ISISOSIRIS SIRISOSIS
5 |
HAPPY |
66 |
30 |
3 |
5 |
BIRTH |
57 |
30 |
3 |
3 |
DAY |
30 |
12 |
3 |
13 |
HAPPYBIRTHDAY |
153 |
72 |
9 |
LIGHT AND LIFE
Lars Olof Bjorn 1976
Page197
BY
WRITING
THE
26
LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN
A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE
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KEEPER OF GENESIS
A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN
LEGACY OF MANKIND
Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996
Page 254
"...Is there in any sense an
interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that
all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have.
That common language is science and
mathematics.
The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
G Hancock
1995
Page 287
"What one would look for, therefore,
would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible
to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand
or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far
between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan
may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal
language of mathematics."
"Of all the other stupendous
inventions,' Galileo once remarked,
what sublimity of mind must have been
his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any
other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking
with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet
born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no
greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little
signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions
of men.3"
WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK
FOR THEREFORE
WOULD
BE
A
UNIVERSAL
LANGUAGE THE KIND
OF LANGUAGE
COMPREHENSIBLE TO
ANY TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED SOCIETY IN ANY EPOCH
SUCH LANGUAGES ARE
FEW AND FAR BETWEEN BUT MATHEMATICS IS ONE OF THEM
"ALL IS NUMBER"
PYTHAGORAS
I
THE
NINTH
HIEROGLYPHIC
THE NEW
APOCRYPHA
A Guide to Strange Sciences and
Occult beliefs
John Sladek 1974
Page 275
Numerology
Gematria
was the Greek and Hebrew
system of assigning a number to each letter
of the alphabet, then adding up words to
find hidden correspondences. Thus in the Kabbalah,
Achad (unity) equalled Ahebah (love), because:
A Ch D
1 + 8 + 4 = 13
A H B H
1 + 5 + 2 + 5 = 13
Gematria has since deteriorated
into a form of clumsy fortune telling called numerology,
which 'can help you learn about the real you, hidden
in the numbers you've used all your life', meaning the numbers'
1 to 9.
A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
The God of the Mystics
Page 250
THE
MESSAGE OF CREATION
IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS
GIVEN
A
NUMERICAL
VALUE
BY COMBINING
THE LETTERS WITH
THE
SACRED NUMBERS
REARRANGING
THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS
THE
MYSTIC
WEANED THE MIND
AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
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1 |
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
Page 417
"I preach mathematics."
"I tell them: that if they
will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find
in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh. Lawyer Paravant
was a bad case; he took my advice, he is now busy squaring the circle,
and gets great relief. But most of them are too witless and lazy, God
help them!"
Page 628
"Next they tired of ordinary photography,
the fashion veered to flash-lights and colour photography after Lumiere.
They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring
eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses
of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed
diaposi-tive, showing him with a copper-:coloured visage, a brassy butter-
cup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poison- ously
green meadow, with Frau Stohr on one side of him in
a sky-blue blouse, and Fraulein Levi on the other in
a blood-red sweater.
Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest
at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Every- body pasted,
haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carrie on correspondence
with special vendors foreign and do- mestic, with societies and private
owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specimens, even by people
whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof.
Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly
on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of
all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody's mouth was stained brown,
and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate
delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites
to Milka-nut, Chocolat Ii la creme d' amandes, Marquis-napolitains,
and gold-besprinkled
cats' tongues.
Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago
carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical
teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof
world, and even the last thoughts and en-ergies of the dying.
Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure
consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several
engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn free-hand without lifting the
pen - or, as a further refine-ment, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer
Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally
succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry;
but he was the only one.
"We know on the authority
of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics, we
know too the disciplinary grounds of / Page 629 / his devotion
to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the
edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof
had more generalIy applied themselves' to the same study, the necessity
for certain recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The
chief of these dealt with the passage across the bal-conies, at the
end of the white glass partitions that did not quite ,reach to the balustrade.
These were now extended by means of little doors, which. the bathing-master
had it in charge to lock every night - and did so, to a general accompaniment
of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey
had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the ve-randah
roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not
been introduced on Lawyer Paravant's account. He had
long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the
Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to cliallenge
his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled
conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed
goddess, of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens
had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night
he devoted all his brains, all the sporting pertinacity which once -
before the beginning of this prolonged and enforced holiday, that even
threatened at times to end in total quiescence - had gone to the convicting
of crim-inals. It was - the squaring of the circle.
In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself
that the argtiments on which science based the impossi-bility of the
proposition were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed
him, Paravant, from the world of the living, and brought him here, having
selected him to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental
into the realms of the earthly and exact. By day and
night he measured and calcu-lated; covered enormous quantities of paper
with figures, letters, computations, algebraic symbols; his face, which
was the face of an apparently sound and vigorous man, wore the morose
and vision-ary stare of a monomaniac; while his conversation, with consistent
and fearful monotony, dealt with the proportional number pi, that abandoned
fraction which the debased genius of a mathematician named Zachariah
Dase one day figured out to the two-hundredth decimal place - purely
for the joy of it and as a work of superero-gation, for if he had figured
it out to the two-thousandth, the result, as compared with unattainable
mathematical exactitude, would have been practically unchanged.
Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant like the plague;
for whomever he succeeded in button-holing, that unhappy wretch had
to listen to a torrent of red-hot / Page629 / oratory, as the lawyer
strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in
the defilement of the. mind of man by the
hope-less irrationality of this mystic relation. The fruitlessness of
for ever multiplying the diameter of the circle
by pi to find its circum-ference, of multiplying the square of the radius
by pi to find its area,. caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited
by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated,
since Archimedes day; whether the solution
were not, in actual fact, a child's affair for simpleness. Why could
not one rectify the cir-cumference, why
could one not also convert every straight line
into a circle? Lawyer Paravant felt himself,
at times, near a revela-tion. He was often seen, late in the evening,
sitting at his table in . the forsaken and dimly lighted dining-room,
with a piece of String laid out before him, which he carefully arranged
in circular shape, and then suddenly, with
an abrupt gesture, stretched out straight; only to fall thereafter,
leaning on his elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat
sometimes lent him a helping hand at the sorry sport, and generally
encouraged him in his freak: And the sufferer turned to Hans
Castorp too, again and yet again, with his cherished grievance,
finding in the young man much friendly understanding and a sympathetic
interest in the mystery of the circle.
He illustrated his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact
drawing, executed with vast pains, showing a circle
be-tween two polygons, one inscribed,
the other circumscribed, each polygon
being of an infinite number of tiny sides, up to the last human possibility
of approximation to the circle. The remainder the surrounding curvature,
which in some ethereous, immaterial way refused to be rationalized by
means of the calculable bound-ing lines, that, Lawyer Paravant said,
with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp,
for all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi
than his interlocutor. He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant
not to over-heat himself with his cat's-cradle;
spoke of the series of dimensionless points of
which the circle consisted,. from Its beginnig - which did not exist
-to its end- which did not exist either; and of the overpowering melancholy
that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence
of direction at any given moment - spoke with such tranquil resig-nation
as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect."
THE NEW APOCRYPHA
A Guide to Strange Sciences and
Occult beliefs
John Sladek 1974
Page 275
Circle-squarers
and Golden Rectangles
"The
ancient problem was: Given a circle, construct a square of the same
area, using only a straightedge and compasses. As mathematicians
now can prove, it's impossible. "
,That hasn't stopped amateur circle-squarers from trying.
For years they've laboured over it, mistakenly believing that
(a) some government offers a huge
reward for the solution; /Page 276 /
(b) it is a major mathematical
problem: and
(c) the answer is really quite
simple, like a circle drawn inside a square.
One seventeenth-century man squared
the circle in a way that would, he said convert all Jews and
infidels. Then Henry Sullamar squared it by using the
number of the beast of Revelations, 666"
Page 184
"1 " That some people
are capable of detecting complex patterns in apparently random data..."
One has to be particularly careful in using statistics
of this type, and in trying to relate them to reality. For example,
the odds against an American's having a social security
number whose digits are all the same, e.g., 777-77-7777, are 1,000 million
to 1, yet several Americans have them."
5 |
PYGMY |
|
|
|
P |
16 |
7 |
|
Y |
25 |
7 |
|
G |
7 |
7 |
|
M |
13 |
4 |
|
Y |
25 |
7 |
5 |
PYGMY |
86 |
32 |
|
Add to Reduce |
8+6 |
3+2 |
|
First Total |
14 |
3+2 |
|
Reduce to Deducee |
1+4 |
- |
|
Essence of Number |
5 |
5 |
EGYPT
E+T = 7 7 = E+T
G =7 7 = G
Y = 7 7 = Y
P = 7 7 = P
EGYPT = 73 73 = EGYPT
EGYPT = 28 28 = EGYPT
EGYPT = 1 1 = EGYPT
A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
The God of the Mystics
THE
BOOK OF CREATION
"THERE IS NO
ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY
THE ACCOUNT
IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE
AS
THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE
ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED
THE MESSAGE OF CREATION
IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS
GIVEN A NUMERICAL
VALUE BY COMBINING
THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS
REARRANGING
THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS
THE MYSTIC WEANED
THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS"
A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
The God of the Mystics
Page 250
"A quality of holiness, a
quality of power, a fearful quality, a dreaded quality, a quality
of awe, a quality of dismay, a quality of terror Such is the quality
of the garment of the Creator,
Adonai, God of Israel, who, crowned, comes to the thone
of his glory; His garment is engraved inside and outside and entirely
covered with YHWH, YHWH. "No
eyes are able to behold it, neither
the eyes
of flesh and blood, nor the eyes
of his servants.6"
4 |
YHWH |
64 |
28 |
1 |
6 |
ISRAEL |
64 |
28 |
1 |
4 |
ZION |
64 |
28 |
1 |
8 |
NOIZ |
64 |
28 |
1 |
4 |
ZERO |
64 |
28 |
1 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
9 |
4 |
EYES |
54 |
18 |
9 |
"If we cannot imagine what Yahweh's
cloak is like, how can we think to behold God
himself?
Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish
mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer
yezirah (The Book of Creation).
There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically;
the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world
by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language
has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer
clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value;
by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in
endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal
connotations of words. The purpose
was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words or concepts
could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience
of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic
signficance, created a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics
did not want a straightforward dialogue with
a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming
holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.
Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad
is said to have had a very similar experience when he made his Night
Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel
on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham,
Moses, Jesus and a crowd of other prophets who confirmed Muhammad
in his own prophetic mission. Then Gabriel
and Muhammad began their perilous ascent
up a ladder (mira}) through the seven heavens,
each one of which was presided over by a prophet. Finally he reached
the divine sphere. The early sources / Page
251 / reverently keep silent about the final vision,
to which these verses in the Koran
are believed to refer.
And indeed he saw him a second time by the lote-tree
of the furthest limit, near unto the
garden of promise, with the lote-tree veiled in a veil of nameless
splendour . . .
[And withal] the eye did
not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he see some of the most profound
of his Sustainer's symbols7
Muhammad did not see God
himself but only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism
the lote-tree marks the limit of rational
thought. There is no way in which the vision of
God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language. The
ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human spirit,
which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning.
The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent
to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language
of Plotinus:
Our minds were lifted up by an
ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed
beyond all corporate objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon
and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal
reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works and entered into our
own minds.8
Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek
imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic
images of the seven heavens.
This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God 'out
there' but a mental ascent to a reality within.
This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says
'our minds were lifted up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients
of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal
being'. Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance
experiences of Shamans 'from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego', as Joseph
Campbell puts it.9
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly
perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is
finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no
longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe
anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, / Page 252 /
his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human
gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who specu- lated
about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his
final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine
presence. 10 Once the mystic
has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the
point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further.
Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their
flight, stressing its transcend-ence of space, time and ordinary knowledge.
They 'talked and panted' for God,
and 'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration
of heart'.11 Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence
has a beginning, a middle
and an end:
Therefore we said: If
to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of
earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut
out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself
by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the
imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory
is silent - for if anyone could hear then this is what all of them would
be saying, 'We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides
for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5)
. . . That is how it was when
at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy
attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things.12
This was no naturalistic vision of a
personal God: they had not, so to speak,
'heard his voice' through any of the normal methods of naturalistic
communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through
nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they,
had 'touched' the Reality which lay beyond all these things.
'.1
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent'
seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret
it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have
had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the
climactic insight a 'vision of
God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience
of the One; Buddhists would
call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is
something that human beings who have a certain spiritual
talent have always wanted to do. The mystical
/ Page 253 / experience of God has
certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective
experience that involves an interior journey, not of a perception of
an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making
part of the mind - often called the imagination - rather than through
the more cerebral logical faculty
Finally, it is something that the mystic
creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental
exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon dtem
unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileleged human beings were
sometimes able to see God in this life:: he cited Moses and St Paul
as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 acknowledged master of
the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He
was not an intellectual and, a had a more pragmatic view of spirituality.
He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity
of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human
beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the
cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Nyssa and
Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that
God was difficult of access. There was no way we could talk about him
familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at
all about God.We could make no predictions about his behaviour on the
basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only is there truth in what
we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully
know anything about him."14
Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach
to God. The joy and peace of contemplation attained for a few moments
after a mighty struggle before tasting God's sweetness, the
soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element:
It cannot
fix its mind's eyes on that which it has with h the within itself, because
it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants
and struggles and endeeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered
with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.15
Page 254
God could only be reached after 'a great effort
of the mind', which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with
the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion;
as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured'
by its desire for God, it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'.16
Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century;
clearly the West continued to find God
a strain.
In the East, the Christian experience of God
was characterised by light rather
than darkness. The Greeks
evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found world-wide.
This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic
or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally
eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God.
As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song
of Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle
in the quest to those who search.' The aim of the contemplative was
to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these
could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire 'a certain sense
of presence' that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human
experiences of a relationship with another person.17 This attitude
was called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since
words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in
the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques
of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only
then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything
that it could conceive.
How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks
loved that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned to the
old distinction between God's essence (ousia) and his 'energies'
(energeia,) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience
something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself,
it was the 'energies' not the 'essence' that we experienced in prayer.
They could be described as the 'rays' of divinity, which illuminated
the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from
God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested
a God who was utterly
silent and unknowable. As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies
that we know our God; we do not assent that we come near to / Page 255
/ the essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence
remains unapproachable.'18 In the Old
Testament, this divine 'energy' had
been called God's 'glory' (kavod).ln
the New Testament, it had shone forth in the person
of Christ on Mount Tabor,
when his humanity had been transfigured
by the divine rays. Now they penetrated the
whole created universe and deified those who had been saved.
As the word 'energeiai," implied,
this was an active and dynamic conception of God. Where
the West would see God making himself
known by means of his eternal attributes - his goodness,
justice, love and omnipotence
- the Greeks saw God making himself accessible
in a ceaseless activity in which he was somehow present.
When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in
some sense communing with God direcdy, even though the unknow-able reality
itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast
Evagrius
Pontus (d.399) insisted that the
'knowledge' that
we had of God in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or
images but was an immediate experience of the divine which transcended
these. It was important, therefore, for hesychasts to strip their
souls naked: 'When you are praying,' he told his monks, 'do
not shape within yourself any image of the deity and do not let your
mind be shaped by the impress of any form.' Instead, they should 'approach
the Immaterial in an immaterial manner'.19
Evagrius was proposing a sort of Christian Yoga. This was not a process
of reflection; indeed, 'prayer means the shedding of thought'.20
It was rather an intuitive apprehension of God. It will result in a
sense of the unity of all things, a freedom from distraction and multiplicity,
and the loss of ego - an experience that is clearly akin to that produced
by contemplatives in non-theistic religions like Buddhism.
By systematically weaning their minds away from their 'passions' - such
as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them to the ego - hesychasts
would transcend themselves and become
deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor,
transfigured by the divine 'energies'.
Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification
was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously
here below. He taught a method of concen-tration that involved breathing:
as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: / Page 256 / Jesus
Christ, Son of God'; they should exhale to the words:
'have mercy upon us'. Later hesychasts refined this exercise:
contemplates should sit with head and shoulders bowed, looking towards
their heart or navel. They should breathe ever more slowly in order
to direct their attention inwards, to certain psychological foci like
the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that must be used carefully;
it could only be safely practised under an expert director. Gradually,
like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she
could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged
the mind would fade away and they would feel totally one with their
prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that
had been practised for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw
prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine
and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body.
Maximus the Confessor had insisted: 'The whole man should become
God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man,
soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.'"
The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and
clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine.
As we have seen, the Greeks saw this 'deification'
as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration
in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired
by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realisation
of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the
Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an 'epiphany', a manifestation
of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did
not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude
to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured.
Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was
Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.
Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other
Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the
icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational:
it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In
Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to re-present anything in
this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable / Page
257 / mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual fonn
to inspire the non-mystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains,
'Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one
another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective
imagination. . . ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural
had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person's
imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had
the validity of a realised dream.'22
Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information,
ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria)
which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.
They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God,
however, that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a
passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning
to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted
Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity but if the artist claimed
that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism,
the heretical belief that Jesus's human and divine natures were quite
distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether but icons were
defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656-747) of the monastery
of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759-826), of the monastery
of Studios near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were
wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation.
the material world and the human body had both been given
a divine dimension and an artist could
paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting
an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God
par excellence. God could not be contained in words or summed
up in human concepts but he could be 'described' by the pen
of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.
The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the
iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that
God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of
Denys's apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for
the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons
were 'expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves
the / Page 258 / ineffability of a mystery that transcends being.
Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God
in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology,23
Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church
and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held
them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious
paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music,
the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion
and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and
concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that
all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth -century Byzantium,
Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography.
They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic
discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates
of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of
God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians.
This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the small
monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the 'New
Theologian'. This new type of theology made no attempt to define God.
This, Symeon insisted, would be presump-tuous; indeed, to speak about
God in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is
comprehensible'.24 Instead of arguing
rationally about God's nature, the 'new' theology relied on direct,
personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual
terms, as though he were just an-other being about which we could form
ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious
experience of the God who had revealed himselfin the transfigured humanity
of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to
contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the
blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually
he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed
into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as
we know it, of course; it was beyond 'form, image or representation
and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer'25
But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only;
the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a / Page 259
/ union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without
having to wait until the next life.
For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead
of attempting the impossible task of describing 'ineffable matters by
words alone',z6 he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced
as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon
during one of his visions: 'Yes, I am God, the one who became man
for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall
make you God'27 God was not an
external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal
enlighten-ment. Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about God did not lead
him to break with the theological insights of the past. The 'new' theology
was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his
Hymns of Divine Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine
of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:
O Light that none can name, for it is
altogether nameless.
O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things. . .
How do you mingle yourself with grass?
How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible,
do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?28
It was useless to define the God who affected
this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet
as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating
its integrity, 'God' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had
developed ideas about God - such as the Trinity and the Incarnation
- that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience
of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.
Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily con-cerned with
the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest
companions had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly
developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth
and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside
the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and
the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment
of the austerity of the early ummah. They / Page 260 attempted
to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing
in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed
to have been favoured by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known
as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as
Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:
The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of
the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily
and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified
by inner purification to find God at any price.29
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great
Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of Hasan
al-Basri (d.728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one
of the fathers of Sufism.
The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply
from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith but Sufis by
and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly-guided
religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet
of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah,
the profession of faith, to say: 'There is no god but aI-Lah
and Jesus is his Messenger',
which was technically correct but intentionally provoca- tive. Where
the Koran speaks of a God of justice
who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d.801)
spoke of love, in a way
that Christians would have found familiar:
Two ways I love
Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought.
'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, I wis.30
This is close to her famous prayer: 'O
God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, bum me in Hell; and if I worship
Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship
Thee for Thine own sake, / Page 261/ withhold not Thine Everlasting
Beauty!'31 The love of God became the
hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian
ascetics of the Near East but Muhammad remained a crucial influence.
They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of
Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were
also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm
of their own experience of God.
They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics
all over the world to achieve an alternative state of conscious-ness.
Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the
Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The
effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behaviour which seemed
bizarre and unrestrained and such mystics were known as 'drunken' Sufis.
The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d.87.) who, like Rabiah,
approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please
al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own
needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective
disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalised
conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt
that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that
he understood as 'self' seemed to have melted away:
I gazed upon [al-Lah]
with the eye of truth and said to Him: 'Who is this?' He said, 'This
is neither I nor other than I. There is no God
but I.' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood . .
.
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying:
'How fares it with me with Thee?' He said, 'I am through Thee;
there is no god but Thou.'32
Yet again, this was no external deity
'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered
to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction
of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality.
This state of annihilation (rana) became central to the Sufi
ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way
that could have been construed as blasphemous, / Page
262 / had it not been recognised by so many other Muslims as an authentic
experience of that islam commanded by the Koran.
Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant
spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d.910), who mapped out the ground
plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al- Bistami's extremism
could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must
be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self.
Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfil
them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine
presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation
and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced
'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state
that a Greek Christian would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole
Sufi quest as a return to man's primordial state on the day of creation:
he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was
also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation
and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic
experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which
Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute
this to a non-theistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work
under the expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself,
al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and
achieve that original sense of God's immediate presence that he had
experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam's loins.
It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper
self that was also the self he or she was meant to be. God was not a
separate, external reality and judge but somehow one with the ground
of each person's being:
Now I have known, O
Lord, What lies within my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored.
So in a manner we
United are, and One; / Page
263 /
Yet otherwise
disunion
is our estate eternally.
Though from my gaze profound
Deep awe hath hid Thy Face,
In wondrous and ecstatic Grace
I feel Thee touch my inmost ground.33
The emphasis
on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing
together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine
presence in personal integration.
Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be
easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice
of a pir, and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the
ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant
when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those
of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At
this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement and the
ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd's famous
pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder)
threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his
mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of
the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned
by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus.
In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: 'I
am the Truth!' According to the Gospels, Jesus
had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the
Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned
the Christian belief in God's incarnation
in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising
that Muslims were horrified by al- Hallaj's ecstatic
cry. Al-Haqq
(the Truth) was one of the names of God and it was idolatry
for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj
had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close
that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems:
I am He whom I
love, and He whom I love is I:
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.34
Page 264
It was a daring expression of that annihilation
of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called fana.
AI-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly
death.
When he was
brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails, he turned to
the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the words: 'And these Thy
servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in
desire to win Thy favours, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon
them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which Thou hast
revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if
Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them, I should
not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou
doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou willest.35
Al-Hallaj's cry
ana aL-Haqq: 'I am the Truth!' shows that the God of
the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective.
Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise
in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated.
Because there is no reality but al-Lah - as the Shahadah maintains -
all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught
that God had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate
himself as in a mirror.36
That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship
the first man. The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that
one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would
argue. A mystic who had regained his original vision of God had rediscovered
the divine image within himself, as it had appeared on the day of creation.
The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by the Sufis shows
God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely that he seems to have become
incarnate in each une of his servants: 'When
I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which
he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks.'
The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between
the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions
of God and revelation. For the mystic the revelation
is an event that happens within his own soul, while
for more conventional people like some of the ulema it is an
event / Page 265 / that is firmly fixed in the
past. We have seen, however, that during the eleventh century, Muslim
philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al- Ghazzali himself had found that
objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and had turned towards
mysticism. AI-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment
and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality.
During the twelfth century the Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi
and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi linked Islamic Falsafah
indissolubly with mysticism and made the God experienced by the Sufis
nonnative in many parts of the Islamic empire. Like al-Hallaj, however,
Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191,
for reasons that remain obscure. He had made it his life's work
to link what he called the original 'Oriental' religion with Islam,
thus completing the project that Ibn Sina had proposed. He
claimed that all the sages of the ancient world had preached a single
doctrine.
Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom
Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Idris
in the Koran or Enoch
in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through
Plato and Pythagoras
and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian
Magi. Since Aristotle,
however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral
philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another
until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj.
This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve
the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous
as al-Farabi but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in
the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from
God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found
in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition.
Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes,
mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people.
Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the
faith of others.
Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master
of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of
light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that
issues from the / Page 266 / East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient,
therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light
and energy. In Suhrawardi's Oriental faith, therefore, human beings
dimly remem-ber their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow,
and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that
his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to
purify the eternal . wisdom within them by means of the imagination.
Suhrawardi's immensely complex system was an attempt to link all
the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth
must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequendy his philosophy
linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary
system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf
had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology,
Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical
origins of the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination
(Hiqmat al-lshraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of
physics and natural science but this was only a prelude to the mystical
part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the
wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did
believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in
the perception of total reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled
in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the
world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi
believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole (qutb)
without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if
he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi's Ishraqi mysticism is stilI practised
in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because
it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone
by Ismailis and Sufis.
The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi's system was
dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover
the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy
and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied
its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in
scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must
be educated and informed by the critical intelligence. / Page 266
/ / Page 267 / As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy
was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God.
It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable
yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident,
it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element
that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged
to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves.
In Suhrawardi's emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corres-ponded
to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It
generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each
light, recognising its dependency on the Light of Lights, developed
a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded
to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament.
There was a similar combina-tion of light and darkness within each one
of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit
(also known, as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light
of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of
Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of
the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this
here below.
Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He
had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but
could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him.
Then he had a vision of the Imam,
the qutb, the healer of souls:
Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness;
there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness
of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was . , . He came
towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my
alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity, And then I began to complain
to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge.
'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved,'37
The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very
different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had
more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: /
Page 268 / "mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality
into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without,
illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no
imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would
enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal,
the world of pure images.
Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world
by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane,
physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the
heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions
had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in Suhra-wardi's scheme
became the alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that
existed between our world and God's. This could not be perceived by
means of reason nor by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative
imagination which enabled us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes,
just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true
spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili
perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning
of the earthly events or Ibn Sina's angelology, which we discussed in
the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam
as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was
examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are
seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There
has recendy been much interest in this phenomenon. lung's conception
of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine
this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars,
such as the Rumanian- American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade,
have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds
of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.38
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of Scripture
- such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real as the phenomena
we experience in this world but not in the same way. They could not
be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative
faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of
earthly phenomena. This experience was / Page269 / nonsensical to anybody
who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment
could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises
had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions
corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet
Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during
the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine
world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish
Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam
al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration.
The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the
Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm
of the mystic.
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian
suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination.
Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious
faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability
to think of what is not.39 Human beings
are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that
is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely
possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements
in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of
God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent
reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire
men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of
God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is
by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative
mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation
of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even
though the realities to which they refer remain elusive. A symbol can
be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses
or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself.
Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal
or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of
the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute
their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are
those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the
human / Page 270 / condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily
beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative
artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together
- science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion
- he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new
meaning and significance in life."
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
45 |
9 |
6 |
ISHRAQ |
72 |
36 |
9 |
5 |
IRAQI |
54 |
36 |
9 |
4 |
IRAQ |
45 |
27 |
9 |
4 |
IMAM |
36 |
18 |
9 |
8 |
DAMASCUS |
81 |
18 |
9 |
THE
KINDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN
YOU
THAT THAT THAT
HOLYWHOLLYHOLY
ISISISIS
WITHIN YOU WITHIN
YOUR OWN MINDS
I
DAILY MIRROR
Jonathan Cainer
Thursday May 27, 2004
SPIRITUAL HEALING
Rupert Sheldrake
Page 54
"Last month I wrote about after death contacts,
when people feel the presence of someone who has passed on, it turns
out that many readers have had these expe-riences, mostly with dearly
loved spouses, parents or children..."
"Very few of these visits were frightening. most
were comforting or reassuring. However we try to explain them, they
certainly help the bereaved to come to terms with their loss.
Suprisingly some dead pets seem to pay visits too. Janine
said: "Early one early morning, after my cat died, she was standing
on my chest as she used to do..."
DAILY MIRROR
Thursday May 27, 2004
Geoffrey Lakeman
Page 35
SLABBY CAT
Pet's tombstone is 900-yr
old carving
"A huge stone used to mark a beloved pet cats
grave has been identified as a rare 11th-century carving. Amateur
historian and potter Chris Brewchorne stumbled on the eight stone
slab in the garden of a house near his gallery.
Expert Prof Rosemary Cramp says the carving of St Peter
is one of the most important medieval pieces found in Britain.
Mr. Brewchorne, 44, of Dowlish Wake, Somerset, said:
"You do not find
top-quality 11th century stonework like this on top of a dead cat.
It is remarkable. I would
think it is worth many thousands. You
can't buy this sort of thing at a car boot sale."
The owner's late husband was a stonemason who bought
the carving, now thought to come from a frieze in a Saxon church,
among a job lot.
He realised it was too good to use so for nine
years it has marked Winkle's grave."
JUST CATS
Fernand Mery 1957
Page 24
"In the year 999,
in the tenth day of the Fifth Moon,
at the Imperial Palace of Kyoto, a cat gave
birth for the first time recorded here, and to five little kittens."
IN THE YEAR
999
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
THE CHESHIRE CAT
Lewis Carroll Circa 1836
Page 349 (number omitted)
"...The Cat only
grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still
it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it
ought to be treated with respect.
"Cheshire -Puss,' she
began rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would
like the name: however it only grinned a little wider.'Come, it's
pleased so far, 'thought Alice, and she went on. 'Would you tell me,
please, which way I ought to go from here?'
That depends a good deal
on where you want to get to, said the cat,' said the Cat.
I dont care where-'said Alice.
Then it doesn't matter which
way you go,' said the Cat..."
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
Sir Arthur Eddington 1932
Page
99
To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is
an incidental characteristic-like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To
the physicist it is an indispensible character-istic, It would be
going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental
to the grin.
Physics is concerned with interrelatedness of
cats and grins.
In this case the
"cat without a grin"
and the "grin without a cat"
are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies"
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
THE CHESHIRE CAT
Lewis Carroll
Page 351
"All right,' said the Cat; and this time it
vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and
ending with the grin, which waited some time after the rest of it
had gone.
'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought
Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever
saw in all my life!..."
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
Mike
Ernest A.Wallace Budge
Page 383 / 4
"(The cat who assisted in keeping the main
gate of the British Museum from February, 1909, to January 1929)"
"...Early in the spring of 1908 the Keeper
of the mum-/ mies in the British Museum was going down the steps of
his official residence, when he saw Black Jack coming towards the
steps..."
"...The Keeper of the Mummied Cats took care
to feed him during the lean years of the war..."
SUPERNATURE
Lyall Watson
Page 96
RESONANCE
"If a tuning fork designed to produce a frequency of 256 cycles
a second (that is, middle C), is sounded anywhere near another fork
with the same natural frequency, the second one will begin to vibrate
gendy in sympathy with the first, even without being touched. Energy
has been transferred from one to the other. An insect without ears
would not be able to hear the sound of the first fork, but if it were
sitting on the second one, it would very soon become aware of the
vibration - and thus of events taking place beyond its normal sphere.
This is what Supernature is all about.
An event in the cosmos sets up the vibration of electromag-netic waves,
which travel across space and create an equiva-lent vibration by resonance
with some part of earth that has the same natural frequency. Life
may respond to these stimuli direcdy, but more often it reacts by
resonating in sympathy with part of its immediate environment. A flashing
light on the same frequency as a brain rhythu} produces resonance
and alarming effects, even though the flicker may be too fast for
us to see. A very weak electrical or magnetic field becomes noticeable
because it resonates on the same frequency as the life field of the
organism reacting to it. In this :way, very subtle stimuli, too small
to make any impression on the normal senses, are magnified and brought
to our notice. The super-natural becomes part of natural history.
In most musical instruments, sound is produced by strings, stretched
membranes, rods, or reeds, and an important part of all of them is
a structure that increases the area of contact these vibrators have
with the air. A guitar string has a sound- ing box and a clarinet
reed has a pipe. The shape of the / Page 97 / structure detennines
the way in which the air will resonate and the quality of the sound.
Shape and function are very closely related, not only for the sender
of the signal but also for the receiver. If the listener is to hear
the sounid properly, he cannot sit in a room of the wrong shape
or wear a football helmet.
Ultimately, sensitivity to sound depends on vibrations being set up
in the fluid of the inner ear, but the sound first has to be collected
by the external ear. In man, the passage between the eardrum and the
outside world is funnel-shaped, with the walls making an angle of
about 30 degrees to the drum. This is exactly the angle best suited
to magnification of sounds in the critical range. The most popular,
and therefore presumably the most effective, old-fashioned ear trumpet
is one that also has this angle of 30 degrees. This could be just
coincidence, but I
doubt it.
Sound, of course, is a vibration
that can be conducted only through an elastic medium; it cannot travel
through a vacuum. Electromagnetic waves
do travel through free space, and we know far less about the factors
governing their resonance. There is, however, one quite extraordinary
piece of evidence which suggests that shape could be important in
receiving even cosmic stimuli. It comes from those favorites of mystics
throughout the ages-the pyramids of Egypt.
The pyramids on the west bank of the Nile
were built by the pharaohs
as royal tombs and date from about 3000 B.c. The most celebrated are
those at Giza, built during the fourth dynasty, of which the largest
is the one that housed the pharaoh Khufu,
better known as Cheops;
This is now called the Great Pyramid.
Some years ago it was visited by a Frenchman named Bovis,
who took refuge from the midday sun in the pharoah's chamber, which
is situated in the center rof the pyramid, exactly one" third
of the way up from the base. He found it unusually humid there, but
what really surprised / Page 98 / him
were the garbage cans that contained, among the usual tourist litter,
the bodies of a cat and some small desert
ani-mals that had wandered into the pyramid and died there. .
Despite the humidity, none of them had decayed but just dried out
like mummies. He began to wonder whether the pharaohs had really been
so carefully embalmed by their sub-jects after all, or whether there
was something about the pyramids themselves that preserved bodies
.in a mummified condition.
Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed
it, like the original, with the base lines facing precisely north-south
and east-west. Inside the model, one third of the way up, he put a
dead cat. It became mummified, and he concluded that the pyramid promoted
rapid dehy-dration. Reports of this discovery attracted the attention
of Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, who repeated the
experiment with several dead animals and concluded, "There is
a relation between the shape of the space inside the pyramid and the
physical, chemical, and biological processes going on inside that
space. By using suitable forms and shapes, we should be able to make
processes occur faster or delay them."
(233) Drbal remembered an old superstition which claimed that a razor
left in the light of the moon became blunted. He tried putting one
under his model pyramid, but nothing happened, so he went on shaving
with it until it was blunt, and then put it back in the pyramid. It
became sharp again. Getting a good razor blade is still difficult
in many Eastern European countries, so Drbal tried to patent and market
his discovery. The patent office in Prague refused to consider it
until their chief scientist had tried building a model himself and
found that it worked. So the Cheops Pyramid Razor Blade Sharpener
was registered in 1959 under the Czechoslovakian Republic Patent No.
913�4, and a factory soon began to turn out / Page 99
miniature cardboard pyramids. Today they make them in styrofoam.
The edge of a razor blade has a crystal
structure. Crystals are almost alive,
in that they grow by reproducing themselves. When
a blade becomes blunted, some of the crystals on the edge, where they
are only one layer thick, are rubbed off. Theoretically, there is
no reason why they should not replace themselves in time. We know
that sunlight has a
field that points in all directions, but sunlight reflected from an
object such as the moon is partly polarized, vibrating mostly in one
direction. This could conceivably destroy the edge of a blade left
under the moon, but it does not explain the reverse action of the
pyramid. We can only guess that the Great
Pyramid and its little imitations act as lenses that focus
energy or as resonators that collect energy, which encourages crystal
growth. The pyramid shape itself is very much like that of
a crystal of magnetite, so perhaps it
builds up a magnetic field. I do not know the answer, but I do know
that it works.
JUST CATS
Fernand Mery
FROM LEGEND TO HISTORY
"By
studying Egyptian mummified cats Cuvier thought it
possible to prove that the species is immutable. On the other hand,
Darwin, by taking a cat to Paraguay, proved how'little
change is needed to alter an animal to the point of giving it a new
form.
Can this be the answer, then? An abrupt mutation? The sudden appearance
of an arbitrary form of dwarfish-ness in a species of African panther
affected by some little-known phenomena? A mutation which, becoming
hereditary, gave rise to the cat, to be gradually tamed and domesticated
by the Nubians and the Egyptians?
This theory would be tempting indeed but for one detail: the difference
in the pupillary opening, round in all other felines and oval in the
cat. However, we may
note, that famous "pupillary crack ," is not altogether
special to the one genus: it is also found in the civet-cat,
a pleasant creature which is readily domesticated-like a cat!
EGYPT, PARADISE
OF CATS
What do
we know of ancient Egypt, a shadowy country beginning at Karnak in
the midst of the temples of Thebes and reaching its apotheosis in
the sombre tombs of the Valley of Kings? The gods, with human
bodies and / Page 18 / animal heads, expressed by
their strange form the limita-tions of a world to which the minds
of mere men had no access.
Egypt is the logical background in which to search for a trace, a
detail, that may help the researcher in his delv-ings into the history
of the civilized cat.
I have visited the remains of Ancient Egypt. The most vivid
reproduction of cats are on the tomb of the sculptors Apuki and Nebamun
at Thebes and date from the reign of Amenophis
III; also in the temple of Medineth-Abou,
on the bas-reliefs dedicated to hunting. In these the cats are represented
as taller, larger and with longer lines than our most highly-bred
Siameses of today, and more often than not are on leads for hunting
the aquatic marsh-birds for their masters.
Were they brown or black? Uniformly coloured or spotted? Ringed or
striped, these cats, so highly prized that their masters went into
mourning when one of them died? Indeed, the killing of these
cats was punishable by death. They were so much admired that
from Mem-phis to Thebes
the most sought-after women, the most successful courtesans, were
those whose eyes had the colour and shape of a cat's,
and whose figure and bearing had a cat's suppleness.
We cannot, of course, be certain about the simple facts of the appearance
of these cats.
There exists at the British Museum a painting from Thebes,
in which the cat is represented as a somewhat irregularly striped
tiger; but there have also come down to us pictures of cats on papyrus,
where the animal, coloured evenly, is just slightly marked with streaks
half- way up the paws and a third of the way along the tail. The cats
of Bubastis, of Hahbe Antar, of Arthemidos, have shed no further light
on this problem.
Scarcely sixty years ago, a discovery was made in Central Egypt, at
Beni Hassan, of an actual cemetery where 300,000
embalmed and mummified cats had been sleeping for thousands of years.
Page 19
No archaeologist was on the spot to prevent
the inevit-able vandalism; stupidly the graveyard was destroyed- an
irreparable loss. It would have been enough to have kept just a random
hundred of these cats for us to know now what the
colouring and texture of the hair of these first cats were. By taking
an average, we should have gained an approximate idea of their size.
By a wild combination of circumstances, this mass of cats
was thrown into the hold of a ship departing for England-later to
be sold as manure! Professor W. M. Conway, in the English Illustrated
Magazine of the time, wrote down all the details of this unpardonable
crime. Twenty tons of Egyptian cats in an admirable state of preservation
were transported to Liverpool, and almost all sold to farmers at �4
per ton, to be mixed into the English soil as though they were mere
dung.
Undoubtedly there are in existence some damaged or half-destroyed
mummies, the scientific value of which is not realized. It can only
be hoped that one day some interested specialist may be able to buy
and study them, so throwing some light on the question. Before the
1914 war, Dr. Ehrenburg and an anatomist, de Blainville, tried in
vain. After performing autopsies on several mummified cats
and analysing the kind of cloths in which they were bound, etc., they
concluded that these were Abyssinian cats. At Cairo we found only
one tomb, an empty sarco- phagus of stone: that of a cat commemorated
by its master, the chief of the Order of Architects, who had his own
name engraved in his companion's epitaph.
When one considers that an entire city, situated between the branches
of the Nile off the present-'day Benha-el-Asl on the railway line
from Ismailia to Cairo, was once dedi-cated to cats, one is surprised
to learn that today cats are rare in Egypt. Certainly one sees memorials
of them everywhere, but often confused with the various effigies of
other, indeterminate felines.
Is it a cat or a lion, that overwhelming
statue of Sekmet with the splendid body of a woman, which leaps out
from / Page 20 / its obscure background? For counterpart it has Bastet,
a milder but equally disturbing figure. The one is terrify-ing, the
other on the surface reassuring; but the dividing line is not quite
clear between the savage beast and the charming little cat.
Elsewhere we find the same confusion between goats and rams, jackals
and wolves, wolves and dogs even. And as Ancient Egypt has left no
document comparable to the Bible or the Koran, there is nowhere to
trace exact infor-mation or references.
Only those statues which are completely, in both head and body, of
cats can help to give a picture of the Ancient Egyptian domestic cat.
All proportions being similar, this type of the statues resembles
that most friendly and tameable feline: the cheetah. Aesthetically
only the cheetah-if it had retractile claws, that is-is the counter-
part of these statues. The lion or the tiger, with their larger, flatter
muzzles, never ha~ that loose frame, those paws with long and solid
toes, that comparatively narrow chest between very straight shoulders,
and that serpentine head.
But Ancient Egypt was only yesterday, comparatively
speaking. What after all are two or three thousand years in the evolution
of a species? The domestic cat seems a comparative newcomer, when
one considers that the dog has been man's companion since our first
ancestors so many hundreds of thousands of years ago.
All we know is that from his first appearance in Ancient Egypt
the cat became a veritable godhead, the sacred host in all his glory.
A male cat was held to be the ally of the sun and the scourge of Apopi,
serpent of night. A female was beloved of the common people
and regarded as a Lady of Heaven.
This astonishing ascendancy lasted for nearly a thousand years,
up to the period of decadence, the collapse of the dynasty of the
Pharaohs, and the birth of the Christian
religion. The new Faith cast a dazzling enlightenment, but
Page 21 / consigned the cat to perpetual darkness and the most tragic
of destinies.
IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S
CAT
John Gribbin
1984
PROLOGUE
NOTHING IS REAL
Page 1
"The
cat of our title is a mythical beast, but Schrodinger was a real person.
Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian scientist instrumental in
the development, in the mid-1920s, of the equations of a branch of
science now known as quantum mechanics.
Branch of science is hardly the correct expres-sion, however,
because quantum mechanics
provides the fundamental underpinning of all of modem science. The
equations describe the behavior of very small objects-gen-erally speaking,
the size of atoms or smaller-and they provide the only understanding
of the world of the very small. Without these equations, physicists
would be unable to design working nuclear power stations (or bombs),
build lasers, or explain how the sun stays hot. Without quantum mechanics,
chemistry would still be in the Dark Ages, and there would be no science
of molecular biology-no under- standing of DNA, no genetic engineering-at
all.
Quantum theory represents the greatest
achievement of science, far more significant and of far more direct,
prac- / Page 2 / tical use than relativity theory. And yet, it makes
some very strange predictions. The world of quantum mechanics is so
strange, indeed, that even Albert Einstein found it in-comprehensible,
and refused to accept all of the implica-tions of the theory developed
by Schrodinger and his colleagues. Einstein, and many other scientists,
found it more comfortable to believe that the equations of quantum
mechanics simply represent some sort of mathematical trick, which
just happens to give a reasonable working guide to the behavior of
atomic and subatomic particles but that conceals some deeper truth
that corresponds more closely to our everyday sense of reality.
For what quantum mechanics says is that nothing is real and that
we cannot say anything about what things are doing when we are not
looking at them. Schrodinger's mythical cat was invoked to make the
differences between the quantum world and the everyday world clear.
In the world of quantum mechanics, the laws of phys ics that are
familiar from the everyday world no longer work. Instead, events are
governed by probabilities. A radio-active atom, for example, might
decay, emitting an electron, say; or it might not. It is possible
to set up an experiment in such a way that there is a precise fifty-fifty
chance that one of the atoms in a lump of radioactive material will
decay in a certain time and that a detector will register the decay
if it does happen. Schrodinger, as upset as Einstein about the implications
of quantum theory, tried to show the absurdity of
those implications by imagining such an experiment set up in a closed
room, or box, which also contains a live
cat and a phial of poison, so arranged that if the
radioactive decay does occur then the poison container is broken and
the cat dies. In the everyday world, there is a fifty-fifty chance
that the cat will be killed, and without looking in- side the box
we can say, quite happily, that the cat inside is either dead or alive.
But now we encounter the strangeness of the quantum world. According
to the theory, neither of the two possibilities open to the
radioactive material, and therefore to the cat, has any reality unless
it is observed. The atomic decay has neither happened nor not
happened, the cat has neither been killed nor not killed, until we
look / Page 3 / inside the box to see what has
happened. Theorists who accept the pure version of quantum
mechanics say that the cat exists in some indeterminate state, neither
dead nor alive, until an observer looks into the box to see how things
are getting on. Nothing is real unless it is observed.
The idea was anathema to Einstein, among others. "God
does not play dice," he said, referring to the theory
that the world is governed by the accumulation of outcomes of essentially
random "choices" of possibilities at the quan-tum level.
As for the unreality of the state of Schrodinger's cat, he dismissed
it, assuming that there must be some un-derlying "clockwork"
that makes for a genuine fundamen- tal reality of things. He spent
many years attempting to devise tests that might reveal this underlying
reality at work but died before it became possible actually to carry
out such a test. Perhaps it is as well that he did not live to see
the outcome of one line of reasoning that he initiated.
In the summer of 1982, at the University of Paris- South, in France,
a team headed by Alain Aspect completed a series of experiments designed
to detect the underlying reality below the unreal world of the quantum.
The under-lying reality-the fundamental clockwork-had been given the
name "hidden variables," and the experiment con-cerned the
behavior of two photons or particles of light fly- ing off in opposite
directions from a source. It is described fully in Chapter Ten, but
in essence it can be thought of as a test of reality. The two photons
from the same source can be observed by two detectors, which measure
a property called polarization. According to quantum theory, this
prop-erty does not exist until it is measured. According to the hidden-variable
idea, each photon has a "real" polarization from
the moment it is created. Because the two photons are emitted together,
their polarizations are correlated with one another. But the nature
of the correlation that is actually measured is different according
to the two views of reality.
The results of this crucial experiment are unam- biguous. The kind
of correlation predicted by hidden-variable theory is not found; the
kind of correlation pre- dicted by quantum mechanics is found, and
what is more, again as predicted by quantum theory, the measurement
/ Page 4 / that is made on one photon has an instantaneous effect
on the nature of the other photon. Some interaction links the two
inextricably, even though they are flying apart at the speed of light,
and relativity theory tells us that no signal can travel faster than
light. The experiments prove that there is no underlying reality to
the world. "Reality," in the everyday sense, is
not a good way to think about the be-havior of the fundamental particles
that make up the uni-verse; yet at the same time those particles seem
to be inseparably connected into some indivisible whole, each aware
of what happens to the others.
The search for Schrodinger's cat
was the search for quantum reality.. From this brief
outline, it may seem that the search has proved fruitless, since there
is no reality in the everyday sense of the word. But this is not quite
the end of the story, and the search
for Schrodinger's cat may lead us to a new understanding of reality
that transcends, and yet includes, the conventional interpretation
of quantum mechanics. The trail is a long one, however,
and it begins with a scientist who would probably have been even more
horrified than Einstein if he could have seen the answers we
now have to the questions he puzzled over. Isaac New-ton,
studying the nature of light three centuries ago, could have had no
conception that he was already on the trail leading to Schrodinger's
cat."
4 |
REAL |
36 |
18 |
9 |
3 |
ITY |
54 |
18 |
9 |
7 |
REALITY |
90 |
36 |
9 |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
PHYSICS |
99 |
36 |
9 |
14 |
ALBERT
+ EINSTEIN |
153 |
63 |
9 |
13 |
ATOMIC
+ NUMBERS |
153 |
54 |
9 |
12 |
PRIME
+ NUMBERS |
153 |
63 |
9 |
14 |
PHARAOH
+ PYRAMID |
153 |
81 |
9 |
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY AND
THREE
IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S
CAT
John Gribbin 1984
Page 3
"The idea was anathema to Einstein,
among others. "God does not
play dice," he said, referring to the theory
that the world is governed by the accumulation of outcomes of essentially
random "choices" of possibilities at the quan-tum level.
As for the unreality of the state of Schrodinger's cat, he dismissed
it, assuming that there must be some un-derlying "clockwork"
that makes for a genuine fundamen-tal reality of things"
THE COSMIC CODE
Heinz Pagels
1982
The Road to Quantum Reality
Page165
"That we may not always know reality is not because
it is so far from us but because we are so close to it."
We feel excited by his remarks, though the old uneasi-ness has not
left us. Yet listening to him is certainly better than that marketplace.
After a long silence our old friend gives us his final words. "What
quantum reality is, is the reality
marketplace. The house of a God that
plays dice has many rooms. We can live in only one
room at a time, but it is the whole house that is reality."He
gets up and leaves us. Only the smoke from his pipe remains, and
then, like the smile of the Cheshire cat,
that too disappears."
DOES GOD PLAY DICE
THE NEW MATHEMATICS OF CHAOS
Ian Stewart 1989
Page 1
PROLOGUE
CLOCKWORK OR CHAOS
?
"YOU BELIEVE
IN A GOD WHO PLAYS DICE, AND I IN COMPLETE LAW AND ORDER."
Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born