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Image Credit: Nasa/​Swift/​Aurore Simonnet

Is there a moral order in the uni­verse? If so, does it come from a god, or some other force? If there is a moral order, is it some­thing we should try to align our­selves with?

I think about that a lot, when I walk out­side, look at the stars, hike, swim in the sea, walk along the strand. I also think about that when­ever I read about com­par­a­tive reli­gion, and won­der how peo­ple could deduce a moral order from ancient scrip­ture, and some­times I wish I could as well. That it would be good to have that kind of faith, even though the scrip­tures them­selves, at least to me, are any­thing but moral.

They con­tain moments of wis­dom, beauty, and poetry, but are off­set by too much bru­tal­ity ordered from above. I need a dif­fer­ent kind of moral order than that, one that extends beyond the lim­i­ta­tions of any one reli­gion, encom­passes all of them, all things, all beings, across all time and space. One that needs no spe­cial des­ig­na­tion or spe­cial invi­ta­tion. One that never tries to con­vert you with promises of eter­nal life or threats of eter­nal pun­ish­ment. I can’t believe in any­thing short of that. Anything short of com­plete open­ness to the All.

There is some­thing truly awe-​​inspiring about Nature, the way it’s ordered, the way things work so well together. Cycles. Circles. Flow. Not per­fectly. If you think about a lot of the aspects of the var­i­ous ani­mals, plants, insects, and humans, you begin to see flaws, baf­fling ele­ments, things that just don’t make any sense. But despite all of that, it some­how coheres. It some­how does what Ezra Pound said his Cantos failed to do.

I’ve never under­stood the con­cept of a god need­ing to be wor­shiped. Always thought that if there were such things, they wouldn’t really need that kind of per­sonal reaf­fir­ma­tion. That they would be a bit beyond that sort of thing. The act of wor­ship was always for humans, for their ben­e­fit. To make them feel like they were car­ry­ing on a dia­logue of some sort. To make them feel they weren’t alone, that some­thing, some omni­scient being, had them in mind at all times. That said, I do think it makes sense to want to be one with what­ever idea a per­son has of the divine, or the moral order, or the Way. I do think it makes sense for us to try to live our lives in such a way that we truly flow with Nature, in the same way that ani­mals do, in the same way that trees bend in the wind. To use a very much overused metaphor: catch­ing a wave, rid­ing it all the way into the shore. Not fight­ing against any­thing. Making your mind and body con­form to the wave and the power of the wave, its motion, its speed, its cross­ing of time and space.

Robert Wright, in his book, The Evolution of God, talks about our inabil­ity to really con­ceive of the ground of being, or god, or the divine, in any clear cut way:

It’s a bedrock idea of mod­ern physics that, even if you define “ulti­mate real­ity” as the ulti­mate sci­en­tific real­ity — the most fun­da­men­tal truths of physics — ulti­mate real­ity isn’t some­thing you can clearly conceive.

Think of an elec­tron, a lit­tle par­ti­cle that spins around another lit­tle par­ti­cle. Wrong! True, physi­cists some­times find it use­ful to think of elec­trons as par­ti­cles, but some­times it’s more use­ful to think of them as waves. Conceiving of them as either is incom­plete, yet con­ceiv­ing of them as both is … well, incon­ceiv­able. (Try it!) And elec­trons are just the tip of the ice­berg. In gen­eral, the quan­tum world — the world of sub­atomic real­ity — behaves in ways that don’t make sense to minds like ours. Various aspects of quan­tum physics evince the prop­erty that the late physi­cist Heinz Pagels called quan­tum weirdness.

The bad news for the reli­giously inclined, then, is that maybe they should aban­don hope of fig­ur­ing out what God is. (If we can’t con­ceive of an elec­tron accu­rately, what are our chances of get­ting God right?) The good news is that the hope­less­ness of fig­ur­ing out exactly what some­thing is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Apparently some things are just incon­ceiv­able — and yet are things nonetheless.

 

Though he doesn’t talk about this in the book, his exam­ple of the elec­tron got me to think about the way mys­tics some­times achieve one­ness with the ulti­mate real­ity. They con­tem­plate para­dox. They med­i­tate on the seem­ingly impos­si­ble. They con­tinue to med­i­tate of those impos­si­bil­i­ties, on a kind of har­mony of oppo­sites, long enough, with enough con­cen­tra­tion, to move into another state of being alto­gether. It’s not a grunt­ing and groan­ing con­cen­tra­tion, though. That would destroy the moment. It’s yet another kind of rid­ing the wave into the shore. And sci­en­tists, when they study the brain­waves of peo­ple doing this, see explo­sions, beau­ti­ful, won­der­ful explo­sions. Stars. A kind of inter­nal moral order no doubt.



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