Bruce’s Thoughts

About a month ago, I started attending a Bible study group that meets on Wednesday afternoons in an unused conference room in Lincoln Laboratory. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but I was certainly looking forward to some discussion of that insightful, confounding, and complex book that is the Christian Bible.

I mean no disrespect to other participants in the group when I say that it doesn’t live up to my hopes in even the smallest degree. They’re all smart, energetic people who clearly care deeply about the Bible as he revealed word of God. I’m the last person in the world to throw rocks at them or their beliefs.

But my approach to the Bible is conditioned by my Physicist’s brain: any and every part is open to inspection, examimation, comparison, and interpretation. I don’t expect that I’ll always agree with others, but I do expect to be able to talk with them on a deep level about what we’re reading. Unfortunately, the rest of the folks in the group don’t seem to share my approach: they seem to take the passage on face value and to ask fairly simple questions about its meaning. Here’s an example from my last week: Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, verse 12 [abbreviated]:

^“1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. ²Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

⁴In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. ⁵And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons:
“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
⁶because the Lord disciplines those he loves,
and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.”

⁷Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? ⁸If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. ⁹Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! ¹⁰Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. ¹¹No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it…”

I arrived at the meeting burning with some important questions. Chief among them was: “From time to time, I had to ‘discipline’ my son when he was growing up, but the discipline was always related to and proportional to the transgression. What, then, can we say to the cancer patient dying by inches: ‘Be glad, because God sent this agony and death to discipline you.’? How can we answer her question, ‘What have I ever done to deserve this, and how is death a discipline?’”

Unfortunately, the questions to be considered were published along with the verse to study, and were on the level of, “Who were the ‘witnesses’ Paul talks about in verse 1?” When I tried (respectfully) to introduce my own question which (I think) challenges Paul on a deeper level, it wasn’t received very kindly. As I remember, the answer was approximately, “Not all suffering is discipline - some is punishment, some is testing, and some we’re not meant to understand - now let’s move on.”

The most charitable interpretation I can make of this event is that the discussion leader had just thirty minutes to get through his list of questions, and we could have spent several hours on mine. If so, that’s fine - but I would rather have been put off honestly.

But if people didn’t want to discuss my topic because it didn’t fit their own conceptions, then I just don’t get this attitude - it seems to me that challenging questions are the most valuable of all, because taking them seriously and answering them deepens faith in ways that coping with shallow questions never can.

And I remain convinced that every verse of the Bible, or the Holy Q’ran, or the Baghavad Gita, or the sayings of the Buddha, or the revelations of the angel Moroni, or the words of L. Ron Hubbard (especially the last) should be open to challenge, comparison, and debate. If our holy texts can’t stand up to honest challenge, how can we put our faith in them?

Some of you know about the Internet Oracle, and the rest of you should go read about the Oracle before proceeding.

I recently had one of my supplications to the Oracle, and its answer, selected for the “Best of” series. Here it is:

— 1434-04 109dd 4.0 —————————————————-
Selected-By: Tim Chew <twchew@mindspring.com>

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

Oh brilliant and quirky Oracle, smarter than the Professor, more
commanding than the Skipper, and richer than the Howells, please settle
once and for all the second most important question of all:

Ginger or MaryAnn?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} Or?

Given the high levelof competition, I’m feeling particularly smug. I don’t know who provided the answer to this supplication, but you’re a fuckin’ genius. Instant immortality with a three character answer. Of course, I did set you up with the world’s best straight line.

Those of you who don’t understand the question - go on home, your mother’s calling.

Reader, I’m about to step way outside my area of expertise and delve into Western and Buddhist concepts of “nothingness,” so please forgive me any naivete - or better still, straighten me out. But it’s my blog and I’ll make a fool of myself if I want to.

I’ve been working my way through The Universe in a Single Atom, by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. This is a wholly remarkable book, but not at all like his other books of self-revelation. You’ll need a background in basic physics and biology and the history of science to make any progress, but it’s well worth it. His Holiness has a first-class mind, and a truly wonderful interpreter.

But I’ve been struggling with Chapter 3, “Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics.” Oddly enough, I’m having little trouble with the concepts of relativity and quantum physics, but I find it very, very difficult to think about “emptiness” in the Buddhist tradition. Here’s the paragraph that I’m wrestling with:

One of the most important philosophical insights in Buddhism comes from what is known as the theory of emptiness. At its heart is a deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity betwen the way we perceive the world, including our own existence in it, and the way things actually are. In our day-to-day experience we tend to relate to the world and to ourselves as if these entities possess self-enclosed, definable, discrete, and enduring reality….

According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental, or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence. To possess such independent, intrinsic existence would imply that things and events are somehow complete unto themselves and are therefore entirely self-contained…

Effectively, the notion of intrinsic, independent existence is incompatible with causation. This is because causation implies contingency and dependence, while anything that posesses independent existence would be immutable and self-enclosed. Everything is composed of dependently related events, of continuously interacting phenomena with no fixed, immutable essence, which are themselves in constantly changing dynamic relations. Things and events are “empty” in that they do not possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality, or absoute “being” that affords independence this fundamental truth of “the way things really are” is described in the Buddhist writings as “emptiness” or shunyata in Sanskrit.

Okay, let me see if I can boil this down. I read it as, “Everything is contingent on other things for its existence. If an atom had no other atoms to bounce off of, or fields to react to, we would have no way of knowing that the atom existed. And if we have no way of telling whether the atom exists, then we aren’t justified in claiming its existence.” This is all very familiar to physicists - in order to “see” something, we have to bounce a photon or an electron or something off of it, and in the absense of observation, the thing is in an indeterminate state of being and non-being.

But now I’m straying into the realm of quantum interactions, and that’s notoriously tricky ground for philosophical arguments. Instead, let’s compare this with another of my favorite traditions: taken from the book of Ecclesiastes:

1	The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2	Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3	What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4	One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
5	The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
6	The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7	All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
8	All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9	The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10	Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11	There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

A difficult passage in a difficult book - but things become a little clearer when we realize that one the the Hebrew heh’bel, usually translated “vanity,” can also be translated “emptiness,” or even “uselessness.” One of the themes of this passage is the transience of physical things - they are continually created, transformed, and destroyed - and their contingent existence. The rivers do not exist independently of the sea, and no generation exists independent of the next. And ultimately, everything passes on and is absorbed into something else - nothing is permanent and there is no fixed point in the universe.

And both of these quotations raise the question,

How can a man persist in his life and labor, knowing that everything is illusory, and even his best efforts are futile in the face of eternal change and disolution?

I don’t have an answer, but it’s a damned good question…

In times of tribulation, I often find myself turning to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, (121-180 CE). Marcus (or Antoninus, as he often called himself) was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal string of emperors who abused the Roman state after the murder of Augustus. He was intelligent, mostly honest, and genuinely concerned with the welfare of the Roman state and people. Unfortunately, he also permitted some of the most vicious of the pogroms of the early Christians, but he seems to have done this in the spirit of subduing a political movement masquerading as a religion - a little like today’s situation with Falon Gong in China.

But he was also raised in the Roman Stoic tradition, and practiced that throughout his life. Roman society had set its stamp on Stoicism, and it was quite different from the philosophy of its Greek origins. The earlier Greek version had sought answers to universal questions like the nature of the universe, and Man’s position in it; but the Roman version focused almost completely on the thought that the Universe (Marcus uses the term logos) has its own origin and purpose, and men are simply swept along in its wake. So, according to the Roman Stoics, there is nothing to be gained by railing against ill fortune or rejoicing in good luck, because everything that happens to you is just part of the logos. Gregory Hays, in the introduction to his translation, says, “Marcus does not offer us a way of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.” This probably worked well for a sensitive, intelligent emperor who lived through trying times in the midst of a corrupt court.

So much for background. I really wanted to write about one of my favorite passages. In my copy, the page is dogeared and the book falls open to it without much prompting:

“You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver for the engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money, or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.”

If you’ve ever been completely involved in what you’re doing - so deeply immersed that the rest of the world vanishes and there is only you and the work - they you’ll know what Marcus is talking about. My own reading of this passage is that there is something that I’m supposed to be doing, some profession or activity that fits me as well as I fit it, and that I could, if I wanted, find it and immerse myself.

Marcus speaks of “loving yourself enough.” This is a remarkable remark for a man as duty-bound as Marcus - almost every passage of the Meditations consists of admonishing himself to self control, abstinence, and adherence to his duty, even when he would rather not. Most of the time, I try to live with the self control that Marcus teaches, but now I wonder if I overdo it. If Marcus can reprove himself for self abnegation, maybe there’s room in life to love oneself, and start searching for “your nature, and what it demands of you.”

I wonder where to start…