it is impertinent for the likes of us even to think of judging God's realm, for a part to doubt the whole. Besides, such a space-time universe as ours seems clearly finite. And finitude has a kind of built-in mystery to it, apparently due to the fundamental fact that light and radiation do not travel at infinite speed, while associated influences such as gravitation may be presumed just as slow. At best this apprises us finite mortals that we have no way of knowing what any distant place in the material universe was like when it influenced any other place a long distance away. If place A, for example, is a billion light-years from Earth in one direction and placeB a billion light-years off in the opposite direction, then whatever influence A had upon B at the time (a billion years ago) that we now observe coming from B had to depend on conditions at A two billion years before that, assuming A and B stayed put all that time. However, not only do we have no way of knowing the influence of A upon B now (even if both are static), but we cannot possibly know much of conditions at A three billion years ago - not even if the universe had meantime been static, which it obviously hasn't been and presumably never will be as long as it is "alive," a state it may well be in forever.
When you add to this such ingredients as the question of whether t
he universe is bounded or unbounded, whether anything exists beyond the horizon of knowledge (the range where galaxies recede faster than light), you might as well in the same wonder admit that the factor of mystery is enormous. In fact you could reasonably surmise a horizon of mystery bigger, farther and faster than the horizon of knowledge of which it is a function. Such a horizon of mystery also derives naturally from the fact that the most profound truths are the least definable and describable, largely because there is almost nothing to compare them to and, practically speaking, they are beyond the scope of language. What, after all, should be expected of a mind so limited it can visualize and accept neither an end to space, with absolutely nothing (not even emptiness) beyond it, nor space without end, with everything in all worlds inside it? Or even if somehow one could abandon both finitude and Infinitude, what (if anything) would remain?
Here we find ourselves wallowing in a field called mysticism, an elusive but wondrous subject that has had an immense if unfathomable influence on mankind for hundreds of millenniums. And it is easy to see why modern physicists, who have been pushing the frontier of knowledge into the unknown probably more profoundly than any other scientists in recent centuries, are ahead of most of their fellows in accepting that all-encompassing mystery of the universe commonly referred to as God.
Isaac Newton, for example, after formulating his famous laws of motion and gravitation, which stated precisely how the masses of the universe respond to each other, still wondered why they should respond to each other, particularly when separated by millions of miles of apparently empty space. Therefore he sought to trace cause and effect back to what he called the "first cause" behind all causes and effects, asking in his great book The Opticks (published in 1704), "Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate towards one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world?"
In our own century Einstem declared that his most awe-inspiring experience was to see and contemplate the unknown, which taught him firsthand that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty ..." Although he never liked the traditional concept of a God in humanly recognizable form, he was profoundly impressed by what he described as "the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."
Many others have voiced similar ideas, such as George Davis, the physicist, who suggested that God cannot be avoided by the common atheistic assumption that nature somehow sprang unassisted out of nothing and keeps on operating without conscious guidance because, "if a universe could create itself, it would embody the powers of a creator, and we should be forced to conclude that the universe itself is a God."
When a man does something at random like throwing a clock into the air while blindfolded, it is called entropy and is not likely to do the clock any good. Yet there are people, including plenty of scientists and perhaps the majority of atheists, who think nature's laws run the world this way: by chance. Presumably they regard Earth in her essence as a very probable world, random action being so casual and easy, and they can hardly be expected to accept the evidence I presented near the beginning of this chapter that no matter how many chimpanzees have been typing away at random since the universe began, they could not possibly, by chance alone, have made a single vitally significant contribution to this mysterious and extraordinary world.
The issue of course is fundamental to religion and philosophy. And it makes me think of a story about Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery, who flourished in southern Ireland early in the eighteenth century - and of the theorem that bears his name. Having heard of Kepler's famous discovery of the laws of planetary motion and of Newton's recent work on gravitation, Lord Orrery had a working model of the solar system built inside his castle. It was an extraordinary, dynamic and up-to-date piece of clockwork with orbital hoops and a brass sun in the center plus smaller globes representing Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn slowly revolving around it, even a moon circling the Earth and four little ones going around Jupiter.
But it seems that Lord Orrery had an atheist friend who had an utterly materialistic outlook and thought of the universe as just an immense moving system of natural machinery that somehow coasts along, blindly but automatically maintaining itself without benefit of consciousness, mind or intelligence of any kind. So when the friend heard tell of Orrery's new and wonderful machine, he lost no time in going to the castle to see it. Entering the great hall where the model was in operation, the atheist's eyes, widened with awe and the first question he asked Lord Orrery was: "Where did you get this magnificent thing? Who made it?"
But Orrery, remembering previous arguments with the atheist about creation, surprised him by replying, "Nobody made it. It just happened."
"How could that be?" retorted the atheist. "Surely these intricate gears and wheels couldn't create themselves. 'Who made them?"
Lord Orrery stood his ground, insisting that his model of the solar system had just happened by itself. Meantime the atheist worked himself into a state of hysterical frustration. Then at last, judging the time was ripe, Orrery let him have it. "Up to now," he declared, "I was testing you. Now I am going to offer you a bargain. I will promise to tell you truly who made my little sun and planets down here as soon as you tell me truly Who made the infinitely bigger, more wonderful and more beautiful real sun and planets up there in the heavens."
The atheist turned a little pale and, for the first time, began to wonder whether the Universe could really have made itself, or possibly be running all this time automatically and unguided by the slightest twinge of intelligence. And this was the origin of the Orrery Theorem which says: "If the model of any natural system requires intelligence for its creation and its working, the real natural system requires at least as much intelligence for its own creation and working."
THE DIVINE HYPOTHESIS
There we have the hypothesis of God. It takes many forms. The ancient Chinese expressed it mildly in their saying that "If you keep a green bough in your heart, the singing bird will come." And I know a research biologist who feels he has a kind of divine right to experiment with large numbers of white mice but admits to wondering at times whether some sort of a superintelligence unknown to us isn't using us for a similar purpose.
Virtually every race of primitive people, so far as I can find out, recognizes some sort of mystic force, be it sun, moon, stars, lightning, volcanoes or a living creature. With the pygmies of central Africa, it is the forest they live in and commune with in their nightly chants of devotion for, as one old pygmy explained it, "We cannot see our god while we are alive, so we don't know exactly what he is like. We only know he is wise and good because he gives us everything we need, and we feel certain he is of the forest. So we sing to the forest and listen reverently to whatever he whispers in reply."
With the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert farther south, they say, "There is a great dream across the world that we are part of. It is not like any ordinary dream in sleep. For we do not dream this dream. Instead this dream dreams us. It dreams us all the time, even while we are awake, and we know that it must be lived out on this earth through everything we do."
AND PROGRESSIVE REVELATION
Such concepts may seem arbitrary in the apparently disconnected way they arise here and there among mankind, interspersed in recent millenniums with the widespread teachings of major prophets like Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Christ, Muhammad and Baha'u'Ilah, each unique unto himself in his own place and time and all too often setting in motion differences of opinion that have led their believers into bitter "religious wars" from the Crusades to the recent fighting between Hindus and Muslims in India or between Arabs and Jews in the Near East. I submit, however, that in a larger perspective such differences are not fundam
ental. In fact I would say they are less fundamental than comparable differences in the revelations of science during the same time span. I expect some readers will deem it inappropriate thus to compare such disparate subjects as religion and science, but my own studies have persuaded me of the remarkable analogy between them. For science too grows by sequential revelation under the guidance of such great teachers as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein - who, more obviously than the prophets, create a natural progression of evolving thought, each one figuratively standing on the shoulders of the one who preceded him and seeing farther than he saw.
In similar fashion then, let us look upon the great religious teachers not as opposing shafts in a confrontation but as connected cogs in a wheel, as branches of one tree, waves of one sea or notes of one melody. After all, they must commune with the same God, whether they call Him Jehovah, Allah or the Great Spirit. They are less enemies of each other than was Copernicus the enemy of Ptolemy or Einstein resentful toward Galileo or Newton. Did you ever hear of Buddha denying Krishna? Did Christ oppose Moses or revoke the Ten Commandments? On the contrary, he declared, "I came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfill them."
The only reason progressive revelation is harder for us to accept in religion than in science, I suppose, is that religion is a more emotional, uncompromising and less rational realm than science, and its ardent adherents therefore more inclined to splinter into separate sects that pride themselves on their differences rather than their similarities. And that seems to be why western Protestantism, for example, has fragmented itself into more than a hundred sects and why the new ecumenical movement, in its serious current effort to reconcile such differences, is working only inside Christianity and, to my knowledge, has not even attempted to reconcile the seeming divergences between the major religions.
