Why the Universe isn't Gradually Unravelling

I was watching a BBC programme about entropy, the idea that the universe gets more disordered over time. As one scientist put it, in non-technical language it means things are getting worse. And I thought what a strange way of looking at the world.

I learned about entropy at school, but it wasn’t until more recently that I felt able to question accepted scientific theories. They are so battened down by proofs and equations and authority that it doesn’t seem like one can question them. This is probably the biggest fundamentalism of our age, every bit as rigid as the Islamists or Christians can get. And of course, if you are in it, you can’t see it.

The guy who came up with entropy, Ludwig Boltzmann, suffered from depression and eventually killed himself. I wonder if there is a connection. And what kind of culture is it that thinks things can only get worse? The eventual fate of the universe, according to this kind of thinking, is ‘Heat Death’, a vast cold empty nothingness.

My experience is NOT that things unravel over time. Our particular culture is making things worse, but that is particular to us. Just look at life, in its abundance and beauty and complexity. It has been there a long time. We are the babes of creation, the ones who do not know who they are and are making a mess. But our elder brothers and sisters, all the animals and plants – they don’t make things worse, they don’t make things gradually unravel, because they know how to live. They know about balance.

So, here is a big question: my experience is that the world does not unravel over time. But accepted scientific theory says it does. Which should I go with, and do I even have the right to think in this sort of way? And almost as a matter of principle I say we need to go with our experience, because if we can’t do that, then what do we have? It is part of the disempowerment, the brainwashing of our complex culture, that needs people to be productive and to conform, that we have learned not to trust our own experience anymore.

Another example is the Sun going around the Earth. That is something we experience every day, it is a basic part of being human to see this happening. And yet we are told it is not so, that it is the other way round, and we believe that, because we are told it. This, in my view, is degenerate, we have lost our power as humans. Humans that have that power are seen as ‘primitive’.

And the other big question is what kind of culture sees things as inevitably getting worse?

According to Buddhism, everything is Mind. Not mind in a narrow sense, more in the sense of the primordial imagination (in astrology, Neptune) that throws up the world around us. The world is produced by the imagination, life imagines the world into being, and it is real, but not ‘objective’ in the way that science would have us believe. Nor is it a solipsistic fantasy. It is something else, ineffable, that takes a lifetime of contemplating.

So the world is a product of the imagination, and that is what keeps it buoyant and creative, it has that force of life behind it. That is why, left to its own devices, the world does not unravel.

But we have become unmoored from that imaginative link to creation. We think the world is material and separate from us: that is a basic assumption behind the scientific method. So the world around us is no longer being maintained by the forces of our imagination, it has been unmoored, and that is why it is gradually falling apart over time. Hence the theory of entropy.

‘Primitive’ cultures understand this link. That is why, some, for example, participate in the rising of the sun every day, in the belief that if they ceased to do so, the sun would cease to rise. We are a literal-minded culture, and think that people must be primitive indeed to think like this. But welcoming the Sun every day is based on a profound truth, it really does make a difference to the nature of the world.

Anything said or done in a heartfelt way affects the world, contributes to its aliveness, stops it unravelling. This is how prayer and magic work. This is a form of cause and effect that is outside the scientific remit, but it is the most important form of all. Contributing to the world – saving the world, even, as if we could possibly know how – is not just a matter of direct action, though that has its place. It is also about inner work, of heartfelt intention, of prayer. And that connects us to the deeper soul of the world. It is that thing beyond us, that is vastly bigger than us, that makes the difference.

Blair vs Hitchens, Religion vs Science

Last Friday there was a debate in Toronto between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens. The motion was: "Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world". The hall was packed, and tickets had been selling at inflated prices. The theme obviously touched a popular nerve. And no prizes for guessing who was putting the case for each side.

Tony Blair is a well-known proponent of religion, while Christopher Hitchens is well-known for being part of the New Atheism movement, which believes it is now time for atheists to be far less accommodating about religion.

The debate, in effect, was religion versus science, and it obviously fascinates a lot of people – just as it did 150 years ago in Oxford, on 30 June 1860, when Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce had their famous debate about evolution to a packed hall of about 1000 people. In both cases there was a hard aspect between Mars and Jupiter: a fight (Mars) about beliefs (Jupiter).

Jupiter is where we look to see the nature of someone’s beliefs, and this planet figures strongly in the charts of both Hitchens and Blair. This is not surprising, as both men are known for having strong beliefs. This to some extent sets the lie to the atheistic crusade against religious belief, because the atheist position can be just as much a religious belief, in the sense of dogmatically held views about the nature of existence, as can the views of formally religious people.

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Tony Blair’s Jupiter is at the end of Taurus, conjunct Mars and the Asc in Gemini. So there is a strong Gemini/Mars influence to his beliefs: the battle (Mars) of good versus evil (Gemini/light and dark) about which he has talked quite explicitly. At the same time, Blair’s Jupiter is in an earth sign, so his beliefs are quite practical and in a way unsophisticated: he has set up a faith foundation to promote faith generally.

We don’t know Christopher Hitchens’ birth time, but he has Jupiter in Aquarius, square to his Sun and Moon. Much of his belief is influenced by the progress of science, which is very appropriate for Aquarius. At the same time, there is the square to his Sun and Moon, suggesting an ongoing inner struggle and evolution around his beliefs that is central to who he is. His beliefs are dynamic. This is in contrast to Blair, whose Jupiter has no hard aspects, suggesting that his beliefs are more of a given. Blair has a sense of certainty about God etc, and for him it’s simply a matter of putting that certainty into action.

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I think that Hitchens (who won the debate by a factor of two to one) can come across as more nihilistic than he is. I think that underneath the intellectualism he feels very deeply, and that the undeniable evils of religion upset him deeply – but he isn’t going to put it like that. Here is his concluding statement from the debate, which is anything but reductive and nihilistic:

“… the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates.

I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I will mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon, I don't believe every civilised person could, if it ... much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. And we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony.

I don't care about the cult of palace Athena, it's gone, and as far as I know ... the sacrifices, some of them human, that were made to those gods, are regrettable but have been blotted out and forgotten, and Athenian imperialism is also a thing of the past. What remains is the fantastic beauty ... the question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art in our own emotions ... I will go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile.”

As you have probably guessed, I am more sympathetic to Hitchens than I am to Blair. In a way, I don’t concentrate too much on what someone’s beliefs are: it’s how they come across as a human being that matters, and in that respect I find Hitchens much more impressive. Hitchens is humane (though I wouldn’t always agree with him) and still trying to work it all out, whereas Blair has found his answers and his certainty and identified himself firmly with what he sees as the good.

Here is Hitchens early in the debate:

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well.

And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical phrase from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.

However, let no one say there's no cure, salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said, it must be said, would have to admit it makes extraordinary claims, but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims."

Hitchens’ 2007 book God is Not Great is an all-out attack on religion. He thinks that science and reason are what should guide us. But then there is his statement at the end of the debate, starting: ”the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter.” This seems to contradict the trend towards scientific materialism in his thought. Sure, science can find places in the brain for wonder, awe, love etc, and one of its strengths lies in demanding evidence for claims. But the sense of something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it?

I think he’s probably in a bit of a fix that a lot of us find ourselves in. You can’t deny the claims of science, and its increasing ability to find a biochemical source in the brain for every human faculty and experience. I think that is to be welcomed, because it constitutes an increase in knowledge and understanding of ourselves. And yet, some of the time at least, we feel there is something else.

Hitchens is dying of cancer. Maybe that is why he allowed himself that extraordinary and unscientific claim at the end of the debate.

But maybe it’s a fix we’ve always been in, because organised religion is just as good at killing off the sense of wonder and openness and transcendence, through its insistence on a fixed and narrow and authoritarian metaphysic, as is science.

I think the real issue is authoritarian belief systems. We have known nothing else in the West for at least 1000 years. First it was Christianity, now it is Science. It is their intolerance that shuts out the magic and transcendence, rather than the systems of belief in themselves. Science can be every bit as intolerant to its rivals as Christianity can be. And Science has the power of the state behind it when it needs to enforce its claims, just as Christianity had.

But even without that, the exclusive claims of Science get into our heads from an early age, just like those of Christianity used to, and it can take a lifetime to get them out again. And ultimately it is not an evil system that is out to get us: science as an authoritarian belief system is simply a reflection of a collective need for certainty. It is because people en masse need simple certainties that we have these systems.

So I think it misses the point to argue about whether Science can explain everything, and where is the room for magic and transcendence in that? It is motive that needs to be looked at. Once you recognise the authoritarian nature of science as a collective endeavour, and take back the power it wants to have over you, then there is plenty of room for everything.

Women and Power: Advice from the Ape-World.

I think the way political power is handed out these days almost guarantees that you’ll get the wrong sort of person for the job. Guiding a society is an onerous responsibility, it has nothing to do with personal ‘achievement’, you need to be old enough to have got that out of your system. The person or people offered the job need to be chosen by a broad church of people who know the candidates well, and who themselves know what it takes to govern a country. It is a specialist job like any other; you wouldn’t appoint a brain surgeon through a popular vote. What we have is practically the worst system imaginable, where leaders are chosen from an undignified scramble of candidates who desperately want the job, and who are chosen largely by people (you and I) who know very little of what it takes to govern a country, and with very little knowledge of the candidates. This is what we call Democracy, on which the west prides itself so much, and which much of the rest of the world scorns – in many ways, rightly.

But if you do want to take part in this undignified scramble, and you are female, here is some advice by Frans de Waal in New Scientist magazine, entitled ‘Midnight Tips for the Clinton Camp’. The author has spent many years observing chimpanzees, and after telling us about their hierarchies, she continues:

'Here are three lessons for alpha females in human politics. First, age helps a female more than a male. Since physical strength and stamina are largely irrelevant in the female, becoming older, experienced and better connected offers an advantage. I have never seen a middle-aged female at the top of a hierarchy if older females were present. In human politics, too, a typical alpha female is post-reproductive, such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel.

‘Second, since males respect power more than age or personality, the alpha female must head a large coalition to handle them effectively. Tight control of her political party might provide this in human politics, but it is unlikely any female could have a stable top role without support from her sex. This can only be secured by being sexually non-threatening and championing female causes.

And third, an alpha female needs to rise above the parties. Older female primates often head large families, and have a natural tendency to be loyal and committed to their kin. The effective alpha female needs to be able to reach beyond her inner circle, build bridges, groom rivals, all of which comes harder to females than males, because males lead more opportunistic political lives and therefore have shorter memories for perceived slights. So impartiality may be the greatest challenge for any female politician.

That the rules of the game are different for both sexes seems ‘unfair’, but is simply how evolution works. Male reproductive success depends on access to females, and one way to achieve this is to hold power over other males. A connection between sex and power is well-known in human politics. For females, things don’t work the same for the simple reason that increased access to mates doesn’t help them reproduce one bit. Instead of serving reproduction via sex, female power serves reproduction via access to resources.

This is important, too, which is why an interest in power is not limited to male primates. Yet the reasons are not the same, and the interplay with sex is so different that advising Clinton to act more ‘feminine’ is misguided. When Clinton shed one tear during an interview, everyone was moved and the media said that finally we saw the real person behind the candidate. But when she went on to shed more tears during a second interview, the headline read: “Again?”, while her opponents countered that Barack Obama “doesn’t go on television and have crying fits.”

Another miscalculation, this time in her favour, came when sexist hecklers in New Hampshire shouted at Clinton: “Iron my shirt! Iron my shirt!” which galvanised the female vote in her favour. Of the three lessons, then, my money says any alpha female’s ticket to success is solidarity with her own gender.

Uranus-Neptune, Magic and Consciousness

A conjunction of 2 outer planets is a very powerful thing, it sets all sorts of new and transformative forces in action for many years afterwards. And we can use quite a wide orb when assessing its influence. The most recent such conjunction was Uranus and Neptune, which was exact in 1993, but operative for pretty much the rest of the nineties. And then, remarkably, since 2003 we have had a mutual reception of Uranus and Neptune, which acts like a conjunction, and so has prolonged the influence of the original 1993 conjunction.

A mutual reception occurs between 2 planets when each is in a sign that the other rules. So Uranus is in Pisces, a sign ruled by Neptune; and Neptune is in Aquarius, a sign ruled by Uranus.

I think that one expression of this continuation of the conjunction has been the continual development of the internet: we haven’t just seen an initial burst of creativity, followed by a period of adjustment. The creativity has gone on and on and shows no sign of letting up. We can expect this exceptional vitality to continue for at least another 2 years, when Uranus starts to enter Aries.

We can compare this to the previous outer planet conjunction, that of Uranus and Pluto in the sixties. This caused a huge social upheaval, with all sorts of progressive ideas coming in and old values being discarded and authorities being challenged. Its effects are still with us, but that initial burst of creativity did not last into the seventies, which were much more characterised by disillusion. If Uranus and Pluto had moved into mutual reception, the sixties would most likely have continued well into the seventies.

Uranus governs electronics and insights and progressive social ideas, and Neptune governs the imagination and the dissolving of boundaries. So we can see globalisation coming out of this, and its particular expression via the internet, where boundaries between people are dissolved (Neptune) electronically (Uranus) and new types of communities (like the astroblogosphere!) can spring up (Uranus).

It is sometimes said that people had much stronger psychic abilities when they lived tribally or as hunter gatherers. And the reason was that these abilities were needed. You needed to know where the game was, you needed to know where other people were and if they were safe etc. We are less psychic now, not because we represent some sort of degeneration from a pure original humanity (which is sometimes how it gets put: the idealisation of tribal people), but because we haven’t needed to be psychic. It’s like a muscle that hasn’t been used.

I have often thought that the internet is a good place for psychic occurrences, because it is such a fluid, immediate medium. And you NEED to be psychic if you are going to make friends and communicate coherently with all these people that you will never talk to or meet in the flesh. I keep getting this when I do email readings for people from all over the world. They keep accusing me of being psychic in my interpretations! Now this is not something I am conscious of. But it may well be happening, because to do a useful reading, you have to tune in to someone. To do this purely over the internet, you need to be ‘psychic’ – a modern word that kind of mystifies and sets apart and even rubbishes what is a perfectly natural human ability.

It is easy to think of computers as dehumanising, and they can be. But looked at in this kind of way, they can be humanising, boundaries that have developed over the last few thousand years are melting, as people re-discover their ‘psychic’ abilities when communicating over the internet. But we’re probably hardly conscious of it. This is a big collective shift in consciousness going on, particularly perhaps among young people. You NEED, for example, to have a sixth sense that tells you that your nice new friend is actually an old pervert who’s grooming you. Or not to open that attachment. Or that so and so has just emailed you.

On Monday I put up a post on Eris on this blog. Later on I also posted it at the Visual Astrology blog, and as I did so I changed the first sentence. I came back to this blog to make the same change, to find it had already happened, apart from one word! So magic happens on the internet, my intention alone was enough to bring about an event. What do you make of that?

Speaking of intentions bringing about events, here is an article from bbc news:

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year. "It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv. "It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity. Ms Le said: "Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we've created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically."

Of course this isn’t quite the same as what I have been talking about. But it is still also about the dissolution of normal boundaries (Neptune) via an electronic medium (Uranus), and the bringing about of events by intention alone. And this is only the start. There have been plenty of lab experiments already where you wire a person or monkey’s brain up to a computer and they get something to happen by brain activity alone. But it is now just starting to go mainstream. It will be a common experience. And it will really get us all thinking about the nature of consciousness. In a sense it is nothing new, for we do it all the time when we move our body: we think it, and it happens.

Science is getting closer and closer to the seat of personality. For some, this will prove that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of matter, an illusory by-product of chemical and electrical activity that can be manipulated just like anything else. For others of us, perhaps, it will show that consciousness and matter are inseparable, it will re-enchant the physical world we live in, which has for so long been separated from, even inimical to, the world of ‘spirit’. And even then, I suspect there will continue to be something elusive and essential that cannot be explained scientifically. We may be able, for example, to provide an objective, physical description of what goes into creating the subjective experience of ‘I’. But you can never describe the experience itself. The closer science gets to this physical description, the more the inherent limits to its type of knowledge will become clear. We have nothing to fear. We are being slowly led into a fascinating contemplation on the nature of consciousness.

Our Sci-Fi Future

Here's one for Pluto in Aquarius (2023-2043):

From bbc news

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted. Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil. He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said. "We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

ASTROLOGY AND SCIENCE

It seems to me that astrology and science pull in opposite directions, they describe very different types of truth. So that any attempt to ‘prove’ the truth of astrology by statistical means is misguided.

Scientific truth is always generalised, it goes from the particular to the universal: it sees the universe as a machine in which certain sets of conditions always give rise to certain results. A particular event is of significance only inasmuch as it is an example of a general law.

But a human being cannot be reduced to a mere instance of a general law, a human being is particular and individual and ultimately unknowable. To the extent that science tries to reduce people to generalities, it is a de-humanising influence. This occurs particularly when science is in the hands of people who have the irrational, unprovable superstition that reality is ultimately scientific and ‘rational’, and that everything must be seen in scientific terms.

For science, the Eureka! moment is when you realise a general law like E=mc2. For an astrologer, the Eureka! moment is generally when you make an individual’s chart work for them, when you are able to put into words that person’s unique and particular way of living out the symbols in their chart.

Of course astrology also deals in general ‘laws’, like the nature of the 12 signs. It also moves from the particular to the universal, but in a very different way. Astrology doesn’t try to ‘reduce’ people to the signs. It is more the nature of artistic truth. A novelist will create characters, based to some extent on his/her observations of real people. If this is done well, the characters will seem real to us, and we will feel something is being said about people in general. But that general truth is arrived at through the depth with which the individual has been observed. The individual is central, yet also mysteriously connects us to a wider truth – but not one that can be proved statistically. This would be absurd, because the novelist deals as much in felt/intuited/experienced truth, that gives us a sense of human nature, as he/she does in truth that can be put into words: and even then, how do you couch those words in scientific terms?

It is the same with the signs of the zodiac. Some artistic genius saw the underlying patterning of human nature that the signs describe. But the essence of the signs is more about having a feeling for the type of character being described than about words. It’s like can you reduce your mother to the things you might say to describe her?

Astrology is also divinatory truth. It is about making connections between apparently unconnected events – i.e. the planets and ourselves – and realising what one has to say about the other. How can that possibly be scientific?

It is the same sort of truth as when an unusual event in nature occurs, and you feel there is a particular message in it for you. Like when you see, for example, a bird of prey doing something it doesn’t usually do, and you go away and think about it, and eventually the meaning dawns on you. In the same way, the universe at the moment you were born has a particular message for you about your soul, and the astrologer’s art is to help you read that message. Scientifically, this makes no sense at all.

Astrology is a higher form of knowledge than Science, because Astrology can understand and accept scientific truth, it can be incorporated within its body of knowledge. But Science has no way of understanding Astrology, the truth of which does not lie within its narrow method.