[This edition of "Islands in the Clickstream" is a revision of the daily reflections, "Imaginary Gardens," December 29-30-31, 1997]
The paradigm or model of reality according to which we operate determines the questions we can ask and therefore the answers we can hear.
My extended family includes people from four or five major religious traditions (depending on how we count) and a dozen denominational flavors, so I don’t have the luxury of forgetting how religious beliefs filter our experience, leaving patterns of tea leaves in our various cups that all look like “reality.”
Different scientific domains build the same kinds of filters. Scientists in different disciplines inhabit radically different landscapes but their discoveries stream into the public domain where, somehow, we must integrate them into our larger understanding of life on our home planet.
Dozens of the year’s significant discoveries were reviewed by Science News. They include:
the heart of the milky way pumps a fountain of antimatter and hot gas into the halo of material lying several thousand light years above it;
apes walked upright about eight million years ago, upsetting notions that only the human branch of the family had this posture;
researchers deduced the presence of planets orbiting other sunlike stars;
a computer program designed to reason in a general way solved a problem that stumped mathematicians for 60 years;
scientists took movies of the world’s smallest rotary motor, an enzyme that makes fuel for biochemical processes.
Et cetera. Many disciplines, many maps.
But what is the key to the unified kingdom? To continue to speak to one another with civility, we need shared paradigms, modules of integrated understanding that knit the diverse perspectives of the human species into a single lattice-work, a network of reciprocal symbols. Then we can imagine a shared heritage and a common destiny.
And then our species can find the courage to continue to learn together, managing the anxiety caused by ambiguity, complexity, and exponential change.
I think one of the discoveries cited by Science News is the key to that kingdom:
“The platypus experiences REM sleep.”
Now, the platypus is a primitive mammal, and scientists had thought that REM (rapid eye movement) sleep evolved fairly late in mammalian development. They thought REM sleep aided dreaming or memory. Now they think it may assist very basic brain stem functions.
In short, we share with the lowly platypus a function previously believed to be a mark of human uniqueness.
That’s why the REM sleep of the platypus is both a symbol and an example of our revised understanding of our place in the universe.
Like Alice eating her magic cookies, we grow smaller and larger as we nibble on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we learn, the more we see how much we didn’t know, how tentative our hypotheses, how incomplete our classification of everything from subatomic particles to cosmic events.
Paradoxically, the more diminished our uniqueness, the more genuinely powerful we become. Real progress in directing our own evolution — genetic engineering, nanotechnology, our first steps off our home planet — gives us the confidence to admit that the special niche we thought we occupied was the vision of an infantile ego compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Now that we know we are specialized ants dancing on a commonplace planet in a classifiable galaxy, we may have the humility we need to begin to mature.
The boundaries between plants and animals, humans and other animals, animals and machines, grow fuzzier and fuzzier. Yet many religions still claim that human beings are the apex of creation, our planet the center of the universe.
That narcissistic cosmology may have made sense in the Bronze Age but in the twenty-first century it is a symptom of pathology.
Human beings are one path by which matter is becoming conscious and intentional, and we travel that pathway with increasing speed. Our self-conceptions are always abstractions, blurred snapshots of hurried travelers; by the time we realize it is our face in the photograph, our real face has aged and changed.
There is a struggle between our desire to hunker down in the darkness and a convergence of evidence from every direction that cries out for the integration of commonsense knowledge and scientific data with a viable religious myth that includes our real shared heritage and our real, more comprehensive destiny.
Now that we know that the uterus produces a marijuana-like compound called anadamide, we can understand why human beings hate to forsake the darkness for the bright light of life. Not only are fetuses nourished and protected, they’re sustained in a mellow high that makes the chaos and cacophony of birth a sobering experience.
Religious quests sometimes sounds like a yearning to return to the blissful oneness of the womb. Mood-altering practices conserved in religious rituals accomplish some of that. But religious rituals are also threaded with symbols and narratives that must bear more than a passing resemblance to experience. Otherwise we divide our lives into “reality” and “religion,” undermining our own integrity.
To say that humankind cries out for a religious myth that integrates commonsense knowledge and scientific data with life-giving symbols of promise and possibility is to ask for clarity and awareness, pure and simple.
Clear thinking saves trouble.
Yet … we cannot just think our way into new religious structures. Every major earth religion has come to us through flesh-and-blood human beings who were transformed into “textual beings,” i.e. translated into written images or personas. That transformation initiated a sea-change for civilization.
Now we are carried along in a different kind of sea-change. Deeper waves are bringing forth digital images of gods, the transforming power of electronic media is giving birth to divine agents, disclosing life-giving possibilities more congruent with new ways of framing reality. And … those divine agents will be incarnate, those digital images linked to flesh-and-blood human beings who can expect to receive the same warm welcome from the gatekeepers and thought-police that prophets have always received.
Keep your belt buckled and your virtual lamp lit.
