Something Out of Nothing, Nothing Out of Something

Le Vide (The Void) by Yves Klein

Contrary to the belief of some cosmologists, something cannot come out of nothing. It’s hard to believe that at the time of the Big Bang an explosion of unimaginable enormity occurred that created the Boson, the elementary particle of matter that scientists have been trying to chase in the Large Hadron Collider. Explosions don’t just pop out of nowhere. Perhaps the Big Bang was actually the work of some ur-suicide jihadist and perhaps there’s even the hope that all the terror and uncertainly will result in another Big Bang, which would in essence be a Second Coming. But if the something cannot come out of nothing, what is the something out of which the early universe was born? We have a BC or BCE, to designate the era before Christ, but what kind of world existed before the beginning of time? Was it an ether, whose laws are simply out of the ken of human consciousness? However, the question of whether nothing can come out of something is even more complex. If matter is turned to energy, despite the law of the conservation of energy, energy is ultimately expendable, and all the matter (or energy) in the universe could, in theory, one day dissipate. It would simply be like a car running out of gas. The warning light would go on and then, if you didn’t do anything to replenish the tank, if there were no suns, emitting ultraviolet radiation, or black holes in which matter is secreted, then the universe could come to an end. The theory of Dark Energy posits the notion that the universe is always expanding. Hence galaxies at one point will be so far from each other and the interstitial spaces so dark, that there would be no possibility of one body rescuing another or finding refuge in the other's gravity. A shipwrecked sailor will eventually drown unless someone comes to his aid. Yes one day, like the gurgling that occurs when the final drop of bathwater is sucked out of a tub, the universe may lose its hard-on. Obviously there will be no eyes left to see it, but imagine ultimate nothingness, a void that is unknowable even to God.

What is God Consciousness?

"Gaia" by Anselm Feuerbach (1875)

What is God consciousness? From the human point of view, it’s the awareness of God, but it begs the question of the relation of a supreme being to those he, she or it looks down upon from wherever such spirits reside. Does God have a conscience? Is that  the motivation behind the order we see in nature and the fact that at the day of reckoning the last end up being first? Or is God's will a kind of value free, Buddha mind, a force of unconditional love and generosity that's ultimately non-judgmental in spirit. Humans can’t be faulted for anthropomorphizing God, but it’s interesting to try to conceive of forces that have nothing to do with human wishes or will. God is often conceived of as either a bearded creature of an earth mother like the Gaia of Greek mythology. In the former case God is a saddened being a bit like the mythological figure ofAtlas who bore the weight of the world on his shoulders; in the latter, the female personification often takes the form of one of those old fashioned l930’s gum chewing switchboard operators. Requests from supplicants come in and God plugs one in with the other, attempting to answer prayers like ones from those seeking parking spaces near the restaurant they've pulled up to on rainy evenings. Is it possible to imagine a God who's not trafficking in human desire and who's not presiding over the agora and deciding who gets what? Is there a God who without being unkind is totally uninvolved in human affairs. Let’s take a planet like Kepler 62f, in the Goldilocks part of the universe, 1200 light years from earth ("Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light-Years From Earth," NYT, 4/18/13). Such planets, with climates that would allow for water, seem like candidates for familiar life forms, but who ever said the dice throw that resulted in mankind was going to be replicated? In other words, if God tried to keep tabs on all his creations, he would have his or her hands full. And it’s not hard to imagine God quitting while she or he were ahead. Copernicus proposed the heretical notion that the earth was not at the center of the universe. From then on mankind has had to deal with the probability that its not likely God’s chosen people.

How the Red Sea (of Traffic) Parted

Garrett Morgan

The Red Sea is everywhere. Just try to cross the street. A good 50% of the time you’re faced with a red light, which when it changes to green immediately stops the oncoming traffic. Moses used a staff; you press the button on a lamp post. The waters aka waves of traffic then part and you’re free to pass. If you try to proceed against the traffic on most thoroughfares you're obliterated just as the Jews would have drowned in the biblical story. Actually if you believe in a supreme being he made his presence felt through an African American inventor named Garrett Morgan who received patent No 1,475, 024 for his three position traffic signal in l923. Apparently Morgan was motivated to do something when he saw a car crash. Whoever thought that crossing the street could be one of those God moments in which some common occurrence, ordinarily taken for granted, enables us to take a broader view of experience? Perhaps on any given day, you're thinking of what you could have said in the argument you were having, where you ended up getting the short end of the stick. As you walk out onto the street you're lost in thought, not seeing any of the world around you, as you try to reimagine the altercation and undo the past. But then for a moment you're forced to stop. It might not be at the first intersection, but you're not always going to have green lights. Whenever it occurs  facing the red light, you're momentary brought back to your senses. You're forced to cut short your inner monologue, your rendezvous with the plethora of impossibility that always configures the attempt to change the past.

Holy or Holey?

“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico

Merriam-Webster defines holy, as “set apart for the service of God or of a divine being: sacred.” On the other hand, holey is defined simply as “having holes.” The words are what is known as homonyms to the extent that they sound alike but have radically different meanings. But there is one school of thought that hones to the idea "if it quacks like a duck it’s a duck." A tear which is a break doesn’t sound like a tear which is the fluid that drips out of the eye when someone is crying. However, soul and sole sound alike and as everyone knows have much in common to the extent that the sole of the foot or shoe is what one employs in the course of the kind of  journey that nurtures the soul. The fact that holy and holey sound so much alike begs the question of their similarity since the holy man or woman is one who has a hole in the sole of his shoe to the extent that he or she in all likelihood has taken a vow of poverty. The holy man or woman may also have a hole in their soul which eventually turns them into a person who is more enlightened. This was true of great sinners like Augustine. "Religion is for those who're afraid of going to hell, spiritualism for those who have already been there,” goes the old saw. There are lots of righteous people who follow the tenets of religion, but the truly spiritual person is one whose holes, frailties or failings have caused him to undertake a journey or reckoning or to make a confession in which he or she's forced to reach out for help from God.

Who is God?

“The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Rembrandt

When you’re waiting for something spiritual to happen is precisely when it’s not going to happen. Deus ex machinas are fine for plays like Sophocles’ Philoctetes or The Threepenny Opera where Macheath is miraculously spared the gallows by a reprieve from the divinely ordained Queen. That’s why so many people are disappointed in God. Foxhole praying rarely works. Instead of using unanswered prayers as a proof of the nonexistence of God, you might try praying in a different way. Praying for things is the telephone operator view of divinity. Remember those old l930’s movies, which preceded the rotary phone, when a character would pick up the receiver and speak directly to an operator. Some of them even featured shots of phone lines or banks of wires, or consoles to show where the call was going to or coming from. That’s tantamount to the anthropomorphic notion of a God or higher being that listens and reacts. But what if God doesn’t have time to field all these requests? What if it has better things to do like attend to dark matter and energy, quasars, pulsars and supernovae or to such eternal questions as how something can coming out of nothing? What if God simply doesn’t work in human ways? What if it’s an emotionlessly immaterial force a kind of sinuous version of Kant’s categorical imperative which implacably seeks to align living matter with a force of multiversal duty? What if God is value neutral and doesn’t weigh in on the side of what we would call good or evil but is rather a juggernaut of torrential will, an unimaginable version of the Shavian “life force?” What then? Do you pray for the knowledge of its will? Do you pray to align yourself with it?

How to Marry a Goy

“Moses Smashing the Tablets of the Law” by Rembrandt  (1659)

What if you’re a Jewish fellow who wants to meet shiksas. Go to ChristianMingle.com and “Find God’s Match for You"—only don’t let her know that that your name is Shapiro, Cohen, Levy or Horowitz. You don’t want to go to ChristianMingle.com with a name like Hy or Shlomo or Abe even if your last name happens to be Rothchild. Or let’s say you’re a gal and you happen to have been born with the name Hadassah which is not only the Hebrew for Esther, but the name of a famous organization of Jewish women. You might not find yourself meeting "God’s Match forYou" on Christian Mingle.com, especially if you haven’t had a rhinoplasty. On the other hand you’re probably going to mingle better on ChristianMingle with a name like Yehudah HaLevi than Mahmoud Abbas or Benjamin Netanyahu. But let’s take the case of a nice Jewish boy by the name of Schmulka Bernstein, whose name once blessed the now defunct Lower East Side deli, and who wants to get on Christian Mingle.com so he can marry into a blue blooded WASP family and send his kids to private schools whose name begins with Saint. The Schmulka Bernsteins of the world, can easily find God’s match for them on ChristianMingle.com if they go to a speech therapist (to stop talking a mile a minute), a plastic surgeon (who will raise their cheekbones), a hair stylist (who will change the curly dark hair to straight blond) and a lawyer (who specializes in identity theft and will sell them the person of someone with a surname like Knickerbocker and a first name like Will and introduce them to a trainer who will teach them to fish and hunt). They should also take the salamis out of their windows and stop sleeping with pieces of liver. Will Knickerbocker will thrive on ChristianMingle, with his flies and crossbow, even if he was brought up to be a Yeshiva bucher who was warned against the dangers of assimilation.

Is There a Croesus Complex?

"God the Father" by Cima de Conigliano (1515)

The Times recently ran a piece about the discipline of financial therapy (“Stressed by Money? Get on the Couch,” NYT, 2/9/15). Usually one needs some degree of financial security to pay for therapy which is only covered on a limited basis by most health plans. So the kind of person who one imagines going into financial therapy because he or she has financial problems may be hard put to pay for it. For instance the person who spends more than they have might go into financial therapy, but if the therapy were long term, it might result in bankruptcy as a result of the treatment itself. There’s an old Pete Seeger line which might apply here, “Oh Dr. Freud, Oh Dr. Freud. How we wish you had been differential employed. For the set of circumstances sure enhances the finances of the followers of Dr. Sigmund Freud..." Or let’s take the person who is frugal, he or she is not going to go into financial therapy to improve largesse because he or she doesn’t like to spend money. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskty, the nobel prize winning economists, have written about “loss aversion,” a condition where people make bad decisions due to irrational fears. Money along with sex and relationships are subjects that people in any form of therapy talk about, but financial therapy like sex therapy obviously has a particular aim. In normal therapy the idea is that if a patient deals with deep seated problems that result in maladaptive behavior, a person will start to make better decisions when it comes to money or sex. Just as a gambler might start investing in low yielding, but secure tax free municipals, a promiscuous man or woman might settle into safe and secure relationships that are totally lacking in passion. However, let’s consider the case of the patient who decides his or her basic problem isn’t his or her personality. It’s just money. Such an individual might go to a financial therapist who will improve their yield or a sex therapist who will enable them to have lots of hot sex with the same person—say a partner who liked to dress up like a male or female whore. However, caveat emptor. No matter how much credit card debt you retire, you may still suffer from bigger problems than just money or love.  For example, you might be suffering from the kind of existential anxiety that comes from the realization that God is Dead.