Quest:: A Search for a Soul for Modernkind

QUEST

A SEARCH FOR A SOUL

FOR MODERNKIND

A book on being a human

V. Virom Coppola

Copyright © 2003 by V. Virom Coppola.

Photo by Pegarty Long.

Cover created by V. V. Coppola.

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Contents

OVERTURE

I

II

III

IV

NOTES

For Joan, Mom, Dad, and Jimmy

and all our shaggy wolves and chirping dinosaurs

down the years

OVERTURE

… Like a madman ‘s trumpet at reveille, it shoots through the gravedigger Candide ‘s repose! The sleeping man ‘s eyes pop open with a start and he sits up in his armchair. Bolts up is more like it. His confused lookfinds its focus on the door that leads out to the adjacent graveyard and the madhouse beyond.

CANDIDE

What was that? The doorknob turns and the old door squeaks open as if in answer. Who’s there?

An unseen parrot cuts through the fear with a whistle. ‘Let’s all go barmy! And join the army! Let’s all go ravy! And join the navy!’ Then it squawks.

CANDIDE

Who is it? In an instant more, an intruder is standing before him in baggy purple pajamas, leaving Candide surprised and cautious. What are you doing here?

Zero doesn ‘t answer. He merely holds in a strange stare, glaring around and back again to Candide without so much as muscle moving on his blank face. Candide takes in the intruder with an examining eye. He is a younger man than he; yet sort of ageless, handsome but worn… with flat eyes. His hair is short and somewhat tousled, even matted down in spots as if he’d slept on it. The intent eyes studying his late night guest move to a patch over the heart but the nametag has nothing on it. And his right hand is bleeding slightly.

CANDIDE

Brushing it all aside as if the fellow is harmless enough. Well at least you’re not Hamlet’s ghost. Or the Grim Reaper come to collect his gravedigger. Candide smiles a Mona Lisa smile. Just life come calling. C’mon, I’ll take you back to Saint Haha’s as you loonies call it.

The man ‘s head turns on a dime, directly at Candide—his eyes bouncing in his head. It was as if Candide has spoken a magical mantra that struck at the very soul of the poor creature. The intruder is now the one doing the examining, his wide, bright eyes studying his host very carefully.

ZERO

No, I can’t go back there! I have to find my head! This is an impostor’s! He pauses a moment; his alarm turning quizzical. Have you seen mine about?

Candide bursts out laughing. He can ‘t seem to help himself. The abruptness into such a silly catastrophe without so much as a blink—well it ‘s too much for the chubby gravedigger to handle.

ZERO

It’s not funny losing your head! Everything I am is in it! My very soul … I think.(1)

Whether existence be madness, sanity, a dream or divine comedy, I am witness to it. The one constant in my life, in your life, in every life is this starting point for each and every one of us. Each of us is witness to whatever existence is and the overwhelming question that comes calling out of it—actually a question and an exclamation both. Everything ultimately depends on that outcry and its response, and there is no asylum from it. As such we are all Zero looking for our very souls, unsure whether indeed we even have souls, wide-eyed in a world where we are in point of existential fact sleuths looking for the point of it all, the point to our existing. If there is one, a point to our existing, it can only be found in us, in our own actuality, the everyday of it, because that’s where we are everyday. It is here that the answer has to be found, whatever it is to be, even as we end. And so we are all Candide, too, each of us awakened to life adj acent to a graveyard, filled with that same trenchant question reflected in our eyes because of what we have been awakened to, outside an apparent madhouse, and within each of us that awaiting boneyard. In truth, you and I and every one of us have come alive to a search, a hunt, a pursuit, a tracking down, a looking for, a quest! Been born into the thick of it! No matter how we might try to put it out of our minds, perhaps even going out of our minds because of it, the event we call life forces each of us to face the quintessential query. Starting where each and every one of us starts, as a witness to existence, every human that ever was, is, or will be is forced to ask that most basic of all questions, who am I?! And to ask it as both a question and an exclamation. Who really am I and what am I doing here?! And how do I act unless I know that?! Know what I actually am and am actually witness to?! Though it is an odd mix, grating grammatically—exclamation and question mark together—it is what we have been born to, our presence in the cosmos leaving us staring at a situation demanding that we find out something essential to us that we may not be able to find out, yet imperative that we do! Just life come calling, we might say with our gravedigger, in a quandary as to whether to laugh or cry, half-amused and half-appalled at what we have come alive to, confused as to why once sweet life comes calling and we are alive, does it have to end?! For we know it will. We are creatures who posses the chilling realization of our own end. Yes, it is a question and an exclamation both that calls out of our depths, perhaps even a protest over our predicament, a predicament that includes more than just the possibility of disappearing altogether. A requiem is in the mix for each of us. And that always has to be at the back of one’s mind … after a few moments’ loss of vital air, does the phenomenon I know as me, conscious me, face the hapless fact of… of actually not being any more?! Is there any sense to that?! To any and all of this?! Really, what is this odd fabric called existence that contains me as a witness?! Is there any real meaning or purpose to it?! Or to me? And if so, what is it?! Such is the onslaught on consciousness—it is a mysterious voyage each of us is on, admitted or not, committed or not. The modern mind is no different than the most ancient in this, no different than the people in the play either. It is, as the play is called, all merely Variations On A Theme. Each of us is the variation on the same theme, the same throughline of thought since the beginning of this strange phenomenon we call human consciousness.

Uncomfortable with the answers of the past, and with those of our own age as well, modern kind continues the pursuit; continues the quest.

It has to be so, for the questions are still there and the insatiable drive to know the answers built into our very being—we are detectives of being by birth. From bambino to burial, just being alive makes us so. Makes us wonder. Wonder and have to ask, for life is just that, questions in abundance. Without let up! A river run of them! Is each of us a mere psychic crystallization around an abyss that writes poetry or doesn’t, and then disappears forever? And if more than that, why oh why do we have to suffer? And if there is an Incomprehensible we call God why does this Incomprehensible let us suffer? And if nothing else, though at a loss to figure out the world we have awaken to, do we at least have one certainty in life and living that allows us to dare disturb this universe of uncertainty? What does it mean to be human?! When we rip away everything what do we see? … what is the face of actuality? … what is the really real? … what does it really mean to be?!!! Until we are pronounced brain dead we will strive to know—unless, of course, we are already brain dead, though functioning, as would be the case if such a quest is not there within the sinews of our being, underneath the sophisticated smiles and ready bon mot, the traffic and daily routine of hurly-burly urban life.

Physicist or philosopher, playwright or a person selling popcorn, we are all on this mind-boggling j journey, my fellow detectives, alive to space and time and what it means to be so. There is more to us than the raw elemental energies of evolution and we live with it everyday. What slouched out of that tide pool to be born is more than mud and carries a mystery within it called consciousness. We cannot abstract ourselves out of that reality—it is where we are—made up of the raw elemental energies of evolution and this phenomenon called awareness, consciousness, presence. Though a blood-blameless tide was let loose and our river of life run red with it, still within this thing we call evolution, something wide-eyed with being itself was also called forth, at wits end to find its own and everything else’s meaning. It might be the madness we are all born to, the comic agony we all find ourselves in—or, punch line of punch lines, wonder of wonders, there might actually be a point to it, a point to ourselves, and we able to penetrate to it.

Over a decade ago, long before my play, on a New Year’s Eve, I began a novel called Wisdom After The Big Bang in which, via two men on the Amazon, one mad, one sane, I was attempting in their riverrun to honestly find out the secret to our being, and in doing so to find a soul for modern kind. I remember Noam Chomsky saying in his book, Language and Problems of Knowledge: It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.(2) Camus, too, talks of art in this vein, and actually used it to convey his philosophy. The great filmmakers did as well when it came to conveying what was inside of them and had to be expressed. As did our ancestors in those cathedral caves of Chauvet some thirty five thousand years ago. I agree with all of them, from cave man to Chomsky. Nonetheless, I will venture into being artless, venture into being artless while still attempting to do what art has always done since the first piece of literature known to us; namely, present humans facing the human condition, humans in a desperate encounter with the silence of the universe, humans left on their own to make an inner decision about it all, each struggling to answer the questions existence itself has presented us with.

We as a species can be defined by those questions, defined as the questioning creatures, sleuths in search of our souls. Consider again for a moment the historical and pre-historical fact that since the dawn of human consciousness we have been grappling with the situation we found ourselves in, left wondering about that very consciousness itself as it wandered across the landscape of life in this desperate encounter between itself and the unconscious cosmos it found itself in. Between itself and the horrendous problem of suffering. Between itself and any meaning to it all. Between itself and something numinous that has been with us since the caves. And so between itself and any Mysterious More, call it by what one will—the Incomprehensible, Nirvana, Numen, God! The modern mind has unmasked so much, traveled so far from the first time mud stood up and talked, now even across our own solar system and beyond via the ‘eye’ in our modern machines. But, still, we don’t know. Still we have not been able to come up with the answer to who or what that consciousness doing all this really is. Why we are here still eludes us. We have banged our collective human head against an implacable silence with our query since we first put flowers on the grave of someone we loved and lost to death, as some say the species before us did as well, those strange Neanderthals with their oval-shaped graves, or the Homo heidelbergenis did before them, one strange day 3 50,000 years ago, when these humanoid ancestors laid a single pristine rose-colored quartz ax among their dead, 100,000 years before the mastery of fire.(3) Perhaps even on the far off landscapes across space-time itself we will still be wondering as we bury one of our own. As perhaps other consciousnesses are on far off galaxies as I write—they, too, wondering. Perhaps that is the journey of all consciousness: to wonder and to die? But can we—after the novels, after the teacups, after hearing the mermaids singing each to each, after consciousness has looked across time to the beginning of time itself—can we at least dare to disturb the universe with some minimal certainty?(4)

Is there finally an answer of some sort for us in this age? Can we at last and at least know who we really are and what we are doing here? Can we flawlessly and finally answer what is really real? Can we convincingly know how, validly, to act in the face of it all? Can we synthesize modern thinking, go to our root-reality, and out of that build a spirituality both secular and sacred? Can we find a soul for modern kind?

If we were Cyclopean witnesses all this might be easy, but we are not. Rather we possess a landscape and an inscape to our being—and must, in the end and through it all, bear witness to existence with both these eyes. Existence has endowed us thus and as such we must interpret the data derived from being and answer the questions put to us by our merely being, and being as we are. It seems it is our birthright to find out, or at least our lot to take on the mystery of things(5)

That then, dear fellow detectives, shall be our quest in this opus. We will attempt to dig to the really real! We will attempt to find out what it’s all about! We will attempt to articulate actuality! We will attempt to answer the fundamental questions of and to our being! We will attempt to find out who we really are. Such an attempt may indeed be, as with my madman, the lunacy in all of us, especially yours truly, the looniest of the lot—far gone, bonkers, mad as a March hare as any honest mother would say. Nonetheless, there will be a method to my madness. It shall think us through the endeavor in a four-part progression—science, self-being, spirituality, and a summing up of our sojourn—each building on the other in a crescendo to any soul we might have. Such a structure lends itself to the fact that it is indeed an unfolding mystery and we in point of existential fact sleuths trying to solve it by thinking through the basic tensions within this odyssey we call breathing, tirelessly looking for a grounding to it all, the absolute bottom line of being for us as human beings and thus, hopefully, the answer to our existence—not from any authority, but from existence itself. The process I am employing in this pursuit covers in full the dynamics of the modern mind, taking in science, self, and spirituality, including the tendency of the mind itself from time immemorial to bring it all together; that is why I truly believe this is the best way to proceed—and who knows, perhaps when the wind blows southerly, we shall know a hawk from a handsaw.

You are, of course, free to skip over the science part, which may be the most difficult, and go directly to the burrowing section on self-being, which is pure philosophy and thus where we wisely try to establish any grounding to all this, looking at what existence is and the deepest experience in it. Of course, you can skip over that as well, and go directly to the exciting section on spirituality itself, if for no other reason than its super metaphysics, which I certainly want you to taste of, not to mention the poignant part on the problem of suffering it undertakes to face and answer. Then again if you so choose you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble and go straightaway to the sensational summing up instead, which says it all anyways. But since there is a method to my madness, a process of building to the spirited synthesis, I would hope you decide to ride the train of thought from beginning to end, or if I might put it another way, to sail the whole of our odyssey in search of a soul. However, I should make mention in this overture to you, that this book is not for the so-so seeker, nor the abstractionist either, only for you who would write with your own blood as the man from Rocken so ingeniously put it. For we will use no authority other than your own blood, and flesh, too, going down to the bare bone and past that too, into the very marrow of your being in our pursuit as sleuths of souls for ourselves and everyone else. And so it must be, for it is only in our own flesh and blood, breath and being that we can find any true grounding and thus any real answer in our quest.

I said of death that there’s always the possibility of disappearing altogether, so too with any point to existing. This quest life has put before us might come up with that finding, that the point of being is quite irrelevant to anything, pointless in point of fact, like the White Rabbit’s pronouncement in Alice’s own Wonderland; and like the King presiding as judge, after listening to such a scenario of possible pointlessness, we might with reliefburst out: If there’s no meaning to it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any(6) But, my fellow sleuths, as we start out on our quest, we don’t know anything of the sort, so let’s go in search of a meaning to all this and ourselves as well. Not only because there may be one, but also because we must. It is the imperative in each of us; we are born to witness being as sleuths—sleuths, not soothsayers saying what it is beforehand, or regal judges wanting to jump to a verdict before all the evidence is in. No, not as soothsayers or regaljudges, nor, I should say, as algorithmic automatons or abstract philosophers either, abstracting ourselves out of the process, so as to be devoid of any flesh and blood conclusion. We cannot abstract ourselves out of existence and ever hope to find out what it is. So look for ourselves we will, my fellow detectives and witnesses to being. In looking for ourselves look for ourselves!

Curiouser and curiouser, I hear you cry out, now I am opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good! Let’s be on our way! Who knows, we might get advice from a caterpillar and a wasp, clues from science, evidence for and of self-being, suspicions of an actual spirituality, and a summary to such a soj ourn quite wonderful. However, since fun always alarms publishers, I will be earnest hereafter, attempting an air of curious detachment as if a real philosopher. But you are a real philosopher, Zero and my lunatics protest. As we all are, I answer. They all laugh uproariously, as I hope you are.

One more thing before we’re on our way, my fellow biped featherless creatures who laugh. As a final preamble to our pursuit, let me say firmly and as a forewarning that I hold for a liberty proper to the human mind.(7) I cherish this freedom. It is a liberty that could possibly take us where no one has gone before; for we know it is a wild and wonderful thing, one that can go from the somber to the scherzo, from the antediluvian inside our heads to the anticipated, even to the sacred. Whether used to create a Requiem or the Rocky Horror Show, and though it might ferment follyforgers, fraudsters, and fear mongers, I firmly hold for this freedom as fundamental to our pursuit. The trick and terror both with this liberty is to make sure our choices and conclusions are based on actuality. This quest will always try to stay true to that. It will be our guideline and throughline throughout. I only ask, again, that you bear with me and the freedom offered and exercised in this quest till the end, realizing I claim no infallibility, only humble heroic honesty in this endeavor I call a book on being a human.

As such, we end where we began. The task before us, in a nutshell, my fellow humans all, is the clear and present danger of finding out who we really are. That is the impossible feat I have given this poor creature, V. Virom, and each of us with him. Whether I, and you with me, finally answer the question that haunts every human head remains to be seen. The proof of the pasta is always in the tasting. Amen.

I

SCIENCE

The modern mind respects science, and, by happy coincidence, it is the perfect place to start in more ways than one. I have asked, if after consciousness has looked across time to the beginning of time itself, can we at least dare to disturb the universe with some minimal certainty? If nothing else, we must reach a minimal certainty in this desperate encounter between ourselves and the silence of the universe, some minimal certainty in all this chaos and chaord of being. We must keep that as our cerebral compass as we think together through not only this section, pondering its three parts of dimensionality, simultaneity, and the necessity of our presence in it all, but throughout this whole soj ourn of ours in search of a soul for modernkind.

Here at the beginning of our endeavor, one has to seriously consider if it’s not to the beginning itself we must go; if at least the process to any minimal certainty somehow lies in the beginning of everywhere and everything? It just might. Therefore, like good detectives, let’s return to the scene of the happening. For I do believe this desperate encounter between ourselves and the silence of the universe finds for the modern mind a beginning to an answer in that very beginning of the universe. It does so in the bridge in being called dimensionality. Of course, for the time being, such a term is not in any language, or in any lexicon we have dug up, and so to get the full scope of its meaning and connotation, we shall have to break it down into its etymological roots, as well as approach it from different angles in evolution and existence itself. But, before all that, let’s start with its basic divide in both evolution and existence itself, an ‘after’ and a ‘before,’ a ‘physical’ and a ‘nonphysical,’ if I can use such a word, especially in this section on the physical per se. I dare say I can, because it is the physical itself that allows me to, in providing evidence of and for my daring. How fascinating, if not funny in a funny sort of way, that the study of the physical assists in providing evidence for and of the ‘meta’-physical for us.

How—how does it do that?

With a bang! The biggest! It stops us dead in our scientific tracks—at the beginning of everything and everywhere. We can go back no further. That is very important for we happy creatures of space-time. It means there is evidence for and of ‘ something’ that is not our space-time, before our space-time began. ‘ Something outside of space-time’ as we might clumsily put it. Since we don’t know how to think outside of time, let alone express such a situation, I call that inexpressible situation a mysterious more, using the lower case so as to carry no baggage. We really have no idea what it could be. It is outside of our scope—literally. Yet human beings, in scientifically establishing a big bang, have given themselves reason to say that there is evidence for and of something other than our universe, that our universe is not the only reality. There is another dimension. We are alive in and to a ‘meta’-universe. Not merely a construct as in mathematics, but real. With our headgear of understanding hesitating at the edge of space-time, we can honestly say, with a swallow proper in such a statement, there is another dimension in and to actuality, giving us a model for a fuller picture of being.

However, before we look at any such dimensionality in a more detailed manner, or the simultaneity that comes out of it, which are two of the maj or goals of this section and will become all too clear I promise you, dear fellow detectives and witnesses to being, we should see how we come to know such stuff, that is, how we know scientifically; using how we know of the big bang in particular as our demonstration. It will kill two birdwatchers with one stone. We should understand and admit to the unsettling fact, before anything, that for we poor creatures called human, there is really no absolute knowledge. Science, like everything else about us, is not absolute. We base it on the best data we have. And as we do just that, look at the best data we have, there will be two fronts that we will have to address and undress, as it were, scientifically in this section and by other means in the next; namely, cosmology and consciousness. After all we are conscious creatures in a cosmos. Consciousness will lead to helping with the who am I question. Cosmology will help in seeing something of where we are at in all this. We know we are in space-time, of course, but what else can we say about that situation and our own in it? We might be surprised.

Scientifically, at least as I write in this 21st Century of the common era, despite scattered descent, all the data indicates that the universe is a dynamic, expanding, maybe ‘continuum,’ that has a beginning and will have an end. Without the benefit of being soothsayers and saying what will come in the future scientifically, in our modern setting we must, as science shows, anchor our cosmology in the big bang, which put us in the space-time situation in the first place. But how did science establish the big bang and what was the thinking behind it? That is so very important: that we understand how science thinks, that is, how scientists think scientifically, how they come to know such stuff. It is important to know this for this section, of course, but also in a wider context as well, for in not having a nai’ve notion of science, we will come to appreciate all our other ways of knowing and give them the credence they deserve. Yes, Alice, you should know up front, there are many roadmaps in your head to get to where we are heading. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t understand you, the sweet thing answers. It’s dreadfully confusing. That’s the effect ofliving backwards, the Queen interj ects kindly, helping me out of a j am, it always makes one a little giddy at first. Are you giddy, my fellow detectives, giddy with all these goings-on, backwards, forwards, trying to think scientifically? But we must as I insisted. Therefore and thus, apologizing to those rocket scientists among you, allow me to explain the process of scientific thought, at least for my own erudition if for nothing else. There is the possibility that even those schooled in science might be hit between the eyes at what this will show us in the end.

In 1965, a theorem thought up by Roger Penrose stated that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity. Singularity is merely the term for expressing a situation where space and time simply disappear so to speak, where the normal concepts of space and time and matter break down and are ill-defined, where there is no science, at least as we know it. That, in words at least, explains our big bang, the initial singularity we are concerned with here. So how did we get to that initial singularity after Penrose’s brilliant theorem? Several years after Penrose’s theorem, Stephen Hawking realized that if you reverse the process in time so the collapse becomes an expansion, Penrose’s theorem still works: given that the universe is expanding fast enough to avoid collapsing again. He turned the tables on time. And in doing so came up with the beginning of time itself, provided, of course, this place we find ourselves in is moving fast enough to avoid coming back on itself. It is a temporal tightrope the cosmos walks, a delicate balancing act; one that against immense odds, as Hawking points out, produced life like ours—what I myself can only describe as ‘ an alarmed awareness looking at it all.’ An alarmed awareness that now knows from the most recent findings that the universe is accelerating even faster than we thought, which, in turn, leads us to establishing its end as well as supporting its beginning. We shall look into the end of the universe later, I promise, but first things first. So let’s stay with its beginning and get back to what happened in 1970, taking it from the horse’s own mouth; namely Stephen Hawking. After Penrose’s initial proposition, the process comes to fruition when he and Hawking prove that there must have been a big bang singularity, provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as science observes.(8) Though that might sound ‘iffy’ to anyone who thinks in absolute terms, it should be stated that general relativity has met every experimental test ever devised for it; and it now appears (at least from gravitational necessity, which we will get into when we come to our discussion on the end of the universe) that the universe contains not only as much matter as science observes, but even more to play with, and of different kinds as well.

Of course, the process of thinking that arrives at a big bang didn’t start in 1965 with R. Penrose. Alexander Friedman’s calculations in 1922 leading to the first model of an expanding universe and Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that the universe was expanding were both obviously significant, and in 1948 George Gamow actually talked of a hot beginning. Yet most scientists still thought, as Hawking points out, that there was no beginning. We proved them wrong. The universe did indeed have a beginning, and in 1970 with Penrose and Hawking, on the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, using Penrose’s theorem, this was finally shown and we had the big bang, as you know. But let’s get into that accomplishment more closely.

Simply put:

(1) The first part of the proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory in that it cannot tell us how the universe started, because all physical theories, including it, break down at the beginning of the universe.

(2) Thus there must have been a time in the very beginning when the universe was so very small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory, quantum mechanics. What the singularity theorem really demonstrated is exactly that.

As to why these theories are called partial, just as a sidebar, apologizing again to those rocket scientists among you, allow me to explain (again for my benefit if nothing else). Quantum theory is a theory about matter on the small scale and deals with elementary particles. By contrast, the theory of relativity is concerned with the structure of space-time on the large scale and with the way matter can curve in space-time to produce gravity. Although the quantum theory and the theory of relativity deal with very different things, each on its own scale, there are deep reasons why these two theories should, at least at some level, be united. But they are not.(9) Hence they are called … That is the tall and the short of it, or big and small if you will. Of course, scientists continue to work on a unification of the two; some trying to turn the two partial theories into a single quantum theory of gravity,( 10) while still others are working on such concepts as superstrings and twistors and membranes of10 dimensions. One might ask why such seemingly sober men and women have become intoxicated with such bizarre scenarios. Desperation, my lunatics would point out. They have a fixation! It is a fixation to give us what the scientists refer to as a theory of everything. One can almost sense in them a reaching for the metaphysical (which of course may be another form of insanity). About superstrings and twistors and membranes, you are free to consult note 26, where all are discussed to your heart’s content and head’s confusion.

But for our purposes, let’s return from our sidebar and get back to singularity: Using the way light cones behave in general relativity together with the fact that gravity i s always attractive, he [Roger Penrose] showed that a star collapsing under its own gravity is trapped in a place where its surface has to sink to zero. And since its surface sinks to zero so too must its volume. All the matter in the star will be compressed into a region of zero volume, so the density of matter and the curvature of space-time become infinite(11) In words we can understand, there is no space or time—though how the hell we can even conceive of no space and no time is beyond me. You, too, I’m afraid. The scientists, as well, as we shall see.

In the search for the lost history of the universe, the classic notion of time breaks down somewhere between 10-3 3 and 10-43 of a second after the big bang—the first trillionth of a second, a microflash if that. What lies on the other side of that no one knows. This is called the Planck wall, beyond which the calculations of physics do not work; and there is no immediate hope of getting past that barrier without getting yourself into a place where it will no longer be possible for experiments to verify your theoretical speculation. You are on your own past that firewall. It is a barrier of the greatest curiosity. For now, let me merely tease with the hint that what Planck sees as ‘the second Planck wall’ might turn out to be the way to get through the first. But more about that later, let’s continue with seeing how science thinks and thought up the big bang.

Before Penrose and Hawking, a poll among the leading scientists would have shown that most thought there was no beginning, for a variety of reasons, and Hawking points that out as I said. Most people thought that there was no true beginning. We proved them wrong, he tells us quite emphatically.(12) Stephen can talk in such a way for two reasons, first because science is done by humans, as he is displaying with his teasing boast, and second because that is science; namely, confirming or disconfirming. That is to say, a scientific theory has to be proved or disproved in the real world; otherwise you have no grounding for or against it. I think somehow everything does, has to be grounded in existence; but for the time being let’s leave my philosophy out of it. Many theorists believed that singularities had no such grounding, that they were nothing more than mathematical abstractions, thus not fulfilling the conclusive requirement of the scientific method. Scientific efforts showed otherwise, however, prompting Hawking to say: It was notjust matter that was created during the Big Bang. It was space and time that were created.(13) That’s pretty heady stuff.

Nobody wanted to believe that the truth could be as simple as it was, Hawking went on, almost with a twinkle in his tone. What we did was show that the simplest solution of general relativity was the correct one. In fact, given the overall complexity of the universe, it actually is quite remarkable that the correct solution of general relativity was also the simplest one.(14) Keep this notion of the simplest solution in mind as we go through the following sections as well; always in search of our minimal certainty.

But back to this section; the fact is you cannot look at our universe without finding a big bang or something very similar at the beginning.(15) The truth is the big bang answers many of the scientific questions better than any other situation, as a matter of fact best of all; especially since we can now measure the big bang background with such accuracy. By background is meant background radiation evenly distributed throughout the universe, discovered unwittingly by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964, and correctly interpreted as a relic of this beginning. The other essential piece of evidence is the 75:25 percent hydrogen-helium ratio in the universe today. I am not going to get into the specifics of either, that’s not our purpose here, but I will say that George Gamow had predicted the radiation, and about helium as well. He did this in that 1948 hot beginning calculation that I already mentioned, but no one took him seriously. However, I did. Not in 1948, I was not in the thinking mode as yet. But I did do it before the proof established by Penrose and Hawking or the Wilson and Penzias findings. I first became interested in my university days when I was writing my thesis trying to establish a real metaphysics and had read Gamow’s long neglected work as part of my research. It has stuck with me, as has the particle-wave ‘ situation’ that we will come to, which I used as well in my youthful enthusiasm of trying to prove my theory of everything and everywhere and establish a radical new substantiation of being itself, a noble effort to be sure. But back then I was a lone voice choking in the wilderness as I wrote of such things as a beginning, or used the particle wave findings as I did, long before the present run and rush to use the two. I was ultimately relying on speculation, of course, and I had no Penrose or Hawking to use and abuse. Of course, with the Penrose-Hawking’s proof, I can now talk with a certain amount of backup about a beginning, and, from that, of a dimensionality of actuality. And so, in this present work, like an aged wine, drunk with I-told-you-so’s, I again return to my bygone endeavor, only this time I am proud to boast that I will actually establish a radical new substantiation ofbeing itself. After that I shall put Humpty Dumpty together again and successfully explain Finnegans Wake.

You chortle? Just you wait and see. But humility aside, I want to return to our immediate endeavor and quote something from Stephen Hawking’s Universe here because it both shows us how scientists think and does so talking about our beloved big bang. It is John Boslough, the author, talking to Stephen Hawking.

I asked Hawking how scientists could be certain that they were at last beginning to fathom the earliest moments of the universe. Was it not possible that cosmologists might be overlooking entire eras in the development of the universe or seriously misinterpreting basic observations?

Well, it is possible, he said. But remember that we can always look backward in time by looking out farther into space with our telescopes. The farther into space we look, the closer to the beginning we come.

But doesn’t that mean making an assumption that everything out there and everything here is the same and operates the same way? I asked.

It does.

And doesn’t it suggest that we believe that the natural laws we have discovered in our time have always been at work in the universe?

It does indeed.

But are not scientists in making those assumptions taking a leap of faith that is more metaphysical than scientific?

One makes some rather strong assumptions in delving into the beginning of the universe, but most of the facts—such as background radiation—seem to bear them out. And there is no reason so far to believe that our calculations are incorrect in any essential way.(16)

This little tete-a-tete, with one of the best scientist in recent times, brings home so much about the scientific method. I quoted the whole of the interchange because the text speaks volumes. I believe more than anything I can say, it gives a true sense of the situation we are examining; namely, that science is truly a human ‘thing,’ with non-absolute assumptions that must eventually return to the real world of facts to bear out any calculations made. However, at the cost of confusing the issue with yet another sidebar, if not with a warning from the bench itself, I must add, even as we discuss the scientific method: let the word go forth that there is more to finding the truth than facticity. Without, I must hasten to add, doing violence to that facticity—in fact, only widening what we mean by it. It is a caveat I believe Hawking himself is aware of because of his rather revealing statement in the midst of his expounding on science, in which, closing the subject, he added: People are not quantifiable.(17) Penrose, the other person in this big bang duo, wrote two whole books on that very point. Even though he uses science and certainly mathematics throughout, he is forever reminding us that we are not algorithms; ending his book Shadows Of The Mind with these words after talking about reality: … the true nature of which we do not even glimpse at present. My point in this: both these men have a true sense of science, not a nai’ve one, and neither should we have a nai’ve one.

That said, since John Boslough wrote his fascinating little book and the quoted conversation with Hawking back in 1989, the discovery of a black hole in our own galaxy has provided even more data on singularity. Combined with the new acceleration find concerning the end of the universe (that we will get to as promised I promise), a singularity at the beginning of it all is only strengthened many scientist tell us. Such scientific accomplishments past and present, not to mention what has been and continues to be observed in accelerator experiments, all give the same remarkable story that our scientists do: the universe had a beginning and will have an end. That is the best model of the universe experimental and theoretical data has. So the universe comes out of timelessness and is accelerating into timelessness; in other words it is a finite system. It will end. It did begin. Thus is the process of scientific thought concerning the cosmos … not absolutely absolute, but certainly certain, in an uncertain way, or should I say a human way, which is the only way we can know. And so, now that we know how we know scientifically, which was necessary in understanding not only this section, but what follows in our search for a soul for modern kind, we can return to dimensionality and the model of actuality it offers.

As we do, let’s look at what the so-called father of the philosophy of words, Wittgenstein, had to say. The great word detective asserted, the solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside of space and time.(18) Yet, while stating that, he goes on to state the impossibility of ever stating the metaphysical. Leaving us, it seems, precisely where we find ourselves with our big bang; namely, with a mysterious more outside space-time we can say nothing about. But, also, with a reality as well! The reality of a metaphysical—the reality of a metaphysical we can say nothing about except that it is. There is the dimension of space-time (19) and another that is nonspace time; namely, meta-physical.

Meta as you know merely means more than, or above, or besides, on the other side of, aside from—something like Nietzsche’s use ofjenseits or Aristotle’s said original use. And what of dimension? Etymologically it comes from the Latin, dimensio, and has evolved to mean in our own language scope, as well as its original use of extension. We are talking about it more in terms of scope here—the scope of actuality—since nonspace time is obviously without extension, unless it means an extension of our scope of actuality. I am using the word in this unique or wider sense, not simply as in the stricture of science alone. Science applies the term to the four dimensions of space-time, which of course is part of my connotation as well, since I accept space-time. But science also uses the term as applicable to mathematical constructs. I never use the term in a mathematical sense, but a real one, as in two real dimensions, one after the big bang and one before it. The same unique use will be true of simultaneity when we come to it; however, first things first. So far then, our scope of actuality includes our space-time universe and another dimension not space-time.

But, you might complain, doesn’t this open up our silent universe to something even more silent? Besides someone might argue, it could only be our own universe after a big crunch starting all over again in another big bang, in some eternal recurrence that would make the wonderful madman from Rocken right after all. That might have been a legitimate argument before. But once again the silence of the universe spoke to us—in the year of2000. At least that’s when this fundamental finding concerning our cosmos was given out to the general public, during Thanksgiving season coincidently—no doubt as a thanksgiving for knowing our future. It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, my helpful Queen interjects, agreeing with the scientists apparently. Anyway, continuing on in our very own Through The Looking Glass, scientists in that finding now say that the universe is made of dark matter at circa 30%, our kind of matter at only circa 5%, and a mysterious energy as well making up the remaining two thirds or more (some say up to 74%) of our universe—a universe accelerating faster, not slowing down as was thought.(20) Certain types of quasars (1 A supernovae) were the speedometer to this find; not only showing how fast the universe is expanding, but its ultimate fate. The bizarre message is the cosmos was telling us its end. But what is holding up the galaxies from this inevitable fate? The answer is our mysterious force; namely this unseen presence, completely invisible to our telescopes and all our instruments of measurement. It is something we know nothing about except that it is there. At least we have to presume it is there. There is no way of tapping into this mysterious energy that seems to come from nowhere. We can say, however, that this nowhere energy that is everywhere, this mysterious energy that permeates all of space and is made up of something different than our own matter, this cosmic force, sounds very much like Einstein’s old idea of a cosmological constant. He thought he knew the answer at the back of the cosmic book with it; then later called it the greatest blunder of his career. But he was wrong, because he was right. No matter, we know something now we didn’t know before, a conclusion about our universe; namely, that it will conclude not expand forever, and it will do so not with a bang but a whimper. It will expand out to a standstill and death. Our earth will be so distant from everything else by then, without a star to be seen in the sky, that it will seem alone in the universe. That should make the Existentialists happy. Is that an oxymoron? Anyway, we have a beginning and an end to space-time—an end that ends. Unless someone proves otherwise, any forever expansion of everything, or any recurrence theory of a big crunch & starting all over again and again and again, can both be laid to rest we can say with relief, albeit a strange kind of relief. For the universe will die like you and me and all of us and everything and everywhere. So it is, with all due respect to the crunchers, the carryoners, Nietzsche, and the Hindus, we consign to the grave the big crunch and the cosmos carrying on forever as well, and continue, instead, to use dimensionality as our model of actuality.

In fact, dimensionality has become more embedded than ever in the minds of scientists with their brane new world as Hawking referrers to their membrane attempt to explain it all. Since it is a purely mathematical construct, if not an imaginary one, only physicists at play one might say, mere speculation sans the verification required in science, I will pass over in silence its contribution to the case, and instead return to where we left off; namely, with a dimensionality we can at least somewhat establish. But even then where does that leave us? Do we know now any more about ourselves and what we are doing here? Any more about suffering? A pause of confusion has to interrupt us here. We have not come to suffering yet, and won’t for a while, but nothing, it seems, has more of an impact on us and our search for an answer to ourselves and what we are doing here, than this experience in existence called suffering. To mention suffering might seem out of place in this science section of cold abstraction, but it leads us right to the other half of what we set out to cover in this section; namely, consciousness, the consciousness looking out at this cosmos, the consciousness looking out at this dimensionality of being, the consciousness looking at this suffering. What is this consciousness—really? Here we must go in the opposite direction from where we have been searching and venture from the macrocosm to the microcosm and at the same time bring out how dimensionality applies to this.

Satisfying the reductionist in all of us, let’s push as far as we can go into the microcosm, as we did in the macrocosm. Many say that the new frontier of science is indeed consciousness itself. So, staying in the scientific realm, let’s see what we can come up with to demonstrate how we might explain this dimensionality of actuality within each of us. Putting aside suffering and all that goes with it for now, let’s start with what Hawking called undoubtedly the greatest achievement in theoretical physics this past century, quantum mechanics. What we find gives the modern mind pause. It is something inherent in the quantum world of the microcosm called the particle-wave description. How that might apply to consciousness is what I want to center in on.

Could this be science helping us again? Since we are greedy to know who we really are and can use all the help we can get, let’s see. It all started with comedy, of course, at least what was called ‘la Comedie Francaise’ or Louis De Broglie’s hv=mc2. The funny Frenchman equated