I just finished watching a promotional video and reading the website for Virgin Galactic. This is a company created by Richard Branson of the Virgin brand. Today they unveiled their second generation commercial spacecraft. The spaceport and runway are under construction. Everything done to the Greenest specs. Reservations are being taken now. The promotions are impressive. This is not an airline, so much as an adventure tour designed to make a reality of what Epcot and many others have dreamed of. The current price is $200,000 for a flight with a $20,000 refundable deposit. Still out of range for most people, which will give it time before it becomes a bus for a villanous rabble of crowded seats and bad service. Right now it is clean and pure.
Looking it over and reading the material, I am struck by the intense emotions it stirs in me. It is this sort of thing that keeps me in the Bright Green camp. A vision of a beautiful merger of human ingenuity, poetry, science, and nature. Humans at their best, which is pitiful rare and less than is necessary. We cannot save ourselves, but the divine spark is in us. We are not all bad.
Thinking of the otherworldliness of such an experience, reading the descriptions from the test runs, it will be a world of experiences pressed together. The expectation, the intensity, the release, and the compression back into the everyday. I have often looked for good descriptions of what it is like to experience space. To live outside of our realm. I am struck by the silence that they describe. As the rocket engines cease, there will be utter silence it says, surrounded by sublime otherworldy visual beauty and the experience of no weight pulling against ones muscles and bones, the loss of up and down.
Space is silent. If God is "up" in our conception, then this is His realm. Amazing that the metaphor extends so well into an experience the writers of those metaphors could never have known. God dwells in silence. In perfect peace. Be still and know... Our senses fail and cannot fully appreciate what it is to be in that mode. But it is attractive. Once it repelled me, but it has drawn me in as I have glimpsed pieces of it.
I am not wholly ignorant of it. I have often sought out these kinds of otherworldy experiences. I am reminded of free-diving. The stillness, the cold, the quiet, the loss of up and down, the beauty. I wonder if in space, I would hear my heart beat as clearly as I do under water?
I have taken a deep breath (the expectation) and plunged head first into the blue deep (the intensity). No air, so sounds are perverted, and ultimately stilled, though those that persist are long and distant. The rhythm of my lungs, my constant accompaniment, is stilled and the pulse of the liquid within me replaces it, slowing, slowing, as I hang between planes(the release). Up or down, right or left have no meaning save in relation to my own body. The zen masters were right. The center of the universe is 6 centimeters below my navel. Strange shapes move about me, sleek and fast. Eyeing me and ignoring me. I am insignificant here. And as my body undergoes the mammalian reflex and shadowy webs begin to obscure my vision I am at perfect peace. Just then, I am keenly aware that I am not at all alone. There is a presence pervading this place, pervading me, dwelling here. And it jolts me. My vision recovers, I look for the glimmer and glide toward it. My chest expands with some invisible substance (the recompression) and then I burst back into my world with a deep inhalation.
In some ways this seems the same as the description of space. In other ways it is different. But in both, God dwells, depths and heights. He inhabits these worlds that are not for us. It is sublime.
Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Space
I had in mind when I created this blog that it would not be a teaching or preaching sort of thing. That it would contain contemplations only, for others to read, evaluate, comment on, and to color their own worlds. To that end I didn't want to post things I had already worked out in my own mind, but only things that were currently passing through.
However, it recently occured to me through a variety of circumstances that if two people start talking about abstractions (like ideas) from vastly different perspectives, they may in fact understand very little of what each other means. So, it would be necessary for them to provide a bit of background to see "where he's coming from". To that end, I may periodically post a few things that most people haven't ever really engaged. These things are pretty much worked out in my own head through long consideration, but so influence my outlook that they may make my often cryptic postings a bit more understandable.
So regarding space...as in the universe...the stuff, or absence thereof, that we live in. Scientists have spent years describing space. Trying to define it, model it, so that we can grasp it. This is useful in many of our technological advancements. And, as with most things on this order of thinking, it blurs into philosophy. It has even crossed into popular culture in many scifi kind of ways, though it usually gets perverted for purposes of the story. A good example is the concept of wormholes. If you read, you might be familiar with a very famous series of books involving tesseracts. These books were also heavily steeped in these 'shape of space' concepts.
So what does space look like? It is considered that space is not actually flat, but wrinkled, like a crumpled ball of paper. If we were a tiny microorganism that could only move across the surface of that paper, in fact so flat that we were effectively 2D, the paper would appear to be exceedingly flat, since our measurements would not be scaled large enough, nor could they pass into the necessary dimensions to picture it as it was. From that perspective, moving from one point to another would require crawling along the surface of the paper. If the paper was 10cm wide, then it would be a 10cm trek to get to the other side. From our perspective out here in 3D, one side of the paper may actually be very close to the other side in 3 dimensional space because it's all crumpled up. If the 2D bug could only jump through the void to the other fold, his trip might be exceedingly shorter.
Now translate this to our world. Measured in three dimensions, space appears immense. But if it is actually folded up in other dimensions, then things that can move through those other dimensions might appear to disappear and reappear in another location, maybe vastly far from the origin. Scientists report seeing quantum particles do this!
Of course this leads to all kinds of Trekkie, Star Gatey notions about space and time travel, but stay with me. (Carl Sagan did an excellent bit on this next portion, which I highly recommend watching online, since it has visuals that I am asking you to imagine in this format.) So let's think about one more dimension above ours...the 4th. Contrary to popular belief, this is not time. Dimensions are squares of the next previous...think back to geometry. A point has no dimensions, but if we string them together we get a line. Now if we square length and graph it, we get width...now we have 2 dimensions (a box). Square that and graph, and we get 3 (a cube). Square 3 and graph and we get 4. But here's the difficulty. We exist in three dimensions, so we can't show a fourth dimension...where would we put it? But for purposes of thinking about it, we can project a 4D object into 3D, like we can draw a cube (3D) on paper (2D). When we do that, we get what is called a tesseract. It's like a picture of a 4D object drawn in 3D. It looks like a cube inside a cube, and if you rotate it across the 4th axis, it passes through itself...Of course it doesn't actually, it just appears to do so in our 3D picture, just like a 2D drawing of a cube appears to have edges passing through other edges, though in reality they don't.
If you're lost at this point, go to Youtube and look up Carl Sagan's thing on 4D and come back. It's short. Ok, done that?...Let's move on.
So, just as Sagan said, a 2D creature, our little bug, would not be able to conceive of a 3D world. If we tried to communicate with it, all it would see of us is a series of flat shapes, like the apple print. Similarly, if the 2D critter were swept up into 3D it would be incomprehensible to him and he might decribe it in a variety of odd ways that would sound more or less insane. Translate that to 3D, and you might imagine some people who have tried to explain wierd phenomena and end up sounding insane. Think of Ezekiel and the whirring wheels. What is that about!? But he isn't alone. There are countless accounts of these sort of ecstatic (ex-stasis, out of the normal state[of existence]) experiences and all are very similar.
So are these things just trips of human psychology? Manifestations of chemical phenomena upon our brains? Materialists think so. But if we believe (as I argue must be the case) that there is an existence greater than what we see in the everyday world, then these accounts would certainly seem to fit the bill. Am I saying that God is really a multidimensional alien? No, far from it. But if He is truly God, He must be multidimensional, and that stands to reason that there may be created beings that exist in more dimensions than we. These beings, if operating in our world, may appear or disappear suddenly as they intersect our dimension, or project something from beyond our dimension...like emmanating light. Could it be that what we call Angels (which really just means 'messenger') are beings existing in dimensions beyond our 3?
Could it further stand to reason that if we were taken up into these other dimensions they may appear to us as incomprehensible and we might babble a bit trying to equate what we have experienced into words that only work in lesser dimensions?
I'm not trying to make theological statements here. I'm simply describing a way to think about these things that lets me make as much sense of it as my brain can handle. This model seems to work pretty well. Of course, I would caution everyone not to stop at this point. By orthodox definition, God is so far above our understanding that anything we can concieve to model Him is necessarily less than He is. So, don't fall off into wierd New Agey stuff. Stick to orthodox understandings. They have the weight of history and the large community of consent to back them up. Without that anchor, you are adrift in treacherous seas. These ideas have been treated numerous times in history, you just have to get past the latest fads and dig into the older stuff...most of which was written in the middle ages...hardly "Dark", any experienced scholar can tell you that was a time of fabulous philosophical and natural learning.
So if this stuff is real, ancient philosophy and modern science confirm it, but can't be described coherantly, then how can we know what is valid from lunacy, fantasy, or lies? That too has been addressed! There are whole treatises on assessing and confirming true "religious experience" (to use the church language) on various levels. Just look it up and you'll see. The internet is a wonderful resource for this kind of stuff as long as you use authoritative sources and resist the urge to self-diagnose. In addition, many modern sources have adapted the older concepts up into our langauge, making it far easier to understand. The first step is understanding the terminology used. Contemplation, Mysticism, Ecstacy, etc. Get a good dictionary (again, online)and look at the old meanings too.
I'm certainly not the only one who thinks these things. Obviously Sagan does. CS Lewis certainly does. These are just two sources of many. As you begin to investigate this as I have, and still do, you will also begin to see that science and religion blur into each other. In fact the conflict is mostly perceived rather than actual. Faith, correctly understood, is perfectly rational. Science, if true, will point to reality, which is God. But this is a whole other discussion that I do not have time for on this blog.
One last point on the subject. Many will inevitably say that other traditions outside Christianity also demonstrate similar experiences. How can one claim supremacy? I can't tell you which is superior. I could give you all my reasons and you would still have to come to that decision on your own. Seek and you will find. But I can at least save you some time and elliminate the common mistake of using similar experience to justify universalism (all ways lead to God) by drawing on one of my greatest teachers, CS Lewis. There are only so many ways that a ship can depart a port. Though the departures may all look alike, the seas they sail and their destinations may be quite different. Take it from this ancient mariner; there truly are far fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.
However, it recently occured to me through a variety of circumstances that if two people start talking about abstractions (like ideas) from vastly different perspectives, they may in fact understand very little of what each other means. So, it would be necessary for them to provide a bit of background to see "where he's coming from". To that end, I may periodically post a few things that most people haven't ever really engaged. These things are pretty much worked out in my own head through long consideration, but so influence my outlook that they may make my often cryptic postings a bit more understandable.
So regarding space...as in the universe...the stuff, or absence thereof, that we live in. Scientists have spent years describing space. Trying to define it, model it, so that we can grasp it. This is useful in many of our technological advancements. And, as with most things on this order of thinking, it blurs into philosophy. It has even crossed into popular culture in many scifi kind of ways, though it usually gets perverted for purposes of the story. A good example is the concept of wormholes. If you read, you might be familiar with a very famous series of books involving tesseracts. These books were also heavily steeped in these 'shape of space' concepts.
So what does space look like? It is considered that space is not actually flat, but wrinkled, like a crumpled ball of paper. If we were a tiny microorganism that could only move across the surface of that paper, in fact so flat that we were effectively 2D, the paper would appear to be exceedingly flat, since our measurements would not be scaled large enough, nor could they pass into the necessary dimensions to picture it as it was. From that perspective, moving from one point to another would require crawling along the surface of the paper. If the paper was 10cm wide, then it would be a 10cm trek to get to the other side. From our perspective out here in 3D, one side of the paper may actually be very close to the other side in 3 dimensional space because it's all crumpled up. If the 2D bug could only jump through the void to the other fold, his trip might be exceedingly shorter.
Now translate this to our world. Measured in three dimensions, space appears immense. But if it is actually folded up in other dimensions, then things that can move through those other dimensions might appear to disappear and reappear in another location, maybe vastly far from the origin. Scientists report seeing quantum particles do this!
Of course this leads to all kinds of Trekkie, Star Gatey notions about space and time travel, but stay with me. (Carl Sagan did an excellent bit on this next portion, which I highly recommend watching online, since it has visuals that I am asking you to imagine in this format.) So let's think about one more dimension above ours...the 4th. Contrary to popular belief, this is not time. Dimensions are squares of the next previous...think back to geometry. A point has no dimensions, but if we string them together we get a line. Now if we square length and graph it, we get width...now we have 2 dimensions (a box). Square that and graph, and we get 3 (a cube). Square 3 and graph and we get 4. But here's the difficulty. We exist in three dimensions, so we can't show a fourth dimension...where would we put it? But for purposes of thinking about it, we can project a 4D object into 3D, like we can draw a cube (3D) on paper (2D). When we do that, we get what is called a tesseract. It's like a picture of a 4D object drawn in 3D. It looks like a cube inside a cube, and if you rotate it across the 4th axis, it passes through itself...Of course it doesn't actually, it just appears to do so in our 3D picture, just like a 2D drawing of a cube appears to have edges passing through other edges, though in reality they don't.
If you're lost at this point, go to Youtube and look up Carl Sagan's thing on 4D and come back. It's short. Ok, done that?...Let's move on.
So, just as Sagan said, a 2D creature, our little bug, would not be able to conceive of a 3D world. If we tried to communicate with it, all it would see of us is a series of flat shapes, like the apple print. Similarly, if the 2D critter were swept up into 3D it would be incomprehensible to him and he might decribe it in a variety of odd ways that would sound more or less insane. Translate that to 3D, and you might imagine some people who have tried to explain wierd phenomena and end up sounding insane. Think of Ezekiel and the whirring wheels. What is that about!? But he isn't alone. There are countless accounts of these sort of ecstatic (ex-stasis, out of the normal state[of existence]) experiences and all are very similar.
So are these things just trips of human psychology? Manifestations of chemical phenomena upon our brains? Materialists think so. But if we believe (as I argue must be the case) that there is an existence greater than what we see in the everyday world, then these accounts would certainly seem to fit the bill. Am I saying that God is really a multidimensional alien? No, far from it. But if He is truly God, He must be multidimensional, and that stands to reason that there may be created beings that exist in more dimensions than we. These beings, if operating in our world, may appear or disappear suddenly as they intersect our dimension, or project something from beyond our dimension...like emmanating light. Could it be that what we call Angels (which really just means 'messenger') are beings existing in dimensions beyond our 3?
Could it further stand to reason that if we were taken up into these other dimensions they may appear to us as incomprehensible and we might babble a bit trying to equate what we have experienced into words that only work in lesser dimensions?
I'm not trying to make theological statements here. I'm simply describing a way to think about these things that lets me make as much sense of it as my brain can handle. This model seems to work pretty well. Of course, I would caution everyone not to stop at this point. By orthodox definition, God is so far above our understanding that anything we can concieve to model Him is necessarily less than He is. So, don't fall off into wierd New Agey stuff. Stick to orthodox understandings. They have the weight of history and the large community of consent to back them up. Without that anchor, you are adrift in treacherous seas. These ideas have been treated numerous times in history, you just have to get past the latest fads and dig into the older stuff...most of which was written in the middle ages...hardly "Dark", any experienced scholar can tell you that was a time of fabulous philosophical and natural learning.
So if this stuff is real, ancient philosophy and modern science confirm it, but can't be described coherantly, then how can we know what is valid from lunacy, fantasy, or lies? That too has been addressed! There are whole treatises on assessing and confirming true "religious experience" (to use the church language) on various levels. Just look it up and you'll see. The internet is a wonderful resource for this kind of stuff as long as you use authoritative sources and resist the urge to self-diagnose. In addition, many modern sources have adapted the older concepts up into our langauge, making it far easier to understand. The first step is understanding the terminology used. Contemplation, Mysticism, Ecstacy, etc. Get a good dictionary (again, online)and look at the old meanings too.
I'm certainly not the only one who thinks these things. Obviously Sagan does. CS Lewis certainly does. These are just two sources of many. As you begin to investigate this as I have, and still do, you will also begin to see that science and religion blur into each other. In fact the conflict is mostly perceived rather than actual. Faith, correctly understood, is perfectly rational. Science, if true, will point to reality, which is God. But this is a whole other discussion that I do not have time for on this blog.
One last point on the subject. Many will inevitably say that other traditions outside Christianity also demonstrate similar experiences. How can one claim supremacy? I can't tell you which is superior. I could give you all my reasons and you would still have to come to that decision on your own. Seek and you will find. But I can at least save you some time and elliminate the common mistake of using similar experience to justify universalism (all ways lead to God) by drawing on one of my greatest teachers, CS Lewis. There are only so many ways that a ship can depart a port. Though the departures may all look alike, the seas they sail and their destinations may be quite different. Take it from this ancient mariner; there truly are far fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.
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