Mini-Brains
And here is one of the coming hard problems in spirituality and human identity, which would have been science fiction a few years ago but now is shoved right in our faces:
TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.
Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.
The tissues self-organised into four distinct zones very similar to the structure seen in human foetuses, and conducted neuro-activity such as transmitting electrical signals, the institute said.
Embryonic stem cells are harvested by destroying a viable embryo, a process that some people find unacceptable.
Riken said cortex tissues were also obtained from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are similar to embryonic stem cells but artificially induced, typically from adult cells such as skin cells.
The tissues can also be selectively induced to different cortex types controlling memories, visual sensation and other tasks.
Is a human foetus human? Does it have a soul?
What about a 'mini foetus brain' grown from stem cells?
If you don't believe in such a thing as a soul -- if you have the current standard consensus scientific-materialist framework -- the first question may well have an answer based on ethics, but the second is a nonsense and can only be answered in the negative: 'of course not, souls are abstractions, not realities'.
But evidence from evaluation of ESP, afterlife research, psi and mystical writings seems to be converging back toward the premodern religious paradigm again. That yes, there is such a thing as a soul -- some kind of meta-dimensional reality structure which *causes* physical effects or information ordering in biological systems, though there are what seem like paradoxes associated with the concept, such as that souls seem not to be entirely 'separate' from each other. One of the clearest elaborations of this idea seems to be in Mary Baker Eddy's works: there is one substance, but where consensus modern materialism would say 'the one substance is matter', it seems like it might solve more practical problems in explaining ESP and psi and 'miracles' and afterlife experiences to say 'the one substance is mind' and work back from there.
So far so good. But given this idea, suddenly the story above starts getting complicated.
Does a human embryo 'have' a soul, or does a soul somehow 'inhabit' or attach to the embryo during pregnancy - in the same way that a human player might 'log in' to a character in a 3D virtual world and start receiving sense impressions from it?
Does a blood cell have a soul? Does a brain cell have a soul?
Does a cluster of brain cells grown from cultured adult-skin-cell-derived genetically engineered stem cells have a soul?
If it doesn't have a soul, yet it behaves functionally identically with a similar cluster of neurons in a standard living-human, soul-inhabited brain, and processes memories -- where does that leave us as humans?
Frankly I think it's pretty darn creepy that we're playing with human brain tissue in such a way without having anything like a philosophical framework to answer these questions (other than 'no humans are alive unless they can speak', which seems scary dangerous to me).
But we are, and questions from Star Trek, tacky vinyl eyebrows and all, are now staring right at us. It's like one of those horrible nightmares where you get asked impossibly ridiculous questions for your final exam, and you're naked, and the thesis examiners are circus clowns. We can't be being asked this bizarre kind of ethics rule -- and yet, there it is.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
We could build computers out of them, or stick them in missiles. We probably will. We possibly are already. These aren't computer circuits. They have human DNA. They might have the potential to be human. They might literally have *souls*. They might be children of God.
Fully grown *humans* are children of God too, and yet we enslaved them, and still do. Some cultures ate them. Might still do. Ancient Rome had infanticide; in the civilised West today we routinely abort foetuses with beating hearts and functioning brains and destroy them like medical waste, and the practice (and the definition of human life which it entails) is defended vociferously by the triumphant, progressive Left, and anyone questioning it is knee-jerk slammed as a Neanderthal hater of women.
The Right deserved to lose the US elections, Bush was a moral disaster, Palin freaks me out, and the Obama phenomenon is a historic and staggering victory for grassroots democracy -- but that doesn't mean the Evangelicals are wrong on abortion or that Markos Moulitsas is right. There are philosophical twists here with daggers in them.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
These things might be tasty-delicious little medical tools, clones grown for spare parts, or organic computing machines. They'll probably be patented, and sold in packs in corner drugstores like disposable razors. Killed without mercy. We'd like to think they're not us, not a possible vehicle for our souls, not part of our reality... but they *are* literally our flesh and blood, and there *are* such things as souls.
The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote some chilling words in his essay Cyberpunk in the ’90s:
We’re just not much good any more at refusing things because they don’t seem proper. As a society, we can’t even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.
Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren’t sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes.
The Dali clock is melting and the angry clown with Spock ears wants our thesis. How do we answer? What philosophy will give us the resources to answer sanely?
Trillions
The name fitted perfectly. It had the right hard, bright sound to it - and Trillions were hard and bright. It suggests millions upon millions - and the Trillions were everywhere, sprinkling roads and gardens and roofs and even the firesides of people's homes with a glittery dusting of tiny jewels (but Trillions were not jewels).
And the name Trillions had a foreign sound to it - a suggestion of other worlds, star-studded skies, the cold emptiness of space. That was right, too. For wherever Trillions came from, it was not this world.
I finally read a book which haunted my childhood: Nicholas Fisk's 1971 young adult novel Trillions.
Whatever age I was when I first glanced at it (ten? twelve?), it scared the willies out of me, so much that I never plucked up the courage to read the whole thing. Reading the book now, it both amuses and startles me that I picked up entirely the wrong idea from the snippets of text I saw then. The Trillions of my imagination were extremely nasty space-Triffids; the ones in the book are the opposite. The story reads like a rather tame Doctor Who episode with an antiwar and ecological message: masses of tiny alien nanobot-creatures fall from the sky, a suspicious military attempt to use nuclear weapons to destroy them, a group of children make psychic contact with the tiny critters, discover that they are ecological repair robots and eventually use their newfound control to save them from the army. Somehow I both reversed the sense of it and created my own monsters (which still make me shiver today). That's kind of cool, actually.
The book does have several scary passages, but what I missed at that age is the context:
Scott suddenly saw a vision, like a photograph appearing in his mind, of the solitary figure in the space capsule. The figure was like a huge, elaborate, insect-like toy. It had a glinting, glassy, bulbous head. Its skin was of metallic silver material. Outside its body were veins - tubes and pipes and wires. But inside the glass-globe head there was a human face, in pain. And from one of the silvery arm-tubes there dangled a human hand with hairs on the back of it, nails on each finger tip and human warmth inside it. The hand moved uneasily and blood dripped from one finger.
The protagonist is talking to an astronaut about an Apollo-13 style space accident, and emphasising the loneliness and alienness of space; it is meant to be a little disturbing, but it's largely a fake-scare. What I picked up from this at age ten-something instead was a vision of alien Trillions somehow infecting and transforming humans into alien creatures. Where I got that, I'm not sure. But it sure freaked me out, and I could probably write a really scary ur-Trillion horror story if I wanted to.
(My Trillions were tiny virus-like diamondoids, each with a little 'sting', indestructible, with a hard cold alien intelligence which only wanted to consume, replicate, and possibly reconstruct the world into an alien ecosystem. They would eat the Terminator-1000 for breakfast, literally. It is difficult for me to convey the cold terror they conjured up in my brain - and I'm wondering now, where that came from.)
The Trillions are fascinating to me because they are an early nanobot story - long before Eric Drexler's 1986 'Engines of Creation', they have most of the pieces in place. They are little cogwork/lego type machines with a collective swarm intelligence, built like robots to serve long-departed 'Masters' and preserve their planet. Plausibly enough, they do not function as atomic assemblers but at a macro-scale: they can build mountains and large-scale structures, but not 'real' matter.
What I also missed was the flash of Christianity, in the dream-scene where Scott psychically contacts the ghosts of the aliens:
'We must serve the Master', said the Masters. 'The Master of everything. The Master of all planets, all lives, all of us, each single Trillion.'
'And the Trillions?'
'Through us, they serve the Master too.'
The mesh hummed gently. The Trillions that made the walls of the cavern shifted, twinkling and changing colour. Now the walls glowed purple, tinged with gold. The mesh vibrated, pleased. A veil of colour rose from it like a mist to thank them.
The ironic thing to me is that for a story which centres on the power of love and understanding of the alien versus fear, and the triumph of childlike trust versus adult incomprehension, it was the child me who was afraid, and the adult me who understands.
Rynemonn
Not shatterwrack. Not breaklight.
Just broken glass at sunset.
Those words end the first magazine-published science fiction short story I think I ever read: Terry Dowling's haunting cyberpunkish Shatterwrack at Breaklight in Omni, 1985. The story (a sand-ship sailor encounters the holographic projection of a woman grieving a long-ago car accident in a future Australian city) got under my skin and left me dazzled and confused in a bewilderingly changed world, struggling to find my breath. It was a long time before I forgave Dowling for what he pulled on me.
(There are a few other SF writers who have had a similar effect: William Gibson's Burning Chrome from the same era stamped cyberspace and the BAMA Sprawl on my brain, but much later; Greg Egan, another Australian, with his infinitely bleak Transition Dreams; Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. But Dowling for me was the first.)
What I didn't realise at the time is that Shatterwrack was to be just the first of a long cycle of short stories all centering around Tom Tyson, the Blue Captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in Dowling's far-future romanticised post-spiritual-apocalypse Australia where Aboriginal Tribes rule the planet with laser satellites, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and psionic powers, while white-skinned Nationals are exiled to the crumbling coastal cities. The stories - collected in three books in the early 1990s (Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach) - are a love song to the Australian outback and the Aboriginal Dreamtime, filtered through a cocktail of 1980s high-tech cyberpunk and a sort of space-opera-steampunk retro-escapism, dashed with tense and elliptical political intrigue. William Gibson meets Cordwainer Smith by way of Frank Herbert. And they remain probably my favourite science fiction works of all time.
But the stories never ended, they just stopped; they never resolved the mystery of just who Tom Tyson was, why he spent years in the Madhouse, what his three dream-signs (a ship, a star, a woman's face) meant, why ID-5982-J, the old rogue Iseult-Darrian belltree AI, had given Colours to the Seven National Captains in defiance of the Haldanian Order themselves...
Well, that's over now, because the fourth and final Tom Tyson volume, Rynemonn, is out. And it's everything I had hoped for. Eleven short, mostly standalone, stories linked by a framing narrative, and resolving in a glorious, bittersweet, ambiguous battle royale that answers the basic questions of Tom's existence but leaves so much - everything, really - open to the reader's imagination.
If you've never read these stories (and the books are hard to come by, printed by a small press and possibly out of print, I had to get most of mine second-hand), but you love thoughtful, swashbuckling sci-fi (robots! aerostats! kite-powered sandships! mindwar! deathlamps! politics! genetic assassins! laser strikes from orbit for breaking tribal law!) - do your best to get hold of these.
Yes, there's probably also a lot wrong with the Rynosseros universe too, starting with a sort of reverse Western orientalism that both glamourises and fears native people's 'inherent spirituality', and a view of religion as little more than a form of mental warfare, so I'm not sure I could write these myself - but there's also a poetry and warmth that is missing from a lot of fiction today, speculative or otherwise.
One day I'd like to write something as good as these. It's just one of the unattainable goals I have that make me cry.
The Usborne Book of the Future!
What the future year 2000 was going to look like, as seen from 1979.
I actually read this book once. I remember flicking through the sections about bionics and ESP space battles.
This is what the inside of my head still looks like.
Review: The New Dispensation
The New Dispensation, As Presented by THE SPIRIT WORLD Through the Automatic Writings of FRANCES BIRD
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind that I am actually awake.
I have been collecting a small pile of 'interesting' spiritual books in the last couple of years, which are fitting together in a rather startling way. This is one of them. (I'm now reading a 2002 book by Mary - yes, the Mary, as far as I can tell, or at least a very similar Mary to the Mary of Medjugorje - which is even more exciting, but I'll write that one up when I'm done).
Frances Bird is a lady I have been able to find little about on the Internet, which in itself is surprising. There seem to be a set of four fairly large books written by her, of which The New Dispensation is one; I found it in the New Age section of a local second-hand bookstore. This edition is 'Copyright 1988 by LC Publishing Company, California', but the actual text has to date to the World War I era, so I am confused as to why there's not an out-of-copyright edition up on Gutenberg somewhere. There is an 'Editor's Note' from Walter F Prince from the American Society for Psychical Research claiming that the ASPR was very impressed and had requested a copy for their archives.
The book has a curiously old-fashioned, scholarly tone to it, which can make it somewhat dense reading, but it's divided into short essay-like chapters. The general theme is 'the end of the age', and gives what appears to be an overview of a time of increasing change on Earth, starting from World War I. There are a number of theological threads which really need more in-depth examination, but what struck me most is the deep parallels between this, a 'channeled' book, and the Pentecostal 'prophecy' The Harvest.
What keeps being repeated is that this era is a time of transition, a time of increasing personal freedom and individual ethical choice/responsibility, and of increasing connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. As well, the idea that wars and natural disasters are not 'sent from God' so much as created by human intention; that 'everything grows from seeds' and that what happens 'legally' is allowed to exist; but that 'what is visible is ended' in the sense that creative power only happens in the invisible, interpersonal realm of mind; when a war happens, it is because a large number of people have decided to have a war; but at the same time, the physical manifestation of that war is also the end of the matter - the devastation being revealed brings us a chance to change our ideas and decide not to do that in future. This follows on from the idea that we should forgive and hold our pasts lightly because nothing in the physical world 'really exists' in the same sense that mental intentions do; the present is already history, and we do not have to be tied to our history, at every moment we have a chance to 'decide again' and change our plans.
There's a lot more, and I feel like I'm babbling a bit, because putting all this stuff into simple words is difficult, even though the ideas feel enormously simple. Basically what I am looking at here is the sort of 'unified God theory' I have been searching for for years; a map and outline of the spiritual territories describing how things fit together and what the purpose of life on Earth is. It turns out that the common understanding of the Christian gospel is, by and large, correct, but there are a few mistakes that have been picked up by various sects over the years which aren't necessarily helpful; the important issues are love, mercy, kindness and forgiveness rather than religious observance as such; the 'dead' really do watch and interact with the 'living' on Earth, and the whole spectrum of saints/angels watching over us is literally true; while the Christians are right about Jesus being 'the Saviour' (though we don't yet really understand even that bit), God looks at our hearts and is more interested in our attitudes to other people, so it's not about religion per se but about love; the Eastern concepts of 'karma' and 'maya' are also pretty much on the ball, but karma can be shifted (which is where prayer for others, and especially prayer for our enemies, comes in); there is One God, so yay for the montheists, and in some sense that is hard to articulate He is both separate from us *and* a part of us (and we are a part of Him); but there also are a whole lot of saints/ancestors/angels, so yay sort of for the polytheists/pagans; reincarnation in some sense may be true, though again whatever happens there is difficult to map onto existing physical ideas; the spiritual universe is composed of intentionality rather than matter, so time and space are fluid where saints are concerned; the purpose of life is to grow and develop our spiritual capacities, of which love/compassion/kindness is the key; even in Heaven there is regret if we fail to accomplish our personal 'mission' in life; everyone is going to be saved eventually, but there does exist a Hell-like place, which is created by our dark impulses, and you really don't want to spend any time there, so all the stuff about 'saving souls from Hell' is also literally true; 'eternal damnation' is only as eternal as we want it to be; you can repent or grow spiritually after death but it's a lot slower than doing it on Earth; everyone is here because they chose to be, literally, and we also choose our experiences; all suffering is karma (caused by human choice) but not necessarily by our choice; we may have chosen to endure someone else's pain in order to become more compassionate; the glib Evangelical Christian slogan of 'God has a wonderful plan for your life' is in fact literally true; basically relax, we are all living in The Matrix, but it's not run by evil machines but by a loving Father.
Oh yes, and a whole planet-load of trouble is heading our way (like we didn't already know that) - but some of it can be averted if we have compassionate intentions and actions, and what remains is an opportunity to learn new skills and basically buff our stats and level-up.
Review: The UFO Experience
Book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek (1972)
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
I was sixteen miles from home and nobody in sight
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
And what's it gonna take to be back home tonight?
Sneaky Sound System, UFO
Hynek (who died in 1986) is one of the key figures in scientific UFO investigation. An astronomer employed as science consultant for the US Air Force Sign / Grudge / Blue Book investigations, he started out as a debunker but by the end of the 1960s had become a believer in the reality of UFOs as a 'real' phenomenon. This book, his first after the end of Blue Book, is the origin of the term 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' later made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie - as well as 'high strangeness' which often occurs in discussions of UFOs and the paranormal.
The book is probably one of the best of the genre in my opinion. It is basically a statistical analysis of the Blue Book case data (UFO observations from the 1940s-1960s) and breaks them down into categories: Nocturnal Lights (moving points of light at night), Daylight Discs (saucer-shaped objects seen in the daylight), and the three types of Close Encounter (objects seen at less than a couple hundred feet, interference with vehicle ignitions, and 'occupants'). Hynek also assigns a simple two-axis scale of 'probability' (based on number and character of witnesses) and 'strangeness' (number of elements not consistent with known science) for each of these typical cases.
Regardless what you think of the UFO phenomenon itself, Hynek's approach is very careful and instructive for any kind of paranormal investigation. He confines himself to the data, he focuses on the most solid and interesting cases rather than the noise, and he does a minimum of speculation as to causes, merely reporting *what* he believes the phenomenon to be - which is hardly talked about today, compared to the deluge of popular science-fiction *interpretations* of UFOs, and the 'Majestic' and 'Roswell' mythologies. Hynek does not appear to believe there is evidence for any particular 'conspiracy' theory - rather he feels that the US military staff he dealt with were simply psychologically unprepared to deal with a phenomenon that they could not understand, could not control, and wished would disappear - but he is also rather precise in how he uses words, leaving the impression that there is evidence that *could* support the existence of a separate, more highly secret UFO investigation unit than the Blue Book team. He merely says that as far as he knows, *he* wasn't aware of any such unit.
At no time, however, did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation. However, many indications, bits of information, and scraps of conversation could be force-fitted into a yes for the cover-up thesis. Thus, for instance, one time when I inquired into the specifics of a certain case, I was told by the Pentagon's chief scientist that he had been advised by those at a much higher level to tell me 'not to pursue the matter further'. One can make of that what one will.
Hynek however does describe the existence of several 'factions' within Sign - the believers and the skeptics - and he also points at the shift from Sign to Grudge (February 11, 1949) as being the point where he believed the project moved into full-on debunking mode. If one were to speculate about the 'UFO believers' within USAF setting up a shadow group, it would seem that the interesting decisions would have been made in 1948. (But of course even if there *were* classified UFO investigations, it does not follow that they necessarily were any more successful at making sense of the puzzle.)
I was interested to notice that Hynek also outright admits that there were 'UFO simulation' exercises conducted in order to track public UFO reports; he considers the failure of these to generate large number of false UFO reports very strong evidence for the UFO.
It is interesting to note, as substantiation of the theory of the credibility of reliable witnesses, that in those instances in which 'fake' UFOs have been deliberately contrived to test public reaction - hot air balloons and flares dropped from airplanes are examples - the resulting UFO reports were not only invariably far fewer than the experimenter expected but of interest more for what they did not report than what they did. Occasionally a fanciful UFO report is generated as a result of such a test, but it fails to meet the test of acceptance because it does not square with what others have reported about the same event - often solely because of its internal inconsistency and incoherence.
This seems to be something confirmed by Jacques Valee's 1993 'Pentacle Memorandum', but I don't see why he is so angry with Hynek about this given the admission above - Hynek gives the impression of always being careful about what he discusses, and respectful of confidentiality agreements, but doesn't ever seem to outright lie or even wilfully misdirect. On the whole, of the whole UFO scene, Hynek still comes out as being the most honest, up-front and frankly scientific of anyone, and I think the attitude of a particular researcher toward him is a good touchstone for how sane they are (or whether they have a hidden agenda).
Tired
I'm tired. Bone-deep, soul-tired. It's been creeping for over a year. I have a week off work in the hope I can recharge. But it's not really like a holiday because I still have commitments I can't walk away from. Or have chosen not to let drop in a flaming heap. I guess it all comes down to personal choice, but it still sure feels like I'm boxed in.
Reading New Age books doesn't always help, either. There are ones that resonate with me, and there are ones that... don't. Sometimes one will seem okay, will say things I largely agree with, but still give me the screaming yeemies - I mean the deep, oh-god-I'm-really-going-to-hell-for-sure-now kind of spiritual terror that I don't really know how to convey to people who haven't grown up in a fundamentalist household. I really don't understand how the heck this works, and I'm not entirely willing to chalk it all down to Those Nasty Fundamentalists, because when it comes down to it, I actually do believe there *are* such things as fundamentals of the faith, non-negotiables, I don't actually view the word 'Conservative' as an insult, and this sort of belief puts me offside with rather a lot of New Age spiritual guides and teachers, as well as maybe 98% of political activists.
The latest book that gave me the heebie-jeebies was 'Emmanuel's Book II: The Choice for Love'. The weird thing is, that I actually do agree with most of what 'Emmanuel' says. Most of it. And yet...
The New Age idea that scares me the most is that 'there is no external morality as such, anything you do is right if you do it out of love/compassion. When it comes to sex, sleep with whoever you want, break up when you want, it all helps you advance. Abortion/euthanasia is fine if you mean well. Everyone chooses their own path.' While this is quite probably true... as far as it goes... and quite possibly Christian... as far as it goes... (after all, Christ did hang out with 'publicans and sinners', defended prostitutes, overruled the morality systems of his day)... it grates with me to the point of inducing a feeling of intense physical illness, because there's an instinct deep in me that shouts, 'But there *is* big-M Morality, there *is* big-T Truth, it is *not* all subjective, the old-school Jewish attitudes towards, eg, sexuality and euthanasia are more basically correct than the modern liberal consensus of 'anything freely chosen by consenting adults is intrinsically moral', and even if I can't figure out how or if this weird old idea applies to other people, it still seems very important to me that I integrate morality into my life, and there are things that I do not want to do even if supposedly and allegedly I am free to do them - and I believe by making this choice I am doing something more than merely exercising personal taste, nor am I being a knee-jerk reactionary blindly opposing the cosmic forces of progress and light'.
This instinct seems to put me in a very lonely position, because quite frankly I'm out of step with both conservative Christianity and consensus pop-spiritual culture on a lot of social issues, and I'm not sure how I'm ever going to reconcile such opposing forces so that my head stops exploding and my heart stops breaking. There is a deep psychic pain in me from this out-of-step-ness that I've almost got used to being there, but hurts like heck when I stop to think about it. And yet I'd much rather it be there, because it feels to me like it's representing something important that should not be forgotten. And it feels like somehow I'm carrying it mostly alone, and I don't understand why.
And I wonder why I feel tired so much.
As a sort of hair-of-the-dog antidote, I read some Frances Bird, who seems to have been doing automatic writing around World War I, as part of a cluster of similar writers (mostly women, apparently). I generally seem to have had the best experiences reading material from this era, as it seems to be more aligned with my Christian intuitions, and puts emphasis on the idea of self-discipline as well as that of freedom. There's also a kind of, for want of a better word, solidity, a sort of intellectual and religious rigour, to both the writing and the thought-forms from this older stuff that I don't really get from a lot of the post-WW2 material. A sense of God's role as a real Father and Creator, separate from us and transcendent, in a way that's not present in much of the later stuff, which tends to major on interconnection, immanence and 'we're all God really', even though it's friendly and happy enough.
(I find it interesting that Frances Bird is almost invisible on the interwebs. Possibly it's because although she seems to have written in the pre-copyright era, the books I've seen were republished in the 1980s, and so will still be locked up for a while.)
By comparison, I tried glancing at Neale Donald Walsch's 'Conversations With God', not for the first time, and try as I might, I just couldn't stomach it. Maybe it's the record of a genuine personal spiritual experience, but as channelled material, it just seems incredibly... shallow. And very trite and pop-spiritual in its teaching. I suppose people have got something out of it, but it really doesn't do anything for me.
Bohm and ACIM: Holiness and Wholeness
I'm reading David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and it's interesting the very strong parallels between his thought and the ideas in A Course In Miracles (and in Mary Baker Eddy). He is very concerned with fragmentation versus unity - ACIM is concerned with separation versus unity (and goes so far as to identify this with the Christian doctrine of sin).
Some quotes from the first chapter:
It is instructive to consider that the word 'health' in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word 'hale' meaning 'whole': that is to say, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew 'shalem'. Likewise, the English root 'holy' is based on the same root as 'whole'. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.
...
It is important to give some emphasis to this point. For example, some might say: 'Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc. are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.' But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of the whole to man's action., guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man's approach to reality then may be whole, and so the whole response will be whole.
...
As has been indicated, however, men who are guided by such a fragmentary self-world view cannot, in the long run, do other than to try in their actions to break themselves and the world into pieces, corresponding to their general mode of thinking. Since, in the first instance, fragmentation is an attempt to extend the analysis of the world into separate parts beyond the domain in which to do this is appropriate, it is in effect an attempt to divide what is really indivisible. In the next step such an attempt will lead us also to attempt to unite what is not really unitable. This can be seen especially clearly in terms of groupings of people in society (political, economic, religious, etc.). The very act of forming such a group tends to create a sense of division and separation of the members from the rest of the world, but, because the members are really connected with the whole, this cannot work. Each member has in fact a somewhat different connection, and sooner or later this shows itself as a difference between him and other members of the group. Whenever men divide themselves from the whole of society and attempt to unite by identification within a group, it is clear that the group must eventually develop internal strife, which leads to a breakdown of its unity...
...
So fragmentation is in essence a confusion around the question of difference and sameness (or one-ness), but the clear perception of these categories is necessary in every phase of life. To be confused about what is different and what is not, is to be confused about everything.
I'd love to drop in some corresponding quotes from ACIM and Science & Health to point out the parallels, but don't have time right now. Suffice to say that the ideas which leap out at me here are 'the world is really one, but at a level beyond what we can sense', 'illusory perception of fragmentation' being (probably) the same thing as 'sin', and very strongly, the idea that there is only really one choice or classification to be made in this world: between things that are different and things that are the same, and we can't easily see this at all (possibly not at all without external help, which, however, is readily available as soon as we relax and look away from our immediate surroundings).
(ACIM/Eddy, I think, would follow this up by saying: everything that is created by God is holy and pure and one; everything created by sin or the ego is false and illusory and complicated and divided against itself; but somehow the difference between the two is not the line between mind and matter, but between two ways of seeing our world. If we choose Christ's vision, we see God in all things; if we choose our own vision, we see God nowhere.)
The Algebraist
The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punchball.
This book gets cool points just for using the word "archimandrite".
I have decided that I rather like Iain M Banks when he's not working in his trademark Culture universe. The Culture books I've read so far have never rung true for me: a society where AIs run everything and never crash, while humans are sort of pets, yet perfectly happy, seems sort of a cop-out. The Algebraist on the other hand is a lot of fun. It's unashamedly widescreen Space Opera - a galaxy billions of years old, with a wide spectrum of races who live at vastly different scales and speeds, about five separate factions vying for power, a billion-year-old secret McGuffin which could Change Everything, a society of very alien aliens, and lots of things exploding in ways surprisingly consistent with the current consensus laws of physics. (Relativistic asteroids are one of Banks' favourite offensive weapons, it seems).
Oh, and it's told from the point of view of a human archeologist - a bit of a rebel and a youngster at a mere couple hundred years old - who spends half the book inside a personalised spacecraft inside a gas giant, interacting with the natives who are kind of like a cross between squids, wheels and crabs, who live for billions of years, and who have a civilisation based around collecting books and fighting sort of historical re-enactment mini-wargames (with live weapons).
Plot? Well, you need wormholes to get around the galaxy. A large chunk of the galaxy's 'holes are still offline after the last war (a mere few million years back) - it takes between dozens to hundreds of years to travel at sublight speeds - and the current consensus civilisation, the amusingly Byzantine Mercatoria, has its hands busy fighting both the uncivilised Beyonders, and various dropout cults such as the Epiphany Five Disconnect (home of our Chad Vader-ish villain, Luseferous. He likes blowing up planets, but he's a little out of his league when it comes to the galaxy's real hard lads. Invading 117 stellar systems is about the level of 'loud annoying domestic dispute' in this milieu.)
Meanwhile, a little system in the middle of nowhere that happens to be home to an archeological station researching the enigmatic gas-giant Dwellers (the squid-wheel-crab people) stumbles on The Ultimate McGuffin - a long-lost epic poem titled 'The Algebraist' which supposedly reveals the location of the Dwellers' secret private wormhole network - which is the sort of information entire civilisations would start a galactic war over. Or at least invade a system for. Which all sides then proceed to do, and wacky antics ensue.
The Sense of Being Stared At
It's time for some belated reviews.
The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake is another interesting little piece in the puzzle of religion, spirituality and the paranormal.
Sheldrake has become infamous for his theory of 'morphic resonance' - which I'm not too invested in either way or the other - but what I find particularly interesting about his work is that in investigating paranormal phenomena (particularly telepathy-like occurences) he does not focus only on humans, but also on animals. If his findings are to be believed (and I see no reason why they shouldn't be, if you believe any of this stuff) then animals are at least as good as, and in many cases better than, humans at second sight or sixth sense. And that certainly fits with the pop mythology. It's a cliche in ghost stories that 'the cat/dog reacted strangely'. Oscar the hospice cat is a current example. This raises interesting questions about the nature of consciousness and the soul: like intelligence (or potentially sentience), it doesn't appear to have a hard cut-off point between species, if dogs are able to tell at a distance when their owner is planning to come home. An African Grey parrot featured in the book is apparently able to read its owner's mind.
(This opens all sorts of weird-science ideas to me. Could we use African Grey parrots in space missions, using telepathic instructions? If a parrot is able to access the psi dimension, which presumably means it has a soul, then what about a planaria, or an e. coli? If we either a) get enough computing power to simulate an organism at the atomic level, or b) develop a teleportation technology (remember, we can already destructively 'teleport' whole atoms, preserving quantum state) and get to the point where we can teleport living things, and then want to determine 'does the process of simulation/teleportation destroy the soul' - well then, don't bother waiting until you can send through a human or even a great ape - just run a psi-attuned African Grey through! And see if it behaves the same afterwards.)
One of Sheldrake's experiments involves the power of gaze: he believes that humans and animals have the ability to somehow detect when they are being looked at intently (or rather, I expect, that it is about the detection of the intention itself - the idea that the universe is constructed primarily of intentions rather than objects recurs a lot in the mystics and in the Gospels - the parable of the Widow's Mite, for example). I personally have never noticed that I have any particular ability to attract the attention of people by either looking at them or concentrating on them. In fact I feel like I'm spectacularly under-endowed in that department. But the idea is intriguing and it would be easy to run the fairly simple experiments he describes.
Sheldrake also has a fairly weird-sounding take on how human (and animal) vision works; he feels that (in accordance with ancient belief) it involves the eye sending out 'rays' to the subject, rather than the processing of incoming photons. This makes absolutely no physical sense, but it does have a certain kind of logic if you view the universe as a computational or simulation system, where the value of a quantity is not calculated until there is a request for it: in fact, this is exactly how the CGI methodology of 'ray tracing' works. I am not sure if this is precisely how Sheldrake is arguing, but I can see how (if attention is a real thing, at an underlying 'spiritual' layer to the universe) focusing one's mind on a distant object - by means of 'paying attention' to the signal path of a physical receptor - could send some kind of underlying 'probe' back up the line of sight to the object being studied. So even 'passive' sensors could leave an 'active' trace on the universe at a subliminal level. Which is a pretty freaky thing when you think about it. It's the sort of weird aliveness we take for granted in computing - that merely by interrogating an object you can alert it of your presence - but we moderns tend to live under the reassuring assumption that the outside, physical universe is 'dead' and doesn't notice when we pay attention to it, until we start bringing out the sharp sticks to stand well back and poke it with.
This 'deadness' is of course what religion has always argued strongly against - religion is all about the universe being alive, and is why the existence of religion seems so weird and unnatural to the modern mind - but intellectually subscribing to that idea is one thing. Becoming terrifyingly aware that everything you do, in fact every thought you think generates real and literal interactions with the cosmos - not limited in any way by any of the usual physical quantities like space, time, energy or matter - is something else. What does that awareness do to science? If our very breath, less than a breath, stirs worlds - how can we move, how can we possibly have any space to exist as separate beings? Science is all about making sure our sticks are sufficiently sharp and sufficiently long and then poking at will - if it turns out that you can't make a stick long enough to isolate you from karma, how can we move without hurting ourselves?
Or put a little more bluntly: If we can't vivisect a cat without scarring our soul, how do we develop new eco-friendly detergents to replace the ones that kill fish?
(The answer would seem to be: we're not separate beings and it is impossible for us to be. And that an acceptance of deep interaction, wired-in at the lowest levels of physics and sub-meta-physics, does us no harm. And that we have to accept somehow that there exists something more than karma, more than cause-and-effect blowback: forgiveness, release, repentance, centering, whatever it is that allows us to somehow realign ourselves with the True World. And that somehow there are two kinds of science, knowledge of the outer world, and knowledge of our inner selves, and our greatest ignorance seems to lie in the second.)
