In Prayer, Does Purity of Intention Matter?

A man of true faith has no reason to call upon the name of God.  His heart is One with God; why would he cry out to Him?  He can better worship by sitting in silence.

And so the intensity of my prayers is a measure of my cowardice.  And if our God is a Gnostic God, like the God of the Old Testament, He reacts to such prayers with resentment and even spite.  Perhaps this is what Jim Morrison of the Doors meant when he said, insistently, that "you cannot petition the Lord with prayer."

 

Sounds of a Midsommar Night

My neighborhood of Newton Highlands lies about 11 miles WSW of Boston and about the same distance from Logan Airport, which no longer is among the nation's busiest but still serves about 40 million passengers per year.  My house lies only about a quarter mile south of Route 9, a major, divided highway or thoroughfare that runs east-west and used to be the main route to the interior before the Massachusetts Turnpike was built. Just beyond the highway to the north is the village of Newton Highlands, which features a church belfry that rings the hour, night and day, synthetically as far as I can tell.

In midsummer in the dead of night there is much that I can tell about my surroundings without opening my eyes, as long as the bedroom windows are open.  By the grace of God my hearing remains in sound service.

For no particular reason I want to take an inventory of what I hear, ranking the sounds from most comfortable and welcome to least so:

• The crickets.  They only make their appearance from early to mid-July.  They make a loud and throbbing hum from nightfall to just before dawn.  They inspire an aura of "oneness with nature" that is milder than, but akin to, what one may feel when experimenting with hallucinogens in a peaceful natural setting.  They would make a great backdrop to meditation.
• The rain, when it is raining.  As I said before, it mimics the sound of sustained applause to a remarkable degree.
• The thunder, before and during violent rainstorms. (Thunder, not to quibble, does not "only happen when it's raining.") Often it can be heard, faintly, more than a half hour before a front reaches the neighborhood.  It reaches a peak that may be very brief or may last for a considerable time, depending on the strength of the storm.
• Our artificial church bell tolling the hour on the other side of Route 9.
• The whistles of freight trains as they make their way along the main east-west track that parallels the turnpike, about three miles north of my home.  They inspire in me an echo of the Folsom Prison Blues.
• The steady ambient noise of cars on Route 9.  It generally reduces to near nothing in the depth of the night, and picks up again about 5AM.  But its volume is highly dependent on the direction of the wind.  It is strongest when there is a north wind.  (This is also true of the perceived volume of the church bell.)
• Helicopters passing low overhead.  Sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from cars, but the question is clarified in favor of a helicopter if the amplitude of the sound remains steady, but for the Doppler effect.
• Motorcycles on the thoroughfare.  They may be single, or worse, two of them may be racing.  They make their presence known from a long way off, and also for a long time after they pass nearest by.
• Commercial jet aircraft.  Their volume too is dependent on the wind.  The prevailing wind in the summertime is from the southwest.  Airplanes always take off and land into the wind.  Therefore, in summer, aircraft take off from Logan Airport most often on one of two parallel runways, labeled 22L and 22R, meaning in universal aviation lingo that the plane's direction on the runway is 220 degs, or SSW.  Since my bed lies SSW of Logan, one would think that departing aircraft would be low over my head routinely in the summer.  But it seems that it is not so.  I surmise that in the prevailing conditions they climb out quickly and have begun vectoring away from 220 degs by the time they get to my neighborhood.  So the planes that are loudest in the night, I further surmise, are those on an approach to Logan for a landing into a north or northeast wind, on the same runways I specified but in the opposite direction, which is to say on the runways labeled 4L and 4R (40 degs on the compass).
• Hordes of dirt bikes ridden on Route 9 by delinquents from the near reaches of the inner city, intent on disturbing everyone "just because they can."  These appear on rare occasions only, I'm happy to say.

And so, the quietest and most peaceful nights in my home are those when the wind is blowing gently from the south or southwest; the nights most sonically "industrial" and disturbing of the peace are those when the wind comes roughly from the north.

 

Randomness, Once Again

Last week on X/Twitter a medical doctor excoriated someone for insinuating that our dreams mean something.  Clearly, she said, they are just a product of the random firing of brain synapses.  And of course she was excoriated in turn.  She would have to eat her words and renounce her materialist fundamentalism, you see, once the veil is torn away, as it soon will be.

I don't know what to think.  Last night was a total phantasmagoria from start to finish.  But first a young missionary gifted me a small marimba, sandlewood in color.  Unlike a real marimba, or a vibraphone for that matter, this did not lay out the bars like the keys of a piano; rather, there was just a straight line of uniform pieces of wood.  It could be played conventionally, with mallets, or, on "auto-play," it could be programmed to play many different tunes.  The missionary demonstrated it to me with great enthusiasm by having it play a short classical piece, one with which he was very enamored.

The gift made me uncomfortable on two levels.  First, it was disproportionate to the scale of our relationship, and that had me thinking that the missionary had a crush on me, one that was unwelcome and could never be reciprocated.  Second, while it was small for a marimba, it monopolized my tiny apartment physically.  I didn't know how I would be able to maneuver around it in my regular daily life.  And yet I did not want to appear ungrateful, so I feigned enthusiam for it, not very well I'm afraid.

At the end of the dream a young woman joined us in the room.  She too found the marimba fascinating, and she lit up when it did its thing.  Then I awoke.

This was all before 10PM, and the fun was just beginning.

And so, in between dreams, I wished once again that I could conjure Prof. Jung, to have him explain to me how this particular narrative might facilitate my integration with the collective consciousness, or maybe just forestall my general personal disintegration.

But perhaps the experience was not about the narrative at all, but the vividness of the details and the overall atmosphere of the dream, which were striking even for me, for whom intense dreams are a nightly phenomenon.

 

 

Our Failed Search for a Foundation

We can start, rather arbitrarily, with Aristotle and Democritus.  The way to come to an understanding of the world, they reasoned, is to tear it down and examine its individual constituent pieces.  Isn't it obvious?  They did not purport to "discover the atom."  Rather, the search for fundamental constituent pieces had to end somewhere, and, wherever that turned out to be, they would call the pieces "atoms," definitionally.  We can visualize the constituent pieces, even now, as perfect (and perfectly opaque) ball bearings.

This worked for a while, until we figured out that our "atoms" were not atomic, but rather made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, in configurations that we visualized as mini solar systems.

This worked for a while, until we figured out that there were myriad other particles, and also that matter could be converted to energy by splitting atoms.  Matter and energy are interchangeable.

Then came the quantum revolution, which convinced us that particles are not entirely particle-like; rather, they behave like waves in many respects.  Also, unlike ball bearings, particles do not occupy any particular place unless and until they are "observed" or "measured."  Observed or measured by what or whom?  That's hard to say.  If it is by a conscious observer, then that places consciousness at the center of things, which can't be right, because it sounds quasi-religious, and religion is the enemy of science.  So we've invented a new cosmology that posits that the particle is in every place that it could possibly be.  The "measurement effect" thereby is trivialized, or even said not to exist at all.

Meanwhile, information science has progressed so dramatically that we can use it to model all of this out.  In fact, our models are so powerful that our Chief Nerds of the Moment would have us believe that what is foundational is not what is represented, but the information itself that is reflected in our models.  We can leave all of the ball bearings behind for all practical purposes.  They are like Wittgenstein's ladder, that allowed us to climb to a new perch of philosophical perspicacity, at which point we could toss it away!

But can almighty information exist in a vacuum, without consciousness?  Who or what is in charge of the Information Field writ large?  Is it in charge of itself?  If so, is this Information Field "the Mind of God," in Stephen Hawking's phrase?

All of this effort, all of these centuries, and it seems that we stand in much the same place as where stood the Egyptians and the Polynesians who tried, mostly in vain, to placate the Sun God, the Source, the Great Animating Principle.