This is purely a self-indulgent excersize.
A woman is on her knees in the dirt before a shrine to Mary in a country village. She feels rest, solace, peace. After all the holy books, religious pageantry, and religious wars, isn’t this religion’s reason-to-be , the end product of religion? Peace of mind. Tranquility of the soul. Finding the strength to carry on and do what you must to survive and do what you can for this needy world?
When I was young, I occasionally turned to religion for help, for solace. I still do, but my religious structure has undergone an iconoclastic change – or maybe simply a metamorphosis. And the quality of my solace has vastly improved.
Of the thousands of things we see, hear and think every week, year after year, some of those thoughts inevitably link up, relate, metabolize in ways we don’t immediately see, and knit together fabrics that lie subliminal as they deviously ferment and expand our consciousness. Then, sometimes – pow – they burst forth in a eureka moment of understanding that amazes. Or they can grow slowly into consciousness and we can’t remember when we didn’t have the belief.
Thoughts, 1984, I think: I was lying on my bed in the afternoon. The radio news was on. The voice said “Today is the hundred and ??? birthday of Joseph Priestly, an American scientist who discovered oxygen in 17??. He believed that spirit and matter were the same” End of announcement. What the? Spirit and matter? The same? What the hell does that mean?
I grew up in Binghamton, NY, a very pleasant conservative town. I loved school, Little League and being Catholic on Sunday, if only for the big pancake, eggs and bacon breakfast after we came home from mass. I learned early that death was sad but not too sad because we went to heaven and saw everyone we wanted to see. Who could beat that? Why would anyone want to?.
Thoughts, 1990 ish, 2 billion years ago. Some non-descript asteroids are slowly passing into the shadow of a non-descript planet. No sound, No life. No love. But a time later, a Beethoven symphony is being conducted, a mime is on the street entertaining smiling tourists, and a man and a woman are hugging in a hospital room, profusely crying tears of joy because the operation to save their daughter’s life was successful. How did we get from the former to the latter?
In the 18th century came the Enlightenment. Some said: The sun was not pulled across the sky by ancient chariots. Potatoes didn’t grow because God willed them to. There were scientific reasons. There were rules, laws, principles governing science. Thus was born the great dichotomy. There were 2 worlds – the scientific – rocks, bones, blood, seas down here. And the divine up there. God and angels and heaven. This is what we Catholics, and most in the western world all believed growing up.
Thoughts. Jan 1, 2007: On NPR’s All Things Considered, in a New Year’s Day theme , the earth was commended for successfully completing another revolution around the sun. An MIT physicist, Robert Jaffe, was interviewed and said that pairs of quarks revolve around each other- but so fast as to put the earth to shame. In every trillionth of a second, he said, quarks revolve around each other ten billion times. But why? And who counted? Do all my quarks do that, too? What would happen if they slowed down to, say, a billion times a second? I read it, now I know it. Do the quarks know it?
There are a lot of strange things in the world. There is a certain lizard that, when it perceives an attacker, does a very weird trick. The quarks and electrons in the molecules of its tail muscles conspire to break off the tail from the lizard’s body. The tail starts flipping around in the leaves, distracting the predator, as the tail-less lizard makes his escape. At the end of the tail’s dance in the leaves, the tissue cells of the tail will die, but every quark, electron and atom which compose them will continue to spin intact for millions more years. These quarks evidently see a lot of things. Do they have memories, I wonder.
Thoughts. 2011. No sub-atomic particles are actually “found” in the strict definition. But in 2011 enough evidence was gathered so the Higgs boson was declared a reality and Stephen Hawking , who had bet scientist Gordon Cane $100 that it would never be found, cheerfully paid up, and commended the team of researchers. The Higgs boson gave credibility to the theoretical model of the Higgs field. And the Higgs field explained, finally, where particles get their mass. This force field engenders a pull on some particles, giving them mass and no pull to others, like photons, which have no mass. On a Frontline documentary, Terry Gardiner, a scientist at the CERN Large Nuclear Accelerator in France was explaining this. At the end he dared querry where the Higgs field had come from. “It is as if it was switched on as soon as the big bang happened.” Of note was that he used the passive voice to describe this, avoiding naming a perpetrator for the switching on…as if somebody switched it on…..as if something switched it on …. as if God switched it on.
Thoughts. 2011 -ish. I heard a funny conversation on a news show between 2 Iranians. Funny because both were from the same country but philosophically worlds apart. One was an Imam, a holy man, in Iran, and the other was a woman, an ‘atheist’ who had immigrated to California.
Imam, after an animated exchange with the woman: Are you an infidel? Because if you are an infidel – I simply cannot even talk to you!!
Woman, casually: Well, I don’t believe in the supernatural, so I suppose I am to you.
The supernatural. What is that? Is is something that has never happened or something that CAN never happen?
If you believe in quarks, but don’t believe in the supernatural, how do you know what the supernatural is, and what isn’t.
A hypothetical conference of 200 astrophysicists in 1985 are listening to another one presenting a paper. A hypothetical youth from the future enters and walks tentatively up to the podium. The professor stops, smiles at him and says, “What can I do for you, partner?” The youth finds his courage and starts: ” Sir, your paper is wrong because you are missing most of the mass of the universe. . There is some dark masses of matter not composed of atoms that we don’t know about. It composes four times more mass than all the mass we are aware of ” At this point the scientists are good -naturedly laughing and enjoying the interloper’s fantasies about some supernatural blob in the universe, although they are not sure if the youth has been put up to this by the organizers as a joke.
But – 6 years after this hypothetical conference, in 1992, and 75 years after Einstein described relativity, scientists made an astonishing discovery. The centrepetal forces of galaxies measured far too great to balance the gravitational pull holding them together. What keeps them from flying apart? After other evidence corroborated, it is now accepted that there is previously undiscovered mass, dubbed ‘dark matter’, made of something previously unknown that composes 80% of all the mass in the universe. This changes everything. Quite humbling for theoretical physics. One physicist, Tommi Tenaken of Johns-Hopkins University rather dumbfounded with studies of the new phenomenon, reported that one theory formulates that dark matter may have been around before the Big Bang. Wow. I thought the big bang was first first.
Thoughts, 2013 ish. Aliens from planet Poojeep are attacking with anti-matter guns. Zap! The anti-matter hits a few and sends them into..where? Nonexistence? Can we all agree that anti-matter is supernatural? It’s only in comix and maybe some bad sci fi movies. Then I find that before anti-matter was the stuff of science fiction, it was science. It was discovered in 1932 by American physicist Carl Anderson who won the Nobel prize for it. When a particle of matter called a nutrino combines with a particle of anti-matter they call an anti-nutrino, they both disappear, but not without a trace. They disappear into a quantity of energy described by Einstein’s E= mc2. If anti-matter, then, is not supernatural, what and where is the supernatural?
The Eureka moment, 2014 (or was it 2015): I was lying on the creaky floorboards of my attic in Gdansk, Poland after a workout on my ancient weight machine, thinking, but not about anything in particular – just letting my mind off the leash for a run. Not all of a sudden, but over a period of a minute or so, I became hyperaware – of what, I didn’t know. It was not a thought but a realization. So many thoughts and ideas synthesizing over the decades. So much caution I have employed as a trained scientist seemed irrelevant. I became, well, physically aware that all the particles that made up me also made up my immediate surroundings – and the rest of the universe as well. The Enlightenment dichotomy was dead wrong. There is only one existence, and all of it is supernatural – all of it. And this is good news. Because I would like there to be a heaven where we go after we die and see everyone we want to see. And if quarks, bosons, gluons, and perhaps some weird things that dark matter may consist of, can create beautiful monuments, symphonies, philosophy, sunsets, colors, love, and can make tails fall off lizards, it is no stretch of my imagination that they can make heaven as well. This is my solace. My religious metamorphosis is complete.
