Archive Home Page The basic overall inflection of western religions has been upwards and outwards (towards the heavens) while the basic overall inflection of eastern religions has been downwards and inwards (towards nirvana), and I'm not so sure they aren't pointing towards the same place. While this sounds totally irrational when said in words, I am pretty sure that advanced mathematics and the mathematical models of space and time contain perfectly rational conclusions that are much stranger than this. (maybe someone can elaborate as I really don't have the background to push this idea much further).
"And so I say to every man and woman, let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." - Walt Whitman
This is a metaphysical "idea". It seems to have some plausability in science thru the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Is it true? I don't know. But for me this is more than an idea. For me this is a "belief". Why do I believe it? I don't really know. It just feels right. Does that make my belief irrational? Perhaps. I think I like it because it deals with another fundamental inner human drive. The drive towards freedom. (release in the eastern traditions, flight in the western traditions).
If you have a different belief than mine, does that make it wrong? Do I have to argue with you or convert you to my belief? In the incredible complexity of the universe we live in and in the incredible diversity and richness of people and beliefs, couldn't we all in our own unique way be right? That's all the "moralizing" I'm going to do here.
Astronomy vs Astrology vs Religion. I'd investigate "determinism" as a underlying shared metaphysical idea.
Continued next post....
Subj: Connections... continued 94-04-25 21:19:28 EDT
From: Joe Uhrig
I originally got into this whole area when about 7 years ago I decided that didn't feel very educated about this stuff. So I went out and bought two books at the same time. One was on Cosmology and the other was a book on mythology by by Joseph Campbell. While many people disagree with the ideas of Joseph Campbell (and I certaintly don't agree with everything he says), I think it's fair to say that very few people have travelled the vast distances of the human inner landscape like he has. It seemed like to him, every idea, every belief was an addition to a rich mythological tradition that is inside of us. As he called it a "net of gems". Some of you may be familiar with him from his book "The Power of Myth"
In his last book titled "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space" (which by the way doesn't talk much about this subject, but it's still very interesting) he links together a subtle connection with the numbers 432 that seems to underly a number of mythologies from Norse, to Christian (something about old testament ages), to Hindu. Sort of strange because it seemed kind of obscure (as most numerology is) and he spent several pages on it. So I like to read between the lines and tried to figure out what he was hinting at. Of course I had more of a science background and it wasn't long before I was looking at stellar distances.
So several years ago I was here in the Forum asking around for the distance between Earth and Alpha Centuri to two decimal places which is 4.34 light years and then I found out that Beta Centuri was about the same distance, but that Proxima Centuri was thought to be a rogue star captured by Alpha & Beta and circling them in a slow orbit. But there didn't seem to be much knowledge about it's actual distance to earth (it was sort of lumped in with the other two), strange considering that it's the closest star. And then of course nothing's stationary and even if I had the radius of it's orbit, I really didn't know the math to calculate distances considering the orbital plane etc...
So there you have it. A testable hypotheses of a possible connection between mythology and astronomy. I don't know the answer. And if there is a connection what does it mean? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe Campbell knew the answer ahead of time, though I doubt he was that intellectually dishonest. And if there is no connection. Does that mean pursuing this kind of thing is a waste of time? Maybe.
I guess what I'm getting at is that it seems to me that we'll never know all the answers when we're only asking half the questions.