Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 4

I tried to start my MacBook but nothing happened. I felt a sudden pressure filling the room that I couldn’t get away from. As I stared at the blank screen, my heartbeat began pound in my ears. The screen remained black. Beating faster, my heart now a belligerent to my brain desired full supremacy. Failed technology seemed not only intent on shutting down my computer but me as well.

I turned the computer off then on again. An icon I’d never seen before appeared in the center of my screen: a picture of a file folder with a flashing question mark—not a good sign. I repeated the off and on again to the same result. The nightmare I had feared had arrived. In disbelief, I could only think of my life’s work in writing being annihilated.

As has happened previously when staring over the edge of the cliff of panic, taunting me to jump, my brain seems to kick into action. A hand seemed to reach inside my chest and ease my pounding heart. I had backed up three days before. I was not in unfamiliar territory either as less than a month before panic had snuck up on me after receiving an emergency message that my wife was lost on a hiking trail; but that’s a story for another time.

At once I was on my phone and Googling the file folder/flashing question mark icon in front of me. I followed the instructions. Still my computer wouldn’t start up.

I called Apple support; my world was slowing. I thought of the sign, “Keep Calm and Carry On” though finding “calm” is tricky.

My experience with Apple has been remarkable. This time was no different.

I share this experience, as it is part of our world today. “My computer doesn’t work, what do I do?” It’s agonizing but part of being the best, smartest, most advanced civilization in history, or more, the best, smartest, and most advanced human beings that have ever lived. At least that’s how many see it; we’re certainly better than our ancestors, right? Today, we carry technology in our hands and pockets that’s equivalent to all the computing available to put the first person to the moon over 50 years ago. Our computers allow us access to information from anywhere in the world about anything known for as long as we have known it—instantly (if it’s not instant in our hyper-active world, we hear “this sucks!”) As the great Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When technology is working, as we have come to expect it to, it is usually the best of the times. When technology fails, it isn’t.

Technology failed me as I was finishing Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know but just before that, one of the topics for this article came in an email from a friend about the archeological site, Gobekli Tepe.

What, you might ask, is Gobekli Tepe and why? Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archeological sites in the world today. Gobekli Tepe is a Neolithic archeological site near the city of Sanliurfa in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. Why? Because it is rewriting our history books as we know them. It seems a perfect way to continue what I started writing about in my article A Changing Frame-Of-Reference.

Neolithic is by definition the later part of the Stone Age where ground or polished stone weapons and tools existed. The Neolithic period preceded the Bronze Age and dates between 10,000 and 4,500 B.C.

The limestone megaliths found at Gobekli Tepe date back 11,600 years. That’s 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, 6,000 years before the invention of writing and 500 years before the development of agriculture. In the megalithic columns found on the site are indications of the earth’s precession (I briefly described precession in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference). Some see Gobekli Tepe as the world’s first observatory. A central column at the site, Column 43, is dated at 10,950 B.C. but there seems to be evidence that parts of Gobekli Tepe date back 14,000 years that place it directly in the time of the Younger Dryas period.

Again, from my A Changing Frame-Of-Reference article where I wrote about Younger Dryas, its revelation and recognition has relevance in the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and what is being revealed about our ancient history. The Younger Dryas was a period of glacial condition globally. Caused by multiple fragments of a giant comet disintegrating and hitting earth plunging the earth’s temperature in 10,800 B.C. (12,800 B.P.). Fragments from the same comet impacting the oceans again in 9,600 B.C. (11,600 B.P.) saw a dramatic rise in temperatures. The science of what happened is still not clear but whatever the cause, the evidence on the ground is not in dispute. The global temperatures soared and the polar ice caps collapsed into the sea causing an enormous pulse of sea level rise. What is astonishing is that the 9,600 B.C. date is the same date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis.

Whoa! Just a second here, where did Atlantis and Plato come from? You were talking about Gobekli Tepe?

You’re paying attention. Good. I haven’t yet mentioned Atlantis or Plato but introduce them here as from another ancient text in perhaps telling us why we know what we know. Written by Plato, a Greek philosopher and an important figure in the development of Western thought, Atlantis is a story that most believe is fiction not unlike what I’ve heard about the stories I’ve been writing about from The Bible.

Atlantis, from Plato’s dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, was an advanced civilization lost to the ocean in 9,600 B.C. It’s hard to believe that date exactly aligns with not only the time Gobekli Tepe existed but also for the enormous rise in sea level of the Younger Dryas period. There are many theories on where Atlantis existed including the archeological site at Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia and Santorini, the classic Greek island of Thera. There are also theories of Atlantis in Donana National Park in Andalucia, Spain, Crete in Greece, a Minoan Civilization, and Gibraltar, in the straits of Morocco. There’s much more on Atlantis, which may find a place in a future post.

But what if these ancient stories are not made up but actually took place? The metastory or story within a story perhaps best describes their function that is left to us to figure out. Remember Homer’s epic poem The Iliad and the supposed mythical city of Troy that was found at Hisarlik, Turkey. The stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them today, filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us to give us a means of explanation; the purpose of which we’ve yet to fully comprehend. What if the ancient stories we read today, though having passed through a multitude of storytellers, are based on what was true? The storytellers and those experiencing the events—as spectacular, fantastic, and impossible, as they seem to our minds today—were limited in what tools (language, writing, pictures) they had at their disposal to formulate a record of what they experienced. We, in a lesser way, experience the same today with the limitations of language in trying to write or speak what we mean.

I used the example previously of the Great Pyramids of Giza not being described in The Bible but surely existed having been built according to the historic timeline nearly a thousand years before biblical times. Were the pyramids originally included in the texts but removed because the Jewish and Hebrew writers did not want to share what they saw as Egyptian greatness, and incredible craftsmanship, with the rest of the world? Or were the pyramids not there in the timelines of the stories of The Bible with the Jewish people coming out of Egypt even longer ago than we know (though that history seems well documented)? I did write about “time” in Do We Know Why We Know and being recognized as a dimensionally measurable thing. The Egyptians were the first to measure time, some time before 1500 B.C., using the sundial, on what we know today.

We’re told in The Bible we’re not supposed to understand, in passages like Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Or similarly in Psalm 139:6, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” But are they related to understanding God as opposed to the stories told by the people about who we are and experiences on this planet. As I wrote in Part 2, we’ve been given this propensity to feed on information. Our brains react to it, according to Jordan Peterson, the same way we react to food; we need to be fed. But then there’s the warning in 2 Timothy 3:7,  “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” This leaves me unsettled and in a quandary.

In another part of Psalm 139, verse 15, seems another clue both mythical and magical in speaking to why we know what we know. “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Archeology discoveries are in the earth but most often close to the surface like Gobekli Tepe. But, as the psalm verse indicates, what lies even deeper beneath the ground we stand on?

We have incredible resources leading us into space. That apparent final frontier, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Hollywood loves it. But does any ancient text describe that that’s where we need to go to find out more about the secrets of life? Psalm 139:15seems pretty clear that it’s “in the depths of the earth.” I’m now in Proverbs in my reading of The Bible but I don’t recall space or planetary travel having yet been mentioned.

So let us go into the earth. Almost two-dozen people to date have descended to Challenger Deep (the deepest known point in the earth’s seabed at 36,200 feet) of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (including film director James Cameron). But even at that great depth it doesn’t come close to the distance it is to the center of the earth at 20.9 million feet.

What one man imagined lies in the earth can be read in Jules Verne’s science fiction story Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The deepest man has drilled towards the center is with the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. I’d never heard of it. A scientific drilling project by the Soviet Union started in May 1970 in Pechengsky District on the Kola Peninsula near the Russian border with Norway was to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. A 9-inch diameter hole was drilled a record 40,230 feet by 1989. Drilling had to stop as higher than expected temperatures of 180°C were reached exceeding the expected 100°C. Along with the higher temperatures, lower density and greater porosity rock, that behaved like plastic, made drilling any farther impossible at that time. That’s thirty years ago!

But they did find fossils of microscopic plankton almost 20,000 feet down. There’s much more to investigate here.

After learning of this limited effort to explore the inside of the only planet humans have ever existed on, I am intrigued further by the text in Psalm 139. What is down there that would cause someone to write such text? This takes me back to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem” on our unconscious and language, the central topic of my three prior articles on Do We Know Why We Know. What would cause the passage of Psalm 139 to remain through the multitude of edits this ancient text has had to have gone through? Why such a limited investigation into earth and obsession and drive into outer space?

This causes me to pause and reflect on the three areas that will be the focus of Do We Know Why We Know going forward. We know because of what we learn from: one, the space above us (the universe and everything outside of us); two, the space below us (when standing on the ground); three, the space inside us (our unconscious). Ancient texts like The Bible have much to feed us.

Space today is our focus. It’s our future, like Columbus sailing the ocean blue for new lands (or a shorter route to India). But it’s also what we see all around us two thirds of every day. (I couldn’t find how long our eyes are open each day on average. I’ve conservatively used two thirds if we sleep for 8 hours every 24). Visually, we consume what’s around us, while our eyes are open (our second most complex organ next to our brain) but have little idea what and how much our brains are recording. That leaves less than one third of our time for the “eyes closed” part of our unconscious that goes on inside of our heads. What’s below our feet, the earth, we cannot see into and maybe part of the reason for its limited exploration. The earth is where we come from and where our body goes when we die. Every thing that we’re made of comes from the earth as written in Ecclesiastes 3:20, “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” Seeing that everything we’re made of and being where we go when this incredible gift of life ends, is it any wonder it gets such little attention?

But maybe there’s more beneath our feet than we realize. The fact that it seems much more challenging to get to than all we see around us, like space, is a significant hindrance but when did that ever stop us. There are certainly enough stories about what we might find to persuade us.

Sheol is known as the abode of the dead and also, the Netherworld, beneath the earth’s surface, beneath our feet. “And the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them,” Numbers 16:30 describes Sheol. Interesting is Sheol is known as the abode of the Rephaim, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name but two of the instances where these giants are mentioned in the Old Testament. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead”. Other names of the giants in this ancient textinclude the Nephilim (fallen angels) and the Anakim (a race of giants descended from Anak). Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim. The earth is sure to offer us much more on these ancient ancestors and who we are.

Interestingly the inner core of our planet is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The sun’s surface is estimated to be about 5,500°C where as the earth’s core is about 5,420°C!

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” Jules Verne, Journey To The Center Of The Earth.

More on the earth, the universe and our unconscious, and what the ancient texts tell us in my next article.

But now to finish my Apple story …

The woman from Apple had made an appointment for me locally. Unbelievably, the Apple dealer is across the street from us. Things were coming together though I remained concerned about all my writing on the drive.

‘What if,’ the voice that speaks in the back in my head. A voice that has been there for some time, maybe my whole life, only I listen to it now more than I used to. The voice was repeating a phrase I hear often, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” from Matthew 8:26.

I broke down why I was worried. If the drive was toast and I’d lost everything on it, what would I do? My calmer state of mind realized The Actor, The Musician and The Drive In, my first novels, were published. They would be unaffected. My recent work, as I described in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference was on a drive I share with my agent. Also, as I wrote at the beginning of this article, I had my entire drive backed up. Why was I still worried? All I might have lost was what I’d done over the weekend. That wasn’t colossal. But still …

As it turned out, Jeremy, the outstanding tech at Apple, discovered the cable connecting the drive had failed. Everything on the drive was recoverable. Not as good a story as one where everything was lost but, to be sure, that story could remain fictional as far as I was concerned. The bad news was a new cable was a few days away. Most, I think, would have left it there—having done their job—but not Jeremy. He jury-rigged an external drive so by late afternoon I was back and working on my MacBook Pro like nothing had happened but a bad dream.

Osiris and Marduk might be next. Stay tuned.

* * *

There’s much more to come. Who knows where we’ll go. 

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician my first three books. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

 

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 3

We did think the sun orbited the earth; some still do apparently. And though I flippantly ended my last post with this, it was pretty serious business.

Nicolas Copernicus, a Polish polymath, announced his discovery of a heliocentric or sun-centered universe in 1543 in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres published just prior to his death. As it turned out, he wasn’t the first (although independently) as Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer, had discovered the same thing between 310 BC and 230 BC. But after Copernicus, the idea upset the Roman Inquisition and they burned Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno to death in 1600 for such a heretical idea as a non-earth centered universe. That wasn’t all he was charged with, as he denied several core Catholic doctrines that included eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary and transubstantiation.

Bruno was known to have said just before he died: “Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.” It’s an ideal quote for the theme of my recent posts challenging what we know and why we know it and the power of an “establishment” in upholding that knowledge, be it accurate or not.

Theology of the day proclaimed the earth as the center of all things. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, a universe where nothing is fixed and everything was relative including time and motion (in 1600 no less). The world is a tiny part of the great unknown and God is a universal mind, found in all things. Bruno's unorthodox views got him in trouble; challenging the status quo got him executed. James Joyce commemorated him in his 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

So how does this fit into what I said I’d write about language from Cormac McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem” in my last post? (Here is the link if you want to go back). McCarthy wrote that language arrived to help us understand our unconscious. The title of the essay came from August Kekule, a German chemist important to the world of organic chemistry. Legend has it that the ring-shaped molecular configuration of benzene came to Kekule after dreaming (our unconscious) of a snake swallowing its own tail. McCarthy’s essay centered on why it is so difficult for us to understand what our unconscious is trying to tell us if indeed it’s trying to tell us anything. He went on to explain the possibilities of language coming to man as a way of explaining our unconscious.

Before language did a person know that another person even dreamed?

As mentioned previously in this space, I’m also reading the book passed down from antiquity that year after year remains one of the world’s best selling books. That book is The Bible. After watching the popular The Bible series produced by Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice) and his wife Roma Downey several years ago, and repeatedly after that, I was fascinated how the stories depicted our behaviour as people and our history. More about this will come in future posts. I started reading The Bible last October at the beginning of the Old Testament and Genesis “In the beginning ...”. Genesis is one of five books that start the Old Testament that are known as the Torah or Pentateuch and attributed to Moses excepting the last eight verses of Deuteronomy where Moses dies. I have reached Psalms (Psalm 130 as of this writing passing the halfway mark which is Psalm 117, the shortest chapter in The Bible and 595 chapters in). I’m reading it like a book from the beginning to the end. All of my previous exposure to The Bible was anecdotal from quotes of verses in chapters spoken of in sermons and different teachings. Many individuals, more knowledgeable and intelligent than I, over many centuries, put this ancient text together in this order. Why wouldn’t I read it like a book? My hunch is that not so many have in our modern times; it’s epic (1189 chapters) and difficult. The book does have a plot and is full of joyful and horrific stories of who we are.

I’ve been using the term “ancient text” in referring to The Bible for a couple of posts now. Briefly this is what I mean. The Bible consists of two volumes, the Old Testament and the New Testament, 66 books in all, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Aleppo Codex (920 AD) and Leningrad Codex (1008 AD) were the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament until the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran that moved the date back another thousand years. Prior to that fragments of the Old Testament text go back to 650 BC with the Ketef Hinnom scrolls. Who knows what more will be discovered. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature. This is partly why I believe it can serve, combined with the Old Testament, more than the purpose of a religious document but the single most important source to who we are and have come to be. Marcion of Sinope published the first collection of the New Testament books in the second century. In AD 325, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great conducted the First Council of Nicaea to select the books that would remain in the New Testament. In AD 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, canonized the 27 books of the New Testament in use today. Thus my use of the word “ancient.”

Okay, back to where I was on the "Kekule" essay. In my last post, I wrote on our unconscious, one of the two parts that made up McCarthy’s essay and said I would write more about language, the second part, in this one. Here we are.

I might tell you where I’m going with this if I knew but I don’t. For me, it’s an exercise in both thinking and learning. I’ve talked often in conversation about some of the subjects I’m writing about in this space and I was encouraged by a few to write about “it” not knowing quite what “it” is.  We’ll see what happens as this is the fourth post about “it” that started with – A Changing Frame Of Reference. The territory of not knowing where the story is going is not so strange to me as most of what I’ve written (i.e. novels, short stories, poetry), I didn’t know where I was going either; I don’t start with the end in mind like some writers do. In fact, I’ve written an article in this space about this if your interested – Don’t Start With The End In Mind.

But back to McCarthy’s “Kekule” essay on our unconscious and the origins of language, and why language landed only on our species of mammal. One might wonder how the two are even connected. That intrigued me. In my last article, I wrote on what McCarthy had discussed on our unconscious; there wasn’t room for language in that article. There were two things that intrigued me on what he said about language. I wrote about the first in Do We Know Why We Know? where he hypothesized that language came to us to help us explain our unconscious. In this posting, I wanted to explore his idea of how language came to us, likening it to a parasite invading a host.

A parasite gets its nourishment from the host. A parasite stays depending on whether the host can harbor the various stages of its development. Parasites cannot survive without a host where as other foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria can. The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus arrived by Darwinian selection; language has not. We, with our brains, were in no way structured to receive language. There was no place for it; language just found places to fit in.

He writes that language is not a “biological system” as no selection takes place in the evolution of language and there is only one language; the ur-language is the “linguistic origin out of which all languages have evolved.“ Though all languages may evolve from ur-language, we do know that knowing one language doesn’t give one abilities to communicate in any other.

There was no need for language (five thousand other mammals do fine without it) but it is useful for something in us.

From Britannica.com the purpose of language, in most accounts, is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmitting information from one person to another. But as McCarthy says, why do the other five thousand mammals appear to do fine without it?

Julie Sedivy, a psychology professor at Brown University in Calgary, who has also written for the Nautilus magazine where I discovered McCarthy’s first science non-fiction essay, says, “The purpose of language is to reveal the contents of our minds.” 

A thought. I re-read the story of The Tower Of Babel.

Genesis 11:6 reads: “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.’“

Though the dates are not necessarily consistent could this story be a clue into a rejected attempt for language to come into us. Knowing parasites, God knew what language would do. As a parasitic invasion, language would not come from a good place but still come provided it could feed on the host. Remember Facebook didn't come from a good place either starting at Harvard as a way to compare girls. That didn’t slow its growth.

This also seems like a warning in how success affects us, the invincibility of achievement.

Then the solution in Genesis 11:7: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Here we’re told of the Almighty's intention for us not to understand each other. Was there something more important that we must do? History obviously has demonstrated that language found its way in whether there was room for it or not. I think of the brain as an organ of infinity; there’s always room for things in infinity. Language landed, physically or metaphysically, and we use it—by and large for communicating with each other.

Kind of unbelievable but it took my thoughts in another direction. Mankind has been so keen, especially in the twentieth century, on trying to use evolution to understand who we are and where we came from that maybe we’ve missed something. Something big like our unconscious that we still know very little about. Evolution is incredibly compelling but does have its holes (We'll leave this for a future post.) Is our unconscious just too hard to fathom with the existential tools we have today?

Yet here we are with a language that apparently didn’t come out of need and is not biological but useful. We don’t seem to completely understand the reason it found us, nor exactly what its purpose is and the other five thousand mammals aren’t about to help.

Did human development miss a turn along the way or take a turn off the path we were supposed to be on? Why figure out something we don’t understand when there is so much that we think we do? Is language our portal into our unconscious that we must venture into somehow to learn more even if we don’t know how to?

Reminds me of a quote credited to Mark Twain; “What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”

Again, my thinking on this has been opened largely by Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints Of The Gods. But it’s also tweaked another book I remember that I was introduced to as a teen. Immanuel Velikovsky’s book Worlds In Collision, though much refuted and disproved by the science world, brought me maybe a more naive feeling but a nevertheless similar feeling to what Hancock’s did, namely that we don’t have it all figured out and some of what we think we do isn’t right as Mark Twain seemed to recognize. I’ve said before it’s wonderful what science has brought us like computers and mobile phones and the Internet and any piece of music we want to listen to in seconds yet we still struggle with the same questions Abraham did in departing from familiar territory into the unknown. Also, as Hancock wrote, are we “a species with amnesia” which he credits to Velikovsky’s book Mankind In Amnesia?

I wonder whether this is a trajectory familiar to my own experience from science to somewhat identifying with metaphysics and what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality. Not that science is unimportant because it is important but not when it’s held up as a control or power mechanism preventing the truth from being understood. In The Tower Of Babel it’s like we’re being told that control is not where we’re going to find our answers. When things are under control real answers are not forthcoming. Since the Industrial Revolution, science has been driving things; driving things further into the hands of those in control or in the very least maintaining that control. It’s no wonder we know so little about the mind and our unconscious; we’ve hardly been looking at it, whether through intention or naïveté. The Tower Of Babel seems to tell us we were on the wrong track in building a tower to the heavens yet it didn’t stop us in that pursuit. Maybe we don’t admit we’re building things for the same reason, to get closer to heaven, but we don’t say we’re not either. If anything it’s the ostentation of our power. We seem almost wired to that pursuit. In The Book of John, was he not telling us “the Word” was arriving? As I’ve hazard to suggest previously, did we misunderstand the reason for the Almighty’s arrival as a way to save us from our sins by understanding our unconscious through language “the Word”; a way to fulfill needs inside us by protecting us from ourselves through avoiding the seven deadly sins and living up to the Ten Commandments. Or is this all part of our intended path, and we’re now approaching the epoch of that understanding.

Language was held back in The Tower Of Babel, maybe a first attempt to descend upon us, but not annihilated and like a parasite, as McCarthy writes, it was able to survive and thrive in its host, us, as we found it useful. Then, a way was discovered on how we use it and was written in John, “In the beginning, was the Word.” I am surprised in not having linked The Book of John with the advent of language coming to us to stay, language in the form of our saviour.

The tower was built apparently generations after the flood in the land of Babylonia and interpreted as a time when diverse languages came about. Genesis 11:9 “Therefore its name was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth.” Interpretation has Babel being similar to the Hebrew word “balal” which means confusion. Does our unconscious not bring us much confusion? Are there not many interpretations for the teachings found after Christ's arrival?

Again is the Bible written to speak to us from our unconscious or a way into it? Is heaven our unconscious? Was the story of The Tower Of Babel telling us that building a physical tower wasn’t the way into heaven or our unconscious? Was it a foretelling of our unconscious that language wasn’t intended for communication between ourselves or that we even had control of it? Why though? As McCarthy indicates, why make what our unconscious seems to trying to tell us so difficult to understand?

Maybe the intention is not only, not to understand God’s work, Philipians 4:7 “the peace of God surpasses all understanding” but that language was not the means to understand each other as in talking and listening, which we often don’t anyway, but a means to greater understanding of our unconscious and the purpose of the Babel story.

Language wasn’t taken away from us obviously; only we took it as a means to communicate with one another rather than something else that we’ve yet to figure out.

I then received an email from a friend about another Tepe site in Turkey, sister to Gobekli called Karahan. There is more to come, so much more.

That was last Sunday night. 

And then hell descended on me. Monday morning my MacBook Pro that I do all my work on, ceased to function for the first time.

* * *

There’s more to come in my next post.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what other readers have already discovered. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

 

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 2

From my last post, I've read Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and now want to watch the movie again. I didn't know that McCarthy originally wrote the story as a screenplay which likely explains why the movie is more recognizable. The novel ends with Ed Tom Bell (deuteragonist turned main protagonist) talking about waking up in the middle of the night. Unsettled, sometimes he gets up. He recollects a dream of meeting up with his deceased father who he feels he never gave enough credit to. The dream reveals his father looking out for him.   

I’ve often tweeted about how remarkable it is that disorder of the night becomes order in the morning. I’ll wake in the middle of the night usually after a disruptive dream or nightmare. I’m left with an ominous feeling of dread and the wisp of memory that my foggy mind transfers to something I’m dealing with in real life that I can’t figure out. I usually get out of bed, get a drink of water then head to the sofa in our living room. After a time whatever disruptive thinking had besieged me seems to wear itself out and I fall back to sleep. When I wake up again it’s usually light and things are resolved and in order once again.

I have multiple recurring-type dreams that wake me up but two in particular: one where I’m in an office that I can’t seem to get out of and one where our family is living in a house that’s falling apart. At one time I thought these dreams were quite literal—a prediction of the future—not that we ever lived in a house that was falling apart but I did work in an office for most of my life. But I’m not writing this article to try to figure out what my dreams—nightmares—are trying to tell me but the fact that they seem to be making the effort.

As described in my last post, I notice similar things are happening on the supposed conscious level; when I’m fully awake. I don’t know whether they are or not but seem to be trying to tell me something. I described my collection of books arriving at our new place of residence and easily finding my Rush books and a Cormac McCarthy novel (see link) like they were being presented to me for a reason. (I had been thinking to read McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men and of Rush for a little inspiration.) Another like event just took place while writing this article. We’d been invited to a movie night at friends to watch The Power Of One, the 1992 movie adaptation of Bryce Courtney’s novel. A day later, I unexpectedly connected with a friend on LinkedIn who’s working at Yorkville University. My wife and son-in-law are enrolled in classes towards their Masters in Counseling Psychology at Yorkville. (I’d never heard of Yorkville until my wife started to talk about it.) This friend was the person who had introduced me to Bryce Courtney’s work. Again, I’m not necessarily trying to figure out what the message being relayed here is, only whether the attempt is indeed being made.

In my last two articles (blogs if you like) I wrote about Graham Hancock and his book Fingerprints Of The Gods awakening something inside me that had laid dormant for most of my life. I’d like to say unknowingly but I don’t think that is true. I’ve spent a lot of my life, subconsciously or unconsciously, trying to explain what it was and is to myself. It didn’t fit into a job description that I knew of and was very likely the reason the job world didn’t fit well with my psyche.

I was noticing these things because of where my recent writing has taken me and what I’ve been writing about over the last year. I’m also beginning to realize that the subject matter—consciousness, the unconscious, metaphysics, postmodernism—is what that “it” seems to be that I may have been pursuing all along and now becoming increasingly recognized even in my work.

What Mr. Hancock’s book initiated was the re-emergence of possibility. The ‘what if’ associated with there being more to us than is written in the text books of academia and corrections to what we know as fact. It’s helped bring us to where we are, only here is not a destination though; how we came to be here and where we’re going might be. Clues seem to lie in the infinity that exists inside us—in our brains and our unconscious—if we could just understand what is there beyond the cognitive and linguistic processes we’ve learned. When we conclude that that’s just the way it is, we tend to stop searching.

Fortunately, some are not convinced. Examples come daily. Last week a story appeared in the journal Science where human footprints in rock were found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, that are estimated to be between 21,000 to 23,000 years old putting human life in North America 10,000 years older than previously thought with more stuff to come that looks even older. 13,000 years was the previous estimate for life in North America that’s been held for nearly a century.

Why do we get locked into our truths?

Part of what seems to happen with education, knowledge, and teaching, is that once we get to know something, that something seems to become ours. We possess it like property and, will in some cases, do anything to protect it’s truth to ourselves. Even a little piece of knowledge carries with it a strange feeling of power. In just writing this, the idea sounds odd, that we can feel so strongly about information we know, but we all do it. Just think of the last argument you were in. We’ve all argued to defend what we think and believe based on the knowledge we have and often it’s not even particularly important knowledge.

Also knowing something seems to have the effect of daring others to question what we know just because we have it. There is the insecurity argument that we’re so diffident about the knowledge we hold that we have to protect it to avoid being seen as weak and having someone else usurp the power that we feel is ours in having it. But it goes beyond that I think; it’s more complicated. Primordial even. The beast that holds the knowledge will eat the ones that don’t.

Academia, when I was there, was full of it; professors had a demigod like status over students who wanted what they had. Many were not about to give it away; “You can’t know this until you’ve suffered like I have to to get it.”

What seems to happen is that we lock into a feeling of possession and seem to forget what is really to be accomplished—learning and understanding. We stop questioning whether the culprit of that feeling, “knowledge,” is even correct. Before long the “knowledge” becomes unquestionable in the minds of the holder and their inexplicable attachment to it. Those that question that knowledge, trigger the knowledge holder’s defenses to quickly shutdown the questioner, the enemy—the monster that wants to eat them—discrediting the questioner in whatever means necessary to vanquish any possibility that what they know could be in question, erroneous or just plain wrong.

I now see this everywhere or at least get a sense of it. I see it in religion. I saw it in the workplace. I see it in the news. It’s rampant in social media. Everyone gravitating onto what they know and holding onto it like a possession they want no one to question or take away. It seems like survival—survival of the fittest (I’ve heard that somewhere before.) Who knows the most will win?

Hold on. Another thought about that knowledge.

A while back I was listening to two men in line at Tim Horton’s talk about Justin Trudeau (the Prime Minister of Canada). I’m quite sure neither knew Trudeau, had worked with Trudeau or had ever met the man, but they each spoke as if they had intimate knowledge not only into the man himself but what Trudeau was doing and thinking. All their information was gleaned from TV, radio, newspaper, the Internet, word of mouth or possibly just made up.

The experience caused me to remember working in the corporate world. I’ve worked on a number of management teams. But in my roles, even being next to president of the company, I didn’t know what he’d do next. I was right there, involved, and I didn’t know what the next decision or action might be until we were acting on it. I was that close and didn’t know.

Listening to the two men who spoke convincingly about what they knew was almost shocking to me in what was revealed. Outside of two humans in a verbal exchange, they were talking fiction, but convinced their points were fact. I was reminded of the U2 lyric: “When fact is fiction and TV reality” from their song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” off the Waralbum. Each man saw their fiction as fact and right and despite just how erroneous what they saw as fact could be, it was their truth.

Time to change gears: how do we know why we know?

Jordan Peterson, author of Maps Of Meaning has said that our brains react to information the same way they react to food. We must be fed. Is there any help for us when we have that degree of need for it, correct or not?

Going back to my previous article’s discussion on McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem,” he wrote about the arrival of both our unconscious and language. There was a lot in his relatively short essay but I come back to our unconscious that “has been organizing and directing our lives” and “has been getting along quite well without it (language) for a couple of million years.” I’ll leave language for a future post.

The Bible, from my last article, starts with Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the world.” I looked at this a little differently after digesting the McCarthy essay. As I wrote previously, I believe there’s much more to this ancient text than what I grew up thinking. Like Kekule’s dream in McCarthy’s essay; is the ancient text of The Bible speaking from our unconscious? Our unconscious seems to want to tell us things; is The Bible trying to do that through the written word—language? The Genesis description of the creation of the world is quite short (one chapter) and all that happened took place before we had language and likely before our unconscious existed. By comparision, the description of how God’s tabernacle was constructed that held the Ark of the Covenant is much longer and more detailed (Exodus 25-31 and 35-40).

Everything started in Genesis like the Big Bang of science. But this ancient text seems to be giving us a clue into how existence was created from nothing. God created everything and then thought of man; Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Did he create man physically then? Doesn’t look like it because in Genesis 2:7 is written “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” It’s like a clue, God first envisioned man in “the unconscious” (Genesis 1:27). Then he made man from the dust and the earth, Genesis 2:7. What are we made up of? The stuff of what’s found all around us “dust and the earth.” God then makes woman from man Genesis 2:22; “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into woman and brought her to the man.” But God then does something extraordinary with his new creations of man and woman in the garden of Eden. They’re touched by consciousness or the unconscious where the serpent says to Eve, “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4) in eating the fruit from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve then eats from the forbidden tree and offers Adam the fruit which he eats. In eating the forbidden fruit, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Both Eve and Adam became aware. They were granted awareness. Were they connected to consciousness? All of this takes place before language is upon us as there are only two people and there’s been no mention of language; only communication between the serpent and Eve and Eve and Adam. Is this our unconscious already at work or the early formation of it?

What if the timeline for these events is closer to what science has estimated that McCarthy uses in the Kekule essay and is in millions of years rather than the apparent short time as it appears to take place in Genesis. Is a timeline even important then? There really is no specific timeline in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; or Genesis 1:2, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep”; and Genesis 1:5, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Would the concept of day come without language? If we were to use the approximate sixty thousand years that language has worked its way into us, there wouldn’t be words for days never mind their duration when Eve and Adam were created. Science has the appearance of modern humans at about two hundred thousand years ago.

There’s a lot here. Are the answers here? I don’t know. Are there answers? I think so but then that’s part of the journey; today’s answers are tomorrow’s questions. The pursuit seems to be important but I can’t explain why, only that it excites me.

There is and has been enormous room for error, misinterpretation and misunderstanding but then isn’t that part of learning while using hard science to measure accuracy. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” We’re going to miss a few shots along the way but we have to keep shooting.

We don’t own the facts; they’re not our’s to own. We need to take care not to cherish the information like it’s a loved one. History has proven we’ve made mistakes on what we know and what we thought was right has turned out to be wrong.

We once thought the sun orbited the earth.

* * *

More about this and other things will be coming in my next post.

I thank you in advance for reading The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician.

You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.