Tag Archives: consciousness

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).

GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).

I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.

To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.

Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:

“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”

TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:

“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)

Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.

If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:

  • If you wanted to start a religion that would last thousands of years, how would you go about it?
  • How would Jesus feel about the religion that is based on his life and death?
  • Could Christianity have taken hold if Jesus had lived at any other time or place?
  • If the story of Jesus’ life/death –as we have known it for 2,000 years– was shown to be inaccurate, would it be better to know the truth, or to allow Christianity to continue to be based on events that never happened?

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Buddha’s Brain

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Amazon: “Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, a neuropsychologist and a neurologist and both practicing Buddhists, show us just how the brain programs us to experience the world a certain way by combining information from the external world with information held in neural pathways within the brain. These pathways operate in the background of our awareness, influencing our conscious mental activity.”

This book was a bit of a struggle for me so the following notes are intended for my own reference and make little sense outside the context of the book.

The self is like someone running behind a parade that is already well under way, continually calling out: “See what I created!” (pg 212)

In the brain, every manifestation of self is impermanent. The self is continually constructed, deconstructed, and constructed again. (pg 212)

We experience “now” not as a thin sliver of time in which each snapshot of experience appears sharply and ends abruptly, but as a moving interval roughly 1-3 seconds long that blurs and fades at each end. (pg 213)

At any moment, the parts of the self that are present depend on many factors, including genetic heritage, personal history, temperament, and situations. In particular, self depends on a lot of feeling tone of experience. When the feeling tone is neutral, the self tends to fade into the background. But as soon as something distinctly pleasant or unpleasant appears, the self quickly mobilizes. The self organizes around strong desires. Which comes first: Do “I” form a desire? Or does desire from and “I?” (pg 213)

The self has no inherent, unconditional, absolute existence apart from the network of causes it arises from, in, and as. (pg 213)

The self is truly a fictional character. (pg 214)

His Dark Materials

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Just finished Northern Lights, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. As we used to say back in the sixties, “Heavy.”

I’ve caught parts of The Golden Compass (the book’s North American title) on cable and wanted to see how the movie compared to the novel. Very well, it turns out. I’m eager to get on to Books 2 and 3.

I enjoyed most of the Harry Potter books –and it’s probably unfair to compare the two– but Pullman challenges readers in a way that Ms. Rowling never did.

Definitely on the short list for the next church bonfire.

UPDATE: Finished the third book today and I’m a little numb. I read somewhere that Pullman wrote the book for “young adults.” I’m not sure what that means… teenagers? Younger? Whatever, I wish I had read the book in my teens, although I’m not sure how much I would have understood. Maybe that’s the point.

I thought it was a terrific story. Life and Death; Sin and Redemption; Good and Evil; Witches and Angles. And a less-than-attractive view of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Easy to see why they weren’t keen on a sequel to The Golden Compass.

If you learned everything you needed to know in Sunday School, you can skip this book but I found the book to be very spiritual and mostly uplifting. A couple of quotes:

“I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn’t.” pg 954

“We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” pg 854

“If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this.”

Don’t interfere with the flow

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“There is a profound Buddhist doctrine that speaks of a great river that flows through all of reality. Once you have found yourself, there is no more cause for action. The river picks you up and carries you along forever after. In other words, effort from the personal level, the kind of effort all of us are used to in daily life, becomes pointless after a certain point. This includes mental effort. Once you become self-aware, you realize that the flow of life needs no analysis or control, because it’s all you. The great river only seems to pick you up. Actually, you have picked yourself up — not as an isolated person, but as a phenomenon of the cosmos. No one gave you the job of steering the river. You can enjoy the ride and observe the scenery.”

I like that. I found it in a book by Deepak Chopra (“Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul”). I’m not recommending the book (you’ll read it if you’re supposed to). But this is where I jot done some of the lines and passages that I want to remember or find again.

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The God Theory

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My interest in quantum theory, time and the relationship between consciousness and reality lead me to a book by Bernard Haisch titled The God Theory. (I’ve included a chunk of Dr. Haisch’s bio below). I include this post for my own reference.

“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of  view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”

“Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. He served as a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for ten years, and was Principal Investigator on several NASA research projects. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Haisch did postdoctoral research at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. His professional positions include Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory; Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.”

Quantum Enigma

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For some years I’ve been fascinated by, and reading about, time. Which pretty quickly gets you into the realm of quantum theory. Recently I’ve come across some wonderful books suitable for folks like me that needed “assistance” getting through college algebra.

Quantum Enigma is co-authored by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who teach physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. If you suspect that things are not as they seem, I highly recommend this book.

I bring this up in an effort to understand —and explain— how my last post here was on Christmas Eve, almost 3 days ago, and yet no perceived time has “passed” for me.

UPDATE: The above was first posted on 12/27/09.  I have since finished this book. It was a challenging read and much more about physics than consciousness. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotes below can be attributed to the authors, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner.

“In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. – Martin Rees

“Space almost instantly expanded, or “inflated,” at a rate much faster than the speed of light. Starting from something vastly smaller than an atom, the entire universe we observe today presumably inflated almost instantaneously to the size of a large grapefruit.”

“The chance  that a livable universe like ours would be created is far less than the chance of randomly picking a particular single atom out of all the atoms in the universe.”

“Consider how improbably you are — the improbability of someone with just your unique DNA being conceived. (Millions of your possible siblings were not conceived. And now go back a few generation.) With those odds, you’re essentially impossible.”

“It is hard to imagine something truly astonishing that we don’t initially rule out as preposterous.”

Biocentrism

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I’m reading a mind-stretching book. Biocentrism by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman). I wouldn’t know where to begin describing what this book is about. Like John Sebastian said, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.”
The authors are very good at explaining the most complex concepts. Here’s a little riff on Time:
“Imagine that existance is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the recording itself, and depending on wherethe needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we all the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, ever moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.”
This book is not for everyone. If you have too much “reality” in you life to think about the possibility it’s all “in your head,” you can take a pass on Biocentrism. But it will get a spot on my nightstand as one of those books I’ll have to read again and again.

Screen shot 2009-12-14 at Mon, Dec 14, 8.15.12 PMI’m reading a mind-stretching book. Biocentrism by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman). I wouldn’t know where to begin describing what this book is about. Like John Sebastian said, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.”

The authors, however, are very good at explaining the most complex concepts. Here’s a little riff on Time:

“Imagine that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the recording itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.”

This book is not for everyone. If you have too much “reality” in you life to think about the possibility it’s all “in your head,” you can take a pass on Biocentrism. But it will get a spot on my nightstand as one of those books I’ll have to read again and again.

Scott Adams: The building blocks of God

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“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime, it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.

A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”

“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”

“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of  God, in the early stages of reassembling.”

— From God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, by Scott Adams

God’s Debris

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I love the writing of Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle played no small part in my escape from Management. His blog is one of the most thought-provoking I read. I just finished God’s Debris. Not a book for those who already have things figured out.

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.” pg 53

It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations. pg 34

The odd collection of molecules that make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less time than it takes the universe to blink. pg 35

What could possibly be interesting or important to a God that knows everything, can create anything, can destroy anything. The concept of ‘importance’ is a human one born out of a need to make choices for survival. pg 36

I love the writing of Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle played no small part in my escape from Management. His blog is one of the most thought-provoking I read. I just finished God’s Debris and will post a few of my favorite bits here. Let’s start with this one:

We’re the building blocks of God, in the early stages of reassembling.

Time is a human concept of how things change compared to other things. pg 57

Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being, the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it. Willpower is a delusion. pg 94

Your short-term payoff for contributing to God’s consciousness is fewer problems in your daily life, less stress, and more happiness. pg 101

Over time, everything that is possible happens. pg 102

“A replica of your mind and body will exist in the distant future, by chance. And the things you do now can either make life more pleasant or more difficult for your replica. pg 102

You can change only what people know, not what they do. pg 107

Awareness does not come from receiving new information. It comes from rejecting old information. pg 125

Go-Chip scene from Wild Palms

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In the 1993 TV mini-series, Wild Palms, Senator Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia) has the Go-Chip implanted and uploads his consciousness to the Net. Immortality! Unfortunately, the IT guys were running Vista on the server. But that’s a damned fine looking smoking jacket.