“I saw eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light...”
Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans was published in 1650. This was the century of John Locke and Christopher Wren. Spinoza’s rationalism established his credentials. Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson and Galileo had seen the denunciation of his controversial Dialogue in 1632. It was a daunting piece of evidence, and this time it would be personal.
Confusion reigned...
Reading Vaughan’s immortal line, I had an emotion that the stars are our timekeepers. That their claim on our attention is profound and enduring. As far back as we venture to do, in the history of the great civilizations, they have always played a central role in human affairs. And what amazing improbably universes, what profoundly dissimilar orders of existence, what different and thoughtful perspectives may be attributed to the same genius and imagination, to the same powers of analysis and judgement at different phases of men’s humanistic evolution. From concepts of faith that began as extremely base doctrines, as amalgams of witchcraft, sorcery and pre-medieval superstitions, to the Theory of Everything which still dominates the research programmes and main funding of theoretical physicists. The latter being the one perhaps supreme contemplative achievement of the West, derived as it is from a sphere of sublime introspection where the cultures of three millennia and five continents hold their symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest superstitious instincts, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-superstitions, monastic latrines and the inquisitioner’s noose.
And I marvel that so scrupulous an adherence to knowledge and causality was able to redeem such an amalgam of chance and circumstance - such a riot of waves and particles, of gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet, visible light, infra-red luminosity, microwaves, and radiowaves etc. Things, after all, are visible, or indeed audible, only because of the way that their wavelength interacts with the retina’s threshold - or, respectively, the fluid within the ear - for perceptible vision and sound. Another way of putting this is to say that consciousness is a term used to describe the properties of the object that are essential to 'the thing' being 'it'. And that again is a term which more properly dwells in the realm of morals and meanings rather than in those of ascertainable fact.
Not hues, tones, shades, tints, blushes or dyes, then, but sensations in the cerebellum! Not sounds, but frequency in the electromagnetic radiation. Physical symptoms, in other words, that only arise from mental processes. To me, this is an illustration of our own Divinity, of a growing sense of immortality, of the view, indeed, championed already by Galileo that the act of observation creates the entire universe, that “tastes, odours, colours, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside only in consciousness.” Or what Spinoza called in "the effecting cause of the existence of things.”
So, if Man and the Universe are self-evidently the cause and effect of one another, then why make a religion out of a plain and simple fact?
*
Dreamy
*
* Stephen Hawking - Master of the Universe. Tonight, 9pm. Monday 3 March. Channel 4.
