Dialog of the Angels
What existed before the beginning?
“Before” and “beginning” are irrelevant.
Time is not primordial, nor is space or matter or energy.
Then why is there something rather than nothing?
If nothing existed, we would not exist to know that nothing.
Yet nothing exists if it is unknown.
Therefore nothing, being unknown, cannot exist; therefore something exists.
You’re playing with words.
That is how it all begins, by playing with words.
In the beginning, there is no beginning. It always exists.
But what does “it” mean?
Itself. We say, “It is raining.”
What is raining?
The rain. Rain rains.
It’s both noun and verb.
Existence exists.
It must be known to exist.
It knows itself.
Knowing knows that it knows.
Knowing is primordial.
How can an “it” know itself?
It’s not an “it,” it is alive.
Are you saying that life, existence, is the Tao?
No, it is not impersonal.
It is a person, who cares.
Caring is primordial.
How do you know that it cares?
Because we care.
If caring had never existed, how could it come to be?
Now you’re asking me.
And it is not an “it.”
It is not sexless.
It is not less than human.
Is it a he or a she?
Both, but not androgynous.
He exists. She exists.
Gender is primordial.
So there are two different ultimate realities?
No, just one.
How can it be both two and one?
It, they, are infinite.
The infinite can be, must be, all that it cannot be.
Except nonexistent.
There was a moment when the infinite
Both existed and did not exist.
That is All you need to believe.
Yet either He or She must be ultimate.
No, not either/or, instead, both/and.
Only one can be infinite.
In the infinite there is no difference between one and many.
There are an infinity of infinities.
Each one is ultimate.
That is hard to imagine.
The difficulty is in our limited imaginations,
In the clumsiness of the words we must use.
Why not create more precise words?
No matter how precise a map we create,
It approaches asymptotically to zero as a percentage of infinity.
Then we can never know what is true about your infinite person.
Only if He, She, decides to tell us.
Does He, She, ever do that?
Of course. All the time, to every one of us.
We need only listen.
But why?
Because He, She, cares.
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To me, it seems plain that knowing and caring -- however long they may have existed -- could not have existed before (hence without) some object to know and to care for. An unbodied "knowing" -- if it had only itself to know -- or a "caring" that has (or that ever had) only itself to care for -- would instantly face the same dilemma as a man who tried to bite his own teeth.
ReplyDeleteIf the "He and She" of your poem exist -- if they have always existed, as one of your poem's angels claims -- then either they exist as some part of the entire universe (defining the universe as all-that-exists) or they *are* the entire universe. Either way, their existence would require the existence of one or more of those physical phenomena that your lecturing angel writes off as Johnnies-come-lately: matter/energy/space/time.
If "He and She" always existed, as your lecturing angel claims, then whatever they use for a body must have always existed too.
I don't insist that "He and She" -- or angels, either -- would have to be composed of protons/neutrons/electrons like us: they might be made of photons or neutrinos or quarks, or of something even weirder & as yet undiscovered.
(DIGRESSION ... Don't ask me -- for I do not claim to know --
how many angels can dance on the surface of a quark.
However, one could, in principle, compute the number:
given operational definitions of "angel," "dance," "surface," and "quark."
RETURN TO SUBJECT ... )
For mind to precede body (your premise) seems vastly frustrating, if possible at all -- for mind with absolutely no body would be -- literally -- nobody: as a mind would have no way to affect (let alone to effect) anything material.
(Getting from unbodied consciousness to matter --
which your poem posits as the way the universe must have happened --
presents difficulties *at* *least* *as* knotty
as getting from unthinking matter to consciousness.
If matter exists first, and some of it becomes conscious,
then at least the consciousness -- once it gets here --
has something to be conscious OF.
But if consciousness exists first, without any matter handy --
well, just how long *does* a consciousness remain alive and sane
while it has no external, material inputs?
Even an eyeball or a tooth has a material object outside itself:
our teeth don't try to bite mere "biting" instead of biting food,
our eyes don't try to see mere "seeing" instead of seeing what surrounds us.)
If your teeth or my eyes tried to do
what you say that consciousness does -- or originally did --
we would quickly, and painfully, seek help to end such a state of affairs.
If the cosmos has a consciousness ("He and She" or however else we may describe it),
I hope for its own sake that it is not, and never was, similarly ingrown.
When I think of a consciousness having nothing but consciousness to be conscious of -- nothing but the mere concept of "caring," itself, to care for -- into my own consciousness hurtle all the horrors I have ever heard about the mental state of people in lightless, soundless, solitary confinement.
Re:
ReplyDelete"The infinite can be, must be, all that it cannot be.
Except nonexistent.
There was a moment when the infinite
Both existed and did not exist.
That is All you need to believe."
I *can't* need to believe a contradiction -- a contradiction, by its nature, can't exist.