Alice's Handhold and Curvature of Escape Philosophy

Subject: Fwd: Heavy Meals for Heavy Weather




We are not going too far or too high. I will mark the places for your hands and feet as I lead, and you don't have to hold a rope or anything but pay close attention. At higher altitudes, we use our blood to mark the holds, but down here the chalk alone will do.

This is based in part on a Scientific American article, but the background comes from many sources and unique expression and reflection. It is a unique little rock face we are about to scale. It is a poem and a speculation about the character of human understanding, and something more.

First consider the Copernican cosmological theory, that the Earth is not the center of the universe. The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Sun is in some sense the center of the solar system. To some, this implies that our species is not important, not as much as if our planet were the center. These associations make no sense except the sense we make of them. To what extent is any theory, including those based on math, merely a projection of our emotions and of our psychology?

Let go of those weeds. They will not hold your weight. You are always plummeting off the side of the rock before you're even really off the ground. Listen to the wind and continue. Let go of that bush. It will not hold you.

There is a theory about dark energy used to explain why the universe seems to be accelerating away from itself, expanding everywhere and speeding up. That would seem counter-intuitive, since the effect of matter and gravitation should be to slow the acceleration down. The universe should be cooling down and slowing. To account for an apparent acceleration of dispersion, a dark energy yet undetected except by implication has been posited. This is also based on concepts of uniformity in the fabric of space-time. That all space and the components in it are more or less evenly distributed across this continuum we find ourselves in. That idea is based on detectable background microwave energy, the static on your TV on certain channels, and also the Copernican concept that we are not in a special place.

As humans, we cannot avoid thinking of this as some kind of a shift, a slight against us. But it is only one aspect of our place. The first place is that we are the center of what we experience. Of course, we are. It is only by an act of displacing ourselves that we can start to see things not as ourselves. We set aside the sense of our importance and, ironically, continue to sense and to think with the same faculties which are in fact the very capacities which determine us to be the center. We engage in imaginative displacement but cannot wholly displace; we can displace at all only in highly insulated moments when we have enough to eat, have slept and are comfortable, when nothing disturbs us, when nothing forces us to be ourselves, just another animal scurrying away from threats or running after something we need. In those insulated moments we can speculate and posit beyond our first place, but usually not enough. We need heavy food and lots of vitamins. We need to be rested and uninvolved. Ironically, motive usually drives us, but for the rare views achieved only through clear reason, we need to have no reasons.

Now stay with me, because it is the curve of ideas which prevents most of us from making this next move. The curve of rationalizations draws the typical person, however intelligent and educated, back to the surface. You have to make this next handhold and hang and, oddly, the action of grasping will pull you up without effort. This is Alice's Handhold, the way you get behind the looking glass and see yourself for the first time from outside. It is the view of Earth from the Moon, a small step for one, a major leap for all. You should be able to see yourself on Earth from the Moon, if you squint a little to blur the image like an impressionist painting.

All theories have strong elements of psychology, of psychological projection. The first place is too strongly with us. The theory of dark energy, or of Special Relativity, are extensions of a paradigm of ourselves and of the universe as we understand, based on our senses and the faculties that make up consciousness itself. There is also that method that comes out of our efforts to understand. The method is part of the paradigm we use, it is the means by which we understand. Each theory is superseded by another more accurate portrayal. Based on what? Based on how well the theory explains observable phenomena. But the ghosts of the previous theories also play a part in our every day actions and understandings because the fundamental means of observing and understanding remain the same. Only the information and concepts change. The ghosts are with us, not only in these words which are filled with the voices of the dead, but also in the ideas behind the words, and in the basis for all of what we are, holding us on a tight leash, an umbilical chord to our origins. We move from deep speculation about the distance to a star and the observable red shift from a supernova to a desire for sleep, fear of the dark, a sudden chill on our skin or unfounded concerns for some silly person we can never really know, although that person is a part of us biologically, experientially tied to us for the whole of our lives, a mere wink of time against the backdrop of the night sky we were but a moment before considering.

Only by our ability to negotiate beyond the curve, to get off the sphere of the limited, the flat Earth, only when we know the difference between reason and rationalization, can we get to the next place. The theory was a god for us, as the food was a good when we were hungry. The theory was displaced by another, and we made of that progress a principle, a desire for truth. But the concept of it as a desire already distorts the endeavor, making this effort in us similar to our desire of a closer kind. This seeking of truth is not a desire, and to link it conceptually to desire is to make our ideas and our striving a vassal to our motives, rather than something outside our psychology. We need to move it outside our psychology in order to gain sufficient thrust to get off this rock and move to the higher ground, to leave the atmosphere we believe our life requires.

The method and the models are our guide, but we make of them our god, however transient. This is a temporary failure. It is a failure in time. Take this time now to breathe for the final few steps to the top of this little rock. We are not leaving the planet so you will be fine with what you carry now. Here we are both ourselves and looking out over a landscape of inhuman possibilities. We are both places, the center of the universe and not at all a part of what we see. We are no longer differentiated from the dust under our nails, a concept we hold even as we use a handy twig to clean the dust from under our nails. We are both and we stay there, seeing both ways without conflict because we are in a moment of repose.

No one thinks of you. No one cares for you. You don't mind because you don't care for yourself. You think you may be freezing but really are just a little cold and may experience hypothermia but not to a lethal extent. All alone you are loved by the elements which hold you together. You shiver in the dark. You are everywhere and nowhere. A bear sniffs you and moves on. It is Ursus Minor. A short climb has turned into a bivouac but you are not really asleep.

I have lost the way to the top of this place. Can you lead the rest of the way?