Expending Our Evil

By the process of “sowing our oats” we find there is no permanent value in self-seeking behavior:

Each man has now a capacity to expend and to receive violence, but he has a mechanism available to alter his mental images that define this capacity – thus, the law does not make man a slave to his past nor to the untried…Using imagination and reasoning power, man may try evil-doing in his mind, both sowing and reaping it upon himself, having done with it if he will follow through in his envisioning to the final harvest, not stopping at the point of momentary gratification in the act. That is, he may exhaust the possibilities and bore himself with evil’s final, empty reward.

But even if we find ourselves bored with evil, it’s a built in part of the deal of life:

But since good and evil interfuse each act, as do the two frequencies of a light wave-group, even if a man could always live by the Golden Rule he would still do evil. Because this is so, however, he may spend his life acting upon the voices of conscience and love, knowing that he expends his quota of evil, which must be expended in order that he be delivered from it – and since every person is a field in which both good seed and tares are sown, his life’s harvest will be of good and evil. The measure he has meted out during this experience, however, constitutes the sowing of a new field, provides a future working capital of memory-images, and the evil that comes back to him in kind will be in attenuated form. The sum of his memory-images both today and tomorrow ad infinitum spell out his empathy and they also spell out his lust: his need to experience, to know.

With each step in experience throughout life, we are building up more empathy:

Eddington says, “Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world.” The psychological parallel would read: there will be more empathy in the world tomorrow than there is today – and the question arises, can empathy be complete? Can thermodynamical equilibrium be achieved?

It is these questions we will look at in our next installment. Until then, peace.

Chapter 6: Nature’s Supreme Law

To begin Chapter 6, which focuses on the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, Preston Harold sets us up nicely:

The realm of physics is paradoxical, topsy-turvy, poetic, as inexpressible in the last reaches as any mystic revelation that has confronted man.

In his “The Nature of the Physical World” Sir Arthur Eddington writes, “Sir William Bragg was not overstating the case when he said that we use the classical theory on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the quantum theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.” Preston Harold says this shift of theory is necessary because scientists have had to divide their laws into different compartments, classic and quantum. Eddington continues, “Unfortunately, our compartments are not watertight…The classical laws are the limit to which the quantum laws tend when states of very high quantum number are concerned…The disagreement is not very serious when the number is moderately large; but for small quantum numbers the atom cannot sit on the fence. It has to decide between (classical) and (quantum) rules. It chooses [quantum] rules.”

Preston Harold pulls us into the realm of religion:

Here, the first parallel may be drawn; when large numbers are concerned, men must operate under classical law, outgrown from the Ten Commandments, and humanity at large will tend to operate according to the classical patterns history presents; but operating within each human being are quantum psychic laws that contradict the classical picture he presents, and as an individual, he is subject to these laws primarily. Just as one psychic law – the Golden Rule – bridges the dichotomy between man and society, so the physicist deals with one law that fits in either quantum or classical compartment. This is the second law of thermodynamics which, in Eddington’s words, “has been equally successful in connection with the most recondite problems of theoretical physics and the practical tasks of the engineer.”

In our next installment we will hone in on the second law of thermodynamics and explore it’s meaning and consequence. Until then, peace.

Reversing the Rules

Preston Harold shows us how empathy aligns with religious thought. He says:

The effect of empathy and its meaning to life may be likened to Tao: Tao is obscured when you fix your eye on little segments of existence only…” but when Tao is grasped universally, “Without law or compulsion men [will] dwell in harmony.” In individual terms, empathy is realizing on one’s own being the Golden Rule. Empathy is Jesus’ new commandment as an act in one’s own soul – love one another, love the Lord your God with your whole mind, heart, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Only through empathy is it possible to step into another’s shoes without displacing him or foisting oneself upon him or losing one’s own precious identity; empathy not only makes this possible, it makes it mandatory.

Mandatory?! Maybe that’s why Jesus couches empathy’s impetus as a commandment. It seems ridiculous to me to make loving someone a commandment that must be fulfilled, but through genuine non-judgmental empathy a slight crack in the door may open that invites me to walk through.

When empathy exists, one experiences in his own being what is happening to another and understands that another suffers whatever is happening to oneself. Empathy is direct, involuntary. It cannot be vicariously expressed because it is borne from out the boundless deeps of a man and, to borrow words from Alfred Lord Tennyson, rises, “too full for sound or foam, but such a tide as moving seems asleep,” and with certainty “turns again home” whatever one does or witnesses.

And here Harold will explain how empathy is born out of the interplay between good and evil:

Because empathy is begotten only of the wholeness of experiencing good and evil involved in any decision, situation, or act, it exerts an incomprehensible power – which is to say, unconsciously it is expressed and it cannot be called into action. Because it is an unconsciously made automatic response, through it man gains freedom from having to make a choice between what appears to be good and what appears to be evil, for his response is both unconsciously tempered and in accord with the reality of the situation. Huxley says: “The fullest freedom is the expression of an inner compulsion of our being, of a choice, which we have come to feel as inevitably necessary…In general, once we manage to ‘see things steadily and see them whole,’ the choice is made for us.”

And with this one can understand Jesus’ breaking of the religious “rules” in order to meet people where they are, with their immediate hopes and needs. Empathy can be summed up in one phrase of Jesus that echoes the Tao quote above and bears along with it huge implications.  Jesus grasped the Tao and stated: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Until next time, peace.

Male and Female – A Balancing Act

As mentioned in our last post, the human being shares much in common with his insect friends.  But at a certain point he must deviate to tread the path of “irrationality” that is his destiny.  How might this deviation come about?  What roles do the male and female play?  Our esteemed author asks:

In the insect kingdom subordination of all else to survival of the species leads to enthronement and enslavement of the female while manhood becomes a mockery, as with the social bees where the queen must murder if necessary to secure her throne, killing her mate in the act of fertilization.  What biological turn could work to set both sexes free of an insects life by “making a man” of the male? 

Harold wonders if it might be Cro-Magnon man that reveals the deviation.  Why?  Because in Cro-Magnon the female was physically much smaller than the male, which meant her brain was probably not quite as efficient.  He ruminates:

Upon her shoulders the whole responsibility for the social order and survival of the species could not rest, as it does upon the queen bee and her like in the insect’s world.  Perhaps by evolving away from equality in physical stature ancestral female induced ancestral male to participate directly and share the responsibility that knowledge imposes, even as Eve did in Eden – Adam’s participation and shared responsibility are points upon which the drama turns.

So in Harold’s view, the female decreases so the male may increase.  Some may reflect that history shows the male may have “increased” beyond a reasonable balance to the point where females have often been viewed and/or treated as second class, subjugated citizens.  Absolutely.  And yet the image of God is male/female equally.  With that in mind, Preston Harold reassesses something he said in the previous quote and sees the female now rising to take her appropriate place at the table:

Certainly, woman lost her physical and social equality long ago, but now the female is gaining in stature and she bids fair to gain equal status on the social level.  It is difficult to believe that there has ever been a time when in actuality the female’s brain was not as efficient as the male’s, because woman carries the heaviest part of the load of bearing life, as the legend states Eve must do, and this responsibility must tend to sharpen her wits.  The Eden legend indicates that Eve’s was the questing mind.

So where does this leave us?

The quality of the female mind versus the male mind always has been and no doubt will be for some time to come debatable: there is the question of ways and means of opportunity for expression, the question of the female mind bringing to bear upon the male mind, and the part woman has played in bringing to life the reward of mental effort, civilization… Homo sapiens cultural development allowed him to adapt to widely varying environments, but this serves only to present the deeper mystery of the human mind, male and female, which led mankind in time to state the Golden Rule.  Man’s ability to learn returns one to the mystery of his brain which, in Arthur Koestler’s words, is an “evolutionary novelty…quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment.”

A mystery indeed.  Until next time, peace…