Seeds of Surprise, Part 1

The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine

Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life — see my recent Organicity series — has philosophical implications that chime well with Ilya Prigogine's excellent 1997 book The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature.

The late Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) was a Nobel laureate physicist and chemist whose major scientific contribution was his theory of "dissipative systems." All living systems — you, me, a rhinoceros, an earthworm, a bacterium; an ant colony; a tree or a forest; an alga in a backwater; a brain or bloodstream; an ecosystem — are dissipative systems. So are many non-living physical and chemical systems. They all have in common that flows of matter and energy course through them, giving them the power to bootstrap themselves into stable, orderly states far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

However, as Prigogine shows, dissipative systems also pass through states that are unstable and disorderly, en route to their orderly, stable states. Inherent in systems that take themselves away from thermodynamic equilibrium is both the potential for self-organized order and the potential for chaotic instability.

When the system is (self-)organized into patterns of high physical order, it is highly predictable. But at times during the evolution of a dissipative system, instability rules. At times of system instability, the system may "choose" between two (or possibly more) alternative stable states, if it is not to remain unstable. Stability will come again only when the system opts for one or another of the available new stable states. Which option is chosen by the system is a matter of probabilistic uncertainty.

In the simplest case of a dissipative system which has reached such a point of instability, there are two equally probable options between which the system may choose. Which of the two options is actually chosen by the system will depend entirely on a tiny "fluctuation" or "perturbation" which comes along at just the crucial moment.

These fluctuations or perturbations which can turn a dissipative system manifesting instability into one with a new order of stability are intrinsically unpredictable; their origin is unknowable. Accordingly, which of several possible trajectories the system will take as it moves farther and farther from thermodynamic equilibrium cannot be foretold.


One of the key words in the above description of far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems, such as you or me as biological organisms, is "trajectory." A presupposition of the description just given is that the system has, in fact, a unique trajectory of successive states forming a discrete track within its overall "phase space." An abstract phase space is the graph of all states that the system might conceivably take on over the course of time.

Another conceptual description of such a system is not in terms of single actual paths, such as hard-and-fast trajectories, but of bundles of available paths called "ensembles." Each available path of successive states in the system's phase space has a certain probability associated with it. The available paths whose probabilities are not negligible (in Prigogine's phrase, "not vanishing") form an ensemble rather than a unique trajectory.

At any particular time, in the ensemble model, the state of the system is not a single point in graphical phase space, but a "cloud" of points with various associated probabilities. Hence, what the system does as it moves from state to state is no longer a matter of certainty, but one of statistical probability.


There are valid correspondences between these two ways of conceptualizing a dynamical system. For example, the mathematics of the first way can be transformed into the mathematics of the second way, as Prigogine shows. But when that is done, there is an interesting byproduct: a "breaking of equivalence." Specifically, when "the breaking of the equivalence between the individual description (in terms of trajectories) and the statistical description (in terms of ensembles)" happens, an "arrow of time" shows up where none was evident in the alternate model (see p. 89).

Prigogine gives as an example of this breaking of equivalence a system modeled as a "Bernoulli map." A Bernoulli map is a well-known way to generate "deterministic chaos" in a computer simulation, simply by performing a series of repeated simple mathematical computations.

In deterministic chaos, a trajectory-based model may be used. If so, the future trajectory of a system's states, based on the initial value(s) of the system's key variable(s), ceaselessly diverges from the trajectory based on a different initial value or values, no matter how tiny the difference between the two (sets of) initial values may be. Moreover, the distance between the two trajectories diverges at an exponentially increasing rate. The system's future states, when plotted, accordingly jump around helter-skelter and never settle into a detectable pattern.

Because of the helter-skelter succession of system states in deterministic chaos, it would at first glance appear that such systems have no arrow of time, no way to tell by looking at the system's historical or computed trajectory which way is "forward" in time and which way is "back." But if the mathematical model is shifted to one involving ensembles, not trajectories, as Prigogine shows (pp. 83-91), for systems in deterministic chaos the associated "probability distribution function" converges nicely to a single value over time.

That is, when the trajectory-based description of a chaotic system is converted mathematically to a statistical description, suddenly an arrow of time materializes out of the seeming chaos!


Prigogine favors the statistical description over the trajectory-based description in The End of Certainty, whereas in earlier books such as From Being to Becoming he favored what he now calls "a much less extreme approach to the conceptual problem associated with irreversibility" (p. 74). That is, in the past he took time's "irreversibility" — the fact that in our mental experience of the world there appears to be a directional "arrow of time" — as merely "a matter of convenience."

After all, the basic equations of Newtonian classical dynamics, starting in the 17th century, and those of 20th-century quantum mechanics betray no preference for "forward" and "backward" directions as realities of time. Neither does Einstein's mathematics in his theory of relativity.

All these theories have in common the assumption that what is being sought is, basically, a trajectory for each moving particle of subatomic stuff. True, in the quantum mechanics that apply to such particles in isolation — according to Prigogine's From Being to Becoming; but see p. 74 of The End of Certainty — "there are observations whose numerical value cannot be determined simultaneously, i.e., [the] coordinates [of the particle's position in physical space] and [the particle's] momentum."

In other words, according to at least one view of quantum mechanics — the so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" of Niels Bohr — there is an inescapable complementarity between certain numerical values that Isaac Newton, were he alive in the 20th century, would have wanted to ascertain independently of each other. For instance, the physical position or the momentum of an electron, which together compose its trajectory, can be ascertained only by trading off knowledge of one quantity for the knowledge of the other.

In The End of Certainty, Prigogine is no longer willing to settle for a view based on quantum complementarity, because accepting complementarity means there is more than one single valid description of events in the natural world. "If there is more than a single description," he asks (p. 74), "who would choose the right one?"

In quantum investigations, it is the observer — the scientist who sets up an experimental apparatus in preparation for making an observation — who in effect "chooses the right" description. That is, the experimenter decides whether he wants to measure position or momentum, since it is impossible to pinpoint both. In so deciding, he breaks the quantum complementarity in favor of one parameter or the other.

The act of observation, then, introduces an arrow of irreversible time into the quantum system. However, the equations of standard quantum theory do not themselves indicate that there exists an arrow of time. As Prigogine notes in the introduction to The End of Certainty (p. 5), "The role of the observer was a necessary concept in the introduction of irreversibility, or the flow of time, into [standard] quantum theory."


There is accordingly, it seems to me, a kinship between, on the one hand, the act of observation of a quantum phenomenon which breaks the position-or-momentum quantum complementarity and, on the other hand, the decisive influence of a fluctuation or perturbation in a dissipative system at a point of instability, when that fluctuation breaks what would otherwise be the symmetry of the existing situation and determines which future stable path the system will take.

Accordingly, it seems to me that Prigogine's worldview as expressed in The End of Certainty could be recast in a way that attributes both types of phenomena to the effects of an outside observer.

Suppose the outside observer is God. Suppose God observes the world system and all subsidiary systems within it. It is by virtue of this outside agent's acts of observational "choice" that the so-called quantum paradox — the perplexing "collapse" of the probabilistic wave function of subatomic particles into one or another definite value; see p. 48 — turns an ensemble of merely possible subatomic positions-cum-momenta into a single trajectory, such that the certainties of the macroscopic world we know can rest squarely on the uncertainties of quantum phenomena.

In other words, suppose it is God who "chooses" which of the many alternate "descriptions" of a quantum event in fact applies.

Suppose, too, that the fluctuations which break the symmetry of otherwise unstable states in far-from-equilibrium living systems and thereby result in new evolutionary orders of stability which are located even farther from equilibrium are, looked at another way, "seeds of surprise." Such seeds would be visualized as being sown by God, by virtue of the way in which he chooses to cast his all-seeing "eye," as an observer from outside this world.

If something like that is true, then there may be a lesson to be learned from Prigogine's "breaking of the equivalence between the individual description (in terms of trajectories) and the statistical description (in terms of ensembles)." To wit, when you adopt the mathematics which honors ensembles over trajectories, thereby setting aside the normal equivalence between the two models, you in effect create time as we experience it, with its ceaseless directional flow.

For temporal creatures such as we, the arrow of time is an immediate reality ... while the "eye" of God which sows such "seeds of surprise" into the otherwise deterministic flow of worldly events is not.

But isn't one of the tenets of theistic, biblical religious belief that "in the beginning" of time, God "created" the world we know, with all its panoply of living creatures? If we take the idea of the "beginning of time" as a metaphorical reference to the introduction of the irreversible arrow of time, à la Prigogine, into the world as we ourselves know it, and if we understand God's judicious sowing of "seeds of surprise" into the evolutionary history of the world as the way in which he "created" living kinds, then it isn't hard to construct a defense of theism from Prigogine's book.


Yet to insist on a theistic interpretation admittedly goes against the spirit of Prigogine's discussion. Prigogine, in fact, wishes to move in the opposite direction: one in which science sees the world in wholly physicalist terms.

That means that there can be no recourse to outside observers (such as God) whose acts of observation turn worldly probabilities into certainties.

Accordingly, Prigogine proposes in The End of Certainty a mathematical theory which can unite classical and quantum dynamics, chaos theory, the theory of dissipative systems, and also the statistical mechanics of thermodynamics. In deference to the general reader, his mathematics are merely described qualitatively, not given in detail.

The point of the mathematics is to render all the key equations in each of these disciplines in a probabilistic, ensemble-based form, rather than in a deterministic trajectory-based form. Only when that is done can the equations imply that the arrow of irreversible time is fundamentally real.

Accordingly, when an arrow of time is discovered in an overarching mathematical theory such as the one which Prigogine proposes, that theory cannot "see" God as (at least hypothetically) an outside observer who turns worldly probabilities into certainties by making observational "choices" from afar. Instead, how certainties emerge from statistical probabilities in the natural world, when and if they do, is a matter of chance alone.

To collapse that description of the situation even further, we can say that an arrow-of-time mathematics à la Prigogine is an intrinsically "godless" theory in which chance plays the role played by God in my earlier speculation about God-sown "seeds of surprise" arising in the evolving world. In Prigogine's arrow-of-time model, "seeds of surprise" are sown by chance, not by God.


It might seem that creationists ought to resent the "godless" arrow-of-time model. However, I do not think they would be well-advised to do so.

After all, religious believers are committed to the idea that we are "in" time and God is "outside" time. If by "in" time is meant that we experience time as irreversible, then nothing Prigogine says goes against that. If by "outside" time is meant that there is some level of "time" which pre-exists time's arrow of irreversibility, Prigogine would agree with that as well.

All Prigogine is trying to do is come up with a scientific theory that takes time's arrow of irreversibility with utmost seriousness. It should not be surprising to religious believers that such a theory may well be valid. Since science cannot peer beyond the natural world to "see" God anyway, a theory which is "godless" is consistent with that viewpoint.

On the other hand, an alternative mathematical model which assumes an outside observer as the source of (what we perceive as) the arrow of time may be equally valid, for the same reason as the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum theory may be valid. From that perspective, the quantum-mechanical equations which do not intrinsically manifest time as irreversible are supplemented by the effects of outside observation to produce an arrow of time.

Creationists and non-creationists might accordingly agree to disagree over these matters by viewing the two models as similar to the dichotomy in standard physics between light-as-waves and light-as-particles. In some situations, light behaves as if it were composed of overlapping waves, while in others it seems to be made of discrete photons. Both viewpoints are correct. Both are necessary. Neither can be discarded in favor of the other.

Likewise, the "godless" Prigogine model of dynamical systems exhibiting various forms of uncertainty and instability can, I hope and believe, coexist with a model which leaves open the possibility that an observer outside this world sows the "seeds" of evolutionary surprise which otherwise must be attributed to blind chance.

The Ordained and the Organic

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, as I said in earlier installments in this Organicity series, has spiritual implications.

The spiritual mind, I suggested in The J.K. Rowling Effect, can be likened to a type of self-organizing system with a complex "phase portrait." Accordingly, it is prone to critical "points of instability" or "bifurcation points." I imagine that one of these spiritual bifurcation points corresponds to being born again, in evangelical Christian terms, or to the Dark Night of the Senses spoken of by Catholic mystics like St. John of the Cross.

The person who has experienced this crisis and crossed into new (for him or her) spiritual territory can easily believe that whatever is not adulterated by man's original sin is expressly ordained by God. The idea that all good things are divinely ordained chimes with the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, in which every living creature appears on the scene at God's immediate behest. No wonder those who live in this particular spiritual frame of mind have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution.

Another point of spiritual bifurcation can follow later on: the Dark Night of the Soul, in which the seeker eventually ceases to be able to maintain that mistrustful, standoffish, all-things-must-pass attitude toward the events of this world. Now the material world exerts its own pull upon the spiritual mind, leading, in famous cases like that of Thomas Merton, to a Zen awakening.

I cannot claim a Zen awakening, but I have developed a deeper appreciation for the organic, as opposed to the ordained, aspects of this world. In fact, I think that the ordained/organic dichotomy is one of the key differences between two major basins of attraction of the spiritual mind.


A basin of attraction in a self-organizing system, such as I hypothesize the human mind to be, is like a drainage basin in the geography of a continent. In such a drainage basin, a river, lake, or some other prominent body of water toward which rainfall naturally gravitates, corresponds to an "attractor" in a self-organizing system.

For example, any rain that falls in the United States east of the Continental Divide and west of the Appalachians winds up in the Great Lakes or Mississippi River. Rain to the west of our mid-continent drainage basin heads for the Pacific Ocean. Rain that falls on the East is Atlantic-bound.

Likewise, in self-organizing systems there is a "virtual landscape" in which multiple basins of attraction exist, each comprising a discrete set of the totality of available system states. In any particular basin of attraction, some of the possible system states in that basin form an "attractor" toward which all the other system states in that same basin of attraction inexorably flow. If the system happens to be operating within a certain basin of attraction, but not on that basin's attractor, it will move to a state on the attractor itself. Once a state on the attractor is arrived at, all successive system states are also on the attractor.

Small or large perturbations can cause the system to jump unpredictably from one state to another. The new system state may or may not be in the same basin of attraction as the old. If the system is a reasonably stable one, small perturbations will usually leave it in the same basin. Larger perturbations can put even a stable, non-chaotic system in a wholly different basin of attraction.


The attractor in that new basin may be a "strange" (i.e., chaotic) one. Strange attractors are associated with mathematical "chaos." Some or all of the attractors in the abstract topography of a system at any moment in time can be "strange" attractors. In fact, some systems have just one single attractor: a "strange" one.

Systems whose attractor is "strange" ans whose future path in moving from one state to the next is chaotic will cycle back around and repeat an already-visited state only after visiting every other state available to the system. In chaotic systems of great complexity in which the number of available states is great, the time needed to cycle around and repeat a state can be a large multiple of the age of the universe.

Systems in chaos are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Any imprecision, no matter how tiny, in measuring the initial state of a system will render predictions about future states of the system increasingly unreliable as time goes on. What's more, the degree of predictive unreliability increases exponentially. This is why it is impossible to predict the weather more than a few days in advance.

Although, it is impossible to predict chaotic systems' long-term behavior, this behavior is nonetheless deterministic. That is, the system's initial conditions do in fact determine its entire future path. It's just that there is no computer in the world capable of doing the necessary computations precisely enough (or, for that matter, swiftly enough) to arrive at an accurate prediction.

Exogenous changes in the system's parameters can put an otherwise non-chaotic system in a basin of attraction associated with a strange attractor: chaos can come out of order, seemingly. But Capra makes clear that a chaotic, strange attractor is in fact orderly. Just because we can't predict the system's future doesn't mean that its future is random. It is in fact as deterministic as that of a system in a basin of attraction whose guiding attractor is a "point attractor" (a single destination state) or "periodic attractor" (an endless loop of repeating states). Barring external perturbations or changes to the fundamental parameters of the system, the future path of the system is set in stone.

Moreover, a self-organizing system's virtual landscape can exhibit change over time. Its configuration of basins and attractors can be revised, sometimes greatly, by even small changes in the numerical parameters of the nonlinear mathematical equations that describe the system (see Web of Life, pp. 135-137). This is another reason why systems that start in a stable and orderly basin of attraction can end up in another which may be chaotic, or vice versa.


But there is yet another source of indeterminacy and unpredictability in dissipative structures such as all living systems represent. This one interests me more than that associated with "chaos" and "strange attractors." The indeterminacy that occurs at the system's "bifurcation points" is apparently one that couldn't go away even if our computer models were to become infinitely fast and infinitely precise.

Capra discusses this topic in chapter 8, which deals primarily with the late Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's theory of "dissipative structures." A dissipative structure is one through which there is a continual flow of matter and energy. The strength of the matter-energy flow determines whether the system needs nonlinear equations to model it, as opposed to just linear equations. In nonlinear equations, corresponding to a strong or swift flux of matter and energy through the system, all of the equations' variables are raised to the power of two or higher. Hence there are multiple possible solutions to the set of equations by which the dissipative system is modeled.

A system whose modeling equations are nonlinear maintains itself far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the state of maximum entropy. "Entropy" is the degree to which a system has "run down" toward the minimum possible level of order, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For example, if you have a container with two compartments, one containing nitrogen and one oxygen, and you remove the barrier separating the compartments, the molecules will tend to mix into a single uniform distribution of nitrogen and oxygen.

Given sufficient time, that expected result — minimum order, maximum entropy — is almost certain to eventuate. It is the result of the motion of the gas molecules, and it happens faster when the gases are heated than if they are cool.

Although it may not be technically correct to put it this way, I think of the behavior of far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems, including living organisms, as "exporting" entropy: the heat energy they give off adds more to the disorder of the external environment than the amount by which the system itself reverses its own entropy. Accordingly, dissipative systems manage to take themselves in the opposite, anti-entropic, direction, at the expense of increasing the entropy in their surroundings. The further from thermodynamic equilibrium the system is, to more entropy it exports to its environment.

But a dissipative structure is typically able to arrive at any of multiple possible stable states far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The farther from equilibrium it is, the more nonlinear it is, and the greater the number of possible solutions there are to its set of equations (see Web of Life, p. 182). Capra describes it this way: "New situations may emerge at any moment. Mathematically speaking, the system encounters a bifurcation point in such a case, at which it may branch off into an entirely new state."


Here is where things get really fascinating ... and a bit confusing. At each bifurcation point, the system must "choose" — metaphorically speaking, since the system generally lacks intentionality — one of two or more possible paths. Which path it will choose is not knowable by an outside observer. The "choice" cannot be predicted, much less controlled, by an external agent. As Capra says, "There is an irreducible random element at each bifurcation point" (p. 183).

Even so, the branch of the path which the system will "choose" for its future trajectory at any given bifurcation point "depends on the previous history of the system," Capra says (p. 182). Unlike systems that can be modeled by linear equations, dissipative systems operating in the nonlinear range do not "forget their initial conditions."

This is, admittedly, a point which confuses me. My confusion comes to a head on page 191. In one place on the page, Capra says:

A bifurcation point is a threshold of stability at which the dissipative structure may either break down or break through to one of several new states of order. What exactly happens at this critical point depends on the system's previous history. Depending on which path it has taken to reach the point of instability, it will follow one or another of the available branches after the bifurcation.

At another point on the same page he says:

At the bifurcation point, the dissipative structure also shows an extraordinary sensitivity to small fluctuations in its environment. A tiny random fluctuation, often called "noise," can induce the choice of path. Since all living systems exist in continually fluctuating environments, and since we can never know which fluctuation will occur at the bifurcation point just at the "right" moment, we can never predict the future path of the system.

So, which is it? Does the system's history "choose" which branch the system will take, or does a random fluctuation make the crucial choice? Perhaps it is a combination of both, involving some probability function. All I can really say is that Capra is, to my mind, uncharacteristically unclear about the interplay of history and chance as they affect dissipative systems at critical bifurcation points.


An example of a linear dynamical system is that of a planet orbiting the sun. The shape of its elliptical orbit never varies, which means that we can run the imaginary "movie" of its motion backwards and forwards in time, with perfect predictability as to where the planet was on any given date in history and as to where it will be on a given date in the future. Its "initial conditions" — such as where the planet came from in the first place — make no difference.

Not so with nonlinear dissipative systems operating far from equilibrium. At their bifurcation points they take this branch or that as a result of the details of their unique histories and/or small random fluctuations in their environment. The most minute differences in their initial conditions or in their environmental circumstances will bias them in favor of branch A and away from branch B.

To me, their imperviousness to external prediction and control and the absolute autonomy of their unique histories and futures make their behavior trajectories organic rather than ordained.


Yet common sense tells us that we living beings — however autonomous, however unique, however unpredictable — exhibit an awful lot of expectability. Sons and daughters tend to look like their mothers and fathers. Identical twins tend to look like each other. Swans don't come from ducks' eggs.

We must all be something like fingerprints. Every human finger can be expected to possess a fingerprint. Yet each fingerprint is unique. Even identical twins have different fingerprints.

Fingerprints show up on fingertips, obviously, at some stage of human embryonic development. A human being in utero develops from a fertilized egg cell. During the process of development, the zygote — the fertilized egg — divides and makes two cells, then four, then eight, and so on. In the early embryonic stages, there are no detectable differences among the cells. Soon enough, however, the cells start to differentiate and form distinctive tissues and organs.

Presumably, if Prigogine's ideas about dissipative systems and their bifurcation points hold for embryos, the embryo is continuously "choosing" certain branches along its own developmental trajectory and discarding other equally available branches. Somehow, some combination of these "choices" results in the formation of ten unique fingerprints ... while at the same time (if the embryo is normal) guaranteeing that there will be ten fingers and ten prints.

Thus is there a mix of unpredictability (the distinctive loops and whorls the individual fingerprints will wind up having) and expectability (that there will indeed be fingers, and fingerprints).


I imagine that, as with other aspects of emergence in living dissipative systems, the human embryo has its associated "phase portrait," its own abstract topography of attractors and basins of attraction which account for its potentialities as it develops. This topography produces both comforting expectability and unpredictable uniqueness.

I also imagine that the same principles apply to the spiritual mind within each unique human being. Our spiritual paths are indeed individual and unique. Yet, at the same time, there are certain expectable patterns in our spiritual life. I suggest the commonality and expectability in our spiritual paths are due to certain basins of attraction universally present in the human spiritual mind.

Let me suggest three such basins of attraction. The first is the one characterized by not being "spiritual" at all, by having no particular religious beliefs, etc. This, canonically, is the state one starts out in and then leaves behind when (say) one is "born again," after which the former, non-spiritual state is typically thought of as having been a "godless" one.

The second basin of attraction of the spiritual mind is that in which there is a profoundly God-oriented (shall we call it?) "steady state" toward which the experiencer is pulled by an "attractor" which is, quite naturally, the experiencer sees as God or Christ or the Holy Spirit. (I am speaking in Christian terms; other religions have their corresponding equivalents.) The spiritual mind that is in thrall to this attractor wants more than anything else to experience God as ordaining every blessed outcome in this world.

The third basin of spiritual attraction corresponds to Merton's Zen awakening following his Dark Night of the Soul ... and (I hope) to my own spiritual embrace of the organic nature of life. Once one's mind is in that third basin, or so my feeling goes, it becomes important to see the things of this world as emerging out of organic, self-organizing principles that guide the evolution of dynamic, ever-changing, living systems. The question of worldly outcomes ordained directly by God becomes much less important when one is in this third spiritual basin of attraction.

Some questions arise: where do these three spiritual basins of attraction come from? By virtue of what occurrences do we move from one to another? Is the progression from seeing the world as "godless" to seeing it as "divinely ordained" to seeing it as "organically emergent" typical, and if so, why? Finally, is there any way to bridge the dichotomy between the last two, such that God can be seen as influencing or even directing the emergence of organic novelty in this world?

More about these questions in later posts ...

The J.K. Rowling Effect

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

I continue to be fascinated with Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, subtitled A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. For many days I have been struggling to figure out how I ought to discuss its spiritual aspects. The topic is complicated, to say the least.

Capra's "systems approach" to the life sciences has many names, one of which is "deep ecology," since all life is deeply interconnected with all other life and with every supposedly "nonliving" aspect of the physical environment. Capra writes, "Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence." (p. 7).

Capra's thinking resonates satisfyingly with what he calls the "perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American tradition."

But notice that Capra picks out "Christian mystics" as the delegates of monotheist religion to the halls of perennial philosophy. One reason is that traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have very often supported, at the level of their theological presuppositions, "the fundamentally antiecological nature of many of our social and economic structures and their technologies [rooted in] the 'dominator system' of social organization. Patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and racism are examples of social domination that are exploitative and antiecological" (p. 8).

I'd like to agree two hundred percent with that radical assessment, but I can't:

• I am instinctively non-radical.
• The very philosophy Capra extols and I echo is intrinsically averse to drawing sharp distinctions, such as ecology-good/patriarchy-bad.
• If the schema "X is good and the opposite of X is bad" is intrinsically suspect as drawing too sharp a distinction, then any pronouncement of the form "the new way of thinking is right, so traditional religious/philosophical assumptions are wrong" is suspect as well.

Or, put it this way. The "new way of thinking" Capra describes inherently deprecates absolutism. Ergo, the claim "Absolutism is always a mistake" is ruled out for the very reason that it is absolutist.

Yet traditional religious thinkers are well known for claiming that their belief systems are founded on the bedrock of unassailable truth, no? How we "new" thinkers ought to feel about absolutely rejecting the absolutism of "old" thinkers is a puzzle.


It's crystal clear to me that the spirituality of the old thinkers is inextricably bound up with absolutist assumptions. One of these assumptions is that in any pair of opposites, the two terms are at war with each other. Light is at war with darkness; we need to be on the side of light. Good is at war with evil, and we need to be on the side of good. And so on.

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Capra, on the other hand, in his The Tao of Physics extols the Taoists' recognition that light-darkness, good-evil, etc., are poles of a single unity they call yin-yang. No matter how you slice it, that's a different kind of spirituality, based on a different set of underlying philosophical commitments.

Using the concepts of self-organizing systems Capra discusses in The Web of Life, the two kinds of spirituality can be seen as two distinct realms of stability in the abstract "phase space" of the mind.

Complex, self-organizing systems of all types manage to converge upon "steady states" of relative permanence and stability, even though they are open systems whose unceasing internal energy flow takes them far from thermodynamic equilibrium, in the deathlike state physicists call maximum entropy. In biological systems, a steady state of homeostasis prevails. Similar steady states are achieved in nominally nonliving, merely physical systems that likewise self-organize.

One of the most familiar types of self-organizing physical systems to us today is the laser. If you have a CD player or a DVD player, you depend on a tiny laser to read your discs. Laser light is "coherent" because the individual atoms emitting the light manage to coordinate the light emission among themselves. That doesn't happen in an ordinary light bulb. Coordinated light emission in a laser is an example of self-organization in a physical system.


This quality of stability in far-from-equilibrium self-organizing systems was puzzling to scientists until a few decades ago. In the 1960s, Nobel Laureate chemist-physicist Ilya Prigogine studied "dissipative systems" — systems through which there is an energy flow that holds them far from thermodynamic equilibrium — and found a number of common characteristics. Among the common characteristics of these dissipative systems is that "when the flow of energy and matter through them increases, they may go through new instabilities and transform themselves into new structures of increased complexity" (Web of Life, p. 89).

Stripped down to essentials, the idea here is that organisms, their internal organs, and their external societies are, as self-organizing systems far from thermodynamic death, capable of generating different patterns of organization, depending on how the energy flows through them. The available steady-state patterns a system may pass through are separated along the pathway of its evolution by critical points of transitional instability.

My thought is, accordingly, that the two spiritual outlooks which parallel what I referred to above as the "old way of thinking" and the "new way of thinking" are alternate steady-state patterns in the human mind. I personally have experienced a transition from a traditional Christian spirituality to a spirituality, akin to that of Capra, which I am calling the spirituality of organicity. In transitioning from one to the other, I have passed through a point of instability which I experienced as confusion, frustration, and a certain amount of guilt that I was not holding true to my Christian commitment. These negative feelings have been mixed with a certain elation that a mode of spirituality that seems to be more "me" is finally emerging in my life.

The spiritual mind is itself a self-organizing system with a complex "phase portrait," I am coming to realize. That is, it is like any other dynamical, far-from-equilibrium system in that its available "steady states" each comprise a set of points in abstract "phase space" that cluster around and gravitate toward a particular "attractor" in one "basin of attraction" or another. The spiritual-mind-as-system dynamically passes from one point in its phase space to another, but unless there is a change in the topography of the various basins of attraction, it tends to stay on one attractor, or at least remain in one basin of attraction.

But the topography can change (see Web of Life, pp. 135-137). Various things can cause the system to experience a "bifurcation," also known as a "catastrophe," in which there there may be a transition to a basin of attraction that didn't exist before. When the spiritual-mind-as-system comes to a point of bifurcative catastrophe, I imagine the experience will be one of spiritual confusion.

J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, recently talked about the Christian imagery she quite intentionally put in her books, as well as her own Christian faith. According to this article:

But while the book [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows] begins with a quote on the immortal soul — and though Harry finds peace with his own death at the end of his journey — it is the struggle itself which mirrors Rowling's own, the author said.

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," [Rowling] revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

I take it that the interior struggle Rowling describes — "my faith is sometimes that my faith will return" — indicates that her own spiritual mind is subject to what I am calling bifurcative catastrophe. Hers concerns (at least in part) whether her Christian spirituality requires a belief in life after death. Whether there is indeed an afterlife and whether I myself can still call myself a Christian if I no longer am sure there is one are questions that have plagued me also.

I can't answer those questions for J.K. Rowling, but I can say that the spiritual "instability" that goes along with asking such questions is entirely natural and normal. I accordingly dub it and other natural and normal agonies of religious faith the "J.K. Rowling effect," in her honor.

The Web of Life

In The Tao of Organicity I broached the topic of "organicity," by which I meant the idea that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it has proceeded over the course of billions of years to develop physically, eventually to produce life and then conscious life. I said:

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

In that post I indicated my interest in reading Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, which I am now deeply immersed in. The book turns out to be an extremely readable introduction to a paradigm of thought called, variously, "systems theory," "cybernetics," "deep ecology," "self-organization," "complexity," and like terms.

I recognize Capra's topic as containing most if not all of what I have already written concerning new ways of looking at the world in light of the theory of evolution in my Beyond Darwin blog. Specifically, the ideas of biologist Stuart Kauffman in books such as At Home in the Universe are, ahem, right at home in Capra's paradigm.

Unlike any other book I have read about what I choose to dub "the organicity paradigm," Capra's gives a wide-ranging overview of the history of this kind of thinking, which goes back well over a century in scientific and philosophical circles. I hadn't realized that. I thought it sort of emerged wholly formed in the 1960s, say, at about the point when the increasing ubiquity of computers was enabling scientists to study nonlinear dynamical systems in some depth for the first time; this was the origin, for example, of chaos theory.


But, no. Among the antecedents of that enterprise was that of the original cyberneticists, starting in about 1946 with the Macy Conferences in New York City, dominated by the likes of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, from the hard sciences and engineering, and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, from the social sciences.

Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was, according to Wikipedia, "the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society." It is interesting that the seemingly machine-oriented concept of feedback generalizes to how living organisms do what they do.

Wiener apparently was intensely aware of this link when he wrote the following two things:

[Feedback is the] control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance. (Capra, p. 57).

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 52)

Those quotes resonate with me. In my own spiritual life, I seem to be seeking to get away from my erstwhile Christian worldview in which God is seen as the Great Expecter who sits in judgment of my, and everyone else's, "performance." According to that worldview, God (who is by definition external to us, or at least "separate in being" from us) sets up standards of conduct for us to adhere to and finds us to be in sin if we don't adhere to them.

I presently am finding that that worldview stokes my sense of "existential guilt," the subject of My Existential Guilt and My Existential Guilt (Part Two) in this blog. My reaction seems to have been to undergo an ongoing dark night of the soul, which now leads me to embrace a wholly different stance toward reality.

The new stance is the one I am calling "organicity." I was moving towards it when I wrote the three posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series — to wit, in the "organicity paradigm" there is no need for an external Great Correcter to judge nature, human or otherwise.

What then can control whatever tendencies we may have to be unethical or immoral? After all, the idea of a Great Expecter/Corrector — a judgmental God — has long served the human race as a jim-dandy external control mechanism.

In the organicity paradigm, the control has to come from within: from our actual performance, not our expected performance. There has to be self-regulation, rather than regulation by dint of some written-down list of must-do commandments and must-avoid "deadly" sins. With self-regulation comes the self-organization that produces Wiener's "patterns that perpetuate themselves" amidst the "river of ever-flowing water" of this world.

Thus might we come to see ourselves as "whirlpools" rather than as "stuff that abides." Whirlpools, after all, maintain themselves for some period of time, according to their inner dynamics ... then dissolve back into the river.

I hope it is evident that it is not easy to reconcile my "organicity paradigm" with that of a world created and judged by a God above and beyond it. No matter that God is also said to be immanent within the world; he is of another substance entirely. In my present frame of mind I simply cannot see how to reconcile his existence with an "organicity paradigm." One of them has to go, and right now, for me, it is admittedly God who is being discarded.

The Tao of Organicity

One night a few nights ago I went to sleep a dualist. When I woke up the next morning, I was a dualist no more. Outwardly at least, it was as simple as that.

Inwardly, I have been fighting a losing battle to stave off whatever the notional opposite of dualism is — monism, I suppose — for many years. The battle is now over. Monism has won.

Dualism? Monism? What do these words mean, and why are they so important to me?

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra gives a clue in his well-known book The Tao of Physics. The book concerns the strong similarity between the time-honored worldview of the Eastern mystics, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist, and modern physics, with its realization that atoms are not really made up of independent, objectively characterizable "particles" after all.

Moreover, the dualism which imagines the observer always to be separate from what is being observed, when one is doing a scientific experiment at the atomic and subatomic level, no longer holds. Rather, according to one interpreter of quantum theory whom Capra quotes (p. 139), "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach out to other things."

Even according to a different quantum theory interpreter who generally has little in common with the first (p. 138):

One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts ... We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.

So it is an illusion to believe that there are two things, the observer (along with his chosen experimental apparatus) and the object being observed (such as an electron). In quantum physics, when the attributes of a so-called "elementary" particle (which is really no more that a pattern of probabilities that certain kinds of interconnections with other particles and systems will predominate) is to be measured, it first has to be prepared for the measurement operation ... and how it is prepared for observation and measurement determines its eventual measured characteristics.

The act of preparation needed to fix the particle's position with total precision prevents learning its momentum (hence its velocity) with equal precision. This quantum indeterminacy is unavoidable. Why? In the final analysis, imply because the imagined distinction between the observer and the observed is untenable.


False, too, are other classical dualisms. One of these, for better or worse, is that of "an intelligent and personal God who stands above the world and directs it" (p. 20).

In his first chapter, Capra gives a brief history of classical Greek thought, in which there was a shift from "the monistic and organic view of the Milesians" — Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, and others — to the view that above the fundamentally dead world of matter was a separate order of pure being, or of indestructible substance. Though mere matter underwent change, Being was eternal.

In that dualist view, what was pure and unchanging came to seem, with Plato and Aristotle, more real than anything that changed from one mode of imperfection to another over the course of time. The philosophies of Plato and, later, Aristotle, came to pervade Western Christendom down through the millennia.

The Judeo-Christian God, born in the Middle East in a different culture, merged into the European worldview at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire. The nascent churches of Christendom had embraced the neo-Platonism of Plotinus in the third century A.D., and later, during the Middle Ages, the now-regnant Church of Rome rediscovered the original, fourth-century-B.C. thought of Plato and Aristotle.


Before Plato, in Greek culture, the philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus sought to avoid the dualism between the mere "things" we know in this material world and what would become Plato's Forms and the Aristotelian idea of Being as the noblest degree of abstraction. The pre-Platonists did this by assigning the unchanging permanence Plato would allocate to immaterial Forms to certain physical items: the atoms, as originally conceived of by the Greeks. But if atoms, matter's building blocks, were "passive and intrinsically dead," what produced motion and change?

The cause of the motion was not explained [by Democritus and other atomists], but was often associated with external forces ... of spiritual origin and fundamentally different from matter. In subsequent centuries, this image became an essential element of Western thought, of the dualism between mind and matter, between body and soul. (p. 21)

So the thought of the West was, even before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on a slippery slope to dualism, leaving behind the insights of an earlier Greek philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who

believed in a world of perpetual change, of eternal 'Becoming'. For him, all static Being was based on deception and his universal principle was fire, a symbol for the continuous flow and change of all things. (p. 20)

It is this Heraclitean idea that you don't need a separate entity, spirit, to explain why "dead" matter undergoes change, that Capra extols as the lesson of modern science in The Tao of Physics. The same idea lies at the heart of Eastern religion, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist. That "perennial philosophy" of mystical traditions, says Capra (p. 10), "provides the most consistent philosophical background to our modern scientific theories."


Capra's discussion carries a lot of weight, for me. But it's not ultimately the reason why my dualist assumptions crumbled into dust one recent night while I was asleep. I am more attuned to matters biological than matters physical ... which is why I feel I ought to read Capra's The Web of Life before too much longer (I've ordered it from Amazon).

Though I haven't read it yet, I have done a lot of thinking about the area of modern scientific inquiry which one scientist, derisively, calls "emergilent chaoplexity." (See "This Man Wants to Control the Internet," Discover, Nov. 2007, pp. 99 ff.) Chaos and complexity are both hot topics in science these days, as are the idea of "emergence" and that dubbed "consilience" by entomologist Edward O. Wilson.

In chaos studies, scientists have found that there is rampant disorder at the heart of many natural processes. This "chaos" has a mathematical basis such that, although we can never be certain what a chaotic system will wind up doing, we can be sure that it is on a path set by its initial conditions. The so-called "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil may inexorably cause a tornado in Texas.

The study of complexity takes chaos study a step further by locating in mathematical "space" not only a region of chaotic dynamics, but also one where life inexorably emerges from a dynamical source located at the very "edge of chaos." In our universe, the biological realm "emerges" ineluctably from the workings of "mere" physics in ways that can be expressed mathematically and modeled on computers.

Meanwhile, Wilson's "consilience" — the word which puts the "il" in "emergilent chaoplexity" — proposes a new "unity of knowledge" (see his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which I also ought to read, but haven't). I gather that Wilson's main idea in showing how the various spheres of human knowledge today hope to "leap together" — the root meaning of "consilience" — is that reason ought at long last to replace mysticism ... which would seem to put him in opposition to Capra.

However, my thought is that "mysticism" is an ambiguous word, as is "reason." If you begin with an unquestioned assumption that spirit (if spirit exists) and matter are separate and dual, and that "mysticism" is a search for spirit, then it is easy for many of us to favor the matter side of this supposed dualism and call your stance the "rational" one.

Go all the way back to Heraclitus, though, and the dualism between mysticism and reason, as that between spirit and matter, disappears.

If the assumption that matter is dead and change comes from something apart from the material world is canceled, then it becomes eminently rational (yes) for so-called mystics to pursue scientific inquiries into how the cosmos works. And, since there is ultimately no way to separate out the individual consciousness that we house in our minds from all the rest of reality, it makes sense — for those who are so inclined; not all of us are — to experiment with altered states of mind, which is what the Eastern mystics have done since time immemorial.


The derisive phrase "emergilent chaoplexity" is one that I would prefer to replace with the word "organicity." I mean it to suggest that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it proceeds over the course of billions of years to develop, and eventually to produce life and then conscious life.

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

I'll refer to that faith, then, as "the tao of organicity." In Chinese Taoism, the tao is the natural, spontaneous "way" of all things when left to their own devices and allowed to unfold without a lot of rules imposed on them from without. In my view now as a former dualist, my longstanding Christian faith was essentially a system of understanding in which God was an external rule-giver. Standing apart from nature, including human nature, and finding it/us "fallen" — or, since Adam's "sin," lacking in its original perfection — the God of the monotheists sought to "save" or "redeem" the world.

No wonder it was so easy to wed monotheistic ideas about God to philosophies from supposedly pagan Greece: both idea systems were fundamentally dualist (once Heraclitus and the Milesians were set aside in Greece). In the monotheist view, the material world is wholly distinct from a God who is basically spirit. Though God "became flesh" and was "made man" in Jesus Christ, in the Christian view, there is still a dualism such that Christ is like us in all ways but sin. That idea is undergirded by the idea that Mary, Jesus's mother, was born without the stain of Original Sin which the rest of us inherit from Adam and Eve — yet another dualism.

The list of monotheist dualisms goes on and on. God vs. world. Heaven vs. hell. Good vs. evil. Soul vs. body. Mind vs. matter.

In recent months, in this blog, I have tried to defend all the dualisms by means of some two dozen or more posts under the topic of Consciousness. My idea was that if it can be established that the attribute of the human mind which is variously called consciousness or sentience or subjective experience is indeed a distinct type of being from all the other, merely physical manifestations of mind/brain, then there is hope for all the other dualisms that are inherent in the Christian worldview.

Now, suddenly, I find myself on the other side of the fence, as it were, believing in my bones that dualisms are illusory.

In posts to come, I plan to discuss what has led me to this "sudden" insight, and where I think it will lead me now. But I must hastily note that this "insight" has not really been all that sudden. I have been flirting with it for well over ten years, at least since I first began trying to show how the ascent of complexity and such constructs as the "edge of chaos" in the halls of science today could be squared with Christian belief.

It did not take me long to twig to the notion that if Darwinian natural selection is abetted by self-organizing, complex systems whose dynamics unfold at the "edge of chaos," and if chaos is rightly associated in the Christian imagination with the evil workings of Satan, then there is every reason for Christians to resent the sciences of complexity as much as many of them have long resented Darwinian evolution theory.

Looking back, I realize that I never really overcame that difficulty, and the book I was trying to write under the assumption that it might reconcile Christian belief with the theory of evolution sort of petered out into nothingness. It never got finished, and today I can see why. The whole idea of an "edge of chaos" bridging the order-chaos dualism is fundamentally unchristian, if you stop to think how crucially dependent the Christian outlook is on the existence of a long list of dualisms.

I intend to extend these remarks about the anti-dualist Tao of Organicity in subsequent posts. Stay tuned ...

My Existential Guilt (Part Two)

In My Existential Guilt I talked about being dogged by a free-floating sense of guilt that bears only a loose relationship, if any, to my actual transgressions. Philosopher, author, and advocate of Unitarian Universalism James Park calls the phenomenon "existential guilt." His Existential Philosopher's Museum website has this page on existential guilt.

Park says:

... existential guilt will not stick to a definite violation of standards. It seems to float from one fault to another. When it does temporarily attach itself to one moral weakness, which we then correct, it takes wing and settles on another fault. Sometimes our existential guilt spreads itself over many 'sins'. ... Our existential guilt arises not from past events but from our core of being.

We tend to look to moral violations to explain our feelings of guilt, but that's a mistake. Why do we make it? "Perhaps we are reluctant to give up our moral interpretation of guilt because we lose control over the problem — and the solution."

Interestingly, during recent weeks and months as I have started to recognize how guilty and inauthentic I feel, I have also noticed how increasingly desperate I am to keep in control of everything that goes on within and around me. It's like my ever-present guilt is an acid I'm carrying around in a beaker, which is now full to the brim. I feel I have to use any method I can to keep from spilling it. So if I give my free-floating guilt a moral interpretation, then perhaps I can control it by amending my life or confessing my sins. But if moral transgressions are unrelated to the guilt — as they are with existential guilt — then I am left without recourse to one of my prime hoped-for stabilization methods.

Park:

When we treat our existential guilt as if it were conscience — by turning away from a troubling dimension of our lives — we discover that existential guilt follows us. Diversion brings no relief; it only spreads the problem. Because our existential guilt arises from within ourselves, we might attempt to escape by jumping out of our selves: We brick up the access to who we really are. We function automatically, hoping to 'quarantine' our disease. If our inner selves are consumed by guilt, we dare not dwell there. So we plunge into frantic and obsessive external activity.

I've done that from time to time. Recently, I've gone through a period of being obsessive about (I know this sounds really weird) my Apple TV. An Apple TV is a device that streams movies from iTunes to an HDTV. I bought one a couple of months ago and soon found myself getting sucked into mastering the technical details of (among other things) ripping DVDs and obtaining illicit movie content on the Internet in other ways.

And another of my obsessions is even weirder, since it is a sexual one: I get a voyeuristic charge out of the idea of women relieving themselves in public (or, for that matter, in private) and can spend days happily looking for pictures of them on the Internet — and there are many of these pictures — engaged in the act of "popping a squat" or sitting on a toilet. Park has a section on Sexology in which he promises to take up the topic of "Imprinted Sexual Fantasies." I'm looking forward to reading the book, when he gets it written, since I imagine that I somehow got imprinted with this particular sexual fantasy from an early age.

But for now my point is that my obsessive behavior in response to pervasive existential guilt can paradoxically involve morally dubious preoccupations: engaging in copyright violations, nurturing a secret (now, not-so-secret) interest in women's excretory functions, etc. It is if whatever guilt I am "supposed to feel" for transgressive behavior has been so drowned out by my free-floating existential guilt that I am now engaging in downright provocative behavior to try to revive the normal connection between behavior and guilt.

Meanwhile, I feel detached from my "true self," as if I were indeed "jumping out" of who I am by taking on the role of devil-may-care copyright violator, or secret pee voyeur, or, say, in another of the personas I have recently explored, the quintessential appreciator of life's ironies — even though the "real me" is inclined to take everything quite seriously. I find that I usually wear some kind of mask, even with my friends. The fires of my inner spontaneity are considerably damped.

Park:

As we become morally better — correcting one fault after another — we might have to invent ridiculous sins to explain our sense of guilt. Is this an attempt to transform existential guilt into moral conscience?

I think so. I'm clearly "inventing ridiculous sins" by acting them out. If I can do that, maybe my moral conscience will oust my existential guilt. Then I can deal with my pangs of moral conscience in the usual, approved ways.

Park:

Moral 'backsliding' might be caused by on/off guilt: As we climb the ladder of self-improvement, we should feel less guilty as we become better. But if we are really trying to overcome our existential guilt, becoming more perfect does not make us feel better. Thus, if we feel just as guilty near the top of the ladder, we give up — and slide all the way back to the bottom again.

That's definitely me!

Park, again:

Let a basketball represent our resilient personality-shell: The air inside is our pressurized existential guilt. The knocks and bumps of everyday life are the pangs of conscience. Little mistakes make us feel clumsy, inadequate, ashamed, inept. But usually we bounce back to shape quickly and easily.

Sometimes, however, these wounds of conscience injure us deeply, pierce thru our tough external shell, releasing our existential guilt. We might experience a gush of guilt or a devastating explosion. The explanation: We have a reservoir of pent-up existential guilt, which is sometimes released by a puncture-wound of conscience. But the tack that punctured our shell did not cause our existential guilt.

I have cleverly learned to avoid the "gush of guilt or devastating explosion" by various psychological dodges, which unfortunately have had the side effect of quashing my joie de vivre. My spontaneous inner self is factored right out of the equation, while joie de vivre depends on expressing the spontaneous self, warts and all.

So, is there hope for me?

If [our guilt] management techniques prove inadequate, we might still yearn for complete release from our existential guilt. If the pressurized guilt inside our basketball can be removed — replaced by forgiveness, atonement, joy, peace, & fulfillment — the little punctures of life will no longer release a gush of guilt.

When we understand the nature of our existential guilt, we can open ourselves to Existential Freedom. Existential Freedom removes our existential guilt, even if normal mistakes continue. Under Existential Freedom we still have pangs of conscience when we "mess up", but we no longer experience overwhelming guilt 'for' trivial reasons.

Wow! Where do I sign up?

We might have to grope our way toward freedom from existential guilt. Perhaps only after some years of struggling with this deeper guilt will we be convinced that becoming better does not cure our guilt. Then we can abandon our moral striving, surrender completely, & open ourselves to Existential Freedom — which overcomes, removes, & abolishes our existential guilt.

OK, consider me in "grope mode." But it's hard to imagine abandoning my moral striving, even now that I've begun to recognize what I'm groping toward. And exactly how do I "open myself" to existential freedom? It sounds like one of those things where you have to stop doing something that seems as natural and habitual as breathing.

Toward the end of this web page, Park asks some significant questions, including:

Have you known moments of release from existential guilt?
If so, how did you open yourself to Existential Freedom?
... what keeps you caught in existential guilt?

My answers are:

• Yes, I have known many moments of release. In my own lexicon, I call them moments of "lassitude," but that's wrong. Lassitude is a state of mental and physical exhaustion. Here, what's exhausted and wants to retreat into its hidey-hole is my existential guilt itself. In a sort of "moral exhaustion," it simply shuts up for a while, and I feel as if God's in his heaven again.
  
• It just happened, and I don't know why.
  
• I don't know why I can't find the "lassitude" when I want to but can't.
  

More later ...

My Existential Guilt

The Taoist insight that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed" was the topic of The Categorical and the Ineffable and other preceding posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series. Having written that last post yesterday, I woke up this morning with the powerful sense that I am suffering from a bad case of excessive guilt.

I don't mean feelings of guilt about any particular sin or sins, though I am not without those too. I mean what I think of as "free-floating guilt," guilt that bears no particular relationship to anything I have done.

Googling that phrase, "free-floating guilt," led me to The Existential Philosopher's Museum on the website of James Park, who calls the phenomenon "existential guilt." Park is an existential philosopher and author who advocates Unitarian Universalism as a religious stance.

I'm about to start investigating Park's sprawling website, but I have to admit I'm not really crazy about delving into existentialism and enlarging on what little I know about Unitarian Universalism, both of which I think of as somehow "godless." Yet I'm intrigued by Park's "Five Differences between Moral Conscience and Existential Guilt" which appear in a table about two-thirds of the way down this page.


Park says that moral conscience is remorse for particular misdeeds and omissions, while existential guilt is characteristically free-floating and non-specific. Well, I do have some specific misdeeds and omissions that I feel (some degree of) remorse for, but mostly what I feel is free-floating and non-specific guilt. So, check.

Park says that pangs of moral conscience are caused by the discrepancy between our actual behavior and our standards. In that sense, they are rationally justified. Existential guilt is uncaused and not psychologically intelligible. Check.

Moral guilt is temporary and passes with time. Existential guilt is permanent and renewed at every moment. Check.

Pangs of conscience are temporary and pass with time, says Park. I'm still feeling guilt over minor misdeeds from decades ago — even though I've "confessed" them in the prescribed manner of my faith. When Park says existential guilt "flows thru-out our selves [and is] pervasive [and] possesses our entire being," I know whereof he speaks. So, again, check.

If we suffer the strictures of moral conscience, we can, Park says, "relieve the tension by changing our behavior or standards." But existential guilt cannot be overcome in this way: "psychological techniques are useless." Yup. Check, again. I've been trying to engineer my own "reduction of tension" ever since the late 1980s, at the time when my parents died and I in mid-adulthood "got religion." (It hasn't worked.)

Specifically, the sacrament of penance in the Catholic Church — known popularly as "going to confession" — doesn't serve to reduce my tension. I expect that may be because it is not expected to have any effect on existential guilt.


Park asks, "Have you ever been a perfectionist, driven by a deep sense of guilt that does not go away no matter how good you become?" Yes, I've been there. "Do you sometimes feel more guilty than you ought to feel?" Definitely. "Does your sense of guilt keep coming back attached to new 'reasons'?" Yes ... that, and I seem to manage to recycle old reasons that one would think had lost their sting.

Why? Why do I have this weird, senseless guilt? Why does nothing I do (or eschew doing) relieve the tension? Park says:

Human beings have been feeling guilty since before the dawn of civilization. The decline of organized religion in the West has corresponded with less interest in guilt. But at least for some people, it is still relevant to look into the deeper dimensions of the experience of guilt.

OK, then maybe the hidden agenda of this whole In Search of Solidarity blog has been, for me, an attempt to change the terms of religion so I could have my cake and eat it too: be religious, but get rid of the guilt.

In other words, I'd like religion to become, not nonexistent as atheists would prefer, but much less in the guilt-provoking vein ... simply because I myself have a boatload of existential guilt weighing me down at all times and I don't need to take on any additional guilt from the teachings of my church.


In view of the above, I believe I have been putting myself in an ever-tighter moral straitjacket over the course of the past several years. It is as if I have been trying to "cure" my existential guilt by ratcheting up punctiliousness. In making this attempt, all I have succeeded in doing is getting less natural and spontaneous — becoming less "refreshing," to repeat a word one of my friends used of me several decades ago.

I am no longer refreshing, and I rarely feel refreshed.

In recent posts to this blog (the Confessions series) I have admitted to being a closet prig and prude, while confessing to feeling "inauthentic" about it all. Inauthenticity is one of the characteristics Park speaks of as the lot of the existentially guilt-ridden, as a quick scan of his site reveals.

In other recent posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series, I have sidled up to a Taoist perspective in which there is no ground whatsoever for guilt. Guilt has no part in a philosophical system in which the whole object is to cultivate spontaneity and naturalness ... as if the only thing we can do wrong is not be spontaneous and natural.

I think the hidden agenda of my Taoism interest is my (formerly unconscious, now conscious) hope to cure my existential guilt.


One of the upshots of discovering that I suffer from existential guilt is that it renders suspect everything I have ever said in this blog, as well as in my other blogs, about religion, morality, and related matters.

It is as if I have held myself out to be an insightful art critic and then discovered to my supreme embarrassment that I have been color blind all these years. Or a music critic who can't, and never could, hear musical overtones.

Without quite realizing it, I have been carrying around a massive load of existential guilt for a very long time now. Because it makes no sense on the face of it to even believe a person can have such free-floating, unmotivated guilt, I haven't been able to put a name to it. Lacking the ability to name it, I simply assumed it wasn't there.

But it was, and is. I has been a bit like a dark star around which a visible star revolves. The position in the sky of the visible star is apt to wobble, as its brightness waxes and wanes. Translate that analogy into the realm of religion and morality, and you can see that my supposedly rock-steady pronouncements need to be taken, now, with a whole shaker of salt.

For my hidden (from myself) agenda has always been to say and make myself believe things that can help me shoulder my heavy load of existential guilt. So when I have dissed "conservative" religious outlooks which, as their theological starting point, emphasize how sinful we are in God's eyes — Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals, mainline churches as the Lutherans, and also my own church mates the "conservative" Catholics — I obviously can't be trusted to be objective.

There may be a valid case to be made that theologies of sin and guilt are simply incorrect and un-biblical, such as the argument set forth recently in a book by Garry Wills (see What Paul Meant). But I am clearly not the best judge: I want Wills to be right so very badly, simply because it might help cure my existential guilt. Ergo, I can't be trusted to pass evenhanded judgment on Wills' ideas.

In fact, I now realize my capacity for making moral judgments is generally out of whack, for the exact same reason. I simply don't have the ability to make consistent moral choices. I find myself trying to exorcise the tiniest lingering blemishes in my own personal behavior while excusing in the behavior of other people what many Christians call grievous sin — as if waving off someone else's major transgressions will somehow lessen my own existential guilt.

So I'm all over the map on sin and Christian morality. I'm a closet prig and a prude, while at the same time I'm tolerant of gays' and lesbians' right to act naturally and spontaneously according to their inmost natures.

I'll continue to explore the ramifications of my existential guilt in future posts ...

The Categorical and the Ineffable

In earlier posts in this Does Nature Need Correcting? series I owned up to no longer believing in one of the most deep-seated premises of Christian thought: that nature, including human nature, is amiss and needs correcting. Now I'd like to explore one of the contrasting views I touched on in the original installment: the Taoist insight that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."

I discussed Taoism a some length in three posts (this, this, and this) I made some two years ago to another blog. Briefly: the tao is an ancient Chinese notion whose name means "the way." If we cultivate harmony with the tao, we will find the peace and tranquility of the nameless "uncarved block," a Taoist metaphor for the entity from which all named "vessels" are carved. Before "the myriad creatures" — the vessels — there conceptually came, in reverse succession, the "three," preceded by the "two," preceded by the metaphysical "one." The latter too has a predecessor, the tao.

As I review the first of my previous discussions, several things stand out:

• If the monotheistic God of Western religion personifies the metaphysical One, the impersonal tao principle conceptually precedes him.
  
• The tao transcends the person-nonperson distinction ... as it transcends all pairs of opposites. In actuality, calling the tao "impersonal" is as mistaken as calling it "personal."
  
• In the history of Western thought, Plato was the consummate anti-Taoist.
  

Plato was heavily invested in the notion that only Ideas (a.k.a. Forms) are truly real. Platonic Ideas or Forms, such as the Form of the Round, are necessarily immaterial; all material objects such as the circles we draw on paper or the spherical shapes of planets represent imperfect copies of Forms. No man-made or nature-made shape is perfectly round, or square, or oval, or whatever. Hence, it is not fully real.

If material things are not fully real, then they're not fully knowable. Plato's hope was to, as I say, invest heavily in that which is truly and fully knowable. Whatever is truly and fully knowable is necessarily a Form or Idea, without material substance. But knowledge of Forms/Ideas lets us control the material world in ways otherwise unavailable to us. For example, even if a wheel is less than perfectly round, our knowledge of its Form lets us predict what a wheel will do. Do that sort of thing consistently enough, and human "progress" ensues.

To the Taoist, it takes only "cleverness" to coerce material outcomes in the world this way. "Wisdom" is something else entirely. The distinction between cleverness and wisdom parallels that between the categorical and the ineffable.


Plato sought knowledge of categories, which are in effect pigeonholes into which we stuff objects, by which we give them their names. But the Taoist's "uncarved block" is expressly said to be nameless, ineffable. It is "rough," where the vessels are "smooth." (But the tao is also "smooth," since it logically precedes the rough-smooth dichotomy.)

Plato said the categories, as Ideas or Forms, lay at the basis of reality. But the Taoist says the ineffable is the true origin of all.

Plato, in his Myth of the Cave, said true knowledge of the categories of reality would destroy the illusions that beset most of us. The highest knowledge of all was that of the Form of the Good.

The Tao te ching by Lao-tzu

The Taoist, for his part, says such "cleverness" amounts to an illusion, and that real wisdom abandons attempts at exerting coercive power over the affairs of man and the world. According to the Tao te ching, also know as the Lao-tzu after its author:

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.

Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,
The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.

After they are transformed, should desire raise its head,
I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block.

The nameless uncarved block
Is but freedom from desire,
And if I cease to desire and remain still,
The empire will be at peace of its own accord.

Western thought historically combines Platonism (as neo-Platonism) with Christian ideas concerning the "fallen" imperfection of the natural world, our sinfulness, and so on. When you shift mental focus all the way back to the tao, pairs of opposites like good and evil vanish. This is why the Taoist would say, in contradiction to the neo-Platonist Christian, that things in our world are not fundamentally "broken" and do not need to be "fixed."

What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant is, oddly enough, a Christian book that (at least in my view of it) suggests that my last post, Only Natural, is not as un-Christian as it may seem. In it, I confessed to no longer harboring what I take to be the canonical Christian view that (human) nature needs correcting.

According to that view, the world is a "fallen" one. Our inner nature is too. It's the fallout of Adam and Eve's original sin in the Garden of Eden.

If I read Wills right — and I am by no means sure I do — the Apostle Paul, author of many of the "letters" that make up the bulk of the New Testament and which document the original Christian movement as it existed before it even bore that name — may actually have had the opposite view. The Christian churches down through the centuries may have simply misread Paul.

The heart of the problem is this [Wills writes on pp. 172-173]. Paul entered the bloodstream of Western civilization through one artery, the vein carrying a consciousness of sin, of guilt, of the tortured conscience. This is the Paul that we came to know through the brilliant self-examinations of Augustine and Luther, of Calvin and Pascal and Kierkegaard. The profound writings of these men and their followers, with all their vast influence, amount to a massive misreading of Paul, to a historic misleading of the minds of people ... down through the centuries.

In this context Wills, who is Catholic, applauds the insights of Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendhal, whose 1961 lecture "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West" maintained

that Luther and his followers took Paul's argument for freedom from the externals of the [ancient Jewish] Mosaic code as a confession of his [Paul's] own ability to follow moral law in general. They read as autobiography Paul's exclamation at Romans 7:22-24: "In my inner self, I am pleased with God's Law. But I observe another law in my limbs doing battle with the law in my mind, holding me prisoner to the law of sin in my limbs. Miserable person that I am, who is to set me free from this body doomed to death?" These words echoed thunderously in depths of generations for whom they are an autobiographical outcry.

Wills shows that Paul did not mean these words to be taken as autobiographical. For one thing, the idea of secular individualism which exploded during the centuries after Paul's death would not have been recognized by Paul. Paul was not concerned with individual salvation. He was concerned with the salvation of nations.

To Paul, the Brotherhood which would only later become a church was the Body of Christ. As a corporate body, it would be rescued from the manifold iniquities of this world by a gracious God, simply because this was God's plan as revealed by Jesus's death and resurrection.

Paul simply would not have understood the idea that an individual's personal sense of guilt has anything to do with the prospect of corporate salvation. Wills (pp. 173-174) interprets Bishop Stendhal as saying

In all of Paul's undoubtedly autobiographical references, there is no expression of guilt. Far from finding it hard to observe the Mosaic Law, he [having been born a Jew and still considering himself one] says that he observed it perfectly in his days as a Pharisee ... and in his days among the Brothers [i.e., the original followers of Jesus] he says repeatedly that he has done nothing for which his conscience could reproach him ... . [Stendhal's reading is that] in this one place [Romans 7:22-24] he is not telling us about himself.

Paul's Letter to the Romans is, says Wills, after Stendhal, "a complex interplay of 'persons' in diatribe-exchanges, meant to show that Gentiles and Jews — not as individuals but as societies — have both failed to observe their covenant with God." One of these two hypothetical "persons," a personification of the Jews as a historical group, is the implied speaker of the oft-quoted words at Romans 7:22-24, castigating "himself" for his centuries-long history of infractions against the Law of Moses.

Likewise, Paul has it that Gentiles, while not subject to the Jewish covenant, were subject to the covenant of natural law as it is written in their hearts. But like the Jews, they as a body had repeatedly broken their covenant.


In the early Roman proto-church, the Jews who counted Jesus as their Messiah and the Gentiles who likewise counted Jesus as (yes) the Jewish Messiah were nevertheless at odds with each other. "Paul is arguing," says Wills, "that neither side can reproach the other, and that God is on neither side."

So Paul was not addressing personal sin/guilt at all. And Paul and Jesus both said

that the worship of God is a matter of interior love, not based on external observances, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods. Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of "religion" and punish those who try to escape them. ... They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. ... Paul's message to us is not one of guilt and dark constraint" (p. 175, emphasis added).

My interpretation of that is the following conjecture: our modern need to "correct" nature stems from the sense of "guilt and dark constraint" which — Paul's intent notwithstanding — got built into the Christian sensibility from the early days of the post-Pauline church on.

In Wills' own terse words (p. 175), "Religion took over the legacy of Paul as it did that of Jesus."

Perhaps my coming to see this, however inchoately, is why I no longer feel comfortable thinking of myself as a partaker of the Christian religion.

Only Natural

Of late I have been struggling with my faith as a Christian. I don't feel all that much like a Christian these days. Today it hit me that one of the reasons why I don't has to to with the conflict between what is natural and what is Christian.

In general, it seems to me, Christianity is anti-nature. What I mean by the words "nature" and "natural" is hard to pin down. Let me try to sneak up on it.

Leading "the Christian life" amounts to, when you strip it down to outtward essentials, doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. What you do and what you eschew are done or conscientiously not done in the name of God. But the question is, why do you need to consciously embrace virtue and avoid sin?

The answer would seem to be that, by our very nature, we want the "wrong" things. Instead of doing righteous deeds, we veer in the direction of iniquity ... unless we consciously undertake a course correction, that is. That's what Christian living is: a permanent course correction that we build into our lives by intent, analogous to what a driver needs to do to steer a car that pulls to one side. The Christian commitment is one wherein we assiduously cock the steering wheel of our lives away from what would otherwise be the "straight ahead" position, under the assumption that the car's front end is out of alignment.

But where does that out-of-alignment assumption itself come from? For what it seems to imply is that our very nature is askew. Absent a course correction undertaken "in the name of God" — since what we generally do proceeds from our inner nature — unless that inner nature is somehow askew, no course correction would be necessary.


Indeed, the whole story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden seems to tell us nothing so much as that our very nature — and indeed, that of the world as a whole — is out of whack. This is what it means to say that we, and it, are "fallen."

Recently I have begun to seriously doubt that perhaps most fundamental premise of the Christian stance. It no longer makes much sense to me to believe in the fallenness of (human) nature: my own, that of other people, or that of the world as a whole.

Today I took a walk around a nearby man-made lake, something I do quite often for air and exercise. This time, as I huffed and puffed, I found myself spontaneously meditating on what it means to say, as we often do, that something is "only natural."

The water level in the artificial lake I was hoofing it around was unusually low. Only natural, I mused, given how little rainfall we've been getting these last few months. But what about the fact that I responded to noticing the alarmingly low waterline by worrying about whether "global warming" is having something to do with its cause? Was my complex mental reaction to seeing the low water level somehow "unnatural" because complex and mental?

It too, I realized, was really only natural, given how much we have all been hearing about the global warming controversy. I am a (supposedly) intelligent creature, and it was only natural that my mind would construct such a hypothetical story about how our species' ever-growing "carbon footprint" might indirectly account for how many mud flats were visible at Lake Centennial. No matter how complex the activities of the individual human mind, there is nothing about them that can be deemed intrinsically unnatural.


Did I say "species"? Another thing I was keenly aware of on my health walk was just how many living kinds there were in that one modest-sized park. Every plant, every tree, every animal species — I saw squirrels and chipmunks and swans and Canada geese, and I knew by the avidity of the anglers (another animal species) that there were fish under the albeit diminished lake surface — was testimony to nature's vast diversity. Yet I knew the fact of the biosphere's diversity was "only natural" — Darwin showed us why.

Surely, though, the existence of each individual species was some kind of accident of nature, no? No, I found myself thinking, it was "only natural" that each particular species should have come about. Even if the long, tangled skein of causality that has led in the present moment to (saay) a Canada goose incorporated junctures at which "random" genetic mutations occurred, who is to say that some such chance-riddled skein was not bound to yield Canada geese and trout and squirrels and chipmunks and humans to appreciate them all, in the fullness of time? Who is to say that it is not "only natural" that chipmunks and willow trees and trout and avid trout fishermen should be expected to arise out of the complex, multidimensional processes of nature on this planet?

Well, what about man-made lakes and other copycat geographical features? Surely they are anything but "only natural"? Well, actually, no, I'd say they are in fact only natural. It is in fact only natural that a species such as ourselves, having risen to a unique level of consciousness and associated power over the forces of nature, should learn how to put lakes where none had been before.

And it is in fact only natural that this (our) species' unique power to manipulate the environment would tend to get things out of whack on occasi0n. If our vaunted carbon footprint does in fact threaten our whole enterprise of human progress, it is not surprising that this eventuality might crop up at some point in our history. And it is only natural that we should engage in heated debate about whether the "evidence" for global warming (in this particular case) ought to be credited. For if it isn't lying to us, we need to change our ways. It's only natural that we would be in no hurry to do that.


I was also mindful of another way in which the ideas of "natural" and "unnatural" have been understood by Christians. To wit, sex. Certain types of sex are said to involve "unnatural acts." But it seemed to me, as I walked and cogitated, that homosexual sex, said to be the most "unnatural" type of all, is actually perfectly natural for some people.

That phrase, "for some people," is key, I pontificated. Just as the natural world is so diverse that its living species are uncountable, the human world (which is, when you think about, it just one branch of the larger natural world) contains vast diversity as well. If this person is gay and that one is straight, who is to say that one of the two is "unnatural"?

We know now that many animals engage in "unnatural" (i.e., homosexual) sex. If one assumes that animals are simply incapable of doing anything which is not "natural," then calling this particular kind of activity "unnatural" beggars reason.

Yet the Christian stance has long been that there is a true, "one-size-fits-all" morality, and such things as homosexual sex, or any sex without the benefit of heterosexual marriage, lie outside its perimeter.

Any act or urge outside that perimeter is perforce, in Christian eyes, "unnatural." By this is meant that, were we not living in a fallen, post-Edenic world, we would not have such urges and would never commit such acts.


And that is precisely what I no longer seem to believe. I simply don't believe that "nature" can be corrupted ... not at its core.

I'm not saying that certain acts, under certain circumstances, are not unethical or immoral. All we need to do is look around us and we see immoral acts being committed right and left. All I'm saying is that this odd idea that the way to forestall immoral behavior is to "correct" nature is bogus.

Look at the prevalence of priestly child abuse over the course of recent decades in my own, Roman Catholic Church, for example. Look at the recent scandal of the prominent evangelical leader Ted Haggard being outed as gay. Look at the intolerance spouted by the late Jerry Falwell and the still very much alive Pat Robertson. They all bespeak the fact that even the most devout Christians fail at their attempts to "correct" their inner nature, because in the end nature wins.

It's like building a dam. For a while, the dam holds, but come a ninety-nine year hurricane or flood or earthquake, and the dam is history. It's only natural that we should try to control nature with dams and levees, and perhaps it's only natural that we should imagine that we are in fact bound to work assiduously to correct nature, but in the end nature always wins.

Which makes me think that the Taoists are right. Water eventually overcomes stone. "The most submissive thing in the world can run roughshod over the hardest in the world — that which is without substance [water] entering that which has no crevices [rock]. That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action ... ." So says the Tao Te Ching. The best stance is to align ourselves with nature, not try to correct it.