The Centre of Being

October 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The centre of being is a point so small as to be indivisible. This core, this heart, this true and authentic soul and self has no top or bottom, left or right, front or back. For an object to have any of these attributes it must have parts, or be conceived of having parts, and the centre of being has no parts. There is only one of us, and it is the smallest thing.

The smallness of the centre of our being is not an insignificant smallness. It is a smallness that signifies accuracy and exactitude; the smallness that is at the intersection of the cross-hairs in the telescopic sight of a high-powered rifle; the smallness that is the triangulated intersection of two lines on a map.

The centre of being is the centre of all being. At the core of ourselves, the point that is our true self is also the centre of the cosmos, the axis of creation, and the still centre of the turning world.

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Cosmology and Creativity

October 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The whole-hearted performance of any activity, including the smooth functioning of the creative intellect, is facilitated by the internalisation of a supportive cosmology or ‘big picture’ of the universe and one’s place within it.

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Lost Baby

October 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

We are among the first, and only, cultures in history not to have a shared consistent cosmology; a big picture’ which articulates the relationship between all the parts of our experience. The worldview held by most, if not all, religions may serve some of this totalising function, but they do this at the expense of the intellectual rigour which would force them to accept the inconsistencies and contradiction between dogma and science.

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The View from the Centre of the Universe

November 18th, 2006 Fred McVittie

“History’s most powerful cosmological images are not just arbitrary inventions, they may be discoveries about human nature.”

Primack, Joel R. & Abrams, Nancy Ellen. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. Riverhead Books. 2006

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Consilience in Performer Training Techniques

January 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Excellence in performance is facilitated most effectively when their is a high degree of consilience among the various Top Down and Bottom Up strategies applied to the training and ancillary activities of the performers. These include, at the bottom of the scale, detailed physical work on specific techniques appropriate to the task, and at the top end of the scale, a relevant cosmology.

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Centre of the Universe

April 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Those of us who have read about ‘paradigm shifts’ or of the Copernican Revolution in astronomy will be familiar with the legend of how the model of the universe shifted sometime around the early 17th Century. Prior to that time, we are told, people believed that Earth was the centre of the universe and the planets and the Sun swung majestically around the fixed point of Terra. The publication of Galileo’s ‘On the Two World Systems’ and works by Copernicus, Bruno, Brahe etc changed all that and a ’shift’ is supposed to have occurred in our understanding, particularly our understanding of our place in the universe. The images of the universe reflecting this new understanding, the so-called Copernican universe, show the Sun as a fixed point at the centre of the map and the Earth and other bodies swinging endlessly around it. This image of ourselves, as miniscule lifeforms clinging to a flying rock three rocks out from the Sun, is supposed to be a more accurate representation of our position than the previous Earth-centred one. However, it is worth considering for a moment what these images actually mean, what function they serve, and what information they leave out as well as what they provide. Starting with the last point first, it should be noted from the outset that any image, or indeed animation, which shows any object as stationary is inevitably partial. There is no such thing as a fixed point in the universe, everything is in motion relative to everything else and the idea that the Sun (or previously the Earth) is stationary is a convenient convention used to indicate particular ideas. In the case of images of the Sun-centred universe, the point of such images is that give an accurate representation of the gravitational and centrifugal relationships between the various bodies illustrated. These images do not, and cannot, meaningfully suggest that the Sun is ‘central’, particularly since the whole system; planets, asteroids, and the Sun itself, is all hurtling at several thousand miles an hour toward Orion. The Copernican model of the Sun-centred universe is extremely useful for predicting the position of planets and the relative movement of these planets, but it’s ontology does not extend beyond these predictions and certainly does not reduce the status of the Earth as central to human experience. In an infinite (and expanding) universe, as Pascal observed, the centre is (conceptually) everywhere. From the point of view of the subjective human being, there is only one centre however, and that is wherever one happens to be standing.

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Centre of the Cosmos

May 29th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Stand still
Stand in the place where you live.
Imagine the centre of the Earth beneath your feet.
You are connected to that Centre.
Gravity pours through you toward that Centre.
Space flows down and around you toward that Centre.
All this is true
As you stand, imagine the Centre of the Earth, the Centre of Space
Moving upward through your feet and into your body.
Imagine the line connecting your centre to the Centre of the Earth contracting and shortening.
Place yourself at cosmic centre and draw cosmic centre into yourself.
Make yourself the Centre of the Cosmos.

Breathe.

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Gobsmacking ideas

October 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie

All of your ancestors had children before they died.
You are not who you were seven years ago
Most of you is shared by everybody else
You are physically connected to everybody else
Everything is imaginary

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Religion as Folk Cosmology

November 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Cosmology is the study of the Universe and the place of humanity within it, although ’study’ is perhaps too objective a word for it. It seems to be a universal human tendency to derive, construct, or imagine a structure for the Universe, a ‘big picture’ if you will, in which the human being is somehow represented, but the means of arriving at this big picture are not necessarily coterminous with what we tend to think of as ’study’. Study implies a dispassionate, rational, distanced investigation of the matter under scrutiny, whereas the majority of cosmologies in which the human is present as anything other than pond-life are anything but distanced. Typically these humanist cosmologies are populated by spirits, gods, ethers, panpsychic forces and otherworldly energies that would not stand up to the most rudimentary rational assault.

The beliefs inherent in most religious practices, represented in their commonality in the form of the Perennial Philosophy, can be regarded as a form of institutionalised Folk Physics, or more specifically, a Folk Cosmology.

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Soul of an Atheist - Grasping the Big Picture

November 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

If I was to sum up the aim of this writing in one sentence, I would say that it was about grasping the big picture. The picture we want, or I would say need, to grasp is very large indeed, and can only be seen from some elevated position high above the plane of usual human grasping, and we should recognise the ambition of our aim at the outset. Imagine a picture of everything. Got that? If you have then you can close the book now and join your friends on Mount Olympus, or Heaven, or wherever it is you Gods hang out. For the rest of us who are still mortal any attempt to grasp the big picture seems like a hopelessly hubristic endeavor. We are the barely conscious products of chemical reactions taking place in a film of moisture on a ball of rock. How in God’s names could we hope to understand things we can’t even see, or touch, or even think about properly? How could we hope to grasp the big picture if can’t even put a sentence together accurately, for goodness sake? Grasp the big picture? Surely we don’t ‘grasp’ a picture, we ’see’ it. When we ’see’ something we look at it from a safe distance and let the light of our objective knowledge bounce off it into our brains. ‘Grasping’, on the other hand, suggests taking hold of something, pulling it close to us, maybe pressing is against our bodies and feeling its contours merging with our own. There is something of love in this grasp, and of understanding, and compassion, and the intimate sharing of a single sense of being. Grasping the Big Picture? Surely this is nonsense? But this is exactly how it should be. No one sense is what we must use to contemplate the immensity and the complexity of Everything. The big picture is too big to hold with our eyes alone, and if we are to take it in then we must become synaesthetes and allow the familiar segregated play of our senses to spill over into each other, to cross the lines on the playground that usually keep them apart, allowing us to feel with our eyes and see with our hands.

We may say that this is impossible, and only those with some bizarre quirk of neurology are capable of such grasping. But if only we could remember back, and maybe we can, we would remember when this was first nature to us, before the second nature of common sense turned us into an I, and a You, and a He or She, or into an It.

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Soul of an Atheist - Overview

November 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The ‘Soul of an Atheist’ section of this writing refers to the hypothesis iterated in various places throughout this blog that the desire to understand the relationship between self and world, the universe and the place of human beings within it, is a universal tendency. This desire may be simply a side-effect of the operation of cognition, perhaps an overactive holistic operator (Newberg & D’Aquili), or some version of the HADD or ‘Hyperactive Agency Detecting Device’ suggested by Barrett, or some other pattern recognition system. Such devices, systems, or operators are presumed to provide the function of cohering data from the senses such that prediction and control become possible; we see patterns in the seasons which allow us to plan our harvests, and this same cognitive skill allows (or demands) that we see patterns in the stars, or in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Furthermore, this cohering tendency operates across a range of scales. At one end there is the relatively discreet process which allows us to cohere the partially occluded outline of a tiger in the bushes into a complete image of the entire terrifying animal. At the other end of the scale the tendency urges us to find a single unifying pattern in all creation. It is interesting to note that at both ends of this scale we ourselves are also posited as an element within the unified image; the fearful symmetry of the tiger produced by our cohering cognition is fearful to us, and that fear is part of the image and the rationale for our producing it in the first place. Similarly, our seeking of a unified image of the universe, a cosmology if you will, also inevitably contains ourselves as active participants.

The quest for a satisfying cosmology probably underpins much of the action of scientists in their talk of ‘theories of everything’, and also of seers, prophets, and evangelists who make apparently similar claims for a unifying goal.

For a cosmology to be both useful and satisfying, as well as being resistant to rational dismissal, it must fill certain criteria. These are, that it be coherent, without obvious internal inconsistencies; that it be expressed in concepts which are capable of embodiment (possibly through the use of conceptual metaphor), and that it not be contradicted by the processes of logical deduction and the scientific method.

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Religion as Folk Cosmology

November 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Cosmology is the study of the Universe and the place of humanity within it, although ’study’ is perhaps too objective a word for it. It seems to be a universal human tendency to derive, construct, or imagine a structure for the Universe, a ‘big picture’ if you will, in which the human being is somehow represented, but the means of arriving at this big picture are not necessarily coterminous with what we tend to think of as ’study’. Study implies a dispassionate, rational, distanced investigation of the matter under scrutiny, whereas the majority of cosmologies in which the human is present as anything other than pond-life could scarcely be regarded as distanced. Typically such cosmologies place the human firmly at the centre of the universe, a universe populated by spirits, gods, ethers, panpsychic forces and otherworldly energies that would not stand up to the most rudimentary rational assault.

The beliefs inherent in most religious practices, represented in their commonality in the form of the Perennial Philosophy, can be regarded as a form of institutionalised Folk Physics, or more specifically, a Folk Cosmology.

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Open Source Spiritual Cosmology

February 7th, 2008 Fred McVittie

One of the criticisms often levelled against atheists is that they dismiss the idea of a cosmology involving a transcendent reality ‘beyond’ normal existence and day to day waking awareness. In particular, the notion that this ‘beyond’ might be populated by giant gaseous beings with super powers is treated with appropriate disdain. Amongst those who do have such beliefs however, these beliefs are supported and reinforced by individual, social, and institutional practices that are (ideally) coherently integrated into the cosmology such that these practices; prayer, meditation, rituals etc, ‘make sense’. And whilst these practices may bring other benefits or have other effects, to do with individual health and happiness, or with social cohesion for example, these other effects are not ultimately seen as the point of the practices and would likely be considered indulgent or cynical if carried out for these reasons alone.

Recent writing by Sam Harris, the author of ‘The End of Faith’ and ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’, unusually for work which is critical of theism, does acknowledge and even praise what might be referred to as spiritual practices. He recognises that many individuals within all cultures have experience of forms of consciousness which are so distinct from normal waking awareness that they seem to require special attention (as distinct from unusual states of consciousness which are less worthy; drunkenness, coma, drug-induced hallucinatory states for example). Meditation particularly is given considerable airtime as a practice which, even if divorced completely from any supernatural connections, can still be of value. It is worthwhile considering what this value might be however, and what role such practice might serve. Without its holistic relationship to an overarching cosmology meditation can ultimately only be a self-help technique. Useful and transformative undoubtedly, but only at the level of the individual and then only within the narrow framework of individual spiritual knowledge. Meditative practice does not, for example, allow one to experience or connect to secular cosmologies provided by physics, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, etc. To the extent that it connects to rational scientifically valid knowledge at all it is to psychology and neuroscience; and as interesting and research-worthy as this may be it is a long way short of the ambitions of religious contemplatives.

It seems to me therefore that there are two possible courses of action which follow from this. Either we can accept the limitations imposed by a secular account of spiritual practice, that whatever intuitions and feelings may be produced by such practice it does not somehow connect one mystically to the workings of the universe. Alternatively we can construct a new interpretation of meditation experiences such that its intuitions match up to the best that rational science can offer, presumably, given the developing state of scientific endeavour, a non-dogmatic, evolving interpretation, a kind of open-source spiritual cosmology.

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An Imagined Universe

April 7th, 2008 Fred McVittie

Primack and Adams begin their book ‘The View from the Centre of the Universe’ with the following line.

“In their hearts, most people are still living in an imagined universe, where space is simply emptiness, stars are scattered randomly, and common sense is a reliable guide. In this imagined universe, we humans have no special place and often feel insignificant.” (Primack 2006, 3)

They then go on to construct a convincing argument that one of the possible causes of the ills which plague contemporary societies is the lack of an imagined universe which does have a special place for humans, and in which we might not feel this insignificance. However, I suspect that hiding in this quotation is a conflict between different ways in which we actually imagine the universe and our place in it, and a possibly ideosyncratic use of the term ‘common sense’.

The universe which they refer to, the one which causes such anomie and existential angst, is, I would argue, not the universe of common sense at all, nor is it the one that lives in our hearts. Rather it is one which has only been brought into existence through the finding of science within the last 400 years. The universe of endless de-centred, inhuman emptiness is not one in which we routinely live, and to the extent that we have ‘internalised’ it at all then it lives as an objective fact in our minds and our libraries, not as felt experience at the core or heart of our being.

Posted in Centre, Cosmology, Imagination, Science, Space, Universe | 3 Comments »