The Buddha used various images and illustrations to convey a sense of the immense stretch of time — called a kalpa — that might encompass the birth and evolution of universe after universe. Here are a few.

Suppose an eagle’s wing brushes against the top of a high mountain once a century. A kalpa is how long it would take for that action to wear the mountain entirely away.

Suppose a wooden yoke with one hole, is thrown into the ocean to float. If a one-eyed turtle rises to the surface of the ocean once a century, a kalpa is how long it would take before the turtle just happened to rise through the hole of the yoke.

Suppose that every hundred years a piece of silk is rubbed once on a solid rock one cubic mile in size; when the rock is worn away by this, one kalpa will still not have passed.

Suppose, said the Buddha, that there was a huge rock of one solid mass, one mile long, one mile wide, one mile high, without split or flaw. And at the end of every 100 years a man should come and rub against it with a silken cloth. Then that huge rock would wear off and disappear quicker than a Kalpa.

Suppose a celestial woman touched a 10 cubic mile stone with her garments once every three years. A kalpa is longer than the time it would take to wear the stone to a mere pebble.

These images of inconceivable lengths of time - kalpas - are, to me, strangely comforting, liberating, soothing.

I get similar pleasure from looking through my binoculars or telescope at galaxies and star clusters in the Milky Way on a warm summer’s night.

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Note: This abridged version of the original essay excludes my commentary on the infamous series of Ken Wilber blog posts—beginning with the “What We Are, That We See” post of of June 8, 2006—in which Wilber viciously attacks his critics and then claims to have been only testing his readers, fans, and any curious passers-by. If you don’t know what I am talking about, click here for the June 8, 2006 Wilber post that started it all. If that link doesn’t work, click here.

The life and career of Ken Wilber is nothing if not interesting. But a google search will reveal that beginning a few years ago, Wilber began losing former fans, readers, followers, and promoters. Why? Ken Wilber is a scholar, critic, teacher, observer, and prolific writer who has written extensively and critically about science, psychology, religion, and philosophy—eastern as well as western. But he is not himself a peer of those whose writings and work he reports and critiques. Not that you have to be an expert, on the cutting edge of a given line of research, to write about that field, but Wilber makes claims and gives critiques that only experts working in a given field are qualified or equipped to make.

Wilber’s pretensions to “expertise” mislead those new to his writings into attributing more importance and legitimacy to his models and ideas than they can sustain. Once a reader realizes—often only after years of study—that Wilber’s work has not been nor is it ever likely to be rigorously tried and tested through experiment and the anonymous, pre-publication peer-review process through which respected experimental results are made public, that reader will likely join the growing number of former fans and followers.

Wilber’s defacto role since the publication of The Spectrum of Consciousness and No Boundary in the late 1970s has been to introduce and popularize various important areas of thought and research in psychology, philosophy, the history of science, and comparative religion. There is a place and a need for someone who can do for philosophy, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, brain research, and consciousness studies what Isaac Asimov did for the subjects he took up: encyclopedic overviews of nearly every major field of science and mathematics, a historical guide to the Bible, annotated editions of Byron, Milton, Swift, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and classic long, short, and multivolume works of science fiction. Instead of the Einstein of consciousness—as he has been occasionally called—Ken Wilber might justifiably be considered its Asimov. Except Wilber would probably feel insulted to be so labeled. Too bad.

If Wilber acts quickly to reassess realistically what he has so far accomplished (he is now in his late 50s) and stop pretending to expertise in the subjects he chooses to write about, there might still be enough time for him to become the next Isaac Asimov: The Asimov of Consciousness, The Asimov of Eastern and Western Philosophy, The Asimov of World Religions, The Asimov of Psychology, The Asimov of Politics, The Asimov of Evolutionary Biology, The Asimov of Education, and so on: The Isaac Asimov of and for whatever subject he may in the future feel inspired to summarize, comment upon, and incorporate into his AQAL theory/map of everthing that is, has been, or will be, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Amen.

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While a graduate student in English at Northwestern (late 70s early 80s), I had the good fortune to study with Gerald Graff and get acquainted with the criticism wars that were beginning to rage. If Graff had lived oh, say, 2,447 years ago, he and Socrates would have given each other much to think about. Like Socrates, Graff practices a method of query-based discussion or dialectic in which no one is allowed to finally rest in or on any single theory, image, or conclusion.The conversation can always continue. Graff has taught the conflicts or controversies from the earliest days of his career, long before the practice was coined as a slogan by various individuals and groups.

I agree to a point with those who consider it unfortunate that religious fundamentalists have co-opted Graff’s phrase, “teaching the controversies,” in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses. But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, by all means, let the controversies continue to be taught and discussed, by everyone. The only way to determine whether someone or some idea is right or wrong is to test it in the laboratory of discussion. So let the discussions continue: teach those controversies! bring on the conflicts!

If I had continued with literary theory as a professional interest, Graff’s query-based, Socratic approach is most certainly the one I would have taken: not identifying with any one school of criticism, but, instead, continually questioning each school’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Taking such an approach you risk angering and alienating, but, what was it they called Socrates . . . oh yeah, a gadfly.

Let the controversies and the conversations continue.

I am sure I am not alone in saying thank you, Professor Graff.

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Having moved beyond the arid speculations and nihilistic gibberish of logical positivism and deconstruction (respectively) some academic philosophers are once again addressing big questions. Questions like: What is the meaning of life? Listening to a Philosophy Bites interview with John Cottingham on my way to Joshua Tree this morning I was graced with his insightful thoughts on how a philosophy that would lead to a sense of meaning in one’s life should accommodate the inevitable vagaries and uncertainties of life � illness, old age, death. That simple observation, suggestion led to a new, if subtle, insight.

I have had similar insights about living and meaning in the past, but from Buddhist and other eastern teachers, never from a philosopher speaking from a western philosophical point of view. There may be a way for east and west to meet after all.

It is easy to be discouraged when one encounters or has been subject to limiting contingencies, lost opportunities, unrealized dreams, paths not taken, failures of various sorts � we all have them. But if one has a “philosophy” that acknowledges and accommodates them, one can move on.

I’ll hang on to that one.

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I just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”

Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation � categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems � vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (Hofstadter, 363-364)

I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.

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from the Amalgamated Press - check local news for updates:

Today during the late afternoon briefing at the Academy it was announced that apparently reality is just as Plato dramatized Socrates describing it. When asked which dialogue contained the most accurate characterization, the secretary said that that was a question still being explored in committee and when an answer is determined, it will be formally announced.

and this as well,

Aristotle, through his press secretary, today made an appeal to any student with written lecture notes or knowledge of other students with saved lecture notes to contact the central Lyceum office as soon as possible. All of his lecture manuscripts, temporarily stored in the Lyceum library for compilation and editing, and nearly ready for mass reproduction, have mysteriously disappeared. Aristotle, deeply distressed and following medical advice, was unavailable for comment. He has promised a statement tomorrow at the regular end-of-the-week news-briefing in the Lyceum cafeteria.

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Who am We?

This . . . This is . . . This is not . . . This is this this is not . . . this is . . . is this . . . not . . . is this?

How you read or interpret “this” depends on how you read it: start slowly, stop, pause and continue. Try it . Marcel Duchamp came up with this. (No, not this, this!)

Sound loopy? I agree, and, may I recommend:

� Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop
� The drawings and prints of M. C. Escher
� Kurt Godel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions
� Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable
� A good collection of Zen Koans

Smell a rose or two today and see (be). In the words of Gertrude Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” If all else fails, and no amount of roses or words avail, then just laugh, yell, think, scream, and then laugh some more and take a peek in a nearby mirror.

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In his newest book, Douglas Hofstader attempts to define the difficult-to-define, self-aware mind, the “I.” The entire volume comprises his attempt. Not that being difficult-to-define is all bad. Its being difficult-to-define has made possible exclamations like the Firesign Theater’s Radio Theater’s: Who am us, anyway?

At the close of chapter 6 Hofstadter writes:

The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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In context of his philosophy, his Ethics in particular, the definitions Baruch Spinoza posits are functionally similar to the “revelations” of revealed scripture. Deny their validity or importance and his conclusions, meanings, and propositions are rendered absurd. The definitions can not be doubted without destroying the edifice which they found. In both theology and rational philosophy, valid reasoning is essential, but when revelation is doubted, explained, contextualized or otherwise secularized, it is a small, yet welcome relief to turn to Spinoza’s definitions for solace.

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In his essay, “Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite,” Nicolas Humphrey writes:

Indeed, Paley’s argument may soon have to be turned on its head. For there will likely come a time in the not too distant future when a complex artifact found lying on the heath will not have had a maker but rather have been “grown” via a genetic algorithm.

Well, of course a watch lying in the grass found tomorrow will not have been so algorithmically grown, but, his point stands. What could be more irreducibly complex than, say, the smallest of mites crawling across a rose; yet, the algorithm of natural selection explains its growth through geological ages.

Humphrey goes on to some remarkable, theory-based speculations on why the existence of God is ironically proven by the logic of human evolution — what makes us human is the belief in a maker. More on this later.

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