My blog post today appears on the Tesseracts 18 blog: check it out here!
http://tesseracts18.com/2015/09/24/faith-and-knowledge-how-can-we-know/
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Let's read some of this wonderful story today. This passage is from near the beginning of the story when Marco and his father are talking about Samavia, the country they are from, and where the Lost Prince is from...
"We are of those who must LIVE for Samavia—working day and night," his
father had answered; "denying ourselves, training our bodies and souls,
using our brains, learning the things which are best to be done for our
people and our country. Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers—I am
one, you must be one."
"Are we exiles?" asked Marco.
"Yes," was the answer. "But even if we never set foot on Samavian
soil, we must give our lives to it. I have given mine since I was
sixteen. I shall give it until I die."
"Have you never lived there?" said Marco.
A strange look shot across his father's face.
"No," he answered, and said no more. Marco watching him, knew he must
not ask the question again.
The next words his father said were about the promises. Marco was
quite a little fellow at the time, but he understood the solemnity of
them, and felt that he was being honored as if he were a man.
"When you are a man, you shall know all you wish to know," Loristan
said. "Now you are a child, and your mind must not be burdened. But
you must do your part. A child sometimes forgets that words may be
dangerous. You must promise never to forget this. Wheresoever you
are; if you have playmates, you must remember to be silent about many
things. You must not speak of what I do, or of the people who come to
see me. You must not mention the things in your life which make it
different from the lives of other boys. You must keep in your mind
that a secret exists which a chance foolish word might betray. You are
a Samavian, and there have been Samavians who have died a thousand
deaths rather than betray a secret. You must learn to obey without
question, as if you were a soldier. Now you must take your oath of
allegiance."
He rose from his seat and went to a corner of the room. He knelt down,
turned back the carpet, lifted a plank, and took something from beneath
it. It was a sword, and, as he came back to Marco, he drew it out from
its sheath. The child's strong, little body stiffened and drew itself
up, his large, deep eyes flashed. He was to take his oath of
allegiance upon a sword as if he were a man. He did not know that his
small hand opened and shut with a fierce understanding grip because
those of his blood had for long centuries past carried swords and
fought with them.
Loristan gave him the big bared weapon, and stood erect before him.
"Repeat these words after me sentence by sentence!" he commanded.
And as he spoke them Marco echoed each one loudly and clearly.
"The sword in my hand—for Samavia!
"The heart in my breast—for Samavia!
"The swiftness of my sight, the thought of my brain, the life of my
life—for Samavia.
"Here grows a man for Samavia.
"God be thanked!"
Then Loristan put his hand on the child's shoulder, and his dark face
looked almost fiercely proud.
"From this hour," he said, "you and I are comrades at arms."
And from that day to the one on which he stood beside the broken iron
railings of No. 7 Philibert Place, Marco had not forgotten for one hour.
Happy reading!
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From The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1915)
"'All thinking is part of the Big Thought,' said Marco slowly. "It KNOWS--It KNOWS. And the outside part of us somehow broke the chain that linked us to It. And we are always trying to mend the chain, without knowing it. That is what our thinking is--trying to mend the chain. But we shall find out how to do it sometime."
This seems to be a similar theme with other things I've written as of late, but it's not a coincidence! (In a future post I'll write about how the philosophical side of this can be connected to science, in particular, physics.)
Later on, Marco talks about the Law of The One. It is:
"There are a myriad of worlds. There is but One Thought out of which they grew. Its Law is Order which cannot swerve. Its creatures are free to choose. Only they can create Disorder, which in itself is Pain and Woe and Hate and Fear. These they alone can bring forth. The Great One is a Golden Light. It is not remote but near. Hold thyself within its glow and thou wilt behold all things clearly. First, with all thy breathing being, know one thing! That thine own thought--when so thou standest--is one with That which thought the Worlds!"
This is also a very Buddhist/Hindu/Taoist teaching, and the idea of a myriad of worlds is essentially a multiverse of different worlds with different dimensions or laws, all of which arise form the one thought. The One is the force that created all the worlds, all of which are still under its sway. This is also reminiscent of Neoplatonism: all lower planes of existence emerge from the One. We have "Nous" below the One (the Divine Mind), then Soul, and then Body (i.e., the material world). I could go into how the Kabbalah is related to this too, but you can just check out the previous post here.
And the mention of Order is interesting because it is common theme in all these philosophies that the One is a simple undifferentiated being (if it can even be called a "being"), and the worlds that exist below it are more differentiated and thus, can be prone to good or evil, love or hate, etc. It is like a beam of white light being dispersed by a prism: the white light is the One, and the coloured beams arise from it, but are not as pure and simple as the white light, and so can take on different characteristics. Yet still, they are all connected to the One, and it is by remembering this and dwelling in the simplicity of the One that one might mend the chain. We are trying to return to the mode of existence that is above our own, and although we can't do it in this physical form, we still ever strive to do it. Body is ever striving to return to Soul, a simpler and purer plane of existence (if you think of it in terms of dimensions, it is to encompass a higher dimension). And Soul is striving to return to Nous, and Nous to the One. So they are all linked, and so the metaphor of the chain is perfect for representing these different layers of existence and how one might attune oneself to the level of existence above it.There is also the Law of That Which Creates, which Marco's father told him:
"Let pass through thy mind, my son, only the image thou wouldst desire to see become a truth. Meditate only upon the wish of thy heart--seeing first that it is such as can wrong no man and is not ignoble. Then will it take earthly form and draw near to thee."
This touches upon the power of our thoughts, how what we think draws the object of our thoughts toward us. Of course, it is not as obvious as thinking about getting something and then getting it, but if we attune ourselves to a certain frame of mind, we will more naturally be able to find others who think similarly and be drawn toward those things in the world. If we think badly of someone else, it will only come back to us, for we are also told that "Let him who stretcheth forth his hand to draw the lightning to his brother recall that through his own soul and body will pass the bolt." Thus the common saying that good begets good and evil begets evil.
I wish this book was more well known, because it is an amazing story that should be forever a Classic. And to all those seekers out there, I wish you well in mending the chain...
[Note: the black and white illustrations are from one of the original editions of the book]
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Kabir was a mysitc poet who lived in India in the 15th century. He tried to untie people of Hindu, Islamic, Sufi, and other religions together, believing that the unity of a single God that was at the base of all these religions. He was critical of both the Hinduism and Islam and their isolation from others (these were the main religions he tried to unite and that were prevalent in India in his time). He also believed in a more personal spiritual path to understand and feel the Divine for oneself, something that is in everyone and the world. It is a sort of pantheism that connects everything and everyone together.
Here is a quote from one the poems:
From Songs of Kabir (~mid 1400s, translated by Rabindranath Tagore):
"The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, the work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers."
So too is the sun within us, the giver of light and life. The principles of male and female are also represented by the sun and moon, and these qualities are within us all. And the "unstruck drum of Eternity" seems to me to be the One, the Tao, Brahman (or Aristotle's "unmoved mover"!), the one being that is the world and also beyond it. This is more panentheism rather than pantheism: pantheism is that God is the world, but panentheism is that the world is in God but that God is also greater than the world.
The next part about the "I" and "Mine" has a distinctively Buddhist flavour. If we continue to think of things as distinct from us, then we will either be in a state of lack or wealth with respect to them. We will "have" the American Girl doll, or we will not have it. And if we don't "have" it, we will (presumably) suffer. Instead, we must learn to see it not as something to gain or lose, but a part of the universe that we are already at one with. We don't need to have things for ourselves, we don't need to possess the world, possess other countries, or other planets and solar systems even! It's not about owning, because anything we own can be taken away. And anything that can be taken away from us has some control over us: we will always be striving to protect our things and strive to get more and more (e.g. "don't touch my American Girl doll!", "I will put it under lock and key!"). And isn't that what so much of our life is focused on in our society? Getting money, getting a car, getting a house, getting an American Girl doll...and even for those who want to gain knowledge, it's about "getting" the best book to do so. With this mindset, we will always be 'clamouring' to get this and that, instead of focusing on what is important.
And what is important, then? Here, it seems that Kabir is saying that the pursuit of knowledge and truth is, and I would agree with him. And based on what he's written elsewhere, I would add that this gaining of the truth is to experience the oneness of the universe and our unity with it. God is the universe, and so to know God, we must experience him through out lives and perceptions, not only grasping him in thought. It is to love the world in its entirety, which might be achieved by the realization (through learning or direct experience) of how we are connection to everything in the universe. This isn't just mysticism, but has correspondences to physics as well, such as the entanglement of particles and the equivalence of mass and energy (see The Tao of Physics, in particular).And so we must go beyond seeing the world as opposites and separate beings to perceive what underlies it all. Perk your mind and ears to hear that unstruck drum of Eternity...
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In this post, I'll look at 3 more possibilities for other worlds. The first 3 were in the previous post that are worth reading first so you know what on Earth is going on (actually, its not on Earth at all).
So here are three more possibilities for other worlds:
4) Parallel Worlds from Time Travel
Time travel works differently depending on your theory of time. By theory of time, I mean how time "works". Regardless of how you do it (via relativity, a wormhole, a TARDIS, etc.), what is more fundamental is the nature of time itself. Some features of time could be that there is or is not an instant in time that you can call the present, that time had a beginning/end or does not, that you can only change things in the past that will not cause too much of a paradox, that all time travel is determined, that time itself is or is not determined...and so on.
What concerns us here is whether parallel worlds will be created because of time travel. Imagine if you could create a world just by travelling through time! (Ok, perhaps it isn't fair to say "just" travelling through time, unless you're the Doctor). In the scenario that the past is determined but the future is not, then if someone travels to the past, then we have a problem. Everything is set in our determined past except for the time traveler going there, because from the point of view of the time in the past, they are in the future, which is not yet set. One possibility is that this creates a parallel world, one that has the same past as the "regular" world until the point in time that the time traveler goes back to, and at this point, time expels him into a parallel world to keep the regular timeline intact, like so:
The parallel universe will start out very similar to the regular one, but it will diverge to become more and more different due to the effects of the time traveler. So after some time, they could be completely different worlds, with different people and histories, different societies and technologies.
If people time travel enough, there would be many parallel worlds, some similar, some vastly different, and the parallel worlds could spurt parallel worlds which could spurt more parallel worlds so that you could get a mess like this:
Here, the bottom line is the regular timeline which fractures to many different worlds because of those clever time travelers. So time becomes even more relative than one would suppose just with the special theory of relativity: you can't even say that these worlds have the same time at the start since the parallel world is created in the past of one timeline (the original one) and the present of another (the offshoot). That's worth thinking about for a moment.
5) Quantum Mechanics (QM)
In QM, what can happen, does. At the subatomic scale, things don't happen in the relatively predictable manner that they do in the world we are used to. Things can be in more than one place at the same time, particles at opposite ends of the universe can be tied together faster than the speed of light, and it is impossible to accurately know both the position and momentum of a particle.
One interpretation of how QM works is the Many Worlds theory. In this scenario, each quantum mechanical possibility occurs in a different world. This is in contrast with the more common Copenhagen Interpretation. In the Copenhagen Interpretation, particles exist in many states at once, but when they are observed (by a person or equipment that takes a measurement) the many states collapse into one, known as the "collapse" of the wavefunction. However, another interpretation is the Many Worlds theory introduced by Hugh Everett, in which every quantum mechanical possibility happens, but each occurs in a different world. So everything happens, and there are nearly infinite possibilities! So think about every possible universe, those that are only a little different to ours (e.g., one in which your favourite colour is red instead of purple) and ones that have entirely different planets, solar systems, and galaxies.
To tell you the truth, when people say that there infinite number of "you"s in parallel universes, the very first thing I think of is: "So there is a world where I am an elf queen in Middle Earth with magic powers?" Um...yes. I guess. If that magic follows the physical laws (see 6) below for universes with other physical laws). But whether it is really "me" is another matter entirely. If you believe that you have a soul, or anything beyond the physical matter that makes up your body, then you'd have to say that unless your soul is also duplicated (something QM doesn't tell us about), then it is not you, but just a being that has a similar body to you.
Another aspect of many worlds in quantum mechanics are the creations of universes. This can be seen analogously to virtual particles. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence in the vacuum of space, being created and, most often, destroyed by annihilating with their antiparticle (for example, an anti-election is a positron, which is identical to an electron except for the fact that it has a positive charge).
Likewise with universes, embryonic universes pop into existence in the vacuum, and although most just get "swallowed up" again, some, like ours, grow to become an actual universe. It seems to me that it's arrogant to assume that our universe was the only special one to develop into a universe: why shouldn't others do the same? Here are our other worlds, and although they may be entirely separate "bubbles", it may be possible with advanced technology or magic to access them.
6) String Theory
String theory is an elegant attempt of theoretical physicists to find a theory of everything, the goal being to unite quantum mechanics (which describes microscopic objects) and general relativity (which describes macroscopic objects). The basic idea of string theory is that at the most fundamental level, matter is made of strings that vibrate. These are one-dimensional strings, and their properties are determined by their vibrations. There are many different versions of string theory, but they all involves extra dimensions, 10, in fact (though with M-theory, a kind of string theory that unites many of the different ones with 10 dimensions, has 11). They often say that the other 7 dimensions are "curled up" so that we don't perceive them and seem to be living in a 3-D world (not including time dimensions).
However, it is also possible that these higher dimensions are larger, and that we are living in a higher dimensional universe (like those mentioned under "Other dimensions" in Part 1). If that's the case, then we can be living in a higher dimensional multiverse that may have higher worlds that encompass more dimensions, though it is also possible that there are other worlds like ours of the same dimension that are "branes" in the "bulk" of the multiverse (I didn't make those terms up--check if you don't believe me!).
So we may be a 3-D brane hovering within the 11-D bulk, and there may be other branes of other dimensions, say, a 5-D brane or a 7-D one, that are also hovering in the bulk. These branes can collide, merge, and other universes can be created by the collision or fission of branes.
These worlds can have different physical laws, and because of some having higher dimensions, things would be very different to our 3-dimensional world. If we traveled to them, we would perceive them all as 3-D worlds because we can't sense higher dimensions directly, but there are other ways in which we could detect them scientifically (e.g. by the "imprints" of higher dimensional objects talked about in Part 1).
