Shadows of God and the Privilege of Existence

Sept 19, 2010

 “It is the purpose ... of religion ... to reunite one with the Reality one has thus lost
sight of due to one’s seeking happiness where it is not to be found ... in the
shadow’s and illusions of one’s own mind.”

- from Entering the Stream by Bhikku Mangalo

". . . all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our
readings . . ."

- Mark Twain

“The shadows of this world are perceived by mortals, and they think they know
Truth, but the Reality which casts the shadows is hidden from them, and they do
not perceive the light.”

- from Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

Shadows of God and the Privilege of Existence

My rst job in education a er college was in my hometown, as a

permanent substitute for a teacher who was quite ill. A er four years of
studying psychology, I unexpectedly found myself teaching physical
education.

A fellow has to pay the bills.

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 I did this for an entire semester, and at rst I really enjoyed it. I played
sports with the students each day, and many of the activities were
outdoors. For a month or so this was heavenly - I was in great shape, had a
nice tan, was making a bit of money, and the kids were attentive, well
behaved, and treated me with respect. But though it was great fun for a
while, the time soon came when I was bored out of my mind with the
minimal demands of being a substitute PE teacher. I quit, took a job
working on a river boat at a better salary, and soon had enough money to
work towards my goal of getting a Master’s degree.

Some twenty years later, I was visiting my hometown, when a man that I
didn’t recognize approached me and asked if I was Mr. Fisher. I responded
in the a rmative and he told me that I had been his PE teacher in High
School and that he wanted to let me know that he and his friends enjoyed
the atmosphere in the class, appreciated the way I treated them fairly, and
that they considered me the favorite teacher they had ever had.

This is the sort of thing, as you might imagine, that a teacher lives for.
Teachers are an altruistic lot, hoping we might somehow help a young
person grow and develop. Hearing this praise from my old student had me
oating on air, thinking to myself how nice it was that I had made an
impression, that I had done some good in my beloved profession.

We shared small talk for a bit and it was time to go. As he turned to leave,
he recounted a nal memory of his time in my PE class. “My buddies and
me,” he said with a big grin on his face, “used to go behind the shed by the
football eld every day during your class and smoke pot.”

This might account for why I was their favorite teacher. It wasn’t because I
was the nurturing educator I pictured in my mind moments earlier, but
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 because I was apparently the most oblivious person to ever take classroom
attendance, and the students associated me with the splendid buzz they
had going on a daily basis. I had never felt so de ated. Where I had
perceived an orderly, respectful educational experience, a teenage bong
party had actually existed. For all I knew, they might have been wearing
togas instead of gym clothes.

I tell this story as a reminder that life is o en an exercise in congratulating

ourselves for thinking we know what is going on, yet, more o en than we
care to admit, we discover we had it all wrong.

We nd ourselves this morning in a church environment, an environment

where men of the cloth usually sermonize on the nature of life with
unsettling certainty.

It’s a bit di erent in our church. We are uncomfortable with messages

transcribed by self appointed proxies of a supernatural being. We are wired
a bit di erently than that. We are more comfortable with uncertainty than
others, especially if the alternative is to live our lives based on false
assumptions. This, of course, is a source of pride.

As I thought about my experience as a young, blindered teacher, I couldn’t

help but re ect on how the creature with the biggest brain on earth is so
o en wrong about really important things. This morning I am going to
share some thoughts and ideas about why this may be so.

There is an obvious tradition of including a moral lesson in sermons. If you

will indulge me for a bit by listening to me speak about things I just
admitted I know very little about, I will act on this tradition by taking the
bold step of giving you some guidelines for living a righteous life.
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 Plato’s Parable of the Cave is one of the great and instructive mental
exercises of all time. Those ancient Greeks, whose thought processes were
unburdened by exposure to reality TV and tweeting, surely knew how to
ponder big ideas. For those of you needing a refresher, Plato asked us to
imagine a cave in which people were kept captive their entire lives. A re is
built in such a way that the captives can’t see it. Actors, also hidden from
the captives, interact by the re in such a way as to throw shadows on the
back wall of the cave. All the captives ever experience are the shadows cast
on the wall of the cave. That is their reality. That is what they believe that
the world has to o er in the way of substance and experience. Plato is
asking us to question the nature of reality. If all you ever saw were
shadows how could your reality consist of anything but shadows? He
obviously felt that most people went through their lives without grasping
the true nature of existence and the cave was a metaphor for this
condition. He believed that people are captives of their own illusions. He
went so far as to infer that captives that le the shadows would be so
overwhelmed by the true nature of reality that they would choose to
return to the shadows.

When we think about the nature of existence, as humans in churches so

o en do, we might ask ourselves the relationship of the thinking process to
Plato’s shadows.

Thinking, of course, involves using the central nervous system. To ponder

the cosmos is to use the most remarkable conglomeration of cells in
Creation, the human cerebrum, the machinery of our mind.

As we go about our daily lives, our sense organs gather sensory

information and our brains compares that sensory input to previous
sensory input, to previous experiences, to experiences we have learned
about from listening to others. Humans are mainly visual creatures and
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 much of our sensory input is visual in nature, sounds follow closely behind,
followed by smell and touch and so forth. We take all that sensory
information and look for patterns to emerge, molding those patterns into
insight and conclusions about the nature of our life.

Our understanding of the world starts with our senses.

But just how dependable are our senses and our brain’s ability to process
the information our senses accumulate? As it turns out, the very
construction of our sense organs makes them not so dependable at all.

Had my sense organs more depth and breadth, I might have seen or heard
those students in the shadows of the storage shed, giggling at my
obliviousness. As it is, our eyes are limited in the distance we can see, and
further, our eyes can only see the narrow band of wavelengths from 400
to 700 nanometers. Others types of electromagnetic waves beyond that
range and thus outside the visible spectrum include, X-rays, UV, gamma
rays, radio waves, microwaves, infrared rays, and so on. If our eyes were
constructed di erently our visual universe might include these
wavelengths and make for a distinctly di erent visual reality. Our hearing
is limited to a narrow band of wavelengths and amplitude, making us
inferior to many other animals in our ability to sense sounds. Smell, taste,
and the kinesthetic senses also are limited to a narrow range of
perceptions, that, if expanded would again change our world in remarkable
ways. Imagine a world in which these very real forms of energy beyond the
range of our perceptual apparatus could be perceived. Some people don’t
have to imagine an expanded perceptual existence. Their are people on
earth a icted with a disorder called synesthesia. They can smell sounds,
hear images, see colors in their mind when they read, numbers can make
them sense tastes. Their perceptual reality is vastly di erent than most
people, but no less genuine, revealing aspects of the natural world denied
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 to the rest of us. The reality the sense organs reveal is inextricably tied to
the brain that processes the perceptual input.

So, if we can only perceive a small amount of the delights of the physical
universe, just how reliable are our senses in understanding the cosmos?
Professor Carl Woese’s work at the University of Illinois studying the
genetic sequences in bacteria show us that life on earth can be divided into
23 groups, only three of which, animals, plants, and fungi, are large enough
to be visible to the human eye. The other 20 groups are microscopic in size
and as di erent from each other as humans are from spiders. In fact 80%
of the biomass on planet earth is made up of the 20 groups of living things
we can’t visually perceive. Four hs of life, by volume, on this remarkable
planet, is beyond our perceptual experience, existing beyond the shadows.
You begin to see the di culty in pondering a cosmos with sense organs
that hide the existence of most of Creation from observation.

Once our senses gather perceptual information our brain goes to work to
organize this terribly incomplete information. But again we have issues.

Most of us have played a game called Telephone. It is an exercise in which a

story is passed along verbally from person to person, until the last person
compares their story to the original. It is always transformed remarkably
from the rst version, becoming something else completely.

We have all heard about several witnesses observing a crime and

describing what happened in completely di erent fashions. Their visual
perceptions of the incident vary enormously. Even something considered
to be a result of the infallible work of God, the four Gospels, describe the
same events, but have signi cant di erences in how those events were
perceived and recorded.
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 Our interpretations of what our senses perceive vary enormously, so much
so as to make any perceptual experience an entirely subjective phenomena.
Our brain o en sees what it wants to see, applying a personal script of
biases and preconceived notions to the information it gathers. It is simply
impossible, as physicists suggest, to separate the observer from the event.

The construction of the brain o en determines how this limited perceptual

information we gather is processed. The late comedian Richard Jeni said
that the di erence between being single and being married is the
di erence between being lonely and being irritated. Some fascinating
research into brain structure helps explain why men and women can so
e ectively irritate each other. We know that the brain is bicameral; it has
two halves, each processing information in di erent ways. One side is
more logical and verbal, the other side more intuitive and creative. The
two halves of the brain communicate via a small piece of tissue known as
the corpus callosum. The number of neural pathways in the corpus
callosum determines how well the two halves of the brain keep each other
informed.

It turns out that a women’s corpus callosum is signi cantly thicker than a
man’s with a correspondingly larger number of neural pathways. Thus
women are more able to multitask - they can write a report, nurture a
child, read a book, change a tire, and talk - all at the same time. The verbal
and intuitive sides of the female brain maintain a dialogue. The relative
dearth of neural pathways in men’s corpus callosum would seem to make
them excel at doing one thing at a time. You can test this by trying to
engage a man in conversation while he is reading a paper. Once that fails,
try exploding a paper bag next to his ear. In either case he will not
acknowledge you, indeed will seem incapable of acknowledging you until
he nishes his article. So men, as your mate becomes frustrated when you
seem unwilling to discuss your relationship while you are watching ESPN,
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 counsel her to count her blessings that she was born with such a splendid
corpus callosum, and ask her to pity you for the atrophied corpus callosum
that you and other men are cursed with.

But wait - not all men are so cursed. An interesting adjunct to this
research is that gay men o en have larger corpus callosums that even
women. As we ponder such giants of creativity and expression as da Vinci,
Alexander the Great, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Tchaikovsky,
Michaelangelo, and countless others, the historical record shows us that
gay men have been inordinately represented in cutting edge fashion,
design, art, theater, music, writing, and other creative activities.

Since a larger corpus callosum allows the emotional side of the brain and
the verbal side of the brain to better communicate, this may explain the
depth and breadth of the creative achievements of gay men. Further, it
may illuminate the phenomena reported by my female acquaintances that
gay men excel as friends and soul mates. Their brains, even more so than
women, are wired to verbalize about feelings and emotions. This is in stark
contrast to heterosexual men whose brains are wired to laugh at farts.

Don’t blame me - it’s all my corpus callosum’s fault.

My point in these observations is that the structure of the brain itself

a ects how we process information, dramatically a ecting how we view
our world and how we interact with the world.

Another observation about the brain: tiny imbalances in brain chemistry

can have profound in uences on the mental processing patterns of a
human and distort their ability to reason. As an example, a microscopic
shi in the amount of the chemical serotonin at the synaptic level can lead
to anxiety and depression, mental states that pointedly a ect ones
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 worldview. The most prescribed drugs in the world are serotonin
regulators, an indicator of the endemic nature of how synaptic chemistry
a ect thought and behavior.

I’d like to move on to a di erent but no less important concept related to

the brain. It’s this: The brain actively creates reality. In other words, the
mind has a mind of it’s own. This pertains to a fundamental aspect of our
brains. The brain hates un nished business. It hates it so much that, if
business remains un nished for too long, or is related to a particularly
emotional situation, the brain will endeavor to bring about closure any
way it can. The German’s have a word called Gestalt that references this
attribute of the brain. Gestalt means something like “a uni ed whole”. The
brain is so infatuated with Gestalt that it insists upon it.

A few examples:
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the .....
If you are like virtually every human in the english speaking world, you
completed that little ditty in your head. You had to say the word Spain in
your mind. Your brain insisted upon it.

Have you ever tried to remember the name of an actor in a movie and
been unable to remember it? Did you feel anxiety and discomfort until it
came to you? Think about it - it literally made you uncomfortable to not
have closure on this meaningless issue.

Have you ever woke up in the night, unable to sleep because you were
thinking about the task you nished at work? No, you woke up because of
the tasks that were un nished. No closure, no completion, no gestalt, no
sleep.
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Need I mention the heartache and su ering brought about by unresolved
issues of romance, family, economics, health? If these things aren’t
resolved the human brain rebels by creating physical and emotional stress
that can literally cripple a person, and send them scurrying to the doctor
for serotonin regulators to get the synaptic chemistry back in shape.

Take out the insert in today’s order of service and play along with me in a
visual exercise illustrating just how much the brain hates un nished
business. (do exercise on blind spot created by optic nerve) As I said, and as
this illustration of how your brain lls in an empty spot in your eld of
vision shows, the brain will actively construct reality if un nished business
is dramatic enough. The brain will literally create something from nothing
if it deems it necessary.

More about the brain. Did you know that some theorists think that
awareness itself is a mathematical equation?

We now know two important numbers related to animals with central

nervous systems. We can determine the amount of information stored in
an animal's genes, as well as the amount of information that can be stored
in an animal's cerebrum. Theorists suggest that a magic moment occurs in
the evolutionary process when the amount of information that can be
stored in the animal’s cerebrum becomes greater than the amount stored
in an animal’s genes. This, they suggest, when the processing device of an
animal has more capacity than the blueprint for the animal, is the
remarkable moment when awareness of self began to occur. Whether by
natural selection or an odd genetic mutation in the past, humans have the
highest gene to cerebrum ratio of any creature on earth - 10 to the 10th
power bits of information in their genes and 10 to the 13th power capacity
of bits of information in their cerebral cortex,. Could it be that humans
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 wring their hands over their place in the cosmos and stare at their belly
buttons simply because their brain has more capacity than their genes?

As geneticist Matt Ridley points out in his book NATURE VIA NURTURE,
for the rst time in almost 4 billion years a species on this planet has read
it’s own recipe. He is speaking of the human genome project, in which we
are being given a window into the ultimate nature of why humans are as
they are. Did you know that they recently isolated the gene for shyness?
Yes, shyness isn’t learned, it is there in your genes, another example of how
the apparatus determines our reality. The human genome project even tells
us where we came from. Genetic research on mitochondrial DNA suggests
that every single human in the world descended from one woman who
lived in Africa’s Ri Valley about 80,000 years ago. Every single person
alive today has the same common ancestor. We know now how closely
related we all are and this reinforces how we di er in only the most
super cial ways. Go back a few thousand generations and we all have the
same picture of grandma on our mantle.

In his book, EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION, Jeremy Rifkin examines recent

research that seems to answer the age old question of whether mankind is
inherently good, inherently bad, or a blank slate. No less that the Christian
bible, the source of cosmic guidance for over a billion humans, places it’s
bet on mankind being inherently bad, a result of Eve’s behavior in the
Garden of Eden. For many years scientists looked at humans as a tabula
rasa, neither inherently good or bad, but shaped into one or the other by
life’s experiences. As Rifkin points out, current research makes a strong
case that natural selection long ago favored mammals with an inborn sense
of empathy, because empathy has such important qualities for survival.
Being a good person, and having empathy for the well being of others, the
research seems to indicate, has helped our species to succeed more
dramatically than any other in the history of the earth.
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 Consider this. Scientists, in their wisdom, have even studied the
physiological and psychological qualities of the hug. Research has shown
that a baby that is denied hugging and physical nurturing will actually
have a lower IQ than a baby that is consistently cuddled and hugged. Think
about it. Simply hugging your child can make her smarter. Hugging leads
to the creation of more neural pathways and synapses and ultimately a
greater capacity for learning. Even more importantly, hugging also makes
children more emotionally secure than children deprived of this tonic. I like
to think we can extrapolate those nding to adults. Had I been hugged
more I might not have been so dense regarding what my students were up
to behind the athletic eld’s storage shed so long ago.

A nal bit of research that helps us better understand our place in the
universe. Recent research has shown that we each have more bacteria cells
in our body than human cells. 99% of the di erent kinds of genes in our
body aren’t ours, but rather come from microbes. These foreign cells are
necessary for vital bodily functions like digestion. Without the bacteria in
our digestive track we would quickly die. Bacteria "rule this planet,
including our body," said Jeroen Raes, a researcher at the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany. "I think it's important that
people realize that we are not really human - we are a walking colony of
bacteria and they are crucial for our well being and health."

This scienti c discovery forces us to face an astonishing truth. Much of

what we are isn’t us. A human, each of us in this room, is a construct of
many di erent creatures, symbiotic, an exercise in group consciousness, a
pantheistic biomass. The consciousness that separates humans from all
other creatures on earth cannot exist unless our physical body hosts
billions of microbes. No microbes, no us.
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 Now imagine this - you are an introspective sort with an empty void in
your soul. You are wondering about the universe. Where did it come from?
What is its purpose? What is your place in the universe? Why do we
su er? Where do you go when you die? Is there an answer anywhere to
help you solve your su ering, solve your many problems? You don’t
know? Your life has no meaning? That is rather fundamentally
disconcerting is it not?

But suppose I told you that the universe began a few thousand years ago,
created by an omnipotent God. The universe’s purpose is to serve man, and
man’s purpose is to serve God. God sent his son to earth some time ago to
save mankind from their naturally sinful state, and if you simply accept this
and serve God properly, you will live with your loved ones, a er death, for
all eternity, experiencing perpetual joy and bliss.

Don’t you feel better already? Such is the sweet release of closure, of
gestalt.

I propose to you that the solutions to life’s puzzles o ered by organized

religions exist not because they provide a reasoned explanation of the
cosmos, but rather because the brains of the folks involved need closure on
this important matter and get it the best way they can by embracing a
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culturally acceptable explanation, no matter how faulty, that brings about

the closure their brains insist upon. This supernatural explanation of the
cosmos has the ancillary quality of allowing those that embrace it to look
in the mirror and see a spectacularly righteous soul looking back at them.
Imagine the comfort that set of circumstance provides to the helpless
sinner.

In actuality, our perceptual apparatus is oblivious to most of the universe,

what perceptual information our limited sense organs provide us is
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analyzed by a brain with severe limitations, a brain that actively distorts
what it processes, a brain that can go haywire from the most minute
disturbances in chemistry at the synaptic level. A brain that can construct
it’s own reality. And most of the body the brain guides is made of microbes
that aren’t really you.

You begin to understand now how your neighbor can think a short
tempered man in the clouds made you and watches over you and
occasionally drops frogs out of the sky on Egyptians. It is much easier to
believe than the truth. Incredibly, the truth is more magni cent, more awe
inspiring, more unfathomable than the myths that have sprung from man’s
imagination.

William of Ockham, an English monk from the 14th century, is perhaps my

biggest hero. William managed to deduce one of the most remarkably
transformational ideas in human history. His idea is called Ockham’s Razor.

This is it: When trying to solve a problem, the best solution is the one that
can solve the problem with the fewest assumptions. This modest idea, that
the simplest solution is the best solution, is the foundation for all science.

As an example, frogs bring dropped from the sky on Egyptians by an angry

God requires a rather large amount of unprovable assumptions wouldn’t
you say? That someone with a vivid imagination might have made the
story up requires little in the way of assumptions.

Science can’t tell all of life’s secrets, some things will remain a mystery
forever, but science can surely tell us what things simply can’t be true.
Thus, the old supernatural explanations that our ancestors relied on to
provide themselves with the comfort and closure our brains demand must
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 fall by the wayside, exposed by the light of day as misguided, unnecessary,
and o en dangerous myths.

As Plato predicted, vast numbers of our brethren continue to prefer a life in

the shadows of the cave, rejecting the brilliant light of Ockham’s Razor.
Let’s not judge them harshly however - they simply can’t help themselves.
Remember, the mind has a mind of it’s own.

Our brain and perceptual apparatus’ limitations make the human

compulsion for trying to understand the meaning of life absolute folly. We
don’t have, and never will have, the mental acuity to gure out why we are
here and what our ultimate purpose is. What we do have, because of a
million years of natural selection, are the mental faculties to hunt and
gather, to build tools to help us hunt and gather and cultivate, we are able
to seek a mate, gather in groups and share stories, and most importantly,
to comfort each other when the inevitable travails of life nd our doorstep.
All the things modern man does, from working in o ces, to inventing
machines, to waging war, to building skyscrapers, to marriage, to sporting
events, to gambling boats, are simply variations on these timeless themes.

We are clever enough to realize life is more satisfying if we embrace a set

of ideals and values. You have learned that I am skeptical of the idea of a
cranky man in the clouds with ten enforced guidelines for living.
Embracing His guidelines require a whole lot of unprovable assumptions,
and suggest an un attering insecurity that we might worship someone
other than Him. But I promised you at the outset that I would give you
lessons to live by, so here is an alternate set of guidelines that I
recommend, based on what I have learned in life. Taking William of
Ockham’s counsel for simplicity to heart, there are only four, instead of ten,
of these guidelines for living.
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 First - Share hugs extravagantly. It doesn’t hurt anyone, it is comforting,
and it might make you smarter.

Second - Acknowledge that the limitations of our brain dictate humility

and a sense of humor.

Third - Use your big, clumsy brain to consider the greater good, to
consider empathy, in all your thoughts and actions.

Finally - Thank the cosmos everyday, regardless of your circumstances,

for the privilege of experiencing the miracle of life.

Do these things and your life will be satisfying and have meaning. You will
have a spring in your step and strangers will comment on the cut of your
jib. Avoid them and you will always feel like something is missing from
your life - and you know how the brain hates un nished business.

We may not always be who we assume we are but, regardless of our

fundamental nature, we have won the most improbable lottery in the
universe. We are the observers of Creation, the luckiest creatures in
Creation, blessed beyond belief.

We are all an integral part of the universe, a part of something majestically

bigger than ourselves, brie y dancing in improvised unison on a
Pantheistic journey. I believe we can see eeting glimpses of our true
nature, and the true nature of the cosmos, when we look beyond the
Shadows cast by Creation, and focus instead on our fellow travelers and
the grand privilege of existence.

Go forth and hug.

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