Understand our Universe and our physical reality - Lent 2022, Day 12

Not long ago, certainly in my childhood, it was believed that science had all the answers. There were a few loose ends to tidy up (such as reconciling Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics into one unified theory, and determining whether we had a steady-state Universe or had it come into being with the Big Bang). But generally, reductionist materialism was the orthodoxy, and to believe in anything else was just cognitive dissonance - wishful thinking, pseudoscience. 

Today, scientists will admit there's more and more that they know they don't know. The very boundaries of physics are being questioned. Is our Universe one, or are there several universes, or many, or an infinite number of them? How did the Big Bang happen - and what came before it, and how will our Universe end? What is consciousness? An illusion? An emergent property of the evolving brain? Or a fundamental property of matter, along with mass and charge? Why are the fundamental physical constants as they are? Had they been even slightly different, we wouldn't be here to observe a Universe that seems to be fine-tuned to accommodate us.

Quantum mechanics is approaching its hundredth birthday, and while it works, providing the theoretical and practical underpinnings for the past century's technological advances, understanding it remains contentious. No fewer than fifteen different interpretations vie for general acceptance.

Cosmology is in a similar state, especially when we consider philosophical cosmology - what is the first cause of the Universe? Why does it exist, rather than nothing? What are the ultimate, irreducible material components of the Universe? Could a different Universe exist with different physical constants to those that govern our Universe? Does it serve to have a purpose, or is it just there? What is the totality of our Universe - or indeed all universes?

Physics gives a broad choice of possibilities. The multiverse hypothesis posits the existence of more than one universe, from few to an infinite number - call them what you will - alternative universes, parallel universes. Throw into the mix string theory - in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. The scientific jury is still out.

Over the past year, I've been watching an increasing number of popular-science videos, such as the Royal Institution lectures, PBS's series Space Time, Sabine Hossenfelder, and History of the Universe, as well as the science episodes of Closer to Truth. I am particularly interested by those videos about the subjects where science is still uncertain - and I can see just how divergent scientists currently are when it comes to the great unknowns. The phase of the Big Bang known as inflation and the conformal cyclic cosmology are two that I've recently followed, theories that divide science.

So - we know that we don't know where we are. In the one Universe, or one of many? In its one lifespan, or in a repeating cycle? We also know that we don't know how we got here. We still don't know for certain how life began. 

But I feel, I intuit - and have done since childhood - that there is a purpose why we are here.

This time last year:
Faith and knowledge

This time two years ago:
Religion and feeling good

This time four years ago:
Perivale Triptych

This time 11 years ago:
Cycling and recycling

This time 12 years ago:
Winter still holding out in the forest

This time 13 years ago:
Little car, huge price

This time 14 years ago:
Old school Łódź

Aliens, angels and daemons - Lent 2022, Day 11

The biggest single thing that has changed in my thinking since last year's Lenten reflections has been the mounting body of evidence that craft from other worlds are here, on our planet. The report to the US Congress from the Director of the Office of National Intelligence made public on 25 June 2021 was revelatory. The US military admitted that it has recordings of unidentified physical craft not of any known human-made origin. This was followed up by the Gillibrand-Rubio amendment to the National Defense Appropriation Act for 2022, which required the Pentagon to log all data pertaining to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and release a report by 31 October of this year.

Even a cursory examination of what's happening - from the 2017 release of the so-called 'TicTac' video on - suggests that simply ignoring the issue of unidentified flying objects is unwise. Scientists who for decades have ridiculed UFOs are beginning to approach the subject with a more open mind - Avi Loeb, astronomy professor at Harvard being one example, Stanford's Garry P. Nolan being another. 

There's a lot going on, if you're prepared to look. In essence, the US military now admits to having many documented cases of UAP recorded on multiple sensor platforms (radar, infra-red cameras, eyewitness accounts from aircrew etc) that it is unable to explain away in rational terms (data anomalies, digital artefacts, Venus low in the sky, flocks of geese, weather balloons etc). This leaves the possibility of adversaries' technology (highly unlikely), US technology (unlikely given the presence of UAP in restricted airspace, posing a danger to pilots) or alien craft.

So this leaves the last explanation - craft from other worlds - as looking increasingly probable.

What are the spiritual implications of the existence of other beings (who could just as well be from another solar system, another time or another dimension)? Why are they here, visiting Earth - what is their purpose? Are they benign, malignant or just neutral observers? Assuming the Pentagon's so-called 'five observables' (instantaneous acceleration/trans-medium travel/no visible form of lift (wings/ rotors)/no visible exhaust/some form of cloaking), they are beyond our current understanding of physics, and may be demonstrating technology thousands of years ahead of ours. So what is their understanding of the Universe - indeed, of consciousness, of life, of a Deity?

Where do they fit into humanity's views of God and Heaven? 

Consciousness is the key here. Imagine beings that are millions of years in advance of us, who can guide their craft by mind power. ("Internet of things? We have telepathy of things.") Tapping into the fields of quantum spin to will desired outcomes from out of myriad possibilities. Powers that we can barely imagine, the result of being millennia of evolution of consciousness ahead of us. Where do we fit in? 

Constructing a cosmology that accepts the presence of alien life here on Earth will require a shift in our perceptions greater than those required when Copernicus proved that mankind was not at the centre of the Universe, but that our planet was one of several orbiting our sun. And far greater than those shifts required when Hubble stated that our galaxy is merely one of billions in the known universe

The Fermi Paradox ('if the Drake Equation is correct, where is everybody?') is explainable in terms of the North Sentinel Islands, inhabited by indigenous people who have been protected by the Indian government. A 'no-contact' policy has been enforced, and no one is to approach within three miles of the islands, allowing the North Sentinelese to live without any external interference.

This would seem to be the case with alien entities and mankind An exception - perhaps - being that aliens might intervene to prevent planetary destruction by nuclear holocaust. This theory is proposed by those ufologists who point to numerous historical sightings of UFOs over nuclear weapons bases.

I can accept the notion of an alien presence on earth, and even tales of alien abductions of humans and some form of hybrid alien-human breeding programme. The classic 'greys' - four foot tall, big heads and eyes, skinny arms and legs - could be biological drones, von Neumann machines, built of local material (human DNA), to be sent off into space to explore distant star systems. We are clueless. Maybe our governments know more than they can let on to, for fear of social disturbance. One part of that disturbance would be to our science - the other part, to our religions.

This time last year:
Reconciling science and spirituality

This time two years ago:
The metaphysical journey as I see it

This time five years ago:
Spirit of Age, spirit of Place

This time six years ago:
The crux of the matter

This time eight years ago:
10,000 steps is a lot for one day

This time nine years ago:
Bary mleczne - Warsaw's cheap eateries

This time 11 years ago:
Old Town, another prospect

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Śródmieście - commuters' staging post

This time 13 years ago:
Filthy ul. Poloneza

This time 14 years ago:
A sight that heralds the coming of spring

Where was God in Auschwitz? Lent 2022: Day Ten

The title of a book by philosopher Josef Siefert encompasses the theological angst that many religious believers experienced in the aftermath of WW2. The horrors of war - in particular the Holocaust, the industrialised mass-murder of an entire people - sowed doubt in the minds of millions of believers. "How could a compassionate God allow for such evil to happen?" 

I see God as compassionate (Why are we here at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we conscious of ourselves and our place in the Cosmos?). But I don't see God as omnipotent and omniscient - only as omnipresent, within the fields of waves/particles permeating the Universe. God is unfolding together with the Universe, not perfect, but tending towards perfection. God - a direction towards an end-point, God as a purpose, God as connection. Certainly not an anthropomorphic God, in the form of a bearded man. 

But if God is everywhere - is God there, where evil is? 

We may consider our minds to be the most complex - indeed the most glorious - things known to us in all the known Universe, but in reality our understanding of ultimate reality is on a par with a cat's understanding of electricity. A smart cat can associate the touch of a human's finger on that white square on the wall with darkness turning into light or vice versa. But how electrons pass through a copper wire all the way from a power station via transformers to power a light-emitting diode is utterly incomprehensible to the feline mind. And so is the Divine Cosmic Mystery to us - we can but intuit that it exists - but how, and why God functions - is a matter of conjecture, the most profound question for us.

I shall be delving deeper into cosmological models and the place for a divinity within them during this Lenten series of blog posts. Science and cosmology do give me succour at this troubled time - looking up at a starry night or listening to a podcast about subatomic physics gives me a certainty that there's more to life than the unremitting human tragedy just across the border right now. Doubt creeps up; it is not physical fear but metaphysical fear that an impending Auschwitz can destroy our faith in goodness, and in an ultimately compassionate God.

My subjective peace of mind has all but evaporated, and with it the nagging anxiety that objectively things will get much, much worse before they get better - and for the first time in many years; it is the doubt that maybe the power of prayer cannot overcome evil. Innocent people killed - loss of human potential, lives cut short - not due to misfortunate accidents or illness, but because of evil. What happens to their souls - their non-material consciousness? I'd like to believe they will reincarnate... a wish, or a prayer?

This time last year:
Near-death experiences - what do they tell us?

This time two years ago:
Build your own religion - choosing your rites and rituals

This time four years ago:
From the origins of conscious life to us and beyond

This time seven years ago:
Underground connection, Świętokrzyska

This time ten years ago:
Nikkor 45mm f2.8 pancake lens tested

This time 11 years ago:
Old Town, another prospect

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Śródmieście - commuters' staging post

This time 13 years ago:
Filthy ul. Poloneza

This time 14 years ago:
A sight that heralds the coming of spring

Precognition and Willing the Future - Lent 2022, Day Nine

Can you tell the future? Are you blessed with foresight? Do you sometimes have intuition regarding some forthcoming event that turns out to be correct? Or a prophetic dream? Which well-known astrologer publicly predicted the outbreak of Covid-19, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine (clue: none). Someone is bound to find a quatrain written by Nostradamus that predicts both, by engaging in verbal backflips to make predictions made four and half centuries ago fit the facts.

Well, I certainly didn't predict (if anything, I was two days out) - but I did feel an encroaching air of unease towards the end of 2019, in an elegy to a passing decade that was a tipping point between an upward and downward arc of history. Unlike many in Western Europe who blithely dismissed the growing threat posed by Putin, I could see it coming, as past posts going back many years on this blog atest. But this is merely my assessment of information, based on history - politically, nothing good ever comes out of Russia. Fearing Putin isn't the result of my precognition or foresight, rather it's hindsight.

Though there may have been a general sense of mounting anxiety, other than having a vague feeling that things have been good too long, no definite prior knowledge that Russia would launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine on the morning of Thursday 24 February 2022.

Pinning down events and dates in the future is truly a paranormal power that few can actually prove to possess. Usually, clairvoyants are deft at using similar sleight-of-hand tricks that stage magicians deploy - good storytelling skills and selective use of facts. None have passed the test of repeatability and proof that science demands.

It's one thing to foretell the future, another thing to ward off personal misfortunes by precluding the possibility of them befalling you, and yet quite another to draw out of the future a positive outcome by force of will. Visualising peace and contentment in place of bloodshed and fear. Prayer, in effect.

Praying not for ego satisfaction. Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, sings "Lord, who made the lion and the lamb/You decreed I should be what I am/Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/If I were a wealthy man?" The answer is - yes, it would spoil some vast eternal plan. Tevye wants a big house in the centre of the town, and above all, for "the most important men in town would come to fawn on me!"

This is not how prayer works - the Lord does not heed such venal petitions. Prayers for peace is what the world needs right now; so let us pray...

This time last year:
Muscle memory and mindfulness

This time two years ago:
Choosing the music for your religion

This time three years ago:
Photo round-up of the week

This time four years ago:
Do the laws of nature govern or describe our universe?

This time nine years ago:
A selfless faith

This time ten years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time 11 years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time 12 years ago:
Half way through Lent

This time 14 years ago:
Spring much closer

Body and soul - Lent 2022: Day Eight

I look after my health because I want a long life. I want a long life to fulfil my potential as a human being; to gather as much understanding as possible - and to share it my understanding with others on a similar journey, learning from each other, as we go.

As regular readers will have gathered, over the past eight years I have systemised my approach to health and fitness. Daily exercise, controlled alcohol intake, plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, and a diet that has virtually cut out all sugar other than the fructose in fruit. Dry January and Lent mean 77 statutory booze-free days; each remaining week of the year should have a minimum of two consecutive booze-free days too. Drink (mostly wine for occasions, beer on hot summer days, spirits in the run-up to Christmas) is now limited to an average of 14 units a week across the year - in line with UK National Health Service guidelines. And way down from my 33.4 units per week on average in 2014, when I first started counting!

Health requires constant gratitude and internal feedback - not ignoring the slightest symptom, and a mind-over-matter approach. It has worked for me so far - should I ever get complacent or boastful, I am sure karma will step in. Health and happiness - inner happiness - are correlated. While brushing my teeth each day I give thanks for my health, and pray for the health of those near to me, especially those who are seriously ill.

My approach to fitness is changing with age. No longer am I focusing on those exercises that build the body into something the ego is proud of or wants to show off. Rather, it is focused on avoiding problems later in life. Sit-ups to maintain flexibility of the spine. Holding the plank (three sessions with short rest between) - up from an average of 3 minutes 40 seconds in 2019, to 4 minutes 11 seconds in 2020 to 4 minutes 21 seconds last year and an average of 5 minutes 11 seconds across the first 66 days of this year. This is an essential exercise to maintain internal or core muscles within the torso strong. Back extensions (two sets of eight a day) work on the same set of muscles but in the other direction. Last year I also started doing squats, partly to keep knees supple, but also to ensure balance. Weights? I've stopped building biceps, and stick to exercises to look after my rotator cuffs. Push-ups and pull-ups I stick with for the sake of habit, but I'm no longer trying to break records here.

Consistency is important - if I drop a set of exercises and return to the same set three or four days later, I find I've already lost it. Use it or lose it - with age, muscle strength diminishes faster. So keeping it going regularly is essential to maintenance of strength and indeed suppleness, consistency rather than setting and breaking new records.

Walking remains key. A good 90-minute walk, now often aided with Nordic-walking poles, is a daily must. Not only a health-and-fitness thing, but a time to contemplate and commune with the environment. Sitting down is bad for us, yet we do so much of it. We evolved to walk, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would walk on average 10-12km a day. Since 1 January 2014, I have walked a daily average of 11,000 paces, which, with my 80cm pace, is around 8.8km or 5.3 miles. A day, every day.

Healthy soul in healthy body. For life.

But here's a question - would you rather swap a fit and healthy body within which sits a troubled mind, for a body immobile in a wheelchair or bedridden - but in a serene and blissful state?

*******************

As of today, I have given over the use of my działka to Ukrainian refugee family from Kyiv - a mother,  her18-month-old son, and her mother-in-law. They can stay there as long as they need to, amid the peaceful orchards and woods.

This time last year:

But where are you really from?

This time two years ago:
Buildings and the sense of the Mystical

This time three years ago:
Face to face with Schrodinger's Cat

This time seven years ago:
Opening of Line 2 of Warsaw's Metro

This time nine years ago:
A selfless faith

This time ten years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time 11 years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time 12 years ago:
Halfway through Lent

This time 14 years ago:
Spring much closer

Monism, dualism and non-dualism - Lent 2022: Day Seven

An important part of this Lenten series of posts is to re-examine my spiritual beliefs in light of everything I have learnt since last year's Lent. In this post, I revisit to a theme I have explored in past Lents (here and here) - namely whether the Universe is exclusively physical, or whether there is also a non-physical, or metaphysical aspect to it. Or indeed, whether it is neither and both...

Cartesian or Mind-Body Dualism posits that alongside all that is material is the realm of the mind, the non-material soul; Christians, for example, hold that God resides outside the material world, as do our souls. After our deaths, our souls will find themselves in heaven, with God. The two realms are separate, intersecting in our minds.

Monism - physicalism - holds that everything is material, there is nothing above or beyond that. Our consciousness is merely an emergent property of our evolution - any thought of souls or God is wishful thinking and pseudoscientific bunk - "woo woo," to use the term coined by scientific sceptic James Randi.

Yet there is a growing number of spiritually inclined philosophers and scientists who talk instead of 'non-dualism' - ruling out an immaterial heavenly realm, while seeing consciousness as an intrinsic property of the Universe, alongside mass and charge. Non-dualism has its roots in Hinduism and Buddhism, stressing the unity of body and soul, rather than ruling out the latter as reductionist materialism does.

This is very much the way of my thinking. God (which I see as the guiding principle, the unfolding, the destination, the purpose of the Universe) is of this Universe, not of a separate realm. 

But what is material? What is matter? Physics is edging towards a view that matter is a property of specific vibrations within fields that make up space time. At the molecular level, we have an intuitive appreciation of what matter is - it's stuff. Atoms. But go into the atom and you enter a strange world of charged particles that also act as waves demonstrating wave-particle duality, the particles being made up of quarks and force-fields (gluons) - all of which is difficult to grasp from our human scale.

Science has not made much progress in unravelling the secrets within the atom since the predicted discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. Ten years without major breakthroughs in particle physics, after a century of triumph after triumph in scientific discovery, suggests that something is missing. I would posit that consciousness should be seen as an integral part of the cosmos, a property as inherent to matter as mass and charge.

The big question is whether consciousness is everywhere, or emerging only within intelligent nodes at those points inhabited by our minds - or in lesser forms of life - plants, amoeba, bacteria - or even in a basic, elemental form, in inanimate matter. 

I hold that God is of this Universe, within this Universe, the destination of this Universe - and the reason for this Universe.

This time last year:
Who are you - no, who are you really?

This time last year:
Find your own holy places

This time two years ago:
An introduction to quantum physics

This time three years ago:
Right and wrong in science and philosophy

This time five years ago:

Free thinking at the Second Vatican Council

This time seven years ago:
Getting ul. Karczunkowska ready for Biedronka opening

This time eight years ago: 

God's own risk

This time nine years ago:
A third of the way through Lent

This time ten years ago:
Balancing surfeit and shortage

This time 11 years ago:
Congruent consciousness

This time 13 years ago:
Intimations of spring

Do you believe in life after death? Lent 2022, Day Six

Nearly everyone would frame this as a simple yes/no question. Either physical death is the end of our subjective consciousness - or it isn't. But what if it "sort-of" isn't? What if our consciousness, after we die, gets reincarnated into another body - but then has no memory of its past life? 

Since last year's Lent, I have watched many episodes of Closer to Truth, in which presenter Robert Lawrence Kuhn seeks answers to his personal quest for certainty as to what will happen to him after death. Over 20 years, he has had thousands of conversations with philosophers, physicists, theologians, cosmologists, neurologists and mathematicians, seeking answers. None satisfy him. He would like to believe that his consciousness will transcend his physical death - but doubt reigns in his mind. 

Personally, I feel that Robert Lawrence Kuhn's 'ask' is too great - he seeks nothing less than the full-on continuation of his ego. But I don't think it works that way at all - based on my experience.

My personal view of life after death is that the only proof you get of having lived before is sparse - the occasional flashback, a significant dream every now and then - but little more. In my case, it's enough to give me certainty that this is how it looks. The flashbacks, I believe, intensify in flavour in each passing incarnation. How much ego you carried with you to your past-life death (as opposed to pure consciousness) affects the quality of your afterlife.

You will not, seconds after emerging from your mother's birth canal, gaze around the delivery ward in the maternity hospital and think triumphantly to yourself, "Hey hey! I'm back again!". Rather, it comes a slow realisation, throughout childhood, that regular experiences of anomalous familiarity may signify a previous existence. I call these 'exomnesia' (memory from the outside) or 'xenomnesia' (foreign memory) events - flashbacks. For me, a life-long phenomenon, consistent in quality, and sense of place and time. Like current life qualia memories - but clearly not from this life. What subjective proof do you have that you were once a child? Objectively, snapshots from that time - but otherwise, it's all to do with memory. And if memories of early childhood - what about memories from previous lives?

However, despite my own convictions as to this phenomenon, I am sure that not everyone will experience this - we here in the West we have been conditioned not to indulge in such 'fantasies', both by the Christian religion and by materialist/ reductionist science. Even so, a strong message I received one evening last summer, is this: "Everyone who genuinely seeks God shall find God in their own way." Reincarnation may not necessarily be your way - but if you seek, you shall indeed find.

[In case you've not seen any episodes of Closer to Truth, here's the conversation between Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Robert Bilder about personal identity persisting over time (actually recorded in 2013) that was uploaded to YouTube today.]

This time last year:

Pleasure - put it off or have it now?

This time two years ago:
Dreams and the Afterlife

This time four years ago:
Free Will and Quantum Mechanics

This time five years ago:
Good thinking captured - the importance of jotting it down

This time six years ago:
Spirit of place and our own spirituality

This time seven years ago:
Poland's road death toll falls but remains too high

This time ten years ago:
My photos turned into beautiful watercolours

This time 11 years ago:
Silver birches and blue skies

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)

This time 14 years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)

The Ego and Evil: Lent 2022: Day Five

How does the spiritually inclined person cope with a manifestation of evil like Putin? The very existence of an individual who can unleash mass-murder upon a nation, who orders the bombardment of residential districts, must raise theological questions.

Personally, I don't believe in Satan or the Devil - an equal and opposite 'anti-God'. Neither do I believe in a God who is omniscient or omnipotent. In the fullness of time, I believe, God will become omniscient and omnipotent, but that is the ultimate destination of the Universe, when God is in All, All is in God, and total awareness triumphs. God tends towards Good, God's Universe, a work in progress.

In the meanwhile, as the Universe is unfolding, we totter along on the edge of Chaos, on the edge of Misfortune. Yet unlike an earth tremor or volcano, a plague or some other natural disaster, Putin has agency. He has choice. He could have carried on running Russia as a miserable captured state, his oligarchs plundering the nation as they had done for years. But the model was running out of steam; he felt his personal obsession with rebuilding the Soviet Empire needed speeding up. He gave the order to invade Ukraine feeling that his armed forces were invincible and that Ukrainian people would willingly return to Mother Russia's bosom. He was wrong on both counts. Now, like Hitler ordering scorched earth, Putin is lashing out at civilians on a massive scale.

How can one take measure of such evil and fit it in one's worldview? I have spent the vast part of my life in the belief that history was on an upward trajectory, towards justice, away from depraved barbarity.

Is evil merely absence of good, or something else? 

The Ego unchallenged, any top dog in a hierarchy, surrounded by sycophants, unrestrained by any moral compass, any sense of 'win-win' -  is likely to behave like Putin. History has seen many thousand Putins - deranged megalomaniacs, and yet to date; apart from Stalin and Kim Jong-Un, none had nuclear weapons. Many died at the hands of their own people - Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, President Samuel Doe of Liberia. Mad and evil though they were, they had not the power to threaten Europe or America. But at the sick heart of each, it was the ego that prevailed over consciousness; it was all about 'me'. Unrestrained egos - the source of all human evil.

Good has had a habit of triumphing over evil - albeit with a huge and tragic cost in human lives before being overcome. I do believe in the power of prayer for a overall positive outcome; sincere, focused prayer - that good should overcome the misfortune of Putin's evil life, and quickly.

This time last year:

Possibilianism

This time two years ago:
To Dudeists and those who have built their own religions

This time three years ago:
Lent 2019 - Looking for the Wonder of It All

This time four years ago:
That was the winter that was

This time five years ago:
Self-discipline, habits and Growth

This time eight years ago:
Putin - tactical genius, strategic failure

This time nine years ago:
Socialist Realist architecture in late winter sun

This time 11 years ago:
The Cripple and the Storyteller - part II

This time 12 years ago:
The station with no name

This time 13 years ago:
Lenten thoughts on motoring

This time 14 years ago:
Flowers, spring - already