Journey to the Web of Life (September 23, 2007 by James Montgomery Jackson)
When I reflect on our seven Unitarian Universalist Principles I am always drawn to our seventh: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part: the Web of Life. For me the other six are subtext to the overarching nature of the seventh. The seventh principle was born in our UU democratic processes. A four-year study (similar to the one the UUA and its congregations are currently undertaking) culminated in the proposal of the first six principles in versions close to their current form. At the 1985 General Assembly there was much debate about its adoption. The debate wore on, patience waned and then from the floor the Reverend Paul L’Herrou (former pastor of my Cincinnati church) proposed the seventh principle. Rather quickly some final wordsmithing was accomplished and the seven principles were adopted. That was its birth and this is the story of my journey to the web of life.
When I was around 16 I began to write a five-act play on religion. We read Shakespeare and he wrote five-act plays; I didn’t know any better. As with many things I have started in life, I had only a faint conception of where writing the play would take me, since I had not developed an outline. I just started writing. Turns out five acts was right.
The first act was about the innocence of a child. I was brought up in the Presbyterian Church; my parents were Episcopalian and Presbyterian. My mother was, and is, the religious one. My father much less so in a formal way. In fact, the night before the day of my baptism in the Community Congregational Church in Conesus, New York, both my father and my grandmother were baptized. They had never been. My grandmother's parents were Universalists and found no need for baptism.
This was a loosely autobiographical play. Act 1 was the "Jesus Loves Me" stage. I was taught in an unquestioned fashion in Church that Jesus Loved me, for the Bible told me so.
The second act introduced a questioning mind. The pat Biblical stories started to seem unreal. My left brain approach to life started to analyze the Bible from a true/false standpoint. How could it be possible to collect two, and only two, of every creature in an Arc built in cubits? How are there so many races in the world if we all started from Adam and Eve? Where did the first wives for Adam and Eve’s sons come from?
My poetry from that time reflected a deep searching for the spiritual. Because I was so limited in resources to draw from, my choices were conventional wisdom as taught by Presbyterians, or conventional wisdom as taught by mathematics and science. For a short time I flirted with a Spiritualist church in downtown Rochester, NY. While it provided some different perspectives it was a bit to way out. Now look where I am.
For me the Presbyterian approach to life could be summarized by the message that my life is completely ordained at or even prior to my birth. I had no real choices. God knew ahead of time if I were one who would be saved or condemned. (I grew up in a predominately Italian Catholic neighborhood and knew that as far as they were concerned, I was clearly among the condemned.) Worse than the concept of predestination was the fact that, although God knew and it was already written, I still had to suffer deciding what were the right choices!
I wrote some of the second act and started thinking about the third act. It seemed to me that the character would have little choice than to develop a strong agnosticism. At the time I thought that the only alternative under that banner would be to remove myself from Church attendance. The play writing ended with the semester. The second act was nearly completed and the third act not started. My English teacher said she would be interested to read how the play came out. I suspect she knew, as I didn't, that that play could never be quite complete.
In college I majored in mathematics, although I toyed with the idea of being a physicist. I chose to stay with mathematics in large part because I had had the head of the Physics department for my first two semesters of physics and disliked him greatly. I no longer have any idea why. It was my interest in Physics, however, that eventually brought me back to formalized religion. Although I never had any physics after my first year in college, I continued to have an interest in particle physics. Generally speaking, that meant learning about what was happening at the subatomic level: smaller than an atom. My first exposure was from a book my father purchased from a science book club. In 1967 I read Kenneth W. Ford’s The World of Elementary Particles and wrote a book report for a high school physics assignment. This was exciting stuff. To put it into perspective, all my physics schooling was taught using slide rules.
Fast-forward twenty-two years to 1989: I was married, had two children and management responsibility for about 200 employees. I picked up a book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. This started out with classical physics. By following developments in quantum physics over time, he developed a position where the physics and philosophy were in large part indistinguishable. When you thought you were reading about one, you realized you were really reading about the other. Although I did not realize it at the time, this may have been a pivotal point in returning me to organized (or disorganized as the case may be) religion, and moving me from Act III to Act IV.
The Newtonian world of physics is what we see and feel in every day life. It is gravity, the earth moving about the sun, mirrors and how light bounces off them. Layered over the Newtonian world, born in the 20th century, is the quantum theory of the universe.
For better or worse, regardless of whether it stands up as a theory in the long run, quantum theory has brought many new tools into our lives. Without quantum theory we would not have lasers, for surgery or for star wars; the electron microscope and transistor were invented based on its predictions; so were superconductors, nuclear power whether harnessed for power generation or mass destruction. We can ignore the theory, but we can not ignore the massive changes it has made on our lives. I would like to suggest we do not ignore the theory either.
How can quantum theory be linked to the spiritual, let alone possibly provide any insight? The link is the uncertainty principle and the apparent randomness the theory projects. Physicists had adjusted to probability in physical phenomena long before quantum theory. For example, if something was said to be radioactive and have a half life of a million years, it meant that half of the material would have decayed in a million years and half would not have changed. If we are talking about an atom of, say, radium though, we can not predict at all when, or if, that particular atom will undergo radioactive decay.
Quantum physics is more mysterious than Newtonian physics and very difficult to describe, except in the language of physics, which is mathematics. I don't pretend to understand the language. In words, however, it is as if all the possibilities remain as such until a measurement is made.
For example, if an electron could be at point A, B or C, it is not until we make the measurement that the potential for choice no longer exists. Frost could be down either path, they are both possible until he writes the poem or until we read it. The question, "Does a tree falling in a woods make a sound if no one is there to hear it?" would be answered with "it is still possible" in quantum physics.
There are some truly astonishing predictions about nature that are made by quantum theory and they affect how it is I have come to start to understand the web of life, our interconnected nature. It also affects how I see we make personal changes.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that you can't know exactly where an atom, or an electron or whatever particle you are talking about is, and at the same time know how it is moving. You would think that if an atom really exists, then part of that existence must be that it should be definitely locatable and its momentum measured. According to quantum theory, this is just not so. While this is perplexing, and even seems a bit incredible, I think the same principle applies to my own life as it is in Act IV of the play. I have the ability, if I concentrate very hard and use the most sophisticated tools at my disposal, to either stop and determine exactly where I am, or determine where I am headed. I am unable to do both of those simultaneously. Perhaps I will develop that skill in Act V – Enlightenment, but I’m unlikely to ever find out.
It has taken me a very long time to discover this about myself: If I am honest, I will admit that most of my life has been spent heading somewhere without specifically deciding that was where I wanted to be. Nor have I had much of an understanding of where I was.
My father has a saying that "life is what happens to you while you are making plans". I suggest many are like me and have spent most of life being carried off by currents we did not understand, recognize, try to measure, or decide whether or not to stay with.
While living life this way, I thought myself to be totally under control. I thought I knew exactly where I was and where I was going. All that I in fact knew was the shape of my balance sheet and the size of my paycheck. Marriages, divorces, moving from one job to another, promotions, increases in pay and responsibility. These were clearly progress, momentum heading mainly in a positive direction, with some downdrafts to keep me humble.
Position and motion measurements in physics are only as good as the tools one uses for the measurement. When dealing with myself, the tools are the questions I choose to ask and the honesty of my answers. Financially, I knew my balance sheet position because I asked the right questions and applied the appropriate financial measurement tools to provide results. What I was completely unable to address was my overall status as a human, or my movement toward humanity. I measured, and therefore led, a one-dimensional life.
Well not really, but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone. In fact the spiritual kept raising a bony hand from the grave to which I had consigned it, and requesting a bit of attention. Poetry would flow from my pen from time to time and write itself without my left brain interference. I would find surcease from life's troubles in rambles through the country. I would read things that jumped off of the bookshelves into my hands. Books like The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
When you are continually running in life you neither measure current position or momentum of change. All is in the running. To assess your true strengths and weaknesses, understand what you like and what you do not like, you must stop. Furthermore, you can not simultaneously measure your current position and where you are headed.
In white water rafting if you get dumped overboard, your instructions are to go down stream feet first (rather than leading with your head), remember to breathe and get yourself to an eddy. Once you are in the eddy you have a chance to reconnoiter, figure out where you are and get some assistance. That seemed to be the only way for me to start the process of understanding current position. I needed to find ways to "eddy out" of life's rush from time to time.
I started to think about ways to do that. I tried returning to the Presbyterian Church. I could not choke down the beliefs and finally in 1992 I found my first UU congregation. Then, I stood up in the canoe and was promptly dumped overboard into the rush of unplanned life. As with many others in the 90s, I was laid off in a corporate merger and subsequent downsizing. Fortunately, my network of associates provided leads to a job that resulted in my moving to Cincinnati. There I knew no one. I brought with me a list of the four local UU congregations and after a few months settled in at my new religious home.
Because I had a house to sell in New Jersey, I brought only a few things to Ohio to put in an apartment. My clothes came along, as did one bookcase: filled; a computer, card table to act as all purpose table, four folding chairs and three lamps completed my furniture. I brought enough utensils and pots to cook, a sleeping bag and mat, and lastly my electronic piano and a bicycle for exercise. I bought a small portable radio. No television, no stereo. I walked to and from work, rather than commute 40 miles as had been my previous lifestyle.
For me, eddying out meant meditating most days, and allowing my mind to clear. It meant singing in the choir at St. John's, something I had not done in 25 years. It meant reading more books, since I did not vegetate in front of the TV. It meant just sitting and thinking. In that quiet, pieces started to come together. I began to get an understanding of what was really important to me. Frankly, it was depressing to understand how I spent much of my time in activities that are in conflict with my beliefs. If I had not made the move to Cincinnati and been in a position to vastly simplify some aspects of my life, I am not sure I would have been able to work on my understanding.
Now, I do not want to give the mistaken notion that I have actually developed any answers to my questions. I still have not. Rather, I think I ask better questions of myself. I also ask them in a timelier manner. I have given up my left brain logical approach to addressing life. Rather I take life more as a mystical whole and recognize there are streams and currents I do not know that in some way affect me. I understand that I do not understand. I now realize that the Newtonian world does not convey meaning to all of my senses and the Quantum world leaves me only in awe and amazement.
The fact that there are currents that affect me that I can not feel, no longer seems peculiar to me. I recognize that I accept as "truth" that the Earth rotates around the Sun at an awesome speed. Yet I have no feeling for that speed. I have no sense of whizzing through space. And yet, I believe it to be so.
Let me try to leave you with a sense of the mysticism of physics. Neils Bohr, one of the early pioneers of quantum physics, has said "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it". And so far, all experiments performed uphold quantum theory.
At the far reaches of quantum theory is Bell's theorem. If quantum theory is correct so is Bell's theorem. Without going to any kind of detail, Bell's theorem essentially states that if quantum theory is correct, then local causes do not provide a complete explanation of how things happen. Local here means communicating at up to the speed of light.
For example, I have a switch in my house that will cause a light to turn on or off. If the switch is on and I turn it off, under local causes, the lights will go off sometime after the time it takes for light to travel from my switch to the light bulb. If it happens faster than the speed of light, then local causes doesn't hold. There must be some other explanation. Experiments have demonstrated for certain physical phenomena that local causes does not hold.
If it takes more than local causes to explain cause and effect, then mathematically there are three possible explanations (1) there is no such thing as free will. All is preordained. If this one is the correct explanation, then Calvin was right in the basic idea of predestination, even if the cause of predestination is not so clear. Or (2), every time there is a choice, parallel worlds are created each one reflecting a different outcome. One Frost goes down the right fork; another journeys down the left fork. Never the twain shall meet, and all possible events create separate worlds. Or (3), if there was a big bang, then everything is indeed connected in a web that covers the universe. A change in any part of the universe can affect everything great or small in the rest of the universe, no matter how far away.
Bell’s Theorem: only three possible ways to describe interconnectedness within the world. I vote for the web of life’s connectivity. I am still too vain to accept superdeterminism as required under the first alternative. The concept of parallel worlds, each with similar roots, but splitting into uncountable numbers is okay with me since this version of me only has to worry about this version of the world. Even if I were to know the parallel world conception is real, it would not change my actions, or challenge me to think differently.
More intriguing as a UU is the wonderment that maybe the web stretches in its own way over everything. Here, every action I take does have ripples that extend instantaneously throughout the universe. All other actions in the universe affect me in ways I will never understand and know. And here is the faith component: I believe good begets good and random acts of kindness are not so random in their overall effects. I believe everything I do has effects.
As I consider these ideas in my quiet eddies, I am less and less sure whether I am thinking about physics, Zen or the web of UUs. And it matters not since each path allows me to gaze in awe at the mysteries surrounding us.