MARTIN BUBER AND BUILDING A COSMIC THEOLOGY
MARTIN BUBER
AND
BUILDING A COSMIC THEOLOGY
by
Frank W. Andres
© Copyright, Frank W. Andres, 2018. All Rights Reserved.
This is a Minibook…..Instead of expressing an idea and then blowing the number of pages up, up towards three hundred just so we can charge $25 as is currently the fashion, we are presenting the kernel of an idea….in the hopes that ideas can be transmitted more rapidly and breakthroughs can occur now, not next century. There is a fifty percent chance that humanity will not make it through this century….it is important that we make as much progress as fast as we can…so as to avoid an untimely demise.
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Introduction
Martin Buber thought about theology in a very serious way…to the extent that he felt that existing religions were just not doing the job…After World War I, he felt the need to examine religion from scratch…in ways that made sense to him…perhaps he felt that just too many horrible things had happened…Where was God?…Obviously what had broken down…was the ability for human beings to connect…He was young and somehow his head was filled with many ideas…
He says in the Afterword to the second edition of his book, I and Thou…
‘When I drafted the first sketch of this book…I felt impelled by an inner necessity. A vision that had afflicted me repeatedly since my youth but had always been dimmed again, had now achieved a constant clarity that was so evidently supra-personal that I soon knew that I ought to bear witness of it.’
When the book was published, people scratched their heads and called him some sort of mystic…his words seemed sort of poetic. He had read Kierkegaard and agreed with that great theologian…that somehow…God was in every human relationship….Well, witness World War I… rebuilding mankind must start with human contact, connection…with the human relationship…How else is humanity to survive?…Somehow, God must be woven into all of this. Working feverishly he published a thin book, entitled Ich und Du, in German in 1923…which later was translated into English… as I and Thou, in 1937. His thinking has been accepted mainly by Protestant sects…and has always found its way into their sermons.
It is the twenty-first century now…it now has been established at one hundred percent probability that man and woman are animals. In the year 2000, the human genome was delineated…and then by the year 2003, this genome had been compared with those of the great apes…and it was found that humans possess DNA that is 99 percent the same…as chimpanzees. Suddenly the words of Buber are resonating…as people now are attempting to create a theology that is consistent with this new world….As it turns out, he was one of the first to think in a new, modern way…As Walter Kaufmann, the translater of the volume I am using…has said in his book, Religion from Tolstoy to Camus…Leo Tolstoy criticized the populus in general for just accepting doctrine and religion that they knew was no longer applicable to their lives…The mediaeval Church may have made sense, may have been a necessary part of the Dark Ages…but those days are gone…Why can’t people be authenic and take actions consistent with their beliefs? Existential truths came from his profound thinking and tremendous novels. The problem with this is that…one cannot merely discard…one must begin to build the new… One must have something to take the place of a piece of history…that was so essential to people’s lives…Tolstoy essentially said we must all be kinder to one another…or something…He was just as guilty as others in not accurately bearing witness to his authencity…Humans need theology…and their theology must be of a Cosmic scope…even if it doesn’t truly reflect the thinking of their age any more…even if a person is ahead of his or her times…After all these years…it is time to regroup…It is time to start thinking seriously about building a new Cosmic theology…and Martin Buber was one of the first to be brave enough to start this process.
So it is…that the Western world is now in 2018, at another seam in history…moving from a century of cheap oil and ‘things’…a materialistic frenzy that is now quietly subsiding…into the unknown…into a world fraught with problems…There is a fifty percent chance that humanity will not make it through this century…I maintain that we must now prepare ourselves for a new phase in humanity…wherein human relationships must play more and more an important part in our lives…The creation of this new world must be guided by new ideas…even it they seem ‘dangerous’…taboo, for some. I have been working on a Cosmic theology now for twenty years…and much of Buber’s thinking is consistent with what I have found…In the following pages, we shall look at some of his ideas and some of mine…and see how far we can progress…how far these ideas can progress…together in this challenging quest. My ideas come from my book, Man and the Cosmos… The Science of Everything, in which a theology that is consistent with the entire cosmos of mind…that is, with the entire world of thought and disciplines of mankind.. as it exists today…is presented.
Ich and Du
Buber’s book is divided into three parts…as a conquering Caesar, on a super important quest… would say… ‘omnes divisa partes tres‘…The first part has to do with Buber’s ideas concerning the I and You…and I and It. Notice that I did not say I and Thou. I and Thou is probably the most famous thing about Buber that people remember. We can just change this?
Well, the translation of’ I and Thou that I am utilizing is, as I have said… by Walter Kaufman…which was published by Simon and Shuster in 1970. Kaufman in a prologue quarrels with earlier translations and insists that what is addressed in this book is not actually ‘I and Thou’, but instead ‘I and You’. Kaufman just doesn’t see much God in what Buber is talking about…even though Buber devotes Part III, the longest of the three parts..to exactly this topic.
Kaufman says:
‘The world of Thou has many mansions. Thou is a preacher’s word but also dear to anticlerical romantic poets. Thou is found in Shakespeare and at home in the English Bible, although recent versions of the Scriptures have tended to dispense with it. Thou can mean many things, but it has no place whatever in the language of direct, nonliterary, spontaneous human relationships.’
For the most part I agree with Kaufman…Buber really does not wrestle satisfactorily with the spiritual aspects of I and You…I feel that there is one exception where I and Thou could be relevant in the relationship of two people, which I shall address later on…after all it was Kierkegaard’s interest in the fact that he thought God was somehow in every relationship…that intrigued Buber to begin with…However, in accordance with Kaufman’s decision, I shall use I and You, generally…throughout this book.
Part I of Buber’s book has to do with the I-It and the I-You and the laying out of the conceptual framework for his theology. In this section of my book, I shall concentrate on this first part of Buber’s book…In subsequent sections I shall lay out my theology in two sections…then we shall address Part Two of Buber’s book, which is about going beyond the individual I-You…to where more than one I is involved…namely, I-World… and then in the next section, we shall move on to Part III of Buber’s book… which is about I-Thou…that is, I and God.
First, come the first paragraphs of Buber’s book with those famous words…
‘The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.
‘The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words we speak.
‘The basic words are not single words but word pairs.
‘One basic word is the word pair I-You.
‘The other basic word is the word pair I-It; but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It.
‘Thus the I of man is also twofold.
‘For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that in the basic word I-It.’
Kierkegaard said that the relationship of human with human…was of God….This idea intrigued Buber…What does this idea mean?…It takes a lot of work to find out what these words mean and Buber did a lot of work…with some progress…However, before one can speak of human interaction in a spiritual way… one first must understand the ‘relationship’ of a person with another human being iin every day life. As Buber says…’The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object,,,the realm of You has another basis…The relation of human being to human being is different from an ‘interactiion’ between an I and an object.’
When two people meet and interact…God is there?…Well, something special seems to be there…What is this special thing?…Buber examines every aspect of this dilemma…and in the end, comes up with metaphors for truths that I think, at that basis…are biological… truths that are really concrete….
for truths that are scientific…
Buber’s theology possesses a dualistic thesis like René Descartes. Descartes said…’I think; therefore, I am.’ Buber describes this entire question as the great I-It question. The first question Buber asks is…What is a person thinking about?…He asks…’We are told that man experiences the world. What does this mean?’ Well, what Descartes meant was that a person ‘perceives’ and such perception involves an ‘object.’
Then the second question is of course…what is this I in Descartes declaration that is conducting this thought? The thing that is thinking is the great mystery of life…that which is thinking is consciousness….I would say that inside of my head is something really strange…there is something… ‘looking out’…Buber doesnt really consider this mystery very much…his I is an abstract I.
I am very curious about this thing ‘looking out’. I have a hypothesis as to what this I really is…when I speak about an I as a physical, biological entity…I refer to it as…’I’. I realize that this ‘I’ can do three things…it can perceive, think, and act…thought is assisted by a memory of sorts, which can be hardwired by DNA…or as in humans, can be very malleable…new data can be received and recorded…when new ideas are created, these also are saved…I shall return to my conception of things… in the next two sections of this book…
Buber maintains that perception occurs with no impact between I and It…I ask…How about touch, taste? We can do these things…at a distance? Still Buber maintains…’Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between them and the world.’ This is indeed magic…how humans can do so much without interacting physically with anything…Is there interaction if I am running away? Is there interaction with an object if I think about it? However, regardless of whether these interpolations of interactions count as being ‘real’ or not… the whole point of perceiving is to think about something…and then perhaps ultimately decide to impact that world about us. So we are not perceiving an object just for the fun of it…possible, potential interaction with an object is foremost in our mind…even if at first we do not touch it…Our lives may be at stake here!
When Buber considers an object that is perceived by the I…he quickly understands that one object that can be perceived is …another human being..
Buber quickly maintains…that this object is different from other objects… Thus, the I-You becomes different from I-It…
In the process of the I interacting with other things…the I changes…
an I that confronts an object is an entity of force…of manipulation….the I is directed outwardly only…The I which interacts with another human…is aware that it is reflected back…upon itself…this interaction moves two ways at once… towards the consciousness we behold…and back at our own concsciousness…that we are necessarily made aware of now….With objects we are, we move….With humans we grow…we are able to realize potentialities that will increase our powers on earth….
Thus, it appears that the main difference between Buber’s I-It and I-You…is that a You….perceives back….One I recognizes another I…I maintain that an I-You relationship is actually an I – I relationship…one consciousness recognizes another. Because of this, Buber says that one has an ‘interaction’ with an object…. however, one has a ‘relationship’ with another human being. ‘Interaction’…’relationship’…what is the difference?…this is the crux of what Buber’s slender book is about.
When one speaks of an object, it implies that an I has perceived that object in the external world…An object may be present in the external world, but not be perceived by any I. Bishop Berkekey has gone through much of this. The object which has not been perceived exists, but it is not a part of human knowledge…Then Buber addresses the I… he maintains that when one says I, he is really saying I-It, I-You or I-Thou…the I cannot stand alone… The I’s in the words are the same in this one respect…That is, he says that one cannot describe consciousness without describing what it is doing. I disagree…I think you can have cataracts and not actually see an object… you can be blind, just standing there not touiching anything…only feeling yourself…the flexing of your appendages…Okay..then you are gaining knowledge about yourself…that you have consciousness…but you are receiving no knowledge concerning objects external to your body….if one closes his or her eyes, he or she realizes there is something in his or her head …that Buber would say you are aware of… just like any other object … You become aware of your I…I have an I…as I say, one has actually encountered the I – I…The I has a relationship with itself. Al other animals are not so self aware…
When Buber considers objects in the external world….he quickly understands that some objects are different from the others…some objects are special…some objects are human beings…Buber immediately examines how humans are different from other objects…that is, how the I-You is different from I-It…
When it comes to I-You…Buber says…
‘There are the spheres in which the world of relation arises.
‘The first: life with nature. Here the relation vibrates in the dark and remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are unable to come to us, and the You we say to them sticks to the threshold of language.
‘The second: life with men. Here the relation is manifest and enters language. We can give and receive the You.
‘The third: life with spiritual beings. Here the relation is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet feel addressed; we answer…creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth.’
In the life of nature…when animals perceive objects in the external world, they can perceive other animals and recognize similarities…they can recognize ‘friend’..or at least, ‘that there is something that I see that probably will not eat me’….But they do not understand that a consciousness is ‘looking back’ at them…And as Buber says…animals are different from humans in the use of language…
In the life of men…Buber speaks of language as if it is almost a definition of what it means to be a human being… Buber says that being I and saying I are the same thing…Humans can say I because they understand that I am something different from the objects about me…An animal, on the other hand… is just going about its business…an animal moves here and there and all behavior is programmed in its brain…there is no real I…Life is just doing and acting in an instinctual manner…
So what is the difference between I-It and I-You?…I-It is the world of objects and man and woman’s Will is used to devise tools to utilize these objects to his or her advantage…He or she first defines objects…A definition…such an idea is a tool…the first step towards impacting the world outside of us…is to create an idea…Then he or she takes that idea…and develops axes, saw mills, hammers…ideas become physical tools with which to utilize a tree for habitation and commerce….In this work, the object does not communicate back…there is merely an interaction here…there is only a one way dealing between man and tree.
Buber says…’When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things…I stand in relation to him in the sacred basic word,’
That is, for humans, relation is reciprocity…I-You…consciousness speaking back to consciousness…For animals, I-You is an idea programed by instiinct in their brains, probably similar to a rudimentary understanding that a bear has…there is an object out there that is similar to me…thus it probably will not harm me…
What is consciousness?…At least…how is it expressed? In my thinking, the ‘I’ is expressed two ways…(as I have said…in my thinking…’I’ with quotation marks…refers to a biological entity in my brain)… First, the ‘I’ can be an expression of Love…that is, connection…Second, it can be an expression of Will….’I’…can perceive, think and act… ‘I’ can impact something…In my thinking, an ‘I’ is endowed by the Cosmos…the capital ‘C’ here designates a universe with consciousness… it is endowed with Cosmic Love and Cosmic Will…the power to connect with other ‘I’s…and the power to impact objects about it.
I’s can connect…can Love…Buber maintains that this is the major signature of the I-Thou…there is a ‘relation’..a consciousness confronts my I right back. Buber says…
‘-What, then does one experience of the You?
‘-Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.
‘-What, then, does one know of the You?
‘-Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.’
In the I-You… I is reflected back. It is essentially I – I. I am at home…with a consciousness like myself…I am with parents, friends, tribe, nation…. at its base…all of this relation…is the same great I. This is where all human life must start…before anything else can be done. The I-You is the only place where consciousness…can grow. Buber says…’The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.’
One is raised, nurtured…is able to grow… in Love, in connection…but once he or she is on his or her own…is old enough to be independent…One is often face to face with a human whose I is not recognized…he or she might be the enemy…an object to be overcome or be freed in space from…there is no connection here, no encounter here different from that of the human with a wolf or bear….Thus, a fundamental I – I must be established…recognition of friend, an other with conciousness…in peace…before concrete connection can be made in I-You.
Thus, there first must be recognition of another I…there is a first I-You…Then there arises the possibility of a connection, relation with that I… at which point a second I-You is able to emerge. This second I-You may then express Will…be creative…be able to make tools, and impact the world about him or her. In creativity there is always an I-You… This, I maintain!…An infant has been taught by his or her parents…or his or her elders….and this instruction remains as language, as tools in one’s memory….frozen, ready at hand to be instant You…one must possess You… either in person or frozen in memory, writing, or culture…to grow… to move…to survive.
There is a melancholy when one realizes that the status quo is always in jeopardy…Once an I-You relationship is established…it must be replenished with energy, attention, kindness, coordination, creativity…for the I-You to endure at full brightness…all light dims continually and ultimately…and must constantly be re-energized.
It is time to stop talking in metaphors and start considering what all this means in real terms, in concrete terms, in biological terms, in terms of science, in terms of the Cosmos…even if some of these ideas are not allowed by the scientific community today… even if society is not ready for a new Cosmic theology…For we know now…that our lives…that the survival of humanity…depends on this work!
The ‘I’
What is an ‘I’ particle?…I believe that every atom has an ‘I’…Just as you have something ‘looking out’…I believe that every atom has a particle within it…capable of…’looking out’. Scientists are forbad contemplating such things…However, six different disciplines I have studied…point toward such a hypothesis….The fight against cancer has been throttled because crucial steps have been blocked…I believe that this fight can gain renewed vigor…if the power of the ‘I’ particle is allowed to open the way….I know this ‘I’ particle hypothesis is surprising….but science is being slowed in recent decades because of the futility of our instruments…things are either too small…or too fast to be measured correctly…or be discerned at all. I have proposed the use of an interdisciplinary approach to overcome the inadequacies of our instruments. When we utilize such an approach…we uncover surprising things….
Let us start with philosophy and theology….In my book, Man and the Cosmos...I have a chapter entitled…’Man and a Cosmic Theology.’…a chapter which begins with the following ideas…
The strategy of the seventeenth century French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1656), is important in organizing my book, Man and the Cosmos…He believed that one should begin with what is most ‘clear and distinct’ to his or her mind…and then proceed outwards into the world…When he considered what was most ‘clear and distinct’ to his mind…he proclaimed…’I think; therefore, I am.’ What he began with…was his mind…things in his mind were most clear…most distinct to him. Therefore, when I re-examined the social sciences…well, we know we are animals now… we look at DNA…we are 99 percent the same as a chimpanzee…so the social sciences must be redone…they must be placed on a biological base…So I utilized Descartes’ approach…and started with philosophy…moved out to psychology…then to anthropology, sociology, economics..out, out to theology…beginning the conversion process in the grand project of viewing
humans as animals.
There is a second thing he probably meant…with the proclamation …’I think; therefore, I am’…The second thing that Descartes probably meant here was…that he was making an empirical observation!…He was making an empirical observation that sneaks up on a person…then pow!…suddenly, you realize that this observation is hard evidence…And just as he was able to deduce a whole philosophy from this one hard fact…this one sentence…this one syllogism…we too can start with it…we can write a book reworking the social sciences…and we can hypothesize amazing things.
The startling observation that Descartes made…was new…Somehow, no one had really noticed it before…Each person on earth is in a position to make this observation…we all do…yet in a sense we shrug it off and continue on our way. What he observed was...I am thinking, I am seeing, I am acting…I am inspecting the world around me. That I is different from my ordinary I…it is an I coupled with an idea…a revolutionary idea…that idea is: I have empirical evidence that there is a part of me…that is different from everything else around me…at least to begin with…There is a part of me that is surprisingly important…This is an idea that lives in my private thoughts…I would never share such an egotistic thought with even my closest friends… There is a part of me that can elevate me to the lofty seat of a king or queen…maybe like a small god…Gee…what is this thing?… We all could use a thing like this…and we all have it…Okay… what it is…is an idea…that idea is…that there is something inside of me…that is Cosmic… probably eternal. Why would I think something like this?…because ‘I’…I…dammit…am ‘looking out! I...am the center of the world…of the whole Cosmos!
I am…I exist…and this is not merely an illusion caused by a collection of neurons. I am ‘looking out’…and this fact is incontrovertible. As I say…I am the center of the world. I am like a god. Such a realization obviously leads to an enthusiastic acquisition of self respect…All of this is a bit blasphemous … no, it is a whole lot blasphemous!…500 years ago…I could well have been burnt at the stake for having the audacity to say such a thing.
However, it appears that the whole thing is true…and, the whole thing is startling. Why are we so humble? We each think…know…that we…I…am the eyes of the universe. If we are extinguished…if all ‘I’s are extinguished…the universe would disappear…Bishop George Berkeley went through all of this…but he missed the most important part…Yes, as he said…everything is
relative because our ‘I’s are all in different positions with respect to the world around us…and all perception must be adjusted for differences in perspective…But he missed the most important thing…what Descartes saw right there…at the beginning of his philosophy…Everything is different from me…from my perspective…because I have an ‘I’…quotation marks refer to a part of the brain…that is ‘looking out’.
We are humble, but our experience tells us we should be otherwise… well, we should be proud of ourselves…based on that experience…we are certainly very special…Of course, we can look around, see things and make generalizations…We can conjecture that other organisms, such as our friends, may have ‘I’s also…so maybe we aren’t so special….As for those other organisms…we can never be really certain…What I mean is…I am the center of the universe…each of my friends…feel the same way!?….This is crazy…We can never be fully in another person’s shoes…because, yes, he or she has an ‘I’ just like mine…but she, he…thinks…he, she…is the center of everything, too….I would have never thought…That person!…thinks he, she, it…is as important as I…the nerve!…But it must be the case…All of these ‘I’s…and what it must mean…is inexplicable!
Well, that is a conundrum we must leave alone…because like Descartes, there is only one truth we really know is true…really, really know is true…and that…is that…I…anyway, for sure…am ‘looking out’. Yes…that is for sure…The rest of you….God bless you… are on your own.
Let us move on to a second point we can address more confidently…We can see that all life dies…always…so we shall, also. Thus, it appears that our ‘I’ will be annihilated…and there is nothing we can do about it. What we are forgetting is that we have empirical evidence of another possibility…another truth. We have an ‘I’…and we are the center of everything. If this ‘I’ were expanded trillions and trillions of times…that great ‘I’…would be a god. It seems that an ‘I’ is too important to be extinguished…it is a gut feeling that we have…
Given the startling realization that every animal on earth has an ‘I’ like mine…’looking out’…this gives us a hunch…that we can empirically verify our hypothesis…about the ‘I’…Well, we know that everything in the cosmos is composed ultimately…of particles…Thus, we have reason to believe that this ‘I’ in our brain is a particle…Yes…because of this, there is a possibility that we can prove our hypothesis scientifically at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN…What do we know about this ‘I’…so that we shall know what we are looking for when we start running experiments on particles….If we are looking for particles…then we are not looking for some kind of ‘spirit’… like the shamans came up in hallucinogenic trances…What else do we know about this ‘I’?
Could it be …that if we learn enough about this so called ‘I’…we might know enough to solve major problems in the world…like cancer?
A Cosmic Theology
What scientists do know…is that all of the cosmos…everything in the cosmos…is made of energy…and the amount of this energy is conserved… is preserved…energy is never destroyed…there always has and always will be the same amount of energy in the universe…Energy in the cosmos is displayed in different forms…Energy is expressed as forces…Energy is encased in parcels called particles….So all matter and force is composed of energy…encased in particles…Therefore, if there is something inside my head…’looking out’…it must be a particle…let’s call this an ‘I’ particle or an ‘I’ …for short.
So I have an ‘I’…does all life have an ‘I’…No!…Animals do and plants don’t. The change, the difference began with bacteria…That is, at first, bacteria were plants…they floated on or beneath the sea or in other bodies of water…they all were passive. Suddenly some bacteria became active…they began to search for food…they began to avoid predators…According to scientists today…bacteria such as these…that move…are not really animals…because they are not eucaryotes…they do not have nuclei… However, this change from non-movement to movement…to being propelled! …this movement was astonishing…It was the first indication that something…in the wall of the bacteria…was, is in charge. Of course, the fact is…that something was in charge of the internal activity of bacteria…all along….This tremendous outward change in behavior occurred with little change in bacterial DNA…Something was added that was of major significance in itself…What was added must have had abilities, capabilities of its own..it had to be able to perceive, think, and act…it required only the addition of a few appendages in a plankton to empower these innate abilities…to transform these abilities operating in a minute way into a way that was larger…probably not a whole lot larger to begin with…Evolution allowed these potentialities to be transformed… these minute abilities became empowered ones….potentialities were transformed…into the outward behavior of an organism.
The ‘I’ in bacteria somehow ‘called forth’ …allowed the formation of…brain. It allowed the evolution of the brain around that minute ‘I’… it allowed plant-like things to change into animal-like things…it allowed organisms to become active, aggressive…instead of passive…It increased organisms’ chances for survival.
When one commonly speaks of cognition, one says that it is like ‘turning on a light’…when one speaks of intellect…of knowledge…we say..let there be light! That is why at first it was tempting to conjecture that ‘I’s are photons. This possibility is even more interesting…as photons are able to combine and become one…which would allow us to jump ahead in our thinking… individual ‘I’s might combine to become god-like consciousness… in ‘I’s in stars and nebulae… Our heads were spinning with the possibilities that light might have…if photons were ‘I’ particles.
But…photons don’t have the components necessary to perceive, think, and act…the abilities that ‘I’s impart to bacteria…It is more likely that ‘I’s are in atoms, and that every atom has one…If this is true, then atoms cannot become one larger atom…they can combine to form molecules but not one larger ‘I’…thus, all atoms and ‘I’s…were one…only at the moment…of the Big Bang…before there were atoms….This is the conclusion you come to…when you look for a big ‘I’…for a God.
So let us think this through…if a particle is to be an ‘I’ particle, then it must do more than sit there…’looking out’…It must perceive, think, and act. Thus an ‘I’ particle must have components linked to it that can perform three functions. Perhaps quarks in an atom could perform these functions. So an atom could have a particle yet to be discovered…maybe like a p particle…that could be ‘looking out’…and is empowered by the three quarks in the nucleus of every atom…three quarks for Master Mark!…No… now scientists have come up with six quarks and six anti-quarks that exist in every atom…These quarks may perform different functions….thus, each atom may have the potential to do a lot…if the conditions are right. Why don’t we notice more of these powers…when we examine atoms?
Well, for one thing…all of this operates at a level beneath the radar… beneath the power of our instruments…that is why quantum mechanics has not progressed very much since 1925…We have a whole lot of trouble… studying the nuclei of atoms. We have made progress…we have discovered a lot of particles by using cyclotrons…that is, by smashing nuclei to pieces…we have ended up with a lot of particles but we have no idea what these particles do in the nucleii of atoms…Could an ‘I’ particle be hiding in the debris?… Does the cosmos require a prodigious amount of energy to produce one?
The question is…how can an atom express itself…display and utilize its powers…if electrons are in the way? The nucleus of an atom could communicate with the world around it…if the electron cloud around it…could be removed. This leads one to consider the possibility of ions…that is, atoms where electron fields have been stripped away…such stripping would be easier to secure completely in the instance of a hydrogen atom that has only one electron to get rid of…
A hydrogen ion!…The ‘I’ may be a hydrogen ion!…If this is true…then immediately…things come to my mind…If one is looking at a plant…a vegetable plankton…there are already a lot of hydrogen ions at hand… primarily in the compartments and activity of photosynthesis… if one of these hydrogen ions in the photosynthesis compartments could have become ‘activated’ somehow…could have been ‘revealed’…could have become ‘in charge’…it would already have been connected to an ‘axon’…a column of hydrogen ions conveying energy through the modules….converted to convey information instead…this column of hydrogen ions would have already been connected to other photosynthesis light receiving areas…thus, this hydrogen ion would already possess a rudimentary ‘eye’!… The conveyance of information by means of hydrogen ions in plankton would thus predate and be precursors for the courier ions in our brain…calcium, sodium, potassium, and chloride ions…
In paramecium…a spike of a brain has developed in its cell wall about what we can hypothesize to be an ‘I’ particle…From the time of paramecium on…brain continued to evolve to augment the innate powers of the ‘I’ particle…until it reached the extent of the wondrous mind of man and woman…
How is an ‘I’ added to living material to make an animal now? We don’t know…but it must be relative easy to do…witness: that each of 600 million sperm in one human emission all seem to possess an ‘I’. Do human eggs have ‘I’s? We know that human eggs can produce viable offspring without sperm…although they are barren. So each egg must possess an ‘I’. Therefore, the sperm and egg must both have ‘I’s..why doesn’t the baby have two ‘I’s? Perhaps the two ‘I’s combine to become a single ‘I’ at an early state…which would have problems empirically…because two atoms cannot become one…More likely one ‘I’ is eliminated…by giving it an electron.
There is so much to think about…We have reason to believe that ‘I’s are eternal and that there is such a thing as conservation of ‘I’s…This is because it now is apparent that ‘I’s have something to do with energy…Perhaps energy is composed of ‘I’s…an ocean of ‘I’s in which nodes may form…called atoms…If this is the case…then ‘I’s have the characteristics of energy…they are eternal…they are conserved, preserved…’I’s are never lost…They can be ‘constrained’…that is, their power can be limited by electron fields around the atom…or they can be ‘revealed’…perhaps partially when electron fields are partly removed…or completely ‘revealed’…when no electrons are left at all…
If an atom has more than one electron…things may end up in an ‘in-between’ situation…As one or more electrons may be removed…some electrons may still remain…that is, the nucleus…is partially ‘revealed’…This partial revelation may leave one with ions..such as exist in the human brain…like sodium, and potassium ions, and the like…which may result in partial ‘revelation’ of the powers of the abilities of the ‘I’. Instead of being ‘in charge’…an ion, with its associated electromagnetic wave…may have the power…to move information along neurons…transfer, deliver…ideas…
The fact is…if ions possess consciousness that is ‘revealed’…then ions in a star…can come close to being one consciousness…one great ‘I’… yet they have nuclei, therefore, they can never really be one…perhaps they can flash back and forth…from the ability to ‘look out’ as one…to individual points of consciousness…
This would mean that the cosmos…is full of consciousness…is composed of consciousness…we shall refer to such a cosmos as …Cosmos…with a captial ‘C’.
All of this is very exciting…there are so many possibilities to think about…The major thing is…if every atom possesses an ‘I’…then our entire concept of ‘materialism’…has changed.
I and World
‘However the history of the individual and that of the human race may diverge in other respects, they agree in this at least: both signify a progressive increase of the It-world,’
In this manner, Buber begins Part II of his book…concerning the I-World. Following Buber’s lead…we are moving in a simular fashion…In this section…we are changing our focus…from the individual and how his or her relationship with another human being can be fundamentally different from his or her interaction with an object in the external world…we are moving from the individual…to a world where there are two or more people. Man and woman are seldom alone in this world…there are always parents, extended family, friends, band, tribe, community, nation, a world of people. How is the I-You manifested with more people involved?…How can conceptualization on our part on this level assist in our endeavor to find God somewhere in the universe…perhaps in a relationship with another human being?
Eating bananas is instinctive…Creating tools is of a Cosmic nature…In the second instance…an ‘I’ is in charge…a brain is not just on ‘automatic’…I believe that the dynamics of creativity moves from the ‘I’…wherein the ‘I’ understands that it is unique in Nauture in its ‘looking out’…then the ‘I’ finds another…one other ‘I’,.. which the first ‘I’ recognizes as possibly being a cosnciousness such as he or she…’looking out’…It is here that connection may occur…Love can come into existence…
Love is possible because each ‘I’ is embued with Cosmic Love from its origins in the Cosmos…With connection, the I-You emerges…Once Love is present..then the couple may move to the next step…that of together confronting the I-It…It is at this point that Cosmic Will emerges…each ‘I’ also possesses Cosmic Will from its origins in the Cosmos…These entities…these ‘I’s… possessing Cosmic Will…may merge strength through connection and thus confront the It with increased power, with combined strength of their Will…
Two ‘I’s may unite quickly…and then move to many ‘I’s united..,’I’ + ‘I’ + ‘I’…which are able to be a sort of great ‘I’ from which the ‘spriit’, as Buber terms it… may emerge…that is, an engine of creativity emerges…creating new things..’I’s working, thinking, creating together,…creating ideas, creating tools.
Conglomerations of I-You, such as this…have led humanity from the Darkness of the Middle Ages…to an age of Industrial Revolution …an age on earth proclaimed officially by the strains of Beethoven’s Third Symphony… Man and woman had stood in the splendor of the great Roman Empire…followed by centuries of despair in the shadow of their lord’s castle…with only a mediaeval Church to connect indivduals and different peoples…Now man and woman are in charge of things again…They can move the earth…create their own destiny…each speck of humanity possessing a spark of what might be construed of as a piece of God…Humans are now united…I’s united again…in a dimunitive way…as they were at the time of the Big Bang…again becoming like gods….
In human beings there is an ‘I’…as I have said…these ‘I’s were once part of a large agglomeration of ‘I’s at the time of the Big Bang…This great agglomeration was a God…one immense ‘I’. As I say…on earth…when many I’s are connected with Love, and are able to combine their Will…it is a reinactment of that initial oneness in a diminutive form…it is as if a re-creation of God in a proxy manner, artificial manner, yet immensely powerful manner has been realized …Darkness in human life on earth…has become…through the process of ‘I’+ ‘I’ + ‘I’… a blinding Light!
Cosmic Will …is the making of new tools…it is about a world in which tools cover all like a blanket…When this first happens…the world is imbued with Cosmic wonder…Tools are Cosmic Will embodied within an object… tools change over time and become more powerful…’I’ + ‘I’ + ‘I’…equals corporations …Tools do not evolve…they must be developed…by ‘I’s…There is nothing automatic in all of this…Humans must constantly exert themselves and not become complacent to ensure that tools are constantly being developed…Just as all the ‘I’s were once one…in a Cosmic God at the time of the Big Bang… many ‘I’s are able to be united on earth in a mechanized star of community with its own power. When ‘I’s are united on earth…a sun of power is created in the engines of industry…by the united efforts of great corporations…the earth is covered with Cosmic Will embodied in tools and creation of products.
In Buber’s words this process is described in this way…
‘The basic relation of man to the It-world includes experience, which constitutes this world ever again, and use, which constitutes this world ever again, and use, which leads it towards its multifarious purpose…the preservation, alleviation, and equipment of human life. With the extent of the It-world the capacity for experiencing and using it must also increase. To be sure, the individual can replace direct experience more and more with indirect experience, the “acquisition of information,” and he can abbreviate use more and more until it becomes specialized “utilization”: a continual improvement of capacity from generation to generation is nevertheless indispensable. This is what is usually meant when people speak of a progressive development of the life of the spirit.’
What is missing in Buber’s disquisition is the fact that each ‘I’ possesses Love and Will which leads to connection, aggregation of ‘I’s… then aggregatrion of connection leads to empowerment of Will, and development of tools…Tools are the symbol of human Will acting in the past…a tool is frozen creativity, innovation created by Will…creating factories, mountains of machinery made by ‘spirit’… that is, creativity…moving the earth…tools are fozen…because the new is no longer new…it has become commonplace… creativity has become frozen into the form of tools…
The problem with all this might is…melancholy….The I-You as Buber has said…must be diligently and continually tended…lest it drift into I-It….
workers are utilized in factories, at first as part of bustling, excitng producers of food, clothes and shelter which makes life better, easier for all…yet with time…workers, humanity become(s) embedded in an artificial world of his and her own making…embedded in a world of machinery…alien to their bodies and their pysches…which becomes a prison…and a Dark Age emerges all over again..
As Buber says…’The obstacle: for the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate…that power which alone can enable man to live in the spirit.’ So it is…that the I-You explosion in tools…tends to die.
And so Buber admonishes us to be vigilant. Creativity…is Cosmic Will …it is the making of new tools. wherein the Cosmic becomes objects, in which we can be qjuickly smothered… both as workers…and as consumers…So it is…that Buber’s melancholy can quickly settle in again…All You degenerates over time..it must be continually reinvigorated… Creativity is stifled by/with a plethora of tools made objects and inevitably will slow down…In time the It-World takes over…people think less…they text and twitter…Hope lies with a chunk of You which is captured in books…reading is actually You frozen in print…energy, ideas from the past that a person may grab at any time to revitalize him- or herself and society…and start the creativity, the expanding and developing again…in this way, print can spring instantly to Cosmic life if the right ‘I’ interacts with it…that is why putting ideas in writing is a Cosmic act…creativity is Cosmic act…
There are three types of creativity…physical, intellectual, and Cosmic…Physical creativity is reproduction of life…Intellectual creativity is conceiving new ideas…and Cosmic creativity is taking those ideas…and moving the world…impacting the Cosmos…
Creativity is the only thing that imparts to humans…joy and happiness…All animals get a ‘kick’…a joy that gives one a reason for living..from procreation…Well, that reward helps ensure that a species will endure. For some reason, in some way…humans receive the same ‘kick’ from creating ideas and new objects or systems…that can impact the world around us….
One way to put ideas to work or have the potential of working is to put them in print…the You is made object…yet eternal…You…made culture… petrified ready to spring into You in a second of reading…a piece of I just sitting there as an object…waiting to relate…As I say…tools do not evolve…they are developed…from constant attention and exertion by creators of ideas, tools, products…constantly taking the frozen and making the new….
Then there are the social tools, institutions, which are as powerful as earthly gods…. Yet these too can become frozen in place…increasingly preventing further progress to occur….constraining, holding back the ‘spirit’ of human endeavor…slowing innovation to a crawl. These institutions are the Church, Government Bureaucracy, the Corporation, the University, and Marriage and Family…these social tools were created during mediaeval times in and for other conditions…and are beginning to hold back progress in a new age.
Thus, humans are embedded in social institutions as well as mechanization…Institutions are controlling and impersonal. In Buber’s words…’Feelings are what is “in here” where one lives and recovers from institutions.’ Machinery plus institutions add up to a global prison in which some people are immersed in material wealth, some are starving…and all are left in a virtual existence…as Jean Baudrillard would say…a Simulacrum of life. Thus arises a substitute world in which connection is superficial on I-phones in isolated suburbs, divisions arising, indifference towards others is rife…the I-You is lost in a worldly flood of things…of I-It.
Buber says…’Man’s communal life cannot dispense any more than he himself with the It-world…over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Man’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration.’
And so at any moment..if conditions are right, and attention is again placed upon the I-You…the humanity of ‘I’s can emerge again to rebuild a world…Most important is the rebuilding of institutions that are constraining progress…the secret to this rebuilding is the formation of new patterns around the primitve organization of the band, the affinal group in which I-You was
initially continually present…first because of instinct..and then intentionally by the development of tribe and custom….a world remade in this image is displayed in my book, Omicron Blue...in which all institutions are remade with the primal band woven in their fabric…However, a combined resolve…a combined decision is necessary and commitment to a great transformaton in ways of doing things is required…to wrest humans from the prisons they have created for themselves. This is not a repudiation of democratic processes or rule of law…It is obvious that the direction of the development of tools is towards automated cities…with a handful of people in charge…It is just that such a Change must be anticipated and the transformation be made in a smooth…intelligently guided manner…without falling into the grips of dictatorship…with individual communities ultimately in charge of their own production and reaping the bounty produced by machines.
Thus can it be…that a society can become a Thou society…all work given significance by a Cosmic ‘I’…However, a society must maintain its focus upon climbing its mountain…refrain from greed and satiation of the senses…be wary that a world of tools that initiates with the Cosmic…may quickly fall into Darkness…Creativity must continually be renewed to maintain its Cosmic core…to keep Cosmic power from devolving into a pile of tools and things…into a Simulacrum of life..
As Buber says…
‘It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and joy can flow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice into all possessions…and that all that is worked and possessed, though it remains attached to the It-world, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it confronts us and represents the You.’
I and God
Part III of Buber’s book is entitled I and Thou… it is a search for spiriuality in the I-You,,,that is, it is a search for God…so I shall entiitle this section… I and God…
To paraphrase what the translater, Kaufman, said above…Buber thoroughly sought God in human relationships…but his quest was not fruitful…I say, this was because one must identify two spheres in the universe before a complete investigation of the I-You can take place… the sphere of the ‘plant’ and the sphere of the Cosmos.
First, the sphere of the ‘plant’. The Cosmos was operating very well for billions of years…without life. Life is merely plant..which is merely cycles of chemical reactions repeating, repeating, and then creating duplicated cycles that all repeat and repeat…the repetition is very slow at first…perhaps over hundreds of years for one cycle…then with the addition of things like catalysts…and then with the insertion of ‘I’s…the cycles reoccur at a faster and faster rate…
Life is an accident…there may be all kinds of cycles of circular chain reactions on earth…that you wouldn’t call life…certain kinds of rocks go through certain cycles of lava, hardening, burying, heating, liquifying, lava, hardening, burying…on and on….This repetition possesses as much life…as a plant does…However, some of these cycles seem to be more alive to us…than others…This repeating…has evolved over millions of years…all of this has happened without ‘I’s in charge…without something yelling at the rest in a mass of chemicals…at least, at the top level…at the level that leadership controls our whole body…
There is ‘Life’…and there is existence…’Existence’ can have two meanings….One is that a thing is present…in the universe…The second is that there is consciousness…in the universe…that is…that there are ‘I’s…in the universe…In this book…the word ‘existence’ refers to the presence of an ‘I’. For example, scientists and non-scientists have been interested in whether Life exists in other parts of the universe…when in fact…there is ‘existence’… all around us…everywhere …in each atom. This is something that should have been recorded as a fact by now…but we are talking about phenomena that are incredibly small. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN should, must, have ‘existence’ high on its list…of things it must find…The problem is…a collider may annihilate the evidence it is seeking to find…At this stage there are few other ways to examine things at the subatomic level….
Second, what is the sphere of the Cosmos?…Every atom comes from the Cosmos..it is inherently endowed with Cosmic features in its conscousness… It has an innate knowledge of Equality…all atoms are equal…but with different personalities…all atoms adhere to attributes of Cosmic Beauty…which includes Cosmic Law…and which is somehow related to earthly mathematics…There is Cosmic Will…the power to impact things about it…There is Cosmic Love…What is this Love?
A God created all that there is….at first…all was Connection…all was Cosmic Love…This God gave herself and mothered the universe…she gave a piece of herself to each mote of dust…this dust is not Dead!…’perchance to dream’!…In this way…there was Creation from the start… Speaking more in scientific terms…In the beginning…all ‘I’s were one…then there came the Big Bang in which the Cosmos was flung out in a violent explosion…
At the present time…there is a piece of ‘I’…a piece of God in each atom of the universe…each atom has the power of connection…that is, it possesses Cosmic Love…It also possesses the power to impact that about it…that is, it possesses Cosmic Will… We look out at space…and see everything blowing up…this is Will…somehow…As a consequence…each atom that arrives on earth…possesses the capability to create…through Cosmic connection and Cosmic power…
On earth atoms are ‘in charge’ of human beings…and somehow creativity is rewarded psychologically here on earth…with the greatest rewards…of joy and happiness… As we have said…there is physical creativity…having children…and here the Cosmic meets the plant…we must reproduce for Life to continue to exist…and the Cosmic ‘I’ facilitates reproduction…it causes the cycles of plant life, plant existence to reoccur…at very fast speeds…For humans, there is also intellectual and Cosmic creativity…intellectual creativity produces ideas…and ideas made manifest…create tools, which are Cosmic in the sense that they allow the ‘I’ to impact the world…to impact the Cosmos…
All Life is built upon Death…yet there is the capability for connection… for Love…On an earth filled with Darkness and hardship…there is the capacity for impact, power…for Will…for creativity… for Light…
Scientists know… that the Cosmos that can be seen…that is, the Cosmos that is Light…is only 3 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe… 97 percent of the universe is ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’…perhaps ‘I’s come to earth for ‘connection’…intense coupling with another ‘I’…and thereby increase their probability of remaining in the Light after earthly Life is over….existence, consciousness is eternal…however, most of the ‘I’s in the universe…are alone….
For all animals…’connection’…a form of Love…leads to mating and reproduction…For man and woman…the same is true…But Love of the band, the tribe…leads to inspiration, to songs sung, to crying to the heavens…to fashioning of weapons for hunt…for warmth, for food….For the band…if there is no Love…there is no Struggle…if there is no Struggle there is no Will…no creation of tools. When strangers meet, there is the potential for Love…yet on earth, the first steps are always in darkness…In the stranger, we must be able to see ourselves…before there may be Love…before there is capability to work together in the Struggle…before Will does appear…before creation may occur…creation of babies, ideas, tools, a new world…Love gives us the greatest rewards on earth…creativity yields joy and happiness…Love, if pursued vigorously…may yield the greatest Cosmic reward…the Light… eternal existence…perpetually…in the Light…with those we love.
‘I’s come to earth for ‘connection’…Sex is where plant and Cosmic meet. Plant is compelled to reproduce…sex is the engine of reproduction…yet sex is intimacy…intimacy means the possibility of very close ‘connection’…close enough for the possibility for eternal Light…One man and one woman are bonded by sex…they are close…Now the challenge comes…for them to feel compelled to become ever closer every day…Sex is dangerous…it can be selfish…the two must be equal in their couple…they must strive to become the same ‘I’… ‘looking out’…a couple should strive to be one trillion times closer…than marriage…it is only then…that the possibility of Cosmic ‘connection’ may occur…In Buber’s terminology…two I’s must become so close…that they become almost the same I….then a return to the Light is possible…to continue for an eternity in the Light of God….
Closeness in a couple is made possible by means of the female sex organ…it is the organ of intimacy…the male organ is irrelevant in this…When man and woman are naked…without the sex act…it is the female organ that bonds both into one…intimately, psychologically…and simultaneously… Cosmically…as man and woman strive to be actually, intensely ‘one’…the female organ must always be nearby…In primitive cultures…the female organ is always accessible…he desiring every two minutes…she making accessible…every two minutes…not for sex…instead…for intimacy…for ‘oneness’….In thiis way, sex becomes Love… becomes Light…In the darkness before a fire, a community filled with real, intense Love of couple…becomes a community of Love…of Light…a community that may exist together forever…in the Light of the Cosmos…
Let’s express Buber’s search for God in the I-You relationship in his words….
Buber feels the spiritual aspect of a relationship…there arises as he says…’the notion of an agent behind
[an]
action. Only then does it become possible for the You that originally could not be an object of experience, being simply endured, to be reified and become a He or She…it has been designated as a supra-sensible, superrnatural force in a human being’…
In the paragraph above…Buber is feeling intuitively that there must be something of the spiritual in a relationship…there is the ‘I’ in each person of a relationship…so the Cosmic is there…but it is as the two become more closely connected…in different degrees of Love, and then with Will..that the Cosmic is felt and expressed…
Perhaps marriage is important…Buber says…
‘Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of all true marriage: that two humans reveal the You to one another. It is of this that the You that is I for neither of them builds a marriage.’
Yes, Buber feels there is something about a married couple that is closer to God…this is because the I-You is becoming more of an I – I…What he missed is…if the couple works at it every day…this close relationship may lead to an intensity of relationship that may keep them together for an eternty in the Light.
Looking at marriage Buber can see that
‘Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.’ and
‘Every actual relationship to another being in the world is exclusive. It fills the firmament…not as if there were nothing else, but everything else lives in its light. As long as the presence of the relationship endures, this world-wideness cannot be infringed. But as soon as a You becomes an It, the world-wideness of the relationship appears as an injustice to the world, and its exclusiveness as an exclusion of the universe’.
This is as close as Buber comes to God in a relationship. Buber seeks seeks and seeks for God in relationships…He looks at magic, the doctrine of Sandilya, Judism, Christianity, Buddhism, mysticism, Hindu, cults…he ends up staring into the eyes of animals…all in futility… to find God.
As Buber laments…
‘We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no “solution.”’
A Cosmic Theology and the 21st Century
In Conclusion, I would like to address a couple of topics…
First, above I have maintained that a spiritual relationship between two humans…I-Thou..as Buber would say..is possible and even desirable on earth…I maintain that it leads to the best life on earth…as well as allow two to exist together…perhaps with other close loved ones…in the Light…forever… Does every animal that mates have a chance for eternal existence in the Light?…
All I know is that in human relationships…man and woman can be married and yet be in a habitual, oh-hum relationship…There are many more of these couplings than most would admit…I feel that an intensity of relationship between man and woman must be nurtured daily….not only because of the possibility of ensuring good things after death…but because such intensity ensures good things during our days on earth.
An important question is…can the I-thou be extended from one intensely adhered couple to other humans in the extension of family relations? Can a community feel the I-Thou? And does that mean that a community might be lifted as one…after Death… into eternal Light?….
I suppose that there is God in community only if intense I-You is permeated, ‘soaked-through’ all the people… continually… face-to-face. How would these relationships differ from those of apes?
As I have said above…I feel that the I-Thou is centered…on Love…I-Thou exists when two ‘I’s become the same person, one ‘I’… Once there are two ‘I’s bonded tightly…more ‘I’s may be added…building towards the ‘I’+’I’+’I’…to the innumerable..which is one great ‘I’…until what is built is similar to that of a God…but each ‘I’ also has a Cosmic purpose on earth which seems to indicate an interaction with the Cosmos with the activities of earth…
We haven’t addressed this fact…but it is true that each person not only is on earth to find another…and couple intensely…but intuitively we know..that each of us…has his and her Mountain to climb…has her and his work to accomplish here on earth…which is strange…this would imply that there is an ability for the Cosmos to enter into the work of humanity somehow…and that there may be some sort of building up of Cosmic Truth, Knowledge, somewhere …way out there…for some reason…out there…where everything just seems to be a lot of monotonous blowing up and spreading out.
A community can feel Love, commitment in climbing a Mountain together…in a primitive, affinal band, tribe of connectiveness and Love… there exists communal life that is collectively commited to climbing a Moutain together…Is it possible to take such Love…such Will…to a higher level…Is it possible for one World of humanity…to feel this same closeness of connection…and commitment to World progress?
All I know …is that the religion of the past that advocated a retreat to a closet to pray…that the monk who is one of the most religious of all…must retreat from the world and contemplate on Godly things…it appears…that that world, that religion…is gone. As Buber says…
‘People speak of the “religious man” as one who can dispense with all relationships to the world and to beings because the social stage that is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. But two basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human units that have no relation to one another….the palpable manifestation of modern man’s lack of
relation. The bright edifice of community, however, for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of “sociability,” is the work of the same force that is alive in the relation among others; it is the universal relation into which all rivers pour without drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers…who would make bold to separate here and define limits? There is only one flood from I to You, ever more infinite, the boundless flood of actual life.’
Can we ever hope…for one blue whirling celestial rock… of I-Thou?
People ask…If every atom possesses an ‘I’…why haven’t the ‘I’s communicated with us?…Well, I maintain that the ‘I’ does talk to us…they call it a ‘field’ in physics…I venture…that it is the fields of ions…that carry information along neurons in the brain…’I’s are crying out…with no ears to listen.
. Thus, we are emerging from an empirical age…Up until this time since the 17th century, we have been able to conduct science upon the bedrock of laboratory experimentation and investigation…but those days are at an end…empirical work now is stymied by the fact that scientific instruments that Britain once was so proud to supply the bulk of… are not able to measure things that are too fast or are too small….cyclotrons are utilized to probe the mysteries of the atomic nucleus…yet they are able to do so only by smashing things to smithereens…a practice not well suited to examining the interaction of particles as they go about their business every day…Most aspects of physics that can be empirically verified have been examined thoroughly and are utilized very completely in the engineering of our daily lives…we have, one might say, claimed most low hanging fruit…now we must reap knowledge another way…we can’t just stop in our tracks right here right now…some most crucial breakthroughs are necessary now…it is necessary to conquer some of our greatest foes…like cancer…I am proposing to allow the incursion of science into these uncharted waters by new means…two of which are…first, the utilzation of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the study of which I have devoted a large part of my life…and second, ‘The Science of Everything’…wherein we take the social sciences, place them on a biological base..add them to all of the other sciences…and with this enlarge platform examine phenomena that are too fast or too small from several directions at once…utilizing many disciplines at once to create hypotheses… and then increase the probability of these guesses being correct by using a Picasso-like approach of attacking a problem from many sides at once, utlizing every dimension…and finding consistencies in conclusions drawn.
So indeed… there is speculation here…but as I say… from now on… speculation is the name of the game…the challenge is to maximize the probability that a guess, a hypothesis made by a scientists working in the dark…may be correct. When we have incresased the probability of a hypothesis as high as possible…then we can try to concoct experiments to test these hypotheses…If we think that the centrosome of a cell is hiding an ‘I’ which can be used to kill a cancer cell…Well, heck go ahead and try to use that centrosome…just say it is in charge of the cell…it peceives, thinks and acts and uses DNA as a memory…if you annihilate the centrosome and the cancerous cell is dead…you have cured cancer…you may have also proven that an ‘I’ exists….
How can we increase the probability that guesses are good guesses?
Well , first… people are dominant in one side of their brain or the other…I have a lot experience with these studies…I have a 200 I.Q. right hemispheric dominance in the brain…with the highest score ever attained on the Wechsler-Bellevue Block Test…the only test that presently exists to measure the abilities of that side of the brain…At the present time, these abilities are deprecated in scholarly climes, although they are an important part of creative thought…this neglect is one reason research in many areas is proceeding so slowly…
An analytical mind uses deductions to find truth…An analytical person…if he were trying to cure cancer…would be thoroughly versed in general biology…then he or she would zero in on one aspect of cell activity and discern its role in developing cancer…The right side of the brain creates syntheses…I began reading extensively when I was in college during the 1960s…I have degrees in economics and economic history with a Masters in Economic History…How dare I conduct research in any other area?
When an analytical person finishes one focus of study, he or she then focuses on another…The right side of the brain is different…by means of analogy, causation, conceptualization…my mind has been building one immense synthesis…I have studied philosophy, physics, neuroscience, theology, biology, all of which have bearing on the topic in this minibook…The thing is… the instruments we use to examine phenomena are running into trouble…they cannot examine things too little or too fast…we can make intelligent conjectures about things we cannot examine…but we are heavily reliant more and more upon circumstantial evidence…when it comes to circumstantial evidence, we can increase the accuracy and speed of forming hypothesis if we bring knowledge from other fields to bear on a given topic…such as cancer…Thus, we need to utilize both sides of the brain in attacking problems from here on out…the right side of the brain ties the whole world together into a synthesis…interdisciplinary research is second nature to it…When two people with different hemispheric dominance in the brain work together…you add I.Q.s…think John Lennon-Paul McCartney….
Second…there is the Science of Everything….The use of several disciplines to attack a problem is called, of course, ‘interdisciplinary research’. Now that it is confirmed that humans are animals, I maintain that the social sciences must be placed on a biological base…and utilize the same methodologies as the natural sciences…as biology, chemistry and physics. When this is done…the disciplines will be able to talk to each other and attack problems together. In my book, Man and the Cosmos…I took first steps towards making such changes…From these efforts I was able to make progress in several directions…I call this…working with…The Science of Everything.
Philosophy first gave us ideas about the ‘I’ particle…after all philosophy is actually a way to examine the human brain from the inside out…
Physics gave me the idea about the hydrogen ion being a candidate for such a particle in the brain…and that all atoms probably possess such a particle!
Neuroscience gave me the idea that information from sensory apparati in the brain communicate with the ‘I’ particle not with on and off currents inside neurons…but instead with the analog waves that accompany flows of ions in neurons..whereby information is passed from wave to wave very rapidly by means of ‘entanglement ‘ not of particles, but of waves…The only way this made sense…was if there was an entity somewhere in the brain…that was too small to discern easily…yet possessed the capability to process wave after wave…of data…of perception…from flows of ions…from waves of waves of information…
Theology makes clear that what we are looking for is something ‘looking out’…something that is eternal, once part of something ‘greater’…although these ideas were confused by shamanic hallucinations that gave an illusion of ‘spirits’…when in actuality particles were the instigators,…
Biology gives us ideas concerning evolution…how the ‘I’ may have entered into plant organisms over time and accelerated the development of organisms.
Another type of biology…gives us a model for how the cell may operate…I have examined how ‘I’s may have developed in the walls of one celled organisms…I have looked at the internal acitivity of cells…and hypothesized how this activity may be ‘run’ by an ‘I’…In looking for a cure for cancer….we need only look for gaps in the research of the cell…where progress has been stymied to see if the hypothesis of an ‘I’ particle can assist in this research….See my minibook, The ‘I’ Particle and Fighting Cancer.‘
In this way…we are using a Science of Everything to accelerate the pace of research…
Moving from three centuries of Industrial Revolution and tremendous gains in material wealth in Western countries…and now the eruption of optimism and power in the Far East…I, of course, am referring to China…it would seem reasonable that centuries of Cosmic Will now must alternate with a 21st Century of pay back, regrouping, concentration on matters pushed to the side in the rush towards lucre….There is a fifty-fifty chance…that humanity will not make it through this century…We need to concentrate upon a century of human Connection on earth… .the raising of all the peoples on this spinning blue dot in the universe…to the highest potential possible…in the embrace of Cosmic Love.
THE END