The Mind of God
God's first language is silence. – St.
John of the Cross
Mathematics is the language with which God
has written the universe. – Galileo
This post is not intended for the
believers of the world. There is probably little that I or anyone can say to a
believer that might change what he or she thinks of God. Rather, this post is
intended for the seekers and questioners and doubters of the world, for it is
you who have not yet forged a case-hardened steel conceptualization of what God
is or is not – whether in reality or in the minds of humans. So, please bear
with me for a bit – even if we’d have a difficult time getting you to admit that
maybe, just maybe, something of what others call ‘God’ resides for you in the
nooks and crannies of the mystery or unknowability that you experience from
time to time; even if ‘God’ for you is merely a construct that is of interest
precisely because so many other people so immensely overvalue it; even if ‘God’
for you is like a stain on your psyche that you’d much prefer to be rid of once
and for all, if only you could throw it in the wash with a cupful of bleach.
Regardless of what you might think
about God it is nonetheless safe to say that the man of God, St. John, and the
man of science, Galileo, do not necessarily contradict each other above.
Perhaps silence is indeed God’s first language, mathematics being a secondary
one – an outgrowth of the act of creation, if you will, or the blueprint for it.
But just as human language is inadequate with respect to revealing the totality
of the human mind, so these posited ‘languages of God’ might seem woefully inadequate
with respect to revealing the so-called mind of God.
What, then, is the mind of
God? Might it be that St. John was only partly right, and that silence, rather
than merely being the language of God, is the very mind of God? But if that
were so, then what are we to make of all the rest of this reality that we
experience? Maybe the Neo-Platonists such as St. Augustine are more correct in
saying that this world in which we arise and through which we navigate is
the mind of God. We are the mind of God! Ah, but maybe we’re fooling
ourselves to even think that we can know the mind of God. How would we even
know it as other than our very own mind if it should come to pass that we suspect
we are experiencing it? Maybe then we should follow the lead of Albert Einstein
as quoted in Isaacson (2007):
Try and penetrate with our limited means the
secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and
connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.
Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my
religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.
But might that “subtle, intangible
and inexplicable” something be the very silence spoken of above? Maybe in
stillness and silence we access our potential to transcend the usual realm of
human consciousness for the sake of consciousness of a higher order. Perhaps silence
is, in Immanuel Kant’s way of thinking about such things, a means by which to
access another form of intellect. As Burnham (2001) states:
Kant… raises the possibility of another form
of intellect, the ‘intellectus archetypus’, or cognition directly through the
original. In such a case, there would be no distinction between perceiving a
thing, understanding a thing, and the thing existing. This is as close as our
finite minds can get to understanding the mind of God.
Hmmm…, how different is this
“cognition directly through the original” from the non-dualistic,
non-conceptual seeing that is spoken of by the Eastern adepts? I’m not going to
answer that question – not that I could at the present time. But the very fact
that I’m asking it is because I’m wondering whether East and West might both
harbor visionaries capable of glimpsing the very same thing – the so-called
mind of God. Please ponder that possibility along with me as I introduce a
passage from my (hopefully) soon to be published novel entitled – you guessed
it – Crossing Nebraska.
From Crossing
Nebraska, Chapter 1
Grandpa mopped up the puddle of
gravy with his last corner of bread and searched the tray as if for something
that he’d misplaced. With the thick fingers of an old ironworker he fumbled to
open the packets of jam that he found hidden beneath his napkin and proceeded
to eat their ruby red contents with a spoon. Silence then seemed to fall over
the room as he pushed aside the tray and looked at Alex once again. It was then
that Alex noticed the uncharacteristic tension in his body and a look of unease
upon his face – more like that of an injured bird than the indomitable man that
had loomed over him in his childhood. And deep in the cloudy pools of his eyes
was the unmistakable and totally uncharacteristic glint of fear. But why? He’d
accomplished so much in his eighty odd years – more than Alex could ever hope
to accomplish. He’d come to a new country and built a home with his very own
hands. He’d raised children who’d gone on to have children and even
grandchildren of their own. And, anyway, didn’t he believe that death would
offer blessed reunion with Grandma and the rest of his family from the Old Country?
Perhaps he didn’t believe that after all. Perhaps that was the one area in
which he’d accomplished far less than Alex. Sure, he’d built a house, planted
an orchard, tilled a garden, and sweated and froze his way to a union pension –
all to provide a comfortable life for his family – but perhaps he’d not yet
prepared a place for his mind to be at ease as life itself began to slip away.
Of course, such a place was precisely
what Alex had been seeking for nearly the entirety of his life, and having
cultivated a Christian fire for more than a few of those years he now sifted
through its ashes – from the parables to the apocalypse – hoping that some
Phoenix might rise up to soar from his lips and light upon his grandfather's
ears. Ah, but how could he expect such words to soar from his lips when they didn’t
even limp about in his heart. Sure, he’d tried to be a good Christian. He’d
tried to set aside all those questions that couldn't be answered by platitudes
dribbling from the mouths of those who smile unreal smiles even as they convey
their absolute assurance of things for which there can be no assurance. No, it
seemed to Alex that such people merely acted out their unexamined faith with
fervor enough to convince their conscious minds by driving all doubt into the
darkest recesses of their beings. He wanted no part of such self-deception.
For a time the disparate realms of
poetry and mathematics filled the void left behind by the collapse of what
meager faith had once sustained him. Mathematics must be the language of God,
Alex reasoned – the only language that can describe the behavior of the
smallest of subatomic particles and the largest of black holes, the nature of
light and the curvature of space through which it travels. Surely those
beautifully succinct equations of energy, gravity, and light must be amongst
the first sentences ever composed, with those yet undiscovered lying like Dead
Sea Scrolls just beyond our evolving human understanding. It would be through
an understanding of mathematics that he would apprehend the world’s truths.
Poetry, on the other hand, is the language of the human mind. The human mind
makes too many leaps across quantum divides to ever be described with the
succinctness with which mathematics describes the natural world. Only poetry
can convey the discontinuities of human consciousness and plumb the depths of
meaning. Only poetry, with its ability to touch the heart as well as the mind,
can convey the truth of human existence.
But even poetry and mathematics
have their limits, Alex would come to realize. His poems were more like
baskets, after all, loosely woven and capable of holding meaning’s coarser
nature even as its subtler essence slipped away. Oh, sure, there were better
poets whose baskets were of such finely woven quality as to capture meaning
more completely. More complete was still light years away from actually being
there, however, and Alex was concerned with absolutes. In time it became all
too apparent just how distant words are from the reality giving rise to them.
After all, it’s only after reality gives rise to sensation and sensation to
perception, perception to emotion and emotion to thought that words finally
begin to arise. Even more troubling than that, however, was the implication
regarding the limits of mathematics, for just as words are incapable of
conveying the true nature of human existence, mathematics is incapable of
taking us back to before the Big Bang in order to explain how it all began, and
why. Indeed, that would require knowing the mind of God and not merely the
language spoken. Nonetheless, he soldiered on, until that fateful day when his
study of mathematics brought him face to face with Gödel’s Incompleteness
Theorem and the realization of how correct his hunch had been. No matter how
much we know there will always be something that we don’t know – that we can’t
know. The map is not the terrain. The mind of God cannot be known, at least not
through mathematics, anyway.
It was then that his gaze turned
eastward to where the sages seemed to have a much clearer understanding of
those hinterlands where language cannot reach. Alex yearned to explore those
lands, to travel to the farthest reaches that the human mind can go, perhaps to
find the mind of God there – if not to dwell within it, then at least to
glimpse it, and with that glimpse perhaps be transformed. He learned to
meditate using whatever books he could get his hands on, and with each fleeting
glimpse of stillness that he experienced his mind opened wider and wider to new
ways of being. As a thick fog dissipates with the rising of the sun, so the
heavy darkness of heaven and hell and judgment began to lift, leaving a bright
expanse of mystery stretching clear to the horizon. Where was the justice and
compassion in a system in which souls are condemned to eternal damnation for
such offenses as his own inability to believe in things too fantastical to
believe! Certainly reincarnation made so much more sense than that.
The more he meditated, however, the
clearer it became that his criteria for determining the so-called justness of any
particular metaphysical system was grounded in prevailing conceptualizations of
the self as an independent entity existing for all time. But maybe it isn’t so
much a matter of this life and that life, Alex pondered. Perhaps it is only a
matter of life – Life, if you will – the continuous totality of all life
flourishing within an ever-changing present. Within that context, the how and
why of his apparently individual existence began to matter less and less. What
really mattered was how his actions helped nourish Life’s expression. What then
should he do with his seemingly separate existence in order to nurture Life
itself?
Yes, and that was the one question
that he still struggled with as he sat there looking into his grandfather’s
eyes for what he knew would be the very last time. He recalled how on one of
Grandma’s darkest days he and his cousins were herded into the kitchen where
they sat mortified as she cried out from her bed for a pill that would put her
out of her misery. The minister was even there that time; that was how bad off
she was. But the gulf was far too wide even for him and all of his prayers. Alex
remembered thinking that she should just let herself die. She should just let
go of whatever slender thread of life she still held onto. Yes, he’d known that
she was dying. He’d even wished for death to come. Not for her sake, though, he
realized only later, but for his. His father, too, had been dying for a long,
long time, but he’d said nothing. And, even now, even as an adult, even after
years of contemplation and meditation, he still had nothing to say.
So how could he speak about matters
of life and death when his own sense of meaning still lay so far beyond his
grasp? He felt as though he was twelve years old again and peering across a
gulf so vast and deep as to seem unbridgeable. Yes, death would soon separate
them for all time, but instead of speaking of anything meaningful like life and
death and love they merely made small talk about sports and food and how damned
hot it was outside. And all the while the television kept the silence in
between those snippets of conversation from growing too loud – just as the
coffee percolator had done with its hissing and gurgling so many years ago –
just like the old oscillating fan droning loud and then soft, loud and then
soft – just like the cars slipping past on the roadway in front of the house.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi….
Thank you. Your thoughts on
Crossing Nebraska – the blog or the book – are greatly appreciated. Your thoughts
on the mind of God are appreciated as well!
References
Burnham, D. (2001)
Kant’s aesthetics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/
Frank, M. (unpublished manuscript). Crossing
Nebraska.
Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein and the
mind of God. The Washington Post. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2007/04/einstein_and_the_mind_of_god.html
Image Credits
Omega
Nebula courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope and NASA via:
Copyright 2013 by Mark Frank
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