- Occam's Razor - Making the fewest assumptions
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This principle was first stated clearly in the middle of the Middle Ages by a monk named Occam. A common way of stating "Occam's Razor" is "Don't multiply assumptions." More precisely, what he said was that when there were alternative explanations about something, believe the one that requires you make the fewest additional assumptions over what you already know.
Thus, if there is a vandal in town that no one has seen, we can believe an ogre is doing the damage or perhaps a group of children no one has yet caught in the act. While the fact that no one has seen the culprits may make a single ogre easier for the superstitious to believe, you don't have to make up a fabulous animal to assume the children while you do to assume the ogre. Thus the children would be the answer chosen by Occam's Razor. Now you might be surprised to catch a strange creature that you call an ogre, but, from the start, that is the least logical decision to make.
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So Occam's Razor says nothing about truth, but about what kinds of assumptions you should make in exploring reality. I normally put it in a different way in teaching my students (because I'm wordier): Believe what you see happen in front of you. If you see something move out of the corner of your eye, it is more than likely a shadow than a thing. That is a simple fact, as our side vision is far more sensitive to slight changes in light and dark and in movement than the main focus of our eye. This is a thing known.
If several people notice a large, horse-sized thing moving near them and turn to look, the ironic reaction is both to deny that they saw anything and to deny they turned to look. I have seen this happen many times. In other words, their beliefs cause them to ignore a real experience. It does not say what was seen was a common illusion caused by what they had been smoking, or a shadow noticed by several of them, but it makes less sense to deny that anything was noticed at all. Thus, we accept what we experience, but make as little of it as will provide a suitable explanation.
- The Pragmatic Principle
Over 100 years ago, Charles Pierce (pronounced "purse") announced the pragmatic principle. It was not a philosophy, but a technique of investigation and thought about things and is really very simple: if a statement does not have any meaningful or practical results, it is a meaningless statement. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" was an excellent example of a meaningless statement (question, in this case) as no matter what the answer, no practical, visible or meaningful answer is possible. For a statement to have meaning, it must have consequences, no matter how impractical.
- Pragmatic Referents
For example, if I say that "Unicorns exist", for this statement to have any meaning, I must have something for the words "Unicorn" and "exist" to refer to -- the "referent." "Exist" means normally to have a separate reality from our imaginations or beliefs, so that is fairly straight-forward. Yet many people will argue that the "unicorn" was really a rhinoceros. However, that denies all early descriptions of unicorns which were presumed to be small, horse-like animals with a single horn growing in the middle of the forehead. Not quite a rhinoceros. So "unicorn" has a referent. This does not say that there really are unicorns, but merely that, should we see one, we would have a pretty good idea what we were looking at.
A good historical example also illustrates the care we must take with understanding the language as used in the time. North African sailors had long talked to Europeans about a strange island off the Eastern coast of Africa on which there were small, hairy, dog-faced men. For a long time, this was laughed at by Europeans until someone noticed lemurs on Madagascar.
Unlike monkeys, a lemur's arms extend out from the body. A monkey's arms extend forward, which relates to how the move on the ground and in trees. To a North African, this was a "man-like" trait and described a "man" as opposed to a "monkey." They were hairy and their faces have muzzles much like dogs.
We run into the same trouble with the Tanakh's (Christian "Old Testament") description of bats as birds. A flying creature that was not an insect, which ate insects and fruit was a bird during that time. Thus describing a bat as a bird was a correct description in the language of the time. Our modern categories have nothing to do with it. In both cases, the referent "dog-faced men" and "bird" was (and is) a true one. There is and was, in the language of the time, something specific these words referred to, it is only our modern terminology that has changed.
"Angels" runs into a bit more trouble. There is no common description of what angels are supposed to look like or do, so it can be accurately said that any statement about "angels" is meaningless. We can overcome this by using a careful description of what we refer to and that gives us a pragmatic reference.
It is also important that our referents be as precise as we can make them. If I assume that an old woman cursed me and my cow soon died, but it can be shown that the cow died three years later, the connection between the curse, "Damn you, I'm starving. God will get you for this." and the death of the cow cannot be assumed to have any relationship. Yet this was the method behind many witch trials used to kill an elderly woman people had gotten tired of. If I can blame my adultery on your "bewitching me" (notice the unnecessary extra assumption -- Occam's Razor) instead of my inability to control my own impulses, I might get the young woman killed as a witch and keep my wife. This was another common theme in the so-called "Burning Times" during which so many were killed over nothing.
Now, back to the Pragmatic Principle. As you might have noticed, this also does not tell us what is true and what is false, but merely gives us a basis on which to judge whether someone is talking about something that is pure nonsense or is worth listening to.
Modern "New Medicine" is filled with large words and convoluted language, but when looked at closely, it is seen that it is talking about nothing at all. Words change meaning sometimes in the same sentence and neologisms (words made up on the spot) that refer to nothing at all are used to "prove" their points. The New Medicine is a meaningless philosophy. For those who do not know, the "New Medicine" argues that humans have no value other than economic, so "older" patients should be left untreated and resources spent only on the "younger." As there is no agreement on what "older" and "younger" mean, the referent is meaningless.
In addition (back to Occam's Razor), common daily experience lets us see that it is clearly true that people are more highly valued for things other than economic earnings potential, the referent to humans as economic production machines refers to a human who simply is incomplete and non-existent. Thus the conclusion that this high-sounding philosophy is meaningless.
At this point, I would hope we are all on the same page. We believe what we experience, make no unnecessary assumptions about that experience and try to be careful that our words refer to things that are real or potentially real without inventing all sorts of additional assumptions. In other words, we take our real,daily experience as superior to whatever we may have been taught is true, and the changes it makes are profound. It is the very basis of the spiritual journey. And don't worry -- we're going somewhere with this.
- Scientific Statements
Karl Popper, in the 1910's finally clearly spelled out a description of what a scientific statement is: it is any statement that is, at least potentially, capable of being falsified. If you cannot disprove it no matter what, the statement is not scientific. It may be true, but it is not scientific. Let's go back to the unicorn to see why.
If I say "unicorns exist" yet never find one, I have made a statement that cannot possibly be falsified. For the simple fact is that looking for millions of years and never finding a unicorn still cannot disprove the statement that "unicorns exist." On the otherhand, if I say "unicorns do not exist", I am making a scientific statement because finding even one unicorn will disprove the statement. In other words, it is possible to disprove a scientific statement but not a non-scientific statement. Notice once again, this has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statement, but is merely a description of the kind of statement it is.
- Existence
Whether a thing exists or not has nothing to do with science or philosophy. Something that we discover exists is real and is part of what we use as the material about which we make scientific, pragmatic and logical statements. Thus, at one time, statements about gorillas were useless because, not having seen one, there was little one could say about them. "Give me an example to talk about and we can talk about it. Give me nothing and I have nothing to say." This is the fact of existence.
Whether you believe in unicorns or not, until one is available to study, there is nothing that can be said about it. Period. End of story. Find one and we have a lot to say. So keep existence out of some of these discussions. You must acknowledge things that are seen by many people and held for at least some study (so you really know what you're talking about) and cannot deny those things (although some fools try). So that thing moving out of the corner of your eye is real, even if you may describe it in different ways. Accept your experience but don't get beyond it and you are well on your way to spiritual wisdom.
- Our Sensing Instruments
So far we've gotten this. Keep our assumptions as few and as believable as possible. Believe what we see happen in front of us. Make sure that what we say can, at least potentially, be disproved. But where is spirit. It is found in the most common place imaginable -- all around us. This is a little harder to make sense of, but leads us into the worlds of spirit, the order of the universe and the world of the Gods without having to make any unnecessary assumptions. So let's start with a few illustrations (don't take them too literally).
Let us suppose that you and all humans are born blind and are issued white canes at birth. You get pretty good at telling what is around you, what it is and how even it is made by the taps, echoes and other signals you get from your non-visual senses and the cane. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot see the building across the street. Your cane and your other senses enable you to be aware of anything you might have to deal with in a critical way, but in nothing else. There is no "veil" between you and the building across the street, it's just that you don't have to deal with it yet, so you are not wasting your precious energy trying to find it because there is no need to. (Remember, no sight equals no cars or horses.)
A closer example might be the older electronic microscopes (they're much smaller now). They used to be three or more stories high. At the top was the energy source, at the bottom was the sample you were trying to get a close look at, and in the middle, where you were, was a huge table with machines with dials, switches and other controls so you could see what you wanted to see. Only when everything was adjusted correctly could you see. Just because you did not see, simply meant that your sensing instrument (the electron microscope) was out of adjustment or the sample was in the wrong place or there was something wrong with your power source. You cannot see what your sensing instrument is not set up to see.
Worse, distort the sensor and you can be in serious trouble, misinterpreting things, clinging to the comfortable and otherwise showing signs of Alzheimer's, schizophrenia or other diseases of the sensing equipment. We are very dependent on it working well enough to let us deal with things we may actually have to deal with and not atoms or galaxies. And for such things, it is very good. It just doesn't show us the Gods very well, or the strange world they live in. It isn't designed to. A few people I have met who have their brains set to pick up rarely experienced "signals" all show signs of severe difficulty dealing with the real world because they are experiencing something different from those around them.
Nevertheless, we may hear static on our radio and eventually learn to know what that static means. This is essentially what happens to good psychics. They learn to "push" the static through different parts of the brain and finally learn what sense they can of the signals. It is not a precise process (no matter how many times "Madame Rita" may claim to be 100% effective), and every single psychic seems to do it differently, but this is the way it is done. It is also something that can be taught, which demonstrates an existing referent. I can read your mind, but very poorly. I can tell you your income changes with great precision, which is a particular talent of mine. There are things I am very good at and things I am really mediocre at and, if I am doing a reading for you, I'll tell you which is which. I am interpreting static in my own way.
My experience in this is what leads me to warn students that what they "see" across the blind-man's street will be fuzzy and imprecise. It will be like catching echoes off the buildings, but not really seeing them. The sensing instrument, the brain, just isn't designed to handle that.
Yet we know we are infiltrated, passed through and affected by radiation all the time. Heat passes through us, as do radio waves, microwaves and hundreds of other kinds of radiation. Some people demonstrate an ability to sense certain radio waves through their brains or their skull. We are surrounded by a world to which our sensing mechanism is not attuned and which we may ignore. We can get killed by bacteria, which are too small to do anything with (and thus outside our conscious sensing range). Viruses, which are even smaller pieces of DNA or RNA (inheritance molecules, only) can do the same. And even floating pieces of proteins, called prions can kill us. We are helped by the Sun, and, believe it or not, by having a certain amount of radioactive material around us at all times.
The point is that there is a lot more going on -- things we really know about -- that we ignore in favor of the belief that we have to see it for it to be real. Our experience is that this is a false belief, yet we persist in believing it. This is one of the heritages of orthodoxy -- the notion that there is a "right belief" and all else is false.
If we apply this information to the universe, we discover that we know a lot more than we believe we know. I will demonstrate:
- The One: Source and Goal of all things
Modern neo-paganism is filled with all sorts of beliefs: that there is but one God and Goddess, that really they are the same, that there are five elements: fire, air, water and earth with a fifth, spirit; that the pentagram is a symbol of those elements and so on. What I would like to show is that these beliefs fly in the face of things we know and we actually know a lot more than we think we do.
It should be obvious to even an idiot that there is but one observable universe. There may be more, but we do not and apparently cannot know of any more. And this universe is incredibly difficult to make sense of. To illustrate, I will deal with smaller and smaller particles and the strange ways they behave. It's not really complicated, just confusing.
In 1887, Michaelson and Morley published the results of an experiment regarding the change (or lack of it) in time of light moving indifferent directions. It caused a bit of confusion.
Let's listen to a train blowing its whistle and coming closer to you, then passing and moving on. As it comes closer each vibration of sound is compressed and reaches you faster so the sound appears high (in light, this would be red). As it passes you, each vibration of sound is produced by a train that is farther away and the sound reaches you more slowly, so it appears low (in light, this would be blue). The same holds for water being pushed toward you by a boat approaching you and then pushing away from you as it passes the waves appear to come faster as the boat approaches and slower as it passes. This is true of everything except light.
Before Michaelson and Morley, we had the invention of the photoelectric cell. This unique device (which makes automatic toilet flushing machines and door openers work), measures precisely the amount of light (or heat, which is very red light) reaching it. It recorded something strange. The amount of light is always whole numbers. It's like a quantity (say a bushel) of apples. Each apple might be considered a "quantum" of the quantity, that is, a single one. Light acts that way. Light reaches a photoelectric cell in units of one, two, three and so on and never as say, one-half or two and a third.
This means that light acts, to a photoelectric cell as a group of single quanta called "photons." But you can never catch up with a photon. The faster you go, the light appears to move away from you at the same speed and catch up with you at the same speed. It doesn't act like a quanta of anything. That's what Michaelson and Morley's experiment showed.
- THE TWO SLIT EXPERIMENT
Imagine if you will, a baseball pitcher whose job it is to pitch a ball through a hole in a fence. Depending on how it is thrown, the balls will all line up with the hole with a few outlying balls which grazed the fence. Now imagine someone opens another hole in the fence but has the pitcher continue to throw the ball through the first hole. Depending on his abilities, there would be no change. That's not true with light.
If you have an iron grill with two slits in it and both are closed, a photographic film behind the grill will show no photons got through. That's expected. Now open one slit. The light will act just like the baseballs with one slit open. That's expected. Now suppose you open the second slit. The world changes. Now the light spreads into patterns of light and dark, just like it was a wave of water flowing through two slits (easy to duplicate in any stream). In other words, it acts like a wave.
"Observation" in science does not mean someone notices something. What it means is that there is some kind of interaction between two things. In some situations, it makes the results come out right if the light were treated as photons. In others it makes sense if it's treated like waves. In fact, it has been discovered that everything acts like that. There is no "logical" reason for it. That's just the reality of the universe.
As a side issue, it should be noted that we really understand nothing about our "visible" universe, let alone the "invisible" one. We are merely used to it and so we accept the most outlandish things without a thought as to why they happen as they do. The same holds true for scientists and light: sometimes it's a wave. Sometimes it's a particle. We can tell in advance what it's likely to be, but can never be certain if the situation is unusual.
As scientists continued to study smaller and smaller objects, they discovered other odd things. There are two kinds of sub-atomic objects in the world: leptons and bosons (sub-atomic objects are anything smaller than an atom). The difference is that leptons are made up of themselves (whatever that is) and bosons are made up of mysterious things called quarks.
Quark hunting is like snipe hunting. You will never catch one. Quarks exist as halves or thirds (one third or two thirds) but always appear in collections of whole numbers. Why? Who knows. They never appear by themselves.
We have recently improved our understanding further. It appears as the universe grew from nothing it eventually reached the size of something somewhat smaller than a quark and immediately split into circles of strings, each vibrating at its own rate. The entire universe consists of such strings. Each "carries" something about nature. A fun one is whatever one might be responsible for matter. If it ever attaches to something, a strange thing happens whatever it attaches to immediately slows down to a speed slower than light. Without it, things move at the speed of light well, sort of.
If you split a photon (you get two whole photons), you can rotate them by the particular process known as polarization, which makes polarized lenses possible. If you rotate one to the right and then measure the other one, you will find it has now rotated an equal amount to the left. Bell discovered that it made no difference how far apart they were when one was rotated, the second one immediately rotated. Thus, although nothing can move faster than light, this change can (no, you cannot use it to send signals faster than light).
What's going on? A suspicion is that everything is based on a single simple principle that immediately gets complex when various bits (the strings?) interact with one another. But of course, that could be completely wrong.
We have a singing, vibrating universe, all acting according to the same laws, which makes it a unity. Or some would have us believe the "laws of nature"are evolving, which implies a fixed way of changing which again says we have a unity. The universe may expand until it dies away at which point it may all start up again, or it may crush itself to pieces and start up again or something completely unimagined might happen, which still changes nothing.
The orthodox have the world beginning a little over five thousand years ago (we have fire-hardened spears older than that). Pagans have never had a fixed belief. Science is carefully done personal experience. Whatever science shows is true is most likely, and we're beginning to get close. We are all of us but bits and pieces of the same thing. I and you are only apparently separate, kept that way by the way in which time and space operates. We ARE a pantheism a one single thing. But our being separate is not in conflict with this. Polytheism is no more in conflict with pantheism than my existence is incompatible with yours. This is true and obvious no matter how much one may believe that only one is possible in the real world. Like waves and particles of light, pantheism and polytheism go together.
There is a LOT that can be said about the One, the undivided or mysteriously unified Universe, and this is only the small physical part of it. As far as pagans are concerned (if they care), this is just as good to go as a take out dinner. The more we get into it, the more unified and convoluted it gets at the same time, but the convolution is required for the divergence we see and the unity preserves the relationship between things.
Note a couple of things. No gender exists within this framework. There is no "couple" consisting of a God and a Goddess (although something even more complicated may be at work look up "m-brane" theory to see what I mean). There is nothing resembling what we call consciousness or love or caring or anything of the sort. They come in, but in an even stranger manner. We have no complements, no "consorts," no "automatic conflicts" or anything of the sort. These are all old ideas that are now way out of date or are being pushed by the orthodox because it makes them feel happy.
- THE OLD AND THE NEW
In ancient times, the origin of things was seen in conflicts between fire and water, earth and water, fire and ice, and sometimes three things. We had gotten up to five when the orthodox took over and have been stuck with them ever since. We have solid things earth; liquid things water; airy things air; and heat fire; plus something which seems to make up the essence of those things. As I see it, this was the early intuition that could have led to modern science thousands of years ago but was stopped by the orthodox.
In the Orient, it is more common to think of things as motions: there are movements within metal; movements without wood; movements upward fire; movements downward water; and movements along a surface earth. It is obvious that the Eastern and Western words are unrelated to one another, but are merely different ways of viewing a complex world.
What do we have now? The strings move in somewhere from eleven to 20 or more "dimensions" and supply more "features" than we can imagine. Instead of five "Western" elements, we have a huge number more. Instead of five "Eastern" elements, we have an unknowable number more. There is nothing sacred about five, nor anything real about it, either.
What about the pentagram? This is an observation. If you mark the spot at which Venus rises on the horizon before the sun on a circular zodiac and keep marking for eight years, you will have drawn a pentagram. If you do it at the spot at which Venus is last seen after the sun sets, you will have an "inverse" pentagram. Thus the Olympic games were held every full Venus cycle eight years. Like many Gods, the planets were frequently associated with particular stars or planets, so we have Astarte, Aphrodite and Venus symbolized by the pentagram. It is the eternal and recurring feminine in nature.
Why does this bother some pagans? The influence of orthodoxy is far stronger than we're conscious of. Orthodoxy tells us there is a fixed answer, and while a pagan may have a favorite theory (some of the best ancient arguments were based on these favorite theories), paganism as a whole is not wedded to any explanation. Whatever is true is true, no matter what an orthodox blind man may say. One remaining piece of work is to free paganism from the curse of orthodoxy, a task that may take some time.
- The Gods
Having taken care of the One, the unified universe, at least physically (remember that love, consciousness and other common traits of living things will be related), we have to consider what the Gods are, and, here again, we have more answers than we expect.
Here we have what is called "collective" or "common" experience. The Gods are encountered hundreds if not thousands of times a day all over the world. They are the couple that shows up in a desert to help us out only to vanish in moments on a flat horizon. They are the strange woman who shows up and says a single sentence to us that solves a problem for us and then vanishes and no one else has seen.
In studying ancient tales and talking with modern primitive peoples, we discover that the existence of the Gods in an area was not always taken for granted. People might move into a new area and then have to find out (often the hard way) if there were any Gods who looked on the area or something in the area as "belonging" to them and then discover by trial and error just how to keep the God happy. As a result, our ancestors were often afraid of the Gods and frequently looked for an area that either had no Gods "in charge" or had one they were used to.
Now what I am calling "Gods" are those spiritual beings who can, but usually do not, interfere with our lives. Some like people. Some hate people. Most apparently could care less. This comes from the encounters people have had with them. Some are quite mischievous and some are even friendly. It is a matter of existence. Most people have encountered Gods in one way or another even though it may take quite a bit of questioning to show them that they have. And, remember, existence is not scientific, but the stuff of discussion.
My personal best (current) guess is that most of the spirits (because they're "across the street") which are called Gods are also the Jinns (some of whom are not friendly), Gods, Angels, bodhisattvas, Saints, and other spiritual beings encountered by people from time to time. They seem to have the following traits: they can be many places at once, but not everywhere at once. They know a lot and learn almost instantaneously compared to humans, but don't know everything. They are very powerful, but even they cannot go against the "flow" of the Universe.
They occupy no normal physical space, but are more like "organized" energy patterns like a radio wave with more consistency and can project images of "themselves" at many places within this space than a human (who projects merely one image in one place). In other words, they are not human, nor do they always understand humans.
Some used to be human, apparently (Chango being a fairly recent example), while others appear never to have been human.
Note that all the above are based on my experience, conversations with others, reading and trying to make sense of what I have experienced. I suspect a lot of it is completely wrong, yet, like this world, I am trying to get used to it.
The "purpose" of most of the Gods seems to be to teach us, guide us and even trick us or slap us into learning. Other spiritual beings seem as self-willed as any creature, but the Gods (those we call "Gods") seem to be leaders, guides, Masters and teachers for our spiritual progress. To claim they do not exist is for the blind man to claim the building across the street doesn't exist, that gorillas do not exist, for the common experience of mankind to be meaningless.
Rev. Robert Black Eagle of the Ft Worth Desert Silver Family
