Simon Richard Lee

 



BOOK DETAILS

Scientific Proof That (God The Holy) Spirit Exists by Simon Richard Lee.
Category: Religion & Spirituality
Paperback: 486 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 9781411678293

 

 

OTHER FASCINATING BOOKS

See the sister website in the first instance: -

Manifesto: Abolish All Money! - Simon Lee
This Manifesto examines in detail what the world would be like should Mankind Abolish All Money. That is, a Utopia or Paradise that is money free, cash free, and credit free. With no money, no cash and no credit in any form!
http://maam.org.uk/


Simon Richard Lee has also written some extremely moving spiritual poetry (also in hardback), and a short career history; as well as editing and producing her book of inspirational memoirs for QT Saunders, a friend. Preview in full or order these books to download or in paperback (poetry also in hardback).

 

 

  

Scientific Proof that (God The Holy) Spirit Exists

 

Book of Life 2010

 

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The Spiritual Energy of (God The Holy) Spirit has Seven Fruit i.e. Dimensions plus an overall Holistic Dimension of Jealousy: -   Wisdom; Joy and Love; Health and Beauty; Peace and Grace.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, aims to prove scientifically that seven or eight ‘extra’ Dimensions of space-time really exist.  Just so!  So prove that (God The Holy) Spirit Exists!

 

Simon Richard Lee BA, MA (Cantab.) CEng MIET MInstMC



Published by:

 

Author Me UK

Ware

Hertfordshire

England

www.author.me.uk

 

 

 

Available to buy in paperback or to download at

www.lulu.com/AuthorMeUK

 

 

 

 

All typesetting and illustrations are by the author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This book is dedicated to my lovely daughter Jeni

 

 

 

 

In memory of my Mum – Dawn Day SRN, MSc(Hons – Uni. Of Hertfordshire): - 1st July 1931-24th August 2007

 

 

 

ISBN 978-1-4116-7829-3

 

 

Copyright Ó Simon Richard Lee, 2008, 2009


Full Career History of Mister il Professori

SIMON RICHARD LEE,

Open Scholar, Saint Albans School

1968-1975; Open Scholar, OA, BA, MA, KCC,

King’s College, Cambridge, 1975-1983;

CEng, MIEE, MIET, MInstMC

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

www.author.me.uk   www.silee.me.uk

 

www.lulu.com/AuthorMeUK  www.lulu.com/authormeuk 

 

www.maam.org.uk   www.simonlee.me.uk  

 

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

 

1999   Ten poems published in an anthology called ‘echoes from beyond’, by Spotlight Poets, Forward Press, of Peterborough, UK.

 

 

2001 ‘Spiritual Energy’ - ‘a Spiritual Science that PROVES scientifically that God Exists!’ - published by www.authorsonline.co.uk.  Now out of print – see below.

 

2004   Second Edition of ‘Spiritual Energy’ published by them also.  Now also long since out of print.

 

 

2005 – 2008   Developed the above set of websites to promote my sales website www.lulu.com/AuthorMeUK to sell six books in hardback (poems); and paperback and downloadable: -

1.  Paperback/downloadable book ‘Scientific Proof that (God The Holy) Spirit Exists’ – totally revised and abridged version of ‘Spiritual Energy’ as above

 

2.  Hardback/paperback/downloadable books of my 22 poems from the 20th Century 1977-2000 ‘A Many Threaded Tapestry’

 

3.  A series of five paperback/downloadable books about my chronically abysmal experiences to date of the ‘Great’ British National Health Service (NHS):

    i.        “Which Witch Doctor?”

   ii.        “Disabled – by Doctors…!”

 iii.        “The Fourth Helen of the Apocalypse!”

 iv.        “Doctor Police!”

  v.        “Always Rise Above The Black Art of PSEXISTRICKERY”

 

4.  Edited and typeset a paperback / downloadable book by ex-lover QT Saunders: - “The Tender Years” a.k.a. “SCARS” or “Heart of Hurts” as published in e-book and paperback form by two other British publishers, ‘SCARS’ by www.authorsonline.co.uk and ‘Heart of Hurts’ by www.chipmunkapublishing.com. A superb gripping read like all of my own books as above…

 

 

October 2008.  Launched all of these books at my then new web-site www.silee.me.uk alias www.author.me.uk.

 

July 2009.  Launched a second new web-site to promote a final part of my main book – ‘Manifesto: Abolish All Money!’ – the site is www.maam.org.uk alias www.simonlee.me.uk .

 

October 2009.  Complete re-launch of these two sites; to re-launch my 100% edited and greatly expanded, so completed book, with a new subtitle added for 2010: -

 

Scientific Proof that (God The Holy) Spirit Exists

Book of Life 2010


FULL CAREER HISTORY

in SCIENTIFIC COMPUTER SYSTEMS

 

 


1993 - 2009 Huge problems with the British NHS! (‘Chronic and acute’…)   I only worked for one of these sixteen years full time: - July 1996-April 1997; on global, world-wide ‘Distributed Interactive Simulation’ (DIS) C++ systems networking of virtual reality tank battle simulation.  The Official Secrets Act covers this work as a Senior Software Design Engineer at Lockheed Martin Solartron (who make the stealth bomber!)

Also 1999-2002 was personal tutor of A level maths and physics; A level/degree C++ computing; and IT to People with Learning Difficulties.  Best result was my last student got from 18% failure to ‘B’ grade AS level pure and applied mathematics in just four hours’ tuition!  He ‘just’ needed confidence!  A familiar story I often found!

In 1991 I was made a full Member of the Institute of Measurement and Control and so a Chartered Engineer.  This was solely based on experience, no examination required apart from one-hour interview and CV.  In 1992 I was made automatically, as a result of the above, a full Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and 2005 a full Member of its successor the Institution of Engineering and Technology - so have all of four Royal Charters – of the UK Engineering Council as a Chartered Engineer; in Electrical and Electronic; Engineering and Technology; and Measurement and Control Engineering.  (Chartered Electrical and Electronic, Engineering and Technology; Measurement and Control; so Instrument Engineer with all four Royal Charters on my lounge wall).

        While unemployed all this time I brushed up further:-

2002. JAVA PDQ (Professional Development Qualification) completed.

 

2004.  Elected under Italian Law to full status of ‘il Professori’ (‘Professor’) in a full 24 hour Induction Ceremony conducted by QT Saunders, fellow author!

July 1988 - September 1992  PA Consulting Group, Gates Way, Old Stevenage, Hertfordshire.  Tough contracts for various Government, military and other blue chip clients as a Management Consultant: -

 

o   BP Chemicals. Grangemouth — extensive systems authoring and testing of ‘ESCORT’, a Lisp/Fortran artificial intelligence system — predicting process control problems.

 

o   National Grid Company HQ, Southwark, London  (opposite what is now Tate Modern Art Gallery but was a very famous power station before that). Eighteen months’ systems acceptance testing of Vax mainframe computer systems cluster housing SD-Scicon’s Fortran- and Oracle-based Settlement System for all UK Electricity Producers and Regional Electricity Companies (TREC’s).  Acknowledged as the top expert of large team on the complex calculations involved and led principal testing team.

 

o   Royal Automobile Club (RAC) HQ Croydon  Fixed all bugs and made many system enhancements to the Vax-based ‘Paragon’ International Routing System.  It is all free these days!

 

o   All Ministry of Defence (MOD) bases in central London including Whitehall. Official Secrets Act covers this full analysis of the Procurement databases of all the services including Army, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and even the Fleet Air Arm.

 

o   Fleet Air Arm - Yeovilton and Portland Bases. Official Secrets Act again - upgrade to military air traffic control system written in Pascal on PC’s.

 

o   ORACLE SQL database system - training course.

 

o   Government Structured Systems And Design Methodology (SSADM) Proficiency Certificate.

 

o   SAS Intelligence Induction Course (NOT enlisted) on leadership, initiative, teamwork and SAS intelligence and psychology - at an SAS Induction HQ

 

 

1987  Found work locally and made the boss multi-millionaire from 1988. By designing lan Pointer of Digitron Instrumentation, Hertford, a four channel temperature/millivolt handheld data logger with just 32 components including case and rechargeable batteries, with just four kilobytes of ‘C’ software in Motorola 68HC11 micro controller.  Seemingly uniquely, was accurate to 0.1 degrees Centigrade.  Use of a Teledyne dual slope analogue/digital (A/D) converter was lan’s brilliant only stipulation for the design, otherwise all by yours truly. Thousands sold nationally and globally to supermarkets!

 

 

 

1980 – 1987  LEE MICROMATICS LIMITED   Welwyn Garden City. TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

 

Chief of design, production, testing and implementation cycle of many 100% working, extremely advanced and complex ‘Microfast’ real-time process control automation systems (‘SCADA’ systems).  These were written in large scale Z80 assembler language for high speed, and Pascal, producing novel software that worked in totally visual graphical ‘building blocks’, not ‘code’ for:-

 

 

o   Fisons Boots Chemicals (FBC) Widnes  Prototype system ‘Microfast I’ installed on this hydrazine rocket fuel plant (also used to scrub out power station insides, I was told!) in 1980 prior to ‘Microfast II’ successor system which we finalised 1983-1987.  Full Turnbull Control Systems Series 6000 one- & eight- Loop Control Instruments Interface, TDS Easycolour 4200 intelligent colour graphics VDU and printer interfaces at this stage of the design.

 

o   Commonwealth Smelting ltd zinc/lead smelting furnace, Avonmouth - now Pasminco Europe plc - biggest customer with four systems bought all integrated with DECNET on Vax computers, Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC’s) and the entire Turnbull Control Systems’ 6000 series of (Texas instrument micro-controller-based) intelligent process control instruments.  All fully real-time and networked with multiple TDS 4200 colour VDU’s, and multiple printers.

 

 

o   Tate Gallery - Clore Extension.  This houses the country’s entire collection of Turner masterpieces. Extremely complex and sophisticated (artistic!) heating, lighting and humidity control system.  Dared to touch ‘Norham Castle Sunrise’ with one finger… in awe of my favourite Turner masterpiece.  This was only while I was trusted alone in the gallery with the collection of priceless works of sublime art like that, lying on the floor while being cleaned and prepared!

 

 

o   Bondina Textiles, Greetland near Halifax, North Yorkshire (now Freudenberg Textiles plc – a multi-national with Japanese and German bases).

 

Very sophisticated control of multiple Siemens S5 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC’s) for the very pragmatic production of everyday bonded artificial fibres, as sold in cleaning pads etc, in supermarkets throughout the world, under world famous trade names like Vileda and Vilena...


1981 – 1988

 

In my spare time I did eight years of wonderful voluntary work, for which I claimed no expenses, for the local MENCAP Gateway Club, and also physically and other disabled.

This included free trips throughout in return to many parts of England, plus Caltagirone, Palermo and above all Raggione in Sicily.

MAFIA HQ got a shock when we took the town square at Raggione over - it all ground to a halt especially when we took the wheelchairs down the local CAVE steps! So their occupants could also see the lovely caves underground, complete with our cheery crowd of people with learning difficulties.

Notoriously Italians, at least then, used to resent and conceal disability at all cost...

My other trip abroad with Hatfield Gateway Club was equally memorable - on a houseboat in Zierikzee, Holland, in deep winter.

 

 

 

 

 

1976 – 1980  Contract ICI plc software designer

 

This involved a very great deal of 100% completed and tested work, on several complete, ICI process control plastics plant automation projects.  First job in 1976 – completely rewrote, and tested, with only ONE small bug, the entire 5,000 line sequence control program for the Melinex polymer plant at ICI Dumfries, Scotland.   Not surprisingly after that, invited back repeatedly and designed 11 packages totalling nearly one megabyte in the ICI language RTL/2, for cost control systems in the year 1979-1980.


EDUCATION

 

 

 

1975-1979 – Won an Open Scholarship in 1975, took a year out, then took my BA (given my MA in 1983) in Natural Sciences (Part I) and Computer Science (Part II) Tripos, King’s College, Cambridge.

 

 

1976-1977 - ‘Got “an incredibly good” First in Chemistry at Part IA’, according to Professor Richard Lambert, Director of Studies in Natural Sciences at King’s - a lot thanks to excellent and intensive personal tuition.

I ‘only’ got a II:1 in mathematics and biology of cells; and devastatingly at the time, only a II:2 in my ‘major’ subject, physics.

 

 

1977-1978 - Despite all problems of love life, and vicious political stress especially in such an academically rarefied college, ‘got’ a very high II:1 - with rather philosophical physics exam answers.

Not surprisingly, having stopped going to lectures halfway through the year, got only a Third at my ostensibly best subject, mathematics.  Nevertheless - high II:1 in Natural Sciences Part IB hence First/II:I overall in Part I of the Tripos.

Loads of hockey (as was the college secretary - who haunted the bar lunchtimes to scratch together any old volunteer team - mixed against the all-male teams of most other male only colleges).

Stroked and was number six (6’2” and 13 stone) in college Third VIII till disciplined for cursing my crew when double over-bumped in the summer season bumps...!

 

 

1978-1979 – Managed a II:2 in Finals in Computer Science Part II despite very serious illness for all of six months the previous year.


1975-1976 – ‘year out’ of education – in heavy IT in the chemical engineering industry (my first four months at ICI as above) then a working holiday on a kibbutz in Israel for six weeks, followed by two weeks travelling round that war-torn country

 

 

1968-1975 - Consistently a top County Scholar at Saint Albans Direct Grant School, Saint Albans, Hertfordshire, England.

 

I followed Cambridge Lucasian Emeritus Professor, of Higher Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, to this same school, ten years after he was there.  So I had all the same brilliant teachers as he did - especially in maths and physics.  That explains a lot later in my life! Top two in class throughout and second in school’s national maths test to one Mr Searby, top Oxford mathematics scholar.

Now enjoyed sport more – squash, Hatfield tennis, darts, bowling, snooker, pool, cards, bar and table tennis club, ‘all sorts’ of concerts - rock to classical – and rugby, soccer, basketball, swimming, and hockey).

 

1972.  Grade 1 in mathematics, English Language, French O level (“l’argot parisien des rues parfait et couramment” after one month intensive ‘Commune Europe’ 1972 at Cognac, France, in a lovely chateau)

 

1973.  Grade 1 in additional mathematics, German, Latin, history, physics, chemistry; ‘only’ grade 2 in geography; O Levels. ‘Perfekte hochdeutsche akzent bei meine deutscher Lehrer mit seine Frau aus Hamburg’!

 

Founder Member school Conservation Society (ecology).

 

School second tennis team; and sometimes second hockey team.

 

1974.  Grade 1 Geometrical/Engineering drawing O Level.

 

1974.  Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award. (Voluntary psycho-geriatric nursing assistant at Hill End Asylum.  Feminism course with Arianna Stassinopoulos at Hitchin Priory.  Cycled 120 miles in 3 days round East Anglia. Honours Personal Survival Swimming.)

 

1974.  A1 A1 A1 grades in my mock A and S (Special) Level exams in Maths, Physics, and Chemistry.

 

1975.  A1 A1 A grades in my Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, A and Special (S) Level exams.

 

Also I passed the Oxford & Cambridge ‘Use of English’ exam, followed by my Open Scholarship to read Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge.

 

I never 100% completed my DEAS Gold Award that year, as I could not bear, at the very end of all that, to write up my log of our 200 mile four-day cycle marathon round the Peak District National Park.  The theme of my log was ‘environmental damage’ and I felt too upset by the sheer hypocrisy – and so vast damage - there…

 

Also took St John’s Ambulance First Aid Certificate for DEAS, did more psycho-geriatric nursing, and got very physically and mentally fit for that Gold Award...!

 

1964-1968 Newtown (Dellfield) Junior School, Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

 

Consistent double ‘A’ grades in Maths and English apart from two ‘B+’ in the penultimate term – I was literally shocked by that ‘dismal failure’ (for me) and soon picked up in the last term back to double A’s.

 So a leading student in that school throughout - apart from football – I mostly loved maths, English, art and music.  My teachers were all excellent and fun. 

Memorably my music teacher, Mrs Sheena Martin, was once married to George Martin.  He was ‘quite musical’, largely thanks to her.  He was the famous producer of the Beatles…!



Contents

 

 

 

Introduction and Summary of this Book                             i

 

 

Volume A.   A New Science of (the Holy) Spirit

1.  Complementary Opposites.  Extremely Fundamental Concepts Indeed!                                                           3

2.  Where Opposites Meet.  An Exploration of Real Value and invented value                                                              27

3.  Deus ex Machina?  Is it possible to build a conscious, so truly intelligent machine?                                              55

4.  The various scientific structures of (the Holy) Spirit 65

5.  How (the Holy) Spirit interacts with the physical world   97

6.  The Spiritual Nature of DNA – Creation v. evolution     127

7.  The “Cosmic Consciousness” of the multi-coloured, musical symphonies of (God The Holy) Spirit                            151

8.  The Anthropic Principle and Intelligent Design.              173

 

Volume B.  The Enemies of (the Holy) Spirit.

    The three Apocalyptic Books in the Bible.

1.  The New Testament - The Book of Revelation              181

2.  The Old Testament - The Book of Daniel                      251

3.  The Apocrypha – The Second Book of Esdras               309

 

Volume C.  (The Holy) Spirit overcoming Their Enemies?

1.  The “seventy ‘sevens’ of years calendar” or “Numera-Logical Calendar” – a new global peace initiative          329

2.  A theory of – and cures for - mental illnesses              355

3.  Manifesto: Abolish All Money!  This examines what the world might be like should Mankind as a whole Abolish Money!                                                                     365

 

Volume D.  Light relief after all that!  My collection of twenty-two poems pre ‘9/11’ 1978-2000 ‘A Many Threaded Tapestry’


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

 

All quotations are reproduced by kind permission of their copyright owners, wherever copyright actually applies.

 

Heraclitus, Parmenides

Ancilla to the pre-Socratic Philosophers, by Kathleen Freeman.  Published by Basil Blackwell (1948).

 

Polybius

de Natura Hominis, edition IV, by Jones.  Published by Loeb.

 

Sengtsan

Zen and Zen Classics, by R. H. Blyth.  Published by Hokuseido Press, Tokyo.

 

Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu

A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, by Wing-Tsit Chan.  Copyright  ã 1969 by Princeton University Press.

 

Leibniz

The Monadology, translated and edited by A Latta.  Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford (1898).

 

Karl Marx

Kapital Volume I, translator Ben Fowkes.  Published by Penguin Books in association with New Left Review (1976).

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man.  Published by HarperCollins (USA).

 

Bede Griffiths

Return to the Centre.  Published by HarperCollins Publishers ltd (1978).

 

Kahlil Gibran

The Prophet.  Published by Heinemann, London (1926).

 

The Bible

All translations are by myself.

 


INTRODUCTION and SUMMARY

 

Sunday 16th November 2009 – 15 years 8 months on!!!

 

This radically new and ‘different’ book is presented in five very different parts or what the author has called ‘volumes’.


        The first volume, ‘A (new) science of the Holy Spirit’,  comprehensively reviews and summarises the author’s views on the Nature of the Holy Spirit.  It is presented in eight ‘articles’, only the last written by another author, which is about ‘the Anthropic Principle and Intelligent Design’.  The author, instead of this latter ‘conventional’ approach to Scientific Proof that God Exists, of ‘do we observe intelligent design in our Universe - by God?’, asks: - ‘how is this achieved – what is its mechanism?’

 

He defines seven extremely surprisingly familiar, ‘fruit’ or components, or seven dimensions of The Holy Spirit with an overall eighth holistic component or dimension of Jealousy: -

Wisdom.  Joy and Love.  Health and Beauty.  Peace and Grace. 

 

Taken together, these form the ‘Holy Spirit’, which he claims occupy the seven ‘missing’ dimensions of space recently proposed in ‘string theories’ of modern cosmological physics!  The Large Hadron Collider or LHC, which is based in a 17 mile long circular tunnel at CERN, Geneva, under the Swiss-French border, may prove by 2010 that these ‘missing’ dimensions exist. In the largest, most expensive and complex scientific experiment ever – involving tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and computers.  Will their answer be ‘42’?!

 

The second part or volume of the book contains completely fresh translations, as literal as possible, then extremely full interpretation in a new, radically different way, of the only three ‘Apocalyptic’ Books of the Bible: -

1.    the Book of Revelation, the last Book of the New Testament

2.    the Book of Daniel, in the Old Testament

3.    the Second Book of Esdras, from the central Apocryphal Books.

 

It shows how many of their predictions relate to the modern world of the last century or so – especially the science, technology and politics of Our Twenty Ten Earth

 

The third volume firstly quotes in full, a vintage 1997 conspiracy theory that was downloaded from the Internet then.  However to prevent any such conspiracy theory coming true in the future as of 2010, a novel, simplistic, Universal Calendar is described, that should greatly simplify time-keeping and hence relations between all cultures.  It is based on the notion of a 73 5-day week year with 12 30-day months but with December having 35 days in total, but with the last three weeks a conventional winter holiday.  So that all dates in the year are always the same day of the week from one year to the next.  You would be able to have one diary for the first year the calendar was introduced, and to keep it – the same - for all years from then – for ever!

 

The second part of the third volume of the book turns in a completely different direction – to consider the causes not just symptoms of mental illnesses.  Are these all caused by people having a maladjusted perception of Time - and Spirit?

 

The third and final part of the Third Volume or part of the book is called ‘Manifesto: Abolish All Money!’  This explores the world as it might be should mankind abolish money, which the author claims would have many advantages and precious few, in fact no disadvantages! (Quoted in full at www.maam.org.uk).

 

By total contrast, the final Fourth Volume of this book – simply contains a collection of poetry he wrote in the 20th Century, stopping just before ‘9/11’ on 11th September, 2001. Not because of that but sadness at events in his personal life.


 

 

 

 

 

Volume A

 

 

 

 

A New Science of

(the Holy) Spirit



 

 

 

 

Article One

 

COMPLEMENTARY OPPOSITES

 

Extremely Fundamental Concepts Indeed!

 

 

March 1979


1.     Introduction

 

        Since the beginning of recorded history all sorts of people with time to spare, from many different countries and walks of life, have attempted to tackle the fundamental question, ‘What does it all mean?’  The purpose of this paper is to approach this sort of question to a rather greater depth than is found at the average house party.  It is an attempt to pick out the common threads of thought in the often disparate approaches of philosophers, scientists, and people of some religious persuasion, to the question of ‘the nature of reality’.

        The paper concentrates on two such main threads of thought.  The first is the ancient notion, familiar to both the ancient Greek ‘Cosmologists’, and Eastern mystics such as the Hindus of India and the Taoists of China, of opposites and their place in the ‘world order’.  A key concept to the ancient philosophers of both East and West was that one cannot ever consider an idea in isolation, that is out of context from its complement or opposite.  What is dark without the notion of light against which to set it?

        The second common theme I have found in considering the approaches of philosophers, mystics and scientists to the nature of reality and the universe, is a direct consequence of the notion of complementary opposites.  That is, they all place great importance on trying to understand what is the principle behind the many opposites they find in their contemplations, that is, the generating principle for them.  For this scientists often find themselves straying into the area of mysticism and religion, at which the majority balk.  In this paper I will be actively and deliberately straying in this way, as a scientist.  I hope the comparisons I draw between the findings of scientists and mystics will prove interesting.

        We begin our tour of the world’s main philosophers with the least well-known, the Ancient Greek ‘Cosmologists’.  Indeed, this earlier movement was suppressed and derided by a revolution in Greek thought, led by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle around 350 BC.  Attitudes to both of the main themes I described above, altered dramatically after this revolution, and as a direct result modern Western Science and Technology, as well as Communism, have evolved.

        We move East next, for a brief look at the attitudes of Buddhists and Taoists to the notions of opposites and the reality behind them.  Then we move to the Middle East to consider the cosmology of the Christian religion, as represented by the often remarkable writing of the apostle John. 

        Next we turn to the arena of modern physics, with all its exciting theories.  Some eminent modern physicists see in their emerging system of theories about the nature of the universe, a return to the views of the Eastern thinkers and the Cosmologists.

        Before concluding the paper I devote a section to a consideration of perhaps the most important duality of all, that of subject and object, which obviously affects our attitudes to all other pairs of opposites.

 


2.     Western Philosophy – the early Cosmologists

 

        Modern Western philosophy was started over 2,300 years ago, by a series of philosophers and mathematicians, notably Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.  These philosophers, notably Aristotle and Plato, are still regarded as the founders of modern Western philosophy, and accordingly are taught about as the major figures of Greek thought.  This was the foundation of classical physics, economics and mathematics.  As such, the teachings of these men have had a profound effect ever since on life in the West.  Their philosophical ideas have ultimately resulted in the current series of industrial revolutions culminating in the microchip.

        However, before these philosophers, there was a powerful movement in Greece of philosophers known as Cosmologists, whose work was scorned and derided by the founders of the ‘modern’ or ‘Socratic’ school.  Plato, for instance, often invented dialectics between his hero Socrates, and leading members of the Cosmological school who were contemporary with Socrates, notably Parmenides.  He consistently attempted to discredit these earlier philosophers.  Needless to say, Socrates always won the dialectic.

        There are two main differences between the teachings of the pre-Socratic and Socratic schools of thought.  Firstly, the Socratic followers of Plato and Aristotle dealt with abstract or ‘atomistic’ notions, such as The Beautiful, The Good, as an ethereal concept, in glorious isolation.  The pre-Socratic Cosmologists, sometimes referred to as ‘Sophists’ (which means ‘wise men’), would have dealt with the rather different issues of what is the difference between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, and so on.

        Secondly, the Sophists or Cosmologists believed there is only one reality, the obvious one we perceive.  On the other hand, Plato thought there exists a world of ethereal ‘Forms’, as he called them, over and above the forms of things we see in the everyday world.  This ‘Theory of Forms’ was picked up by the ‘Orthodox’ wing of the early Christian Church, as opposed to the mystical ‘Gnostic’ wing.  It was the Orthodox wing that won the ensuing theological ‘battle’.

        In this section we will consider the writings of three of the early Cosmologists, who were Heraclitus, Polybius and Parmenides.  All three dealt with the important idea, obviously prevalent at that time, that opposites are complementary and that there is a fundamental basis for this.  Heraclitus and Parmenides called this divine principle the LOGOS.  This remarkable Greek word, which means ‘Word’ itself, or ‘Reason’ or ‘Law’, often crops up in the writing of both men, as we shall now see.

 

 

2.1   Heraclitus

 

        Heraclitus of Ephesus was in his prime about 500 BC.  He wrote just one book, of which only fragments remain, covering ‘all knowledge, metaphysical, scientific and political’.  Here are some extracts.  Notice the twin emphasis on a system of opposites, and the idea of the logos, the underlying harmony through conflict between these opposites, both physical and metaphysical.

 

1.   The Law (LOGOS) is as here explained; but men are always incapable of understanding it, both before they hear it, and when they have heard it for the first time.  For though all things come into being in accordance with this Law, men seem as if they had never met with it, when they meet with words and actions such as I expound, separating each thing according to its nature, and explaining how it is made.  As for the rest of mankind, they are unaware of what they are doing after they wake, just as they forget what they did while asleep.

 

2.   Therefore one must follow that which is common.  But although the law is universal, the majority live as if they had understanding peculiar to themselves.

 

3.   That which is in opposition is in concert, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful harmony.

 

4.   Joints: whole and not whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.

 

5.   Those who step into the same river have different waters flowing ever upon them.

 

6.   That which alone is wise is one: it is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zen.

 

7.   That which is wise is one: to understand the purpose which steers all things through all things.

 

8.   You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, so deep is its Law (Logos), though you travelled the whole way.

 

9.   Fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, earth that of water.

 

10. And what is in us is the same thing: living and dead, awake and sleeping, as well as young and old; for the latter of each pair of opposites having changed, becomes the former, and this again having changed becomes the latter.

 

11. To those that are awake, there is one ordered Universe common to all, whereas in sleep each man turns away from this world to one of his own.

 

12. To God, all things are beautiful, good and just; but men have assumed some things to be unjust, others just.

 

13. The bow is called Life, but its work is Death.

 

14. In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.

 

15. When you have listened not to me, but to the Law (Logos), it is wise to agree that all things are one.

 

16. They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.

 

17. The hidden harmony is stronger than the visible.

 

18.   Those things of which there is sight, hearing, knowledge: these are what I honour most.

 

19. God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-famine.  But He changes like Fire, which when it mingles with the smoke of incense is named according to each man’s pleasure.

 

20. Cold things grow hot, hot things grow cold, the wet dries, the parched is moistened.

 

 

2.2   Polybius

 

        Polybius was the son-in-law of Hippocrates, the famous physician after whom the Hippocratic oath of medicine of today is named.  The extract below deals with the rôle in health of the famous four Ancient Greek opposites of fire, water, earth and air:

 

‘The body of man always possesses all of these (the four humours, characterised by the four primary opposites), but through the revolving seasons they become now greater than themselves, now lesser in turn according to nature.  For, just as every year has a share in all, in hot things as well as cold, in dry things as well as wet (for none of these could endure for any length of time without all of the things present in this universe; but if any one of these were to cease, all would disappear; for from a single necessity all are composed and nourished by one another); just so, if any one of these components were to cease in a man, the man would not be able to live’.

 

It was almost certainly another – unknown – ancient author who wrote about just two opposites, fire and water being in conflict:

 

‘Each one rules and is ruled in turn, to the maximum and minimum of what is possible.  For neither one is able to rule altogether...  If either were ever dominated, none of the things which now exist would be as it is now.  But as things are, these (fire and water) will be the same forever, and will never cease either separately or together’.

 

 

2.3   Parmenides

 

        We now turn to Parmenides of Elea, who was in his prime about 475 BC.  He was acknowledged by Plato as the first philosopher to use a dialectic, but was also pitched by Plato in dialectical arguments against his contemporary, Socrates, who always ‘won’!  Plato used these imaginary conflicts to attack the early Cosmologists.  He did so, perhaps surprisingly, against Parmenides in particular, even though Parmenides regarded with scorn the attitudes of his contemporaries to the ‘laws of opposites’.

        Parmenides used Divine Intervention to justify his claim that all opposites are an illusion, and that only the logos or law (which he calls ‘Being’) is to be considered.  I quote below most of the text of a poem that Parmenides wrote, from which classical scholars have deduced almost all that is known of his original thinking.

This poem, called the ‘Doxa’ or ‘Truth’, was written for Parmenides’ pupil Zeno, who is supposed to have been responsible for a famous series of paradoxes that confounded most mathematicians of his day.  Notice his emphatic denial in the poem that the traditional four opposites described by Polybius above have any meaning, and by his appeal to divine justice, how he implied that they belong in the occult, which is whence they are relegated today.

 

Parmenides’ DOXA

 

1.   The mares which carried me, conveyed me as far as my desire reached, when the goddesses who were driving had set me on the famous highway which bears a man who has knowledge through all the cities.  Along this way I was carried; for by this way the exceedingly intelligent mares bore me, drawing the chariot, and the maidens directed the way.  The axle in the naves gave forth a pipe-like sound as it glowed (for it was driven round by the two whirling circles at each end) whenever the maidens, daughters of the sun, having left the palace of night, hastened their driving towards the light, having pushed back the veils from their heads with their hands.  There (in the Palace of Night) are the gates of the paths of Night and Day, and they are enclosed with a lintel above and a stone threshold below.  The gates themselves are filled with great folding doors; and of these Justice, mighty to punish, has the interchangeable keys.  The maidens, skilfully cajoling her with soft words, persuaded her to push back the bolted bar without delay from the gates; and these, flung open, revealed a wide gaping space, having swung their jambs, richly-wrought in bronze, reciprocally in their sockets.  This way, then, straight through them went the maidens, driving chariot and mares along the carriage-road.

 

      And the goddess received me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and thus she spoke and addressed me:

 

      ‘Young man, companion of immortal charioteers, who comest by the help of the steeds which bring thee to our dwelling:  Welcome! – since no evil fate has despatched thee on thy journey by this road, for truly it is far from the road trodden by mankind; no, it is Divine Command and Right.  Thou shalt inquire into everything; both the motionless heart of well-rounded Truth, and also the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliability.  But nevertheless thou shalt learn these things also – how one should go through all the things-that-seem, without exception, and test them.

 

2.   Come, I will tell you – and you must accept my word when you have heard it – the ways of inquiry which alone are to be thought; the one that IT IS, and it is not possible for IT NOT TO BE, is the way of credibility, for it follows Truth; the other, that IT IS NOT, and that it is bound NOT TO BE: this, I tell you, is a path that cannot be explored; for you could neither recognise that which IS NOT, nor express it.

 

3.   For it is the same thing to think and to be.

 

4.   Observe nevertheless how things absent are securely present to the mind; for it will not sever Being from its connection to Being, whether it is scattered utterly throughout the universe, or whether it is collected together.

 

5.   It is all the same to me from what point I begin, for I shall return again to this same point.

 

6.   One should both say and think that Being Is; for To Be is possible, and nothingness is not possible.  This I command you to consider; for from the latter way of search, first of all, I debar you.  But next I debar you from that way along which mortals wander knowing nothing, two-headed, for perplexity in their bosoms steers their intelligence astray, as they are carried along as deaf as they are blind, amazed, uncritical hordes, by whom TO BE and NOT TO BE are regarded as the same and not the same, and for whom in everything there is a way of opposing stress.

 

7.   For this view can never predominate, that That Which is Not exists.  You must debar your thought from this way of search, nor let ordinary experience in its variety force you along this way, allowing the eye, sightless as it is, and the ear, full of sound, and the tongue, to rule; but judge by means of the Reason (logos), the much-contested proof which is expounded by me.

 

      There is only one other description of the way remaining, namely that What Is, Is.  To this way there are very many sign-posts: that Being has no coming-into-being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end.  And it never Was, nor Will Be, because it Is now, a whole all together, One, continuous; for what creation of it will you look for?  How, whence could it have sprung?

 

      Nor shall I allow you to speak or think of it as springing from Not-Being; for it is neither expressible nor thinkable that What-Is-Not Is.  Also, what necessity impelled it, if it did spring from Nothing, to be produced later or earlier? Thus it must Be absolutely, or not at all.  Nor will the force of credibility ever admit that anything should come into being, beside Being itself, out of Not-Being.  So far as this is concerned, Justice has never released Being in its fetters and set it free, either to come into being or to perish, but holds it fast.

 

      The decision on these matters depends on the following; IT IS, or IT IS NOT.  It is therefore decided – as is inevitable – that one must ignore the one way as unthinkable and inexpressible (for it is no true way) and take the other as the way of Being and Reality.  How could Being perish?  How could it come into being?  If it came into being, it is Not; and so too if it is about-to-be at some future time.  Thus Coming-into-Being is quenched, and Destruction also into the unseen.

 

      Nor is Being divisible, since it is all alike.  Nor is there anything here or there which could prevent it from holding together, nor any lesser thing, but all is full of Being.  Therefore it is altogether continuous; for Being is close to Being.

 

      But it is motionless in the limits of mighty bonds, without beginning, without cease, since Becoming and Destruction have been driven very far away, and true conviction has rejected them.  And remaining the same in the same place, it rests by itself and thus remains there fixed; for powerful Necessity holds it in the bonds of a Limit, which constrains it round about, because it is decreed by divine law that Being shall not be without boundary.  For it is not lacking; but if it were spatially infinite it would be lacking everything.

 

8.   To think is the same as the thought that IT IS; for you will not find thinking without Being, in regard to which there is an expression.  For nothing else either is or shall be except Being, since Fate has tied it down to be a whole and motionless; therefore all things that mortals have established, believing in their truth, are just a name: Becoming and Perishing, Being and Not-Being, and change of position, and alteration of bright colour.

 

      But since there is a spatial limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from its centre in every direction; for it is not bound to be at all either greater or less in this direction or that; nor is there Not-Being which could check it from reaching to the same point, not is it possible for Being to be more in this direction, less in that, than Being, because it is an inviolate whole.  For, in all directions equal to itself, it reaches its limits uniformly.

 

      At this point I cease my reliable theory (logos) and thought, concerning Truth; from here onwards you must learn the opinion of mortals, listening to the deceptive order of my words.

 

      They have established the custom of naming two forms, one of which ought not to be mentioned; that is where they have gone astray.  They have distinguished them as opposite in form, and have marked them off from one another by giving them different signs; on one side the flaming fire in the heavens, mild, very light in weight, the same as itself in every direction, and not the same as the other.  This other is also by itself and opposite; dark Night, a dense and heavy body.  This world-order I describe to you with all its phenomena, in order that no intellect of mortal men may outstrip you.

 

9.   But since all things are named Light and Night, and names have been given to each class of things according to the power of one or the other, everything is full equally of Light and Invisible Night, as both are equal, because to neither of them belongs any share of the other’.

 

 

 

        This poem is remarkable in being one of the first reasoned attempts in the West to explain the world.  Only Thales, Heraclitus and Pythagoras, and some handful of other pioneers dared question the mythology of their ancestors.  These are the very early beginnings of Western science, and in section five I will show how modern physics now appears to be returning to its origins after a lengthy ‘classical’ materialistic diversion following the rationale introduced by Plato and Aristotle.


3.     Eastern Religions

 

        I was at first very surprised to find ancient Eastern writers express very similar views to those of the ancient Western writers like Heraclitus and Parmenides.  At about the same time as Parmenides and Heraclitus were alive, but separated from them by a vast gulf of distance, and hence very much culturally isolated, were similar thinkers in India and China, and later Japan.  They were developing or had already developed, great philosophical and religious systems, in particular Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism.

        When I came to read the writings of some of the founding figures of Taoism and the Zen branch of Buddhism (both originally Chinese philosophies), I was struck by the similarity of these pioneering works, to those of the pioneering Cosmologists in Western thought.  I give below quotations from the ‘Hsinhsinming’ of Sengtsan, the first Chinese Zen Master or Patriarch, and the ‘Tao te Ching’ of Lao Tzu.  Lao Tzu is regarded as one of the founding figures of the Taoist philosophy.

 

3.1          Zen Buddhism – the ‘Hsinhsinming’ of

               Sengtsan

 

        Sengtsan lived in the sixth century AD, and wrote one of the earliest treatises on Zen Buddhism, the ‘Hsinhsinming’ or ‘Inscription on the believing mind’.  It bears an astonishing similarity to the ‘Doxa’ of Parmenides which I quoted in the last section.  Both emphasise that duality (the existence of opposites) is a delusion.  Whereas Parmenides has an Ultimate Principle in the notion of ‘Being’, Sengtsan talks of the ‘Great Way’, a familiar term in Eastern thought.  We shall see in the extracts I give from both the Hsinhsinming and Lao Tzu’s writings, the emphasis, as strong as that in Parmenides, that the only true approach to reality is through this principle of ultimate reality.


Extracts from Sengtsan’s Hsinhsinming

 

        There is nothing difficult about the Great Way,

        But, avoid choosing!

        Only when you neither love nor hate

        Does it appear in all clarity ....

 

....    Perfect like Great Space

        The way has nothing lacking, nothing in excess.

        Truly, because of our accepting and rejecting,

        We have not the “suchness” of things ....

 

....    If there is the slightest trace of this and that,

        The mind is lost in a maze of complexity.

        Duality arises from Unity,

        But do not be attached to this Unity ....

 

....    The activity of the Great Way is vast;

        It is neither easy nor difficult.

        Small views are full of foxy fears;

        The faster, the slower ....

 

....    Illusion produces rest and motion;

        Illumination destroys liking and disliking.

        All these pairs of opposites

        Are created by our own folly ....

 

....    If the mind makes no discriminations,

        All things are as they really are.

        In the deep mystery of this “things as they are”

        We are released from our relations to them ....

 

....    When all things are seen with “equal mind”

        They return to their nature.

        No description by analogy is possible

        Of this state where all relations have ceased ....

 

....    When we stop movement, there is no-movement.

        When we stop resting, there is no-rest.

        When both cease to be,

        How can the Unity subsist? ....

 

....    The believing mind is not dual;

        What is dual is not the believing mind.

        Beyond all language,

        For it there is no past, no present, no future.

 

 

3.2   Taoism – the ‘Tao te Ching’ of Lao Tzu

 

        Taoist philosophy is a lot older than Zen Buddhism, and had a considerable influence on its origins.  The ‘Tao’ is another Ultimate Principle, like the Way, Being and the Logos.  In Taoist tradition it is the One, which is natural, eternal, spontaneous, nameless and indescribable.  The ‘Tao te Ching’ (Classic of the Way and its Virtue) is certainly the most important classic work in Chinese literature.  More commentaries on it have been written than on any other Chinese book.  The opening is as dramatic as the opening of John I in the New Testament:

 

1.     The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;

        The name that can be named is not

        the eternal name.

        The nameless is the Origin of Heaven and Earth;

        The named is the mother of all things.

        Therefore let there always be non-being

        so that we may see their subtlety,

        And let there always be being so

        we may see their outcome.

        The two are the same,

        But after they are produced,

        they have different names.

        They both may be called deep and profound.

        Deeper and more profound,

        The door of all subtleties!

 

        The piece continues with a discussion of opposites and their interplay.  It is important to understand something of Chinese tradition about opposites, in order to appreciate this section.  Chinese tradition places great emphasis on just two principal polar opposites, the yin and yang, which are two poles limiting all cycles of change.


2.     When the people of the world all know

        beauty as beauty

        There arises the recognition of ugliness.

        When they all know good as good,

        There arises the recognition of evil.

        Therefore:

        Being and non-being produce each other;

        Difficult and easy complete each other;

        Long and short contrast each other;

        High and low distinguish each other;

        Sound and voice harmonise with each other;

        Front and back follow each other.

 

36.   In order to contract,

        it is necessary first to expand.

        In order to weaken,

        it is necessary first to strengthen.

        In order to destroy,

        it is necessary first to promote.

        In order to take, it is necessary first to give.

        This is called subtle light.

 

41.   The Tao which is bright appears to be dark.

        The Tao which goes forwards

        appears to fall backward.

        The Tao which is level appears uneven.

        Great virtue appears like a valley (hollow).

        Great purity appears like disgrace.

        Far-reaching virtue appears as if insufficient.

        Solid virtue appears as if unsteady.

        True substance appears to be changeable.

        The great square has no corners.

        The great talent is slow to mature.

        Great music sounds faint.

        Great form has no shape.

        Tao is hidden and nameless.

        Yet it is Tao alone that skilfully provides for all

        and brings them to perfection.


4.     Christianity

 

        In preceding sections we have seen how mystics of both East and West have often searched for an ‘Ultimate Principle’, which founding figures of the Western Cosmologist movement called ‘Being’ or the ‘Logos’, and early patriarchs or founders of Taoism and Zen Buddhism called ‘the Tao’ or ‘The Great Way’.  The major religions of the West (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) at first sight do not appear to have a corresponding notion.  Indeed, both the Old and New Testaments are remarkably free of cosmology, and there is very little in Islam to suggest a supreme principle.  Instead attention is focused on a ‘Lord God’, with very human attributes, who is a supreme being rather than a supreme principle.

        However, the few cosmological passages in the Bible, notably the opening of the books of Genesis and John, seem to hint at such a principle.  I give below my own translation of part of the opening of John I, from the Ancient Greek.  I think that none of the meaning of the passage is lost, but that I can highlight parallels between the ideas expressed here and those of the Greek Cosmologists, notably Heraclitus.  Notice how the word ‘logos’, the Greek word for reason, law, or the ‘Word’, is here synonymous with the word ‘God’.  Note also how, in the final verse, the nature of the logos or God is compared via a simile, to the ‘Being in the bosom of the Father’, a safe and secure metaphor to express the nature of the universal principle:

 

 

Extracts from John I verses 1-18

 

“In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and God was the logos.  This was in the beginning with God.  All things evolved through it, and without it became not one thing that has become.  In it was life, and the life was the light of mankind, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it....

 

....  The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.  It was in the world, and the world became through it, and the world knew it not.  It came to its own home, and its own people received it not.  But as many as received it, who believed in its name, it gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God.  And the logos became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we beheld His glory, glory as of an only begotten from a father, full of grace and truth....

 

....  No man has ever seen God; the only begotten God, the ‘Being in the bosom of the Father’, the one declared here”.

 

 

5.     Modern Physics

 

        About the beginning of this century, classical physicists believed that they were on the brink of possessing an ‘ultimate’ description of the universe.  By viewing the universe as a machine that obeys certain mechanical laws, as though it was a piece of clockwork, they had almost completely defined it in terms of a large set of theories.  These divided the physical world neatly up into areas like mechanics, electricity and magnetism, kinetic theory and atomic theory. 

This division of the world into elegant-seeming boxes, with no mystical blurring, was a direct and logical conclusion of a philosophical and scientific train of development that had begun with the materialistic revolution started by Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Democritus and Pythagoras.

        The rosy mechanistic world-view of the classical physicists was nearing completion when it was forever impeded, within the space of a few short years, by the advent of a series of new discoveries which did not fit into any of the classical ‘boxes’.  Rutherford showed that atoms were not, as scientists since Democritus had believed, the smallest particles in nature, but that there were a whole host of smaller structures and particles.  Heisenberg in particular showed, furthermore, that even these particles were not fundamental, and that there are in fact no ‘basic building blocks’ of matter.

        Instead, we should think of matter as either a particle or a wave, but matter chooses to alternate between these vastly different conceptions in a very mysterious fashion.  Einstein showed in his theories of Relativity, that the very framework of classical physics, absolute time and space, was delusory, and that space and time formed a complex ‘four-dimensional continuum’.

        As if that was not enough, one consequence of Relativity Theory is that energy and matter are regarded as interchangeable forms of some more fundamental quantity.  Hence the two basic axioms of mechanics, the absolute nature of space and time, and the interaction of energy and matter, were partly shattered by the new theories.  Finally, the ‘ultra-violet catastrophe’ showed that energy, like particles, is present in packets called quanta.  In fact, apart from the description of a limited range of everyday physical phenomena, classical physics had lost its hold on the science.

        It appeared that the far more mysterious theories now emerging, although not fitting into a neat mechanistic structure, afforded a far more accurate picture of the universe at the extremes of the very large and the very small.  They offered a far greater insight into the structure of the universe.

        Although today we are still some way from a unified picture of the physical universe provided by these new theories, they have produced a curious ‘counter-revolution’ in science.  Physics in particular has moved away from the philosophy that produced classical physics, back towards the Cosmological views of the earlier Greek Philosophers.

        It is very interesting to look at pairs of concepts, which in the framework of classical physics were distinct opposites, or at least were listed in pairs but were extremely different.  These all became complementary to each other, or were even interchangeable, in the new physics.  Some examples are given below.  Many commentators see in this change and other trends in modern physics, a return to the philosophical attitudes of the early Greek Cosmologists, and a blending of physics with the ancient mysticism of the Far East.

 

Matter – Energy

 

        These two concepts, opposed in classical physics, became interchangeable forms of the same concept in the relativity theories of modern physics.  Einstein’s equation, perhaps the most famous of science, relates these two quantities:

 

               E = m c 2

 

        They are complementary views of the world.  To understand the one you need an understanding of the other; a measurement of one implies, in atomic theory, a measurement of the other.  For instance, particle physicists are quite used to quoting an energy level as a measure of an entity’s mass.

 

Space – Time

 

        In classical physics, space had been regarded as a rigid three-dimensional framework in which the mechanical parts of the universe operated like clockwork.  This frame could be measured, it was thought, in terms of a square lattice that extended evenly to infinity in all directions.  Time was seen as a continuous flow through this lattice, that though mysterious, was assumed to be just as absolute as the classical notion of space.  Another assumption inherited from the period of Aristotle, was that time and space would be measured the same by anybody, regardless of how they moved in the lattice of space or where they were in it.

        Einstein’s two theories of special and general relativity showed that space and time are far better not regarded as absolutes, and that they changed according to the position and motion of the person measuring them; and with the presence of matter, increasingly as the mass of nearby objects increased.  Although the alterations were minute at the everyday level, at astronomical distances they were significant.  An early experiment that verified the equations of relativity with great accuracy, showed how light passing from distant stars close to the sun was actually ‘bent’ in its passing. 

        Hence that great body of assumptions that had been inherited by classical physics from the time of Plato and Aristotle, and had been greatly refined by Newton, was totally undermined by Einstein’s theories, which despite refinement have still not been disproved.

 

Waves – Particles

 

        In classical physics, waves and particles had been regarded as very different forms of matter, and indeed were treated by different areas of the science.  However, Heisenberg’s principle, when tested by experiments with light, shows that matter that is very small or of very low mass, exhibits attributes of both wave and particle behaviour, depending on circumstances.  As in relativity, the presence of other matter, and indeed the human observer of any experiment, radically affects the results.

 

Electricity – Magnetism

 

        The two fields of force, the electric field and the magnetic field, were also regarded in classical physics as being very different, and usually opposite in their effect, and in the equations used to describe their action.  Once again, relativity shows that these ‘opposites’ are aspects of the same fundamental concept.  They are only distinguishable in the equations of relativity used to describe them, by a relativistic ‘shift’ relative to the Space-Time continuum.

 

Matter – Antimatter

 

        Classical physicists had no notion of antimatter, which was first postulated by Einstein’s equations, and only later detected in laboratories.  It is the polar opposite to ‘normal’ matter, and every fundamental particle so far detected, apart from the ‘neutral’ pions and photons, has a corresponding anti-particle.  Once again, nature appears to operate on the basis of complementary opposite pairings.

 

Light – Darkness

 

        Using Maxwell’s equations, which in fact originally derived from classical physics, one can show how light comprises two complementary electric and magnetic fields.  They are coupled in such a way that photons – particles of light – can propagate even through an absolute vacuum.  Again, light has the attributes of waves and particles, which are equal and complementary.

 

 

        We have seen how the findings of modern physics appear to totally confirm the purely inspired insights of the ancient mystics, even when made with the utmost precision.  The simplistic mechanical view of the world proposed by classical physicists, based solidly on the materialistic revolution of Plato and Aristotle, is gradually being replaced by a world view in which the universe is regarded via a set of complementary concepts.  Furthermore, the presence of human observers actually affects the results of apparently clinical, objective experiments.  This brings us to consider the most important duality of all, that of the subject and the object, the difference between us and the rest of the universe.

 

 

6.     The Subject – Object Duality

 

        One pair of traditional opposites that I have only briefly touched upon so far is the subject and the object.  I say ‘traditional’ and yet the subject-object duality, and the split between ‘subjective’, ‘artistic’-ness and the objective nature of science is very much a Western phenomenon.  The Cosmologists of Ancient Greece, and the early mystics of the Far East, would have had no such difficulty in coming to terms with these two modes of thought.

As Sengtsan says in the Hsinghsinming, the aim of all mystics is to understand the ‘suchness’ of the world, with no reference to ‘the observer’ and ‘the universe’ as in Western science.  There are no two modes of thought for mystics – they have attained a blissful ‘selfless’ state, where distinctions of any sort between apparent opposites, including ‘self’ and ‘world’, have disappeared.  This is ‘Nirvana’ – the aim of countless people in the East for millennia, attained only by the very few.

        The notion of ‘self’, ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ as opposed to the ‘material world’ has its philosophical origins, once again, with the work of Aristotle.  It was the basis of both Western science, and most of Western Christian doctrine, for hundreds of years.  It has remained largely unchallenged, and whole edifices of thought have evolved, especially in the Middle Ages, to justify the mind-matter dualism.  These have enabled classical physics to persist virtually unchallenged until very recently.

        The development of modern physics, in my view, heralds the end of the strict division between mind and matter, although the crumbling of this edifice will almost certainly take a long time yet to complete.  There are still a large majority of scientists, particularly those educated in other branches of science than physics, whose training is still based on the notion that the ‘observer’ always plays a pristine, clinically detached rôle in scientific experiments.  Until the impact of the latest discoveries of physicists can fully ‘filter through’ to other areas of science, most scientists will still persist with the delusory mind-matter dualism as the basis of their research.

       

 

7.     Conclusion

 

        The areas of thought I have described, Cosmology in Ancient Greece, Eastern mysticism, and more surprisingly, Christian Cosmology and modern physics, bear striking resemblances to one another in two crucial ways.  Firstly, they are all to do, to a large extent, with contemplating pairs of opposing concepts, which are approached in one of two ways, the dualistic and the non-dualistic.  However, we seem to be seeing the non-dualistic starting to replace the dualistic approach, at least in the science of modern physics.  Heraclitus was the first in the West to nominate a ‘Logos’, as a set of laws governing opposites.  Now we see, after a diversionary period lasting over two thousand years, the return of at least physics among the sciences, to a search for this ‘Logos’.

        The second and far more important resemblance between all these areas of thought, is their approach to the governing principle between all the complementary opposites we encounter.  What is it that holds two complementary concepts together, yet keeps them opposed, in a sort of dynamic tension?  The Cosmologists and the Eastern mystics would have had no dispute over this.  The words differ – Logos, Being, Tao, Great Way – but the meaning is clearly the same in each case.  Even physicists, in seeking a Logos or set of universal laws, appear to be pursuing knowledge of this same indefinable absolute – that which generates opposites.

        From the point of view of Western religion, this surely is the place of a ‘third force’ beyond duality: God (alternatively, the ‘Ground of Existence’ or the Godhead), the Universal Arbitrator of all pairs of opposites.  This is the One who (that which) generates all the complementary opposites in the first place.  Indeed, perhaps it is better to regard each pair of opposites as a ‘trinity’, with the central generating principle vastly more important than the details of the two opposing concepts.  This central principle, which expresses the quality or degree of balance between each pair of opposites, cannot be defined.

        Robert Pirsig explored the meaning of the word ‘quality’ in his book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, and concluded that there are two kinds of quality.  One is the one I just mentioned, where it expresses the balance between all pairs of opposites.  However, the Quality between the subject-object pairing is of a higher order – it is the notion of Goodness and Worth, the Numinous itself.  Hence he saw in the end just one kind of metaphysical trinity – subject and object and Real Quality (to coin a phrase). 

        These eventually, he found, are reducible to just Quality, the Godhead, the Tao.  Hence he found a modern Western equivalent to the Tao, Being, or ‘The Way’.  It appears to me that considering the nature of pairs of opposites, and the ‘third force’ between them, leads one inexorably to the very same ‘Ground of Existence’ or ‘Godhead’, the generating force behind all religions.

 


 

Article Two

 

WHERE OPPOSITES MEET

 

An exploration of

Real Value

and invented value

 

 

 

 

March 1980


1.     Introduction

 

        In my previous paper, Complementary Opposites, I used the notion summarised by the paper’s title to try to examine common threads of thought in many areas, from both East and West, and occurring over a very large timespan.  In that paper, I looked in this way at pre-Socratic philosophy and religion.  This was the work of the Ancient Greek philosophers who came before the revolution in Western thought around 350 BC, which was initiated mainly by Plato and Aristotle.

        Next I considered Buddhist and Taoist philosophy as examples of the corresponding style in the Far East, of religious philosophies similar to pre-Socratic thought in the West.  Then I looked at the small amount of explicit Cosmology in Western Christianity.  I tried to establish a link between this and the far larger body of Cosmological thought that I had explored in the preceding two sections of that paper.

        Next I turned to two areas with which I was much more familiar.  I was able to point out the occurrence of many pairs of opposing and complementary concepts in modern physics.  Finally I looked at the whole area of ‘Subject and Object’, a perennial source of discussion!

        In the present paper I will be examining the dominance, once confined to ‘Western’ thought but becoming much more global this century, of so-called ‘rational thought’.  I will point out that this is not nearly so complete or solidly-founded as one might be led to believe by our increasing reliance on scientific advances and technology.

Indeed, I will be showing how ‘reason’ (which I employ loosely as an umbrella term for all aspects of the ‘scientific revolution’ of 350 BC and later, as described in my first paper), is totally dependent on the concepts of opposites.  This leads to a system of what I call invented values.

        Immediately following this, in the third section, I introduce again the concepts I just touched upon at the end of my first paper.  These assert the essential importance to any such system of a Real Value, the transcendental ‘something’ which is not really a ‘thing’, to create the invented values.

        Then in the fourth section I will compare and contrast Real Value and invented value in some detail.  In the fifth section, I apply all these notions to an exploration of the similarities of religions of the world.

        In the final concluding section, provocatively entitled ‘Towards a Creative Anarchy!’, I bring the whole paper to a head.  We will be exploring the world as it might be, if the current world system were actually to give people real freedom of choice, made on the basis of Real rather than invented values.

 

 

2.     Reason (I)

 

        ‘Reason’, as a philosophical system, or even a way of life, is probably what most people would answer if asked what ‘normal’ thinking is supposed to comprise.  The word is synonymous with a balanced, common-sense view of the world.  It is probably a surprise to learn that reason has only become the ‘norm’ or ideal, relatively recently in the time scale of human history.

        Prior to the invention of reason (for that is what it was), mankind throughout the world placed reliance on a mixture of myths, legends and mysticism, as a guide to how to live.  The replacement of this moral system by the ‘system of rationality’ seems to be a fundamental feature of all maturing civilisations, which at a certain critical point of their development take reason on board.  Western civilisation began to adopt reason around 450 BC, and the more ancient civilisations of China and most of the Far East, some centuries or even thousands of years before this.  Less mature cultures, such as the Minoans on Crete, have come to an end before even emerging from the mythological opening phase.

        I should like to make a few points about the above observations.  Firstly, it should be obvious that myths and legends always persist in a culture even after it has adopted rationality as its ‘norm’; people seem to have an insatiable appetite for both fiction and non-fiction which inflames the imagination.  Thankfully no society’s appeal to reason has quenched this need, and its fulfilment.  Secondly, it should be equally obvious that there is room in any mature society for a vast number of ‘norms’, not just one, especially when it is vague and ill-defined.

        I will be spending much of this section in an attempt to define reason itself in terms of the system of opposites I introduced in my first paper, in an attempt to show that reason is entirely dualistic, that is, dependent on the existence of opposites.  Finally, we will be seeing how reason, however lofty and elevated it is made out to be, is not really much of an advance from mythology.  Because of the brain’s vast capacity for pattern-matching, which I will be trying to reduce reason to, it will turn out to seem a very primitive system indeed, by comparison to what a fully integrated and peaceful community might achieve.  The love of mankind for violence and domination, on many levels, both international and civil, has always precluded this possibility.

        Reason has two fundamental ingredients.  These are, first, logic, which is the process by which we proceed from one known state of affairs to another, usually in a progression of successive ‘known states’.  Second, much more dangerous, the set of assumptions we need about any situation, in order to apply logic to it in this progressive fashion.

I intend in this section to first of all dissect logic itself, firstly to discuss its two well-known forms, deductive and inductive logic.  Furthermore I intend to show how both of these depend utterly on the use of polar opposites as a mode of thought.

I will then demonstrate briefly how it is equally impossible to make one’s initial assumptions (prior to using the logical components of reason), by using logic itself unassisted by ‘something else’.  What this ‘something else’ is, I will go on to discuss in the next section, entitled ‘The Transcendental’.

        The use of reason as the major tool of thought, philosophical or more down-to-earth, in Western Civilisation, began in Greece, as we just said, over two thousand years ago.  As I showed in my previous paper ‘Complementary Opposites’, prior to this the only attempts to achieve ‘structured thinking’ over and above the ancient myths and legends that had prevailed till then, were the works of the Cosmologists, that Classicists call ‘pre-Socratic’ philosophers.

        Reason, in the form first developed and systematised by Aristotle, is totally dualistic.  It divides the world up into ‘this’ and ‘that’, and ‘you’ and ‘the rest of the world’, and then constructs an elaborate system of tools to manipulate the ‘information’ produced.  These tools are logic, both inductive and deductive, and systems of hierarchies, of cause and effect, and degree of sophistication of the dualistic objects.  (For instance, biological hierarchies of species, genera, etc.). 

At the back of all this is the desire to arrive at a ‘true’ picture, or as the philosopher Kant described it, a true ‘apriori’ model of the universe.  This is in stark contrast to what Zen Buddhists and Taoists look for, which when they name it at all, they call the ‘suchness’ of reality.  But what do we mean by the statement that something is ‘true’? For one possible answer I turn to one of the most eminent followers of the Aristotelian tradition, Leibniz:

 

‘There are two kinds of truth, those of reason, and those of fact.  The truths of reason are necessary and their opposites impossible, those of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

 

When a truth is necessary its reason can be found by analysis, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths, until you reach those which are primitive.  It is in this way that mathematicians reduce speculative theorems and rules of practice by analysis to definitions, axioms and postulates.  In the end one has simple ideas which are indefinable.  There are also axioms and postulates – in a word, primary principles which cannot be proved and do not need to be either.  These are identical propositions, the opposite of which contains an explicit contradiction.

 

But there also has to be a sufficient reason for contingent truths – truths of fact; for the sequence of things spreads out through the whole creation, that is where the resolution into particular reasons could run into unlimited detail on account of the immense variety of things in nature and the infinite indivisibility of bodies...’

 

        This passage from Leibniz illustrates all three of the ‘classical’ aspects of reason – inductive logic (‘truths of fact’), deductive logic (‘truths of reason’) and classification of causes and effects (the last paragraph).  Let us now, armed with this classical notion of reason, proceed to reduce reason to the dualisms it ultimately is based on.

        Both deductive and inductive logic are pattern-matching activities, finding relationships between two or more patterns of rational thought or of words.  They have opposite starting points, deductive logic starting from a general statement and inductive logic starting from a particular statement.  Having then established the first ‘truth’ or positive relationship between two or more patterns, that is after showing that a pattern relationship exists, both types of logic then produce a chain or network of further truths by means of the word therefore (or its symbolic equivalent).  For example, in deductive logic, consider the following sequence of simple ideas:

 

Postulate: “The post office closes at five o’clock”.

Conjunction: “It’s five-thirty”.

Therefore (conclusion): “The post office is closed”.

 

        By contrast, in inductive logic we work the other way, from a ‘singular statement’ to a general one.  For instance:

 

Singular statement: “This cup of coffee tastes good”.

Therefore (general statement): “All cups of coffee taste good”.

 

        The first duality involved in logic of both types is the ‘Subject’/‘Object’, the ‘Me’/‘The rest of the world’ division, which is obviously the most important.  Reason and the scientific method always try to be ‘objective’, to make statements about the rest of the world that would be true even in the absence of an ‘observer’.  There takes place a complete reduction, an analytical knifing of the world into subject and object.

        Needless to say this raises great problems, which prompted, for instance, the philosopher George Berkeley to propose that “it’s all in the mind” for how otherwise could ‘things’ exist with no-one there to experience them?  His final solution was to assert that, since God is omnipresent, all ‘things’ continue to ‘exist’ when there is no human onlooker, since God is there instead.  This obviously raises a whole bundle of other questions, which we will not pursue here.  Suffice it to say that this whole problem does not arise in Eastern philosophy, simply because Taoists, Buddhists, and all other Eastern philosophical schools of thought, refrain from applying this particular analytical knife.

        The second duality is the division of what we actually experience, from an essential unity as presented to our senses, to a ‘this’, and ‘that’, followed by the classification of the ‘these’ and the ‘those’ into a hierarchy.  Eastern mystics spend a great deal of effort to point out that while it is seemingly a very natural thing to do, this second knifing is a very strong barrier to ‘seeing’ the Tao or Zen.  It is a totally dualistic operation.

        Whenever we categorise the world into ‘this’ and ‘that’, and produce a name for the ‘these’ and ‘those’, to fit into our model of the universe, we are (probably without consciously realising it) applying another very sharp analytical knife.  We effectively erect an intellectual fence, its opposite sides marked ‘this’ and ‘that’.  By contrast, Eastern thinkers emphasise it is vastly better and more natural to allow such intellectual constructions to run down, so that one comes to terms with the essential ‘suchness’ of reality.

        The invention of the ‘this’/‘that’ duality allows the mind to compare and contrast things, and to combine its complex conception of ‘something’ into a pattern, which can then be compared with other patterns.  This is the origin of the rational conception of truth.  A statement is ‘true’ when the patterns it compares match; it is false when they don’t.  For instance, the statement “The Post office is closed” from my example above, is a comparison of ‘post office’ with the pattern of things we call ‘being closed’.

        The last tool reason uses in its construction of statements and thoughts is invented value, which term I had better explain.  Invented value arises when the pattern-matching of ‘this’ and ‘that’ is performed on a scientific basis, when the attributes and characteristics of the two patterns are measured.  The process of taking a measurement, like weighing out flour for cooking, is yet again totally dualistic!  Consider that whenever we take a measurement we create a pair of opposite directions for the character, like up/down, high/low, large/small, and so on.  When there are obvious limits to the two directions, measurement, the selection or assignment of an invented value takes the form of determining the balance between the two extremes.

        However, when one or both limits are infinite, reason invents a cunning trick to make measurement possible, the unit (like the weights used to weigh out flour in the kitchen).  The same is done for time, money and many other invented values that lack limits.  However, the unit is once again a totally dualistic concept.  We have now invented the concept of ‘this’ minute and ‘that’ minute of time, for instance.

        Armed with this reduction of reason to a totally dualistic operation, let us now analyse into dualisms and patterns, the first simple example of logic that I made up earlier.  First of all let us consider the postulate that “the post office closes at five o’clock” which is actually quite complex!  First of all it attempts to be an “objective” statement – normally post offices close whether we are there or not!  However, it is a postulate, based on our experience that whenever we have asked at what time it closes in the past, this is the answer we always got.

        To analyse the statement further, it is composed of three patterns.  These are “the post office”, “closes”, and “at five o’clock”.

“At five o’clock” is itself a pattern made by dualistically splitting up a continuum, time, into units.  Hence the truth of this sequence of logic is based on matching up our conceptions or patterns called “the post office”, “closes” and “five o’clock”, all of which are dualistic.  Since the patterns appear to match we say the statement is “true”; we then proceed to say and “it’s five-thirty now” therefore “the post office is closed”, which equally are dualistic patterns.

        This system of pure reason is refined by the introduction of logical operators to help make pattern matching as simple as possible.  These are and, or, and not (to add to the basic implication operator therefore).  With these, and the end in view of making our model of the Universe systematic, we then go on to produce categorical hierarchies of the facts and statements.  These start from postulates (the post office closes at five o’clock) or singular statements (this cup of coffee tastes good) and proceed via deductive or inductive logic respectively, to further ‘true’ statements, i.e. statements that ‘logically match’.  Obviously, from all that I have said, such hierarchies are totally dualistic as well.

        Now let us apply all this reduction of rationality to dualisms, to that invention which has done most to advance the cause of reason and make it as efficient as possible – the digital computer.  Surprise, surprise, the computer is utterly dualistic throughout! To begin with, its memory consists of simple polar digits, which may take the opposite values of ‘1’ and ‘0’.  These correspond to ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the basic tools of the logic system.  They are arranged dualistically in ‘this’ and ‘that’ patterns, called words, and to speed things up whole word-patterns are compared and operated on at a time.

        To achieve this there is a large amount of complex, and totally logical and dualistic circuitry, in the processor or processors of the computer.  These operate with and’s, or’s and not’s (by the billion!) to relate the patterns kept in the words.  Since the binary patterns can be taken to represent any form of rational information, from truth values (1 or 0), through numbers to text, the processing can be arranged (the machine is programmed) to carry out a very wide range of activities.  The computer performs any purely rational activity very much more precisely and quickly than the human brain.

        Needless to say, since the computer is totally dualistic it can be used to represent any form of rational information.  However, the essence of ‘The Transcendental’ is totally missing, the sense of undivided reality, so computers (in the present design at least) are not conscious, but do think.  Let us now go on to consider ‘The Transcendental’ in detail, and see why any dualistic design of computer will never attain consciousness.

 

 

 

3.     The Transcendental

 

        In the introduction I said that I had arrived at the conclusion that for all dualisms, bar the very special case of the subject and the object, what creates them is the human mind.  In section two I followed on this argument by showing that the tool we use most in our structured thinking, reason, is totally dualistic.  I said then that reason first of all divides the world into ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and then the subject measures ‘invented values’ in the object or objects observed.  These invented values can always be defined in terms of opposites.

        Now I would like to put forward a completely different way of looking at things, starting from what I call Real Value, or Quality.  That alternative way is to say that the subject-object situation, in a non-dualistic way is created by something other than reason – Real Value.  That’s quite a mouthful, so I’ll explain in detail what I mean.  On the way you should begin to see why I draw such a strong distinction between Real Value and ‘invented values’.

        My first statement, and it is a crucial one, is that whatever it is that creates the subject-object situation, the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object, can never itself be categorised as either subjective or objective by dualistic reason.  This statement has profound implications!  If the Tao or ‘mu’, as the Eastern mystics call the creator of subject and object, is forever outside the ‘object’ category, then ‘it’ is never to be called an ‘it’!  (In other words it is beyond rational analysis into a dualistic framework of this and that).

        Furthermore there is absolutely nothing in the universe we can compare it with.  It is absolutely impossible to put it into words or even give it a name (how do you name something that isn’t a ‘something’?).  Nor, on the other hand, can we claim it is a part of ‘me’.  Hence the Taoist Lao Tzu, whilst compromising and giving this ‘suchness’ the name ‘Tao’, says: