Quigley’s Tibetan Buddhist Theory of Relativity (Nothing is Relative)

“The Inside is Out and the Outside is in . . .” The Beatles White Album, taken from The Gospel of Thomas ("When the Inside is like the Outside . . . the Kingdom is at hand.")

I was shocked this morning when reading an LA Times story on brain neurons in which the author brought up the name Alfred Wallace. The author, Robert Lee Hotz, was discussing creationist doctrines & evolutionary biologists, saying the latter are hard presses to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. “Even Alfred Wallace, the 19^th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.” Before WW I the two names, Darwin and Wallace, were spoken together. Then Wallace was abandoned.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who like to do Suduku puzzles and people who prefer to watch Lost. Current research by a British scientist has it that on the first day a baby is born a boy will generally look at a mobile hanging over his head while a girl will look at a face; the one direction is a technical puzzle (Suduku doers), the other is empathy (Lost watchers).

Likewise all things in the world have either one or two directions. The Creationists have had a difficult time explaining themselves because their agenda is political rather than spiritual. Likewise with the Darwinists. Darwin’s argument at the Oxford seminar was always in opposition to the narrow Christian view, but by putting itself in opposition to another view, the “science” became political, and it is impossible to do science as a creative art with a political agenda.

Now these are the core Creation myths of red and blue America. One sees it on car bumpers – the Creationists have the sign of the fish pointing to the left, (the sign of the Inner Life; the “negative’ arrow sign in math), the Darwinists have their little fish with feet and pointing to the right, (the sign of the Outer Life; the “positive” sign for the arrow in math). The Christ was marked by the Fish in early Christianity, as the Star over Bethlehem to which the Three Zoroastrian astrologers followed began the Age of Pisces, marked by two fish n opposition, beginning the first of 12 Platonic Months and a new 24,000-year Sun Cycle. These are the two Fighting Fish of Astrology, no?, like Holmes and Morriarty, going over the waterfall.

Lately we have been getting déjà vu all over again (Paul McCartney making sure the Indians don’t whup up on the baby seals in Canada, boursie students in Paris demonstrating in the streets against the government before they go to work for the government), so I thought I would bring it up. Yesterday, the NYTs had an essay on Freud (To paraphrase Bette Midler with apologies, “When its 3 am in LA, its still 1970 in New York.” They hold their breath long, no?). Largely Freud has been left behind by the world (but the English Dept., alors, she holds on to things in the attic). Freud, like Darwin, starts with a negative template, which the culture already shares, and builds on that. But recognize that the shared base is a cultural one; an agreed-upon paradigm of vague cultural understandings and misunderstandings, some of them intentional; a religion. Freud and Newton bring a mechanistic view. It can be seen as coming from John Calvin, who brought to the north of Europe a vision of a deterministic God, and the West took it from there – Newton was the logical and natural next step. The journal of science in Newton’s name 20-some years ago made a public apology for all the pseudo-science which evolved (evolved is the right word) in his name; blurred visions which inculcated ideas of Freud and Marx and perhaps Keynes. Scholarship at the time published several volumes about Newton’s writings on the Green Man, a million words on the vegetation spirit of the earth (like the big swirlly deal in Princess Mononoke and on the first season of Lost.) But apparently they didn’t get that memo in the English Dept. In New York they are at wits end. They are terrified of blogs. They hate LA. They know not J.J. Abrams nor Markos Moulitsas. They are terrified that a new generation will replace them and they are right. There is no place to go but back.

The mechanistic view was sent forth in Newton’s name; Freud sent it forward in his own name. Both had a Double. Newton’s was Gottfried Leibniz, who discovered calculus in the same month as Newton in Germany. Leibnitz was, however, at the time reading the I Ching, which had been sent to him by a Jesuit from China. Leibnitz said the I Ching was the same as calculus. Yet the culture went forward on Newton’s view, recreated and somewhat misunderstood as a mechanistic path. Freud had a double as well, C.J. Jung, who’s principles drew a vision of the psyche similar to a Tibetan Mandala. Related to this, he brought in the phrases, Introvert and Extrovert. He was dispised and excluded from the discussion as it didn’t fit the negative template. Likewise Darwin had a Double, forgotten today, Alfred Wallace. Wallace, like Jung and Leibnitz, provided an Inner Vision rather than the Outer movement of Darwin and the ascending mechanistic view. So the Three Steppingstones of the expanding contemporary world, Newton, Darwin, Freud, each had a Double; Leibnitz, Wallace, Jung. The first group were technical Extroverts (Suduku doers). The second group were empathetic Introverts (Lost watchers).

Good to know, as Leibnitz, Wallace and Jung have all but been forgotten on the Journey Outward.

We have been driving outward since 1492 and we are still trying to drive. I have on my other blog, Quigley in Exile, varied essays about dreams of clairvoyant dreamers I talk to (one in particular) who dreams of being in the sky and returning to earth. This is just the opposite of prominent dreams of 50 years back when people dreamed of going into space (UFO dreams). I call this a “Returning to Earth” myth and it is the prominent myth of our times. The 50s were marked by Outgoing Myths; movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds and popular periodicals like Analog science fiction magazine. Today, the Survivor tv series and Lost mark the age. They are Incoming Myths; Returning to Earth Myths.

Ask a scientist about Alfred Russel Wallace. No one remembers him. It is good that he is beginning to be remembered. His Creation myth is similar to the Hindu, which started with a vision of natural selection similar to the Darwin/Wallace picture, then moves Inward. Newton/Darwin/Freud are Outgoing Philosophers. Wallace/Leibnitz/Jung are Incoming philosophers.

We as a people are losing interest in going into space. It is becoming post-seasonal and old fashioned, like the railroads. We can no longer “keep going West,” either. We have been West and then found the East. Now the East is coming back to the West. Our Outward Journey is ending because we have no where to do. We can only go Inward.

American visionary Walt Whitman, greatest of men, poets and Children of God, predicted this. Our journeys to China and the Spice Island were the same as our journey to space, just ahead, he wrote in 1871 in the poem Passage to India. But soon the Outward Journey would end.

Our space journey did not begin with Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk. It began with Columbus. These are Whitman’s sentiments: “Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?/ The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,/ The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,/The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,/ The lands to be welded together.” The passage would be to the sun and the moon and all of the stars and to Siruis and Jupiter. Then: “After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d)/ After the great captiains and engineers have accoomplish’d their work,/ After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,/ Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name;/ The true son of God shall come singing his songs.”