What Is Not

“Earth is off the shelf of and planetary geology.” - JB

This represents the same basic argument that prevailed during Galileo’s time. Galileo essentially discovered that the earth orbits the sun. This got him into trouble with the elites of that time - philosophers and clerics - who subscribed to the view that the sun orbits the earth, thus making the earth the center of the universe. He was denounced to the Roman Inquisition. Although cleared a year later of any offence, the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as heresy and Galileo was told to abandon his support for it. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’, he was tried again and forced to spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Isn’t this the same as what is going on today re ‘global warming’?

Eventually we would come to accept that our solar system itself is merely some insignificant adjunct to some insignificant galaxy on the fringes of the universe. What does that do to our considerable egos? Some say it lead to existentialism; nihilism and beyond. Let me suggest that the next (and possibly final) knot along this thread may yet emerge, namely that the true center of the universe is the human mind. This would certainly go a long way toward uprooting whole herds of sacred cows - ego for one. Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda came tantalizingly close to articulating this concept. The scriptures of all the world’s religions allude to it.

As we strive to understand all ‘being‘, we remain largely ignorant of ‘non-being’ which cannot be measured or quantified by our senses or by the extensions thereof. The scope and significance of ‘non-being‘, some say, can only be grasped by what Zen refers to as ‘no mind’ (or ‘no thought‘).

It is ‘non-being’ within which what some call ‘God’ resides. So, even if we - who look to telescopes, rulers and scales as the ultimate test of reality - should succeed in figuring out everything there is to know about all there is, we would still fall infinitely short of figuring out what is not.

Paradox

Perhaps one of the failings of language is – and there are many – that words are perhaps not sufficient to explain paradox. Let’s just say that ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are two sides of the very same coin – like heaven and hell; life and death; etc. Again, the illusory difference emerges in where we choose to place our focus.

A holy man wandering the plains of India toward Varanasi on the Ganges, begging for his sustenance along the way, has totally abandoned politics. That is to say, he has ceased to think of himself as a separate and distinct corporal entity. He is nothing; he is also everything - and quite without bias toward any one thing that can be assigned a name. In this way, he has become like a newborn that has not yet learned to distinguish itself from what it sees. It’s interesting that the first thing we do when a baby is born is give it a name.

Alan Watts speaks of man’s internal and external organs in an effort to blur the basic rhetorical divide that gives rise to the political “I”. As the child grows and learns the names of more and more things, so also increases the distancing and fracturing that some vital part of us always feels compelled to call home. Politics is the process by which we count our possessions; by which we seek to validate our right of ownership; by which we work, litigate and fight for what we say belongs to us. The holy man has found a shortcut that bypasses all the strife, all the exertion, all the pain associated with political maneuvering. He has learned that by simply letting go, all things automatically come back to him.

I agree that the “wizened curmudgeons” in the ivory towers of our universities are doing us irreparable harm. This is only because they have become shamelessly political and we were foolish enough to place our emphasis on their degrees and rhetorical skills. But, short of killing them, they will always be with us. It is we who have afforded them undue importance. We were told that one of Obama’s many virtues was that he was a constitutional scholar at University of Chicago Law School. That was enough to disarm many of us. Now, as the rubber is hitting the road we realize how little academic titles actually mean. The University of East Anglia e-mail revelations should only broaden our doubts.

All this stuff, however, is self-correcting. We just happen to be coming down from the apex of a trend that was never sustainable in the first place.