Dante wanted to lead his reader from misery to felicity. I suppose that’s why he starts the Divine Comedy in Hell and ends in Heaven. Whatever Dante’s motives were in writing his verses, that very structure of his work suggests felicity is a goal, and I think Pope Francis would probably agree that felicity is a goal worth attaining.
 
However, making the news this 2018 Easter season is a report by the Pope’s atheist friend, Eugenio Scalfari, claiming that the Holy Father said there is no Hell. The Vatican denied the denial, writing, “The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting…without giving him any interviews. What is reported … is the result of his [Scalfari’s] reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”*
 
Whew! There’s still a Hell, and thus Dante’s travelogue through the Inferno on the way to Paradise is worth the read. We rise to felicity because we know misery. We can still strive to join Dante’s beloved Beatrice among the saintly denizens of Heaven. And here’s a related point from the Catechism: “It’s incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny.” We’re riding that escalator upward only if we use our freedom responsibly.
 
If you use your freedom responsibly—this assumes you do not accept predestination—do you do so selfishly? Point? Are you a good person because being good gets you to Paradise? No Paradise, no altruism. No Paradise, no self-control. I don’t know Eugenio, for example, but I’ll guess that he’s a relatively good guy if he shares a friendship with the Pope. So, what drives Eugenio toward some “Good.” He isn’t driven by fear of Hell. He most likely is not into Hinduism, either.
 
The “reward” of Heaven is a powerful motivation for moral behavior, and it makes me return to a question I asked in another blog: Is moral behavior outside religion and belief in eternity based on personal safety? After all, if everyone exercises good behavior, everyone is relatively safe during a finite lifetime. There would be no jeopardy from intentional inimical acts.
 
So, if safety is a moral motivator, then what can we say about the immoral? Do they eschew personal safety by jeopardizing the safety of others? If the immoral can act without constraint and without an eye on an eternal reward (or punishment), then everyone is freed from constraint and karma really does come around. Jeopardizing the safety of anyone risks the safety of others—all others. Does the Pope’s friend act ethically because it is ultimately in his best interests, even if those interests are only finite?
 
I can understand the atheist rejection of Heaven and Hell and a belief in nonexistence, but I’m not of a similar mind. However, for  the believer and the nonbeliever, I think both have a problem rooted in the concept of “place.” Place (all Place) originated with the universe. No beginning. No Place. No places. The idea of “place” is bound to the idea of the universe, regardless of its dimensions (big, small, multiple). We know only Place and are, as constituents of the universe, thinking places. We are Place aware of itself. So, we ascribe “place” to eternity, to the Not-place because that’s what we know and how we think. Those who have a problem with Heaven or Hell and those who have no problem with either, both derive their positions from the metaphor and the reality of place. Bound to place, we accept the image of an Eternal Place, even though we subtly realize that any Infinite Life would be different in kind from Finite Life. Since we live in a world of places, we have difficulty with a “world” without Place, and since all places we know undergo change, we have difficulty conceiving an unchanging place. Those who reject an Eternal Place might not accept a Not-place because they have no analog save the finite places they know or imagine—no one can truly wrap the brain around infinity or “feel” the nature of the Infinite. For most, if not all of us, infinity is an extension, something like more of the same, but somehow different.     
 
Both belief in an Infinite Place, an Eternal Place, and belief in a Death-ending existence can motivate the believer into moral behavior. There’s a touch of self-centeredness in both, the former driven by individually reaching a Place beyond places, and the latter driven by staying in place for as long as one can in the safest possible way—a finite world in which everyone behaves for the benefit of everyone else because that behavior leads to some good karma, kind of a limited Heaven-on-Earth.
 
If we could just get a postcard from the dead. A message from the “happy dead” living in Eternal Felicity or even one from the “unhappy dead,” living in Eternal Misery, could finally resolve the problem of Place in Eternity. But we are locked in finite places, are places in ourselves, and are incapable of comprehending a Place that houses no time as our own universe houses it.
 
While you wait for your turn either to answer the question of Heaven and Hell or for your turn to become unaware, to leave all places for no places, it behooves you to act for your own safety by adopting that long cherished Golden Rule or, as Christ voiced it, “Love your neighbor as yourself”—in this Place of places.
 
 For all who dwell in it, a safe place is a place of felicity.   
 
 
*Chapman, Michael W. “Pope Francis: ‘There Is No Hell.’” CNSnews online at https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/pope-francis-there-no-hell

There’s a verse in Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” that should be the motto of Artificial Intelligence: “The pianola ‘replaces’/Sappho’s barbitos.” Not familiar with either instrument? The latter is a lyre, that ancient stringed instrument associated with poets and poetesses like Sappho.* The pianola? Some might call it a “player piano.”** Turn it on, select a song, sit back and listen. And the pianola never makes a mistake. Same song, over and over again. Of course, its more modern versions are electric synthesizers that enable the listener to select different tempos and volumes, and maybe even to add some notes.
 
You have to guess that the pianola was just another invention on the road to automation in our lives. Player pianos simply needed a scroll of perforated paper to “read.” Listening to a different song meant selecting another roll for the large music-box-like instrument. “I want to hear this one,” you might say. And with a quick switch of scrolls, your wish is fulfilled. Or today, you might say, “Siri, play such-n-such.” Are we headed toward a time when someone else or something else takes control of what we do? And will we acquiesce to choices made by not only others, but also by machines? Think of the player pianos: Those scrolls were produced by someone who said, “This is a nice song and this one, too.” That process gave the owner of the player piano only the choices someone else made.
 
We’re all musicians in an automated world. And, given that we can send in a photo to have a machine turn it into an oil painting, we’re all artists. Is there no limit to what we can do when we don’t really have to do anything? As we incorporate more artificial intelligence into our daily lives, we will find ourselves increasingly more dependent on someone else’s choice of scrolls.
 
Time to learn how to play the barbitos. 

*https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0geK9Z4Z75aSmgAK3YPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMDgyYjJiBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=lyre&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01
To listen: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elERNFoEf3Y

**https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hsimp=yhs-SF01&hspart=Lkry&p=pianola#id=2&vid=65f8ad4f34f090eb190b1da1290b91ad&action=view

  

Who wants advice? Probably, not many. Aren’t all advisors a bit hypocritical since everyone has some kind of issue or problem? Maybe advice on living should be reduced to a single statement that would be advantageous to everyone: “Don’t take life-threatening risks.”
 
Five major extinction events: Orodovician, Devonian, Permian Triassic, and Cretaceous. Most people know about the last one because the dinosaurs kicked the proverbial bucket 65 million years ago. Since then, there have been catastrophes of various kinds, but nothing that ranks with the five events, one of which, the Permian some 252 million years ago, eliminated most species (maybe up to 90% of them). And, who knows? We might be living through a sixth mass extinction, though being in the middle of something makes seeing it holistically difficult.
 
Nevertheless, you are safe for now, well, not you individually sorry to say, but your species. It hasn’t had to deal with a 6-mile-diameter comet impact like the one that occurred 65 million years ago, and it hasn’t had to deal with an atmosphere with a low-oxygen content like the air of 252 million years ago. Yes, our species has been hit by a number of disasters like the plague and large volcanic eruptions like that of Toba 74,000 years ago, but nothing global in nature that destroyed large numbers of life-forms in a brief time. Even if we are forcing a number of big organisms out of existence (the last male northern white rhino just kicked the same bucket the dinosaurs kicked—and don’t forget the poor Dodo), we might not be eliminating much of the world’s cryptofauna, small fauna, flora, and micro-fauna. Bacteria, for example, have long ruled our planet—hope that’s not a blow to your ego, but the little critters can even be found in long buried and miles-deep rocks, well out of reach of any destructive human madness.
 
Of course, there are those who proclaim that your species is in dire straits: Increased carbon dioxide, potentially increasing methane, and increasing amounts of pollutants inimical to animal health. Then there are those pesky nuclear weapons in the hands of a species that doesn’t always exhibit an emotional calm. And don’t forget the potential for 999042 Apophis or some other passing body to collide with the planet ala the Cretaceous impactor.
 
Wait! Am I just making an argument that you aren’t personally safe? What am I doing? The title of this little essay suggests that safety is attainable.
 
In fact, you--personally You—are relatively safe from most natural “big events.” The probability of any natural disaster affecting you is low, though not nonexistent. Apophis will probably miss Earth when it passes in 2029 and again in 2036. There are windows of safety that stretch 11 years and 18 years at the time of this writing. It’s only a little over 2 miles wide, anyway, so what’s that in comparison to the Cretaceous impactor that made the Chicxulub crater (about 100 miles in diameter)? Yeah. Little impactors strike the planet every year, but big ones rarely do. And with extinctions? Well they occur on average once every 100 million years. Even the Yellowstone supervolcano seems to be on a 600,000-year eruption cycle (Oh! I just remembered: The last such eruption occurred 600,000 years ago).
 
This isn’t getting any better, is it? And I didn’t even mention the potential rise of “superbugs,” bacteria and viruses that are immune to antibiotics and vaccines. Well, at least, there’s been only one tragic death by a self-driving Uber.
 
Do you not find it interesting that in a world fraught with various avenues to individual and species extinction, that humans continue to take unnecessary risks? This isn’t any individual’s practice life. Species can practice and lose members, but individual members can’t practice and fail. Genera can practice. You personally really can’t. A genus can lose most of its species, but still survive in one, say, like the Albany pitcher plant or the cream-spotted cardinalfish. Of course, there’s always an exception of longevity like the Ginkgo biloba, the sole survivor of a genus that has survived three of the mass extinctions.
 
But you would probably note that having just one species doesn’t bode well for most genera. And, you would probably note that, come to think of it, Homo sapiens sapiens is the only species left in our genus. H. habilis, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. naledi, Cro-magnon, and H. neaderthalensis are all gone like the dinosaurs, never to return—regardless of some mad scientist’s future efforts to revive their genomes. Those sister species practiced and lost the game of continued existence.
 
Back to that question: Isn’t it interesting that humans continue to take risks that might eliminate not just themselves, but all humans?
 
You know as I do that no one can eliminate all risks, but isn’t there something we can do to preserve the species a little while longer? (Ginkgo biloba and horseshoe crabs aside, the average lifespan of species is probably about 4 million years thanks to those long-lived species; but humans are just pushing about 300,000 or so, and look what’s happened to our sister species, not one of which met that average lifespan)
 
Here’s a modest proposal. Start in preschool to teach mass extinctions, not just dinosaur extinctions, but other extinction events. And adopt a view held by the late Stephen Gould, who entitled his widely-read book Wonderful Life. Gould argued that since the number of body forms (phyla) are limited, that any past extinction event could have wiped out descendants. If that early vertebrate Pikaia—our ancestor—had been killed in a local or global disaster, then I wouldn’t be here to write this, and you wouldn’t be here to read it. All versions of the vertebrate body form subsequent to Pikaia wouldn’t exist. And then, as Gould writes, the descendants of Pikaia had to pass through the filter of five major extinction events, any one of which could have stopped the phylum from evolving.
 
Maybe if children understood early on that unnecessary risk, though sometimes as exhilarating as skydiving, is personally dangerous and possibly inimical to the species, they would form the first generation ever that eliminated the risks they could control. Maybe they would understand that this isn’t a practice life for any individual--or species.
 
“Whoa!” you say. “You want the world to be a boring place. Surely, you’ve flown and broken the speed limit in your car. You’ve gone scuba diving. You’ve played sports like football and faced baseball pitchers throwing a hard sphere very near your head.”
 
No, I don’t want boredom, but boredom is a relative matter. There are times and places where preservation takes precedence over risk and thrill, over escapism and foolhardiness. Accidents and disease will always be with us. Living in three-dimensional space means that there will probably be some bump to trip us when we jog. However, celestial impactors will rarely hit, and long-term changes to the planet will occur beyond our individual lifetimes. By comparison, foolish risks are largely avoidable, and youth who learn that principle and the principle that this is not a practice life, might stretch their personal existence toward a natural biological end caused by shortening telomeres or one caused by an unavoidable incoming asteroid.   

Sometimes, something that appears to be substantial turns out to be relatively unsubstantial.
 
Bubbles would be a good clown name, wouldn’t it? Maybe also for a jolly good fellow or gal. How about for a wall, an island, a universe, an economy, or a reason for strong emotions, including anxiety over trying something new?
 
Concerned about the invasion of Asian carp, Michigan has given $200,000 to Edem Tsikagta to prevent the fish from entering the great lake from the Illinois river.* His invention: Propellers that produce a wall of bubbles to discourage the fish from invading. I guess Tsikagta discovered that carp can’t take the noise of the bubble-making machinery and the appearance of the bubbles. Bet you wish you could solve some nuisance with a similarly simple solution, say line-jumpers at Disney World or competitors for the attention of someone whose affection you seek. Or how about convenience-store robbers that could never penetrate the bubble defense inside the glass doors?
 
For a while scientists believed that Titan, that giant moon the size of a planet, had lakes with “magic islands” that might have been bubbles. Recent evidence suggests that the islands are not nitrogen or ethane bubbles, but rather waves generated by the relatively docile breezes transferring their energy to lakes of liquid methane.** Talk about something insubstantial! Bubbles that were not even bubbles—or maybe they are; the debate isn’t completely settled.
 
So, we keep asking the theoretical physicists, “Are there other universes out there, and are they shaped like bubbles?” Not an easy concept to accept. If there are bubbles, do they assume a round shape? Do they touch? We know that where soap bubbles touch they share a bubble wall, and that as more bubbles join, their mutual walls take on the shape of polygons.*** So, is the end of our universe a polygon and not the outer margin of an expanding sphere? And if all the bubbles are expanding, does our expanding bubble feel the expansion of a neighboring expanding bubble in a multiverse of bubble-universes?
 
And then there’s the economic bubble. We ride inside one on our way to apparent riches only to find that such bubbles eventually burst. Money made becomes as insubstantial as a sphere of soap.
 
Bubbles. Fascinating to child and adult alike. Useful and possibly even instructive, but often not what they seem to be: Walls for carp, magic islands for planetary scientists, shapes for unknown universes imagined by theoretical physicists, and an expanding wealth that disappears in a seeming instant.
 
Bubbles. Are there other aspects of our existence that are ostensibly substantial but strangely insubstantial? Reasons for contention? Anger? War? Even reasons for not attempting to reach a goal?
 
After every contentious moment, every outburst of anger, and every tragedy of war, the bubble bursts. For a while, of course, each such bubble seems to be very substantial. You remember the reason that the Catholics and Protestants went to war in the sixteenth century, don’t you? You remember the reason for a news report last year about violence caused by a domestic dispute, don’t you? Surely, you remember that one instance of violence over the bubble of an argument. Wait! Don’t get confused. I’m not referring to the 10 million instances of domestic violence for the year. I’m just talking about that one instance when the police had to go to a house one block over.
 
You remember the reason for the genocide in Rwanda, don’t you? And certainly you remember the reason for all your strong emotional responses? Uh! Wasn’t that something So-n-so did last decade or maybe even two or three decades ago? You remember the reason for the bubble that seems to have followed you through decades, the bubble that wafts on the breezes of your life. Still upset about that bubble? Still enveloped in it?
 
And remember that wall of bubbles you broke to explore a new direction in your life? Oh! Wait! Don’t tell me that like the carp, you were prevented by a wall of “bubbles.”  
 
Bubbles of all kinds. Many people seem to live their lives trapped in bubbles or stopped by walls of bubbles.
 
*Flesher, John, AP Environmental Writer. Michigan Crowns Winner in Contest to Prevent Carp Invasion. March 27, 2018. Online at  https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2018-03-27/michigan-crowns-winner-in-contest-to-prevent-carp-invasion   
 
**They are bubbles: https://www.space.com/36501-saturn-moon-titan-magic-island-bubbles.html
They aren’t bubbles: https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/18/world/titan-magic-islands-fizzing-ocean-saturn-study/index.html
And a bunch of other stories on the subject.
 
***See The Code. Episode 2, at 10:41 for a demonstration (available on Netflix)

Do you want to become more insightful?
 
We’ve all had the experience of knowing where we were when a particular insight popped into our heads: Sitting in a restaurant with friends, riding public transportation, putting together a recipe, running or exercising, or trying to solve a problem. But how does insight occur? We can categorize possible sources of insight: Seeing some object or process for the first time, reading someone else’s insight, or drawing on someone else’s findings, or having an experience. In some instances, insight seems to rise from a conscious effort; in others, from some unconscious activity, such as a dream or daydream.
 
As Einstein noted, “A new idea comes suddenly in a rather intuitive way…but, intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” Shaggy haired Albert was an example par excellence of an insightful theoretical physicist, but he might have worded his analysis a bit differently had he been a neuroscientist.
 
Neuroscientists have approached the problem of insight through experiment. One conclusion cognitive researchers have reached relates unconscious processing to insight. The Annual Review of Psychology’s online summary of insights on insights proclaims: “The fact that a subliminal prime can spark a later insight supports the hypothesis that insight solutions are preceded by substantial unconscious processing rather than spontaneously generated.”* I guess for Einstein that would mean not only memory, but also the unconscious houses earlier intellectual experience.
 
Neuroscientists have run all sorts of experiments, including watching the brain work during the process of problem-solving. Using EEG and fMRI, John Kounios and Mark Beeman found that “the transient state of one’s attentional focus…helps to determine the range of potential solutions that a person is prepared to consider when a problem is presented. Outwardly directed attention coupled with low anterior cingulate activity focuses processing on the dominant features or possibilities of a situation; inwardly directed attention and high anterior cingulate activity heightens sensitivity to weakly activated remote associations and long-shot solution ideas.”* Anyway, the gist is that there are parts of the brain that can be primed to be insightful, but that blocking certain kinds of attention opens up other kinds of attention, a bit like closing the eyes or plugging the ears to think without distractions.
 
Einstein found some of his insights through “thought experiments” (Gedankenexperiment), one of the earliest of which had him thinking of what it might mean to “ride alongside a light beam.” And in running thought experiments, Albert kept his focus. As he wrote, “I do not permit myself a single distraction save for what my studies offer me, sustains me and sometimes protects me from despair.”**
 
Einstein did not run his thought experiments in the absence of knowledge. Like Newton, he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” He knew his physics. And that’s not all he knew. He played the violin and knew music. And he dabbled in just about every aspect of life, including women’s rights, international relations, and education. This stereotypical “scientist” was a Renaissance Man, a polymath.
 
Looking at Einstein’s unkempt hair, we might guess that he had never visited the barbershop, and that he was truly the representative “mad scientist” or “absent-minded professor.” Certainly, he didn’t seem to own a comb, and certainly, he did get lost in reverie, sometimes forgetting to row back to shore when he sailed in his little boat.
 
But if he had visited the barber, I believe that as he sat waiting his turn, he would have picked up the closest magazine—regardless of its age and condition—and perused its ripped pages. Not that he would be looking for anything in particular: No, he would simply look, read, and possibly learn.
 
We never know what will kick off our insightful thinking, but there’s little denying that insights spring from everywhere and at unexpected times. It’s also clear that any of us can synthesize an insight from our storehouse of information and experience.
 
Magazines in the doctor’s office, the lobby of a business, the library, the bookstore, online sources: Read everything. Observe as much as you can. Put as much into your brain as you want, and want more than you currently know. Somehow, that jumble of stuff will occasionally self-organize into an insight or the makings of an insight.
 
Here’s Albert: “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of the concepts of his own specific field.”*** And that’s coming from a guy who seems to have rarely visited the barbershop, where all those diverse magazine articles lie around for free consumption.
 
No one knows when what he knows will engender an insight.  
 
*The Annual Review of Psychology: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, Volume 65, 2014, Kounios, pp. 71-93. Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154
 
**Einstein to Maya Einstein, quoted in Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York. Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 39.
 
*** Einstein, Albert. “Physics and Reality.” The journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, No. 3, March, 1936.

You might have caught the March, 2018, report that Mount Etna is moving, and you might have been surprised that a large volcano is, as the geologists tell us, sliding into the sea. Etna will continue to move because it, like every other surface feature, is part of an outer planetary shell of shifting units. As you learned in elementary school, the crust of Earth is like a dynamic cracked eggshell. The cracks are sites where the pieces can slide past one another, bump into one another, or pull apart from one another. In many places, the yolk and white rise to the surface; that is, magma rises, becomes lava, and builds volcanic features like Etna.
 
For those who live around the base of Etna, the volcano is a substantial feature on the landscape, and its eruptions, though at times disruptive to daily living, don’t alter the mountain by much. It appears to be the same through successive generations of local inhabitants. But in reality, it is changing, and it is moving.
 
And that’s what we see with regard to community standards. They appear to be substantial, but they change, often imperceptibly. Fashion: Think of the first bathing suits. Think of today’s bathing suits. Look at the difference between the initial bikinis and contemporary thongs. Look at the difference between clothing permitted in schools in the 1950s in the United States and the clothing accepted today. And language. When Rhett says the word damn in Gone with the Wind, the word shocks very few in a modern audience, but it was quite shocking for the initial audiences. And in today’s movies? Apparently, if an alien being were to go to the theater to see a typical action or crime film, it would think that a word once reserved for crude backroom or alley talk is common.
 
Community standards change. For almost every aging person, the standards of their youth seem no longer to apply. What once seemed to be as substantial as a mountain that occasionally erupted probably no longer seems to be quite so substantial. “Sure, we can understand the small eruptions, but we always knew where the mountain was. Now, geologists are telling us that it is moving as it erupts. Is nothing permanent?”
 
No, nothing is. Anecdote: Walking on a main street of a small town, I observed one young woman shout a greeting to another: “Hey, So-n-so, how the …. are you?” You can put any word in there you want, but I’m guessing that you’re guessing what I heard. And I’m guessing that you’re thinking, “That’s not a big deal today. It’s normal. It’s part of a crude society.”
 
Right, “crude talk” is relatively normal. But in the 1950s such a greeting was very rare. Community standards change sometimes little by little, sometimes in violent eruptions of change. Community standards are very much like Mount Etna.
 
In 1974 Justice William Rehnquist wrote about community standards in Hamling v. U.S. The case centered on the distribution of “obscene materials.” The Justice said,
 
            “This Court has emphasized on more than one occasion that a principal concern in requiring that a judgement be made on the basis of contemporary community standards is to assure that the material is judged neither on the basis of each juror’s personal opinion nor by its effect on a particular sensitive or insensitive person or group.”
 
And, ironically, where are we today with regard to community standards and “a particular sensitive person or group”? What was once regarded as shocking is not shocking to sensitive persons or groups, and what was regarded as friendly banter or historic reference has become “offensive.” Like Etna, the cultural mountain shifts, and as it does, it erupts, sometimes spitting out just a little ash and lava and at other times throwing up a mass of culture-changing lava and debris. 
 
So, what can anyone do? Should anyone even attempt to stop the movement? The reality of the mountain is that the people living around its base have no control over the volcano or over the underlying tectonic plate movements. The only control over community standards is to personally choose to live differently or to live in a different place with like-minded people. But be forewarned: Every group that has ever set out to establish a secure set of community standards has run into the inexorable change that comes with the realities of circumstance, including the arrival of the next generation that wishes to build its own mountain of culture. 
 
And if you are one of the “sensitive,” maybe you might consider what the people do around the base of Etna. When its eruptions disrupt their lives, they shrug their shoulders, clean up the ash if they can, and when it’s possible, move back to ride on the same tectonic plate that carries the volcano. In short, they become desensitized to some of the changes wrought by the moving volcano. Test this: View Gone with the Wind, and see what emotional response you have when Clark Gable utters that word. 
 
But you might argue that becoming desensitized is just “giving up.” You would be correct, of course. Becoming desensitized is a matter of giving up, and it’s also a matter of becoming indurated like solidifying lava. In desensitization, we lose our pliability and our ability to make the changes to community standards we wish to make.
 
Ah! I empathize with your plight. You live on the side of a mountain that forces you to become desensitized to its eruptions; yet, you want to be pliable while maintaining the landscape you have long known. Now people find themselves in a quandary. Am I insensitive if I say "...," or am I too sensitive if I am offended by "..."? 

Me: “Here’s the thing. I am not emotional about my belief, but I believe in God, and I choose to be a Christian, also. But in an Age of Smugness, I find atheists difficult to engage without seeing behind their eyes a ‘Hrumpff’ in a brain trained to dismiss any such thinking. There’s always the I-know-better-than-a-mere-believer that lies within brains that lump all ‘believers’ together. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I think I know how to balance my cognitive self with my religious self, maybe not on the level of brilliant people, but at least on the level of someone who knows a little about logic, thinking, and science.
 
“My belief has both little to do and much to do with my science. I don’t believe Earth is merely 6,000 years old. And no, I don’t believe a single worldwide flood was responsible for most of the planet’s erosional and depositional features or that some guy crowded two representatives of each of an estimated 5 to 50 billion species into an ark. Continental floods are common. Just look at Hudson Bay. Epicontinental seas have transgressed the developing North American continent for hundreds of millions to billions of years, and all of them have left their history in sedimentary layers—deposits of six transgressive seas over the past 600 million years alone. And mountains have risen and ‘fallen’ leaving their histories in rocks. Great deltas like the Catskill and Queenston, the erosional-depositional products of ancient mountains, formed long before the Mississippi Delta began to form. I’m not a literalist, or as the smug would say in derision, a fundamentalist. I probably fall in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo and some Neo-Platonists, but I wouldn’t claim to be as smart.
 
“Yes, I do think the Cosmic Microwave Background discovered by Wilson and Penzias in the 1960s is a leftover from the expansion of the initial stuff of the universe that was compact beyond comprehension and beyond what physicists can explain. I know what they discovered is real because I can hear that background radiation as part of the static on my TV and AM radio when they aren’t tuned to a strong station signal.* And yes, I think I probably contradict myself when I say there was a Before before there was an After. An impossible-to-understand Nothing preceded the Something we call the universe. Augustine seemed to have a way of handling it by saying, if I understand him, that what was created was the potential for forms to exist. Maybe physicists could accept that as the creation of probabilities or of Probablity itself.”
 
Another: “I’m befuddled. How can there be a ‘before’ if there was no time? We keep circling the universal room as though we’re dancing to Eugen Doga’s ‘Vals Gramofon.’** The waltz is captivating, but it keeps us repeating our steps without leaving the room. I can’t leave my universe to see the Nothing. I’m—no, all of us are—dancing round and round and round…
 
 “Nevertheless, don’t worry about your self-contradictory stance. Even the late Stephen Hawking’s comment on God suggests that the famous physicist’s reasoning power had some limitations when it came to explaining the ‘Before.’ Hawking had been brilliant throughout his career as he wrote about ‘that which exists,’ like quantum fluctuations, evaporating black holes, and the singularity at the outset of everything that now is. But like all of us, he stumbled a bit when he talked about ‘that which was (or is) not,’ the ‘nothing’ that preceded and that underlies ‘what is.’
 
“I can’t fault him, however. Heidegger and other philosophers like Sartre have tried—and in my estimation, failed—to explain Being, No-thingness, and Time. Frankly, I think that we get a better understanding of time from Einstein and from people like Hawking who addressed ‘the Beginning’ from a physicist’s point of view. They wrapped their explanations in the language of mathematics, whereas the philosophers wrapped theirs in nuanced language. But Hawking’s explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing lacks the holistic Grand Unified Theory that I believe should surpass mere physical explanation and mathematical modeling. I think it should incorporate some philosophical reasoning—and possibly some theological thinking. I don’t think your ancient St. Augustine would have any difficulty accepting the Big Bang.”
 
“Of course, the reason most people don’t care about belief and beginning is that they can’t apply such a difficult topic to their daily lives. I mean, look, here I am about to go into my weekend to enjoy some ‘time off’ and you thrust this unsolvable problem on me. Sure, I’m sure, some atheists recognize that their own position requires some belief because no logic or math rests on itself. There are always those underlying axioms. Always those assumptions that ground logic in non-logic like the wire from a lightning rod. How does thinking about the ‘before’ apply to life, my life?  That’s a utilitarian approach to life, I know, but with a finite lifetime, we can’t waste the little time we have asking questions we can never fully answer—unless we believe that every consciousness is on a mission of self-discovery.”
 
Me: “Maybe this is just the problem with being in Being. The longer any of us exists, the greater the personal need to answer the biggest of questions; but once we ask, we don’t seem to have the time, the instruments, or the intellect to write down a final explanation. Poor Hawking and poor Einstein; they worked to the very end on the problem of the beginning, but time caught up to them—or they used up their share of time. Whatever. Professors Hawking and Einstein left us with unanswered questions.
 
“In reality, our species has survived for a very long time without a comprehensive explanation of Being and why anything exists. Almost all science, though dependent upon assumptions, ignores the ultimate nature of what it examines; yet, science has provided us with practical knowledge. Wasn’t it Feynman who said that we can say how photons act, but we don’t know why they act the way they do? Mice in a maze don’t have to know why they are running the maze; rather, they just have to know how to get to the target area or target. We can run the maze of our existence without understanding why. We survive within the system. However, like the mice we can’t see the whole system or know the purpose of our running the maze. We’re just in the maze, and we don’t really know where the maze came from or how we got here.”
 
“But we aren’t mice. We are the self-aware combination of matter and energy. We want the same perspective on ourselves that we have on the mice and the maze. We want an explanation from above and beyond, not just physically, but also intellectually. And not just the above and beyond, but also the ‘Before’ that we can now date to 13.8 billion years ago. It’s so frustrating. We are much closer to the beginning of the universe than we are to its end. Billions of years back to the Beginning. Trillions forward to its End, to quote T.S. Eliot, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper.’ Or, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘…for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.’
 
“Enter Hawking and a host of other like-minded thinkers that can’t accept a consciousness at the origin of the universe. Hawking says that “because there are laws, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”*** Profound? Or not? Gravity is part of the universe. It plays an important role, as anyone who has fallen or who wants to lie an extra five minutes in bed without floating knows.”
 
Another: “I might be missing something because of my own limitations, but if gravity is part of the universe, and if the universe didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang, then did gravity create its own universe so it would have a place to play havoc with people trying to climb a greased pole? Or did the ‘laws’ exist before the universe existed? Hawking seems to make a result its own cause. And doesn’t he say something about quantum fluctuations?
 
Me: “That’s a problem for me. The Nothing for Hawking engenders Something because of laws. But the very act of engendering or creating requires a process, and processes can be marked by time. That gives my poor little brain another conundrum: How can there be a process before time. I’m back to asking how there can even be a ‘before.’ Yet, Hawking and like-minded physicists and philosophers suggest that even though they accept that time is bound to the universe, they also accept by convoluted reasoning that there was a time before time, and that ‘before-time’ was a time ‘during’ which laws—such as gravity—caused the universe to be. Or Hawking simply dismisses the question about the ‘before’ by saying the question is moot. Now, he’s not the first to deal with the problem. I’m thinking of E. A. Speiser’s translation of Genesis. He says the opening words of the book have been mistakenly translated as a prepositional phrase that begins with in, but the book actually opens with a dependent clause that begins with the word when.”
 
Another: “What?”
 
Me: “Think; how does the Old Testament begin? The usual opening is “In the beginning….”
But Speiser says it should be “When God first set about to create….” The opening should be a dependent clause, not a prepositional phrase. Speiser says you can’t have the hexaemeron—the ‘six-day-creation’—without making the Creator imperfect if you use the prepositional phrase. The phrase makes it look as though God made an incomplete creation, so he had to do some fixing during the ‘week.’ But a dependent clause, well, that’s a process, and it allows for what Augustine and I argue for: The creation of the unfolding of forms, the possibility for forms to exist, the creation of Probability itself. Of course, that poses another problem: If creation occurred outside time and if an Infinite Creator exists outside time, then how does the act of creation occur as a process—since process implies time? In that, maybe there’s something to Hawking’s quantum fluctuations.
 
“So, now I’m wondering that what you just said about Hawking’s hypothesis with regard to quantum fluctuations before there was a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur doesn’t point to the choice between accepting an instantaneous or an ongoing creation—or at least a creation that occurred as a process. The argument Hawking and others make because they cannot accept the idea of a Creator is based on laws that create or on an eternal multiverse. Now, I understand that by ‘laws’ Hawking means an inescapable mechanism by which the universe works—or must work, but that doesn’t get me past that point called the Big Bang when time begins and processes start.  
 
“And if Hawking and others want to argue that our universe is just another in a series of universes or that it is one among many in a concurrent multiverse, then he still has the problem of the ultimate time before time and laws before laws, especially since those who argue for a multiverse suggest that each multiverse might operate on laws not applicable in another. If that is true, if the laws of one universe don’t necessarily apply to another, then were there, like the pantheon of Olympians, many such Law-gods or Law-creators? And to run the analog of Speiser’s statement about single act of creation and creating process, are there still quantum fluctuations ‘out there’ in the timeless nothing from which they created the universe?
 
“But for the sake of the Smug, let me argue for Hawking. He might look at me and say, ‘You just don’t understand, my dear Professor. The universe just had to derive from nothing just as dark energy seems to spring from the vacuum of space. Nothing demands it. I know, that doesn’t sound right, but then you just don’t have the capacity for thinking that I have; plus, I was famous and highly accomplished, more accomplished than you during our virtually contemporaneous lives, what with all my evaporating-black-holes theory and whatnot. Anyway, I gave a lecture once in which I compared the origin of the universe to the South Pole. I argued that there is nothing south of the South Pole. But the South Pole obeys all the laws that apply elsewhere on the planet. So, the question about the origin is a bit irrelevant. Time, I said, was like the lines of latitude as they expand on circumferences that increase toward the Equator just the way the universe is expanding (though now at an increasing rate).’****
 
“Of course, I could point out that all analogies limp, as you know; so, the South Pole as an analog of the singularity from which the universe formed also limps a bit. The space beyond Earth lies beyond the South Pole but within the framework of a universe that contains Earth, it’s in that universe where we all waltz. The South Pole is neither on the edge of nothing nor at the beginning of something other at a convenient point of putting coordinates on a globe. I could say that south of the South Pole is the Not-Earth and that the Not-Earth is spinning in the same waltz in the same room in which Earth spins—or dances.
 
“Anyway, there are plenty of atheists—I think Hawking was one—who just can’t tolerate someone’s assigning the ‘moment’ of creation to a deity, and some of them scoff at those who accept a purposeful Creator over a random act of Nothing before time (paraphrasing and countering Einstein, Hawking said, ‘God really does play dice’). I can’t convince anyone who accepts Hawking’s explanation that that explanation is a water bucket with as large a hole on the bottom as it has on the top. No, I just want to mention that even the reasoning of a very bright guy who contributed much to our understanding of the universe might be a bit faulty when it comes to that same universe’s origin. And now that he’s gone, I have only the incomplete work he left.
 
“You don’t define a banana as a banana. Quanta exist in a post-Big-Bang era. Saying that quantum fluctuations might be the cause of a universe in which quantum fluctuations occur is saying a banana is a banana. Saying that the laws of a universe demanded the universe in which they operate seems just as circular.”
 
Another: “As usual, you are leaving me with a bunch of confusing thoughts. I wanted to rest this weekend, get things of consequence off my mind. I guess that now I’ll have to work out my own explanation of the ‘Before.’”
 
*I wonder whether the popularity of “white-noise” sleep aids aren’t an indication of our connection to the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, some archetypal static that permeates us.
 
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p0pe-1_xUk
 
*** http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-43408622/stephen-hawking-on-god-artificial-intelligence-and-mankind-s-future
 
**** http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html

The rest of the quotation is “sic stabit contiguum rigidum.” No, this isn’t a lesson on architecture, but rather a lesson on how we can turn stubborn rigidity into flexibility. The famous line is Robert Hooke’s and it applies to a hanging rope or chain suspended between two hooks (just had to say that, sorry). Basically, “as hangs the flexible line (or chain), so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.”*
 
Hooke saw that arches were catenaries, curves that mirrored the shape that a flexible line takes when it is suspended between two points. The strength of the line and the pull of gravity find a balance. You can see catenaries everywhere, but power lines are good examples. Sometime long ago the Etruscans learned that reversed catenaries make arches, those highly stable and rigid curves of stone. Their knowledge transferred to the Romans and from then on, well, just take a look at any dome, the US Capitol, for example. Turn a catenary upside down, Hooke said, and you’ll have a very strong structure.
 
Amazing, isn’t it, how the catenary-arch relationship reflects our own flexibility and inflexibility? That same person who seems to find a naturally stable configuration of thought that can, like a suspended cable, move with forces as simple as a blowing wind, cannot yield to the strongest forces of vertical compression. Responding to Earth’s pull, the humble cable hangs. In response to overlying weight, the arch stands proud.
 
What comes from beneath finds us flexible. What comes from above finds us resistant. Is there a lesson for the belligerent in this? Is there a lesson for those who would communicate with the belligerent in this?
 
When those with an axe to grind perceive another to speak from above, they stubbornly resist. The better tactic seems to be the invisible pull from below. The next time you encounter belligerence, think the lesson of the catenary. If you want to communicate without resistance, interact from below. You’ll make little progress trying to bend an arch from above.
 
*Robert Hooke (1635-1703)

A: “Should I act as though I am alone on a planet of seven billion people?”
 
B: “I don’t follow. What’s making you ask?”
 
A: “Well, I was looking at satellite images of the planet, and I stopped on pictures of two regions that should be similar but are very different.”
 
B: Which two regions?”
 
A: “Rub’ al Khali and Imperial Valley.”
 
B: “Rub’…?”
 
A: “It’s called the Empty Quarter. It is part of the Arabian Peninsula, and it touches several countries, including Yemen. It’s desert, real desert. Lots of sand and little vegetation. Hard-to-find water.”
 
B: “I can understand calling such a place a desert, but Imperial Valley? Isn’t that where we get lots of food? I’m picturing farms everywhere.”
 
A: “Yes. There are farms everywhere in the Imperial Valley, but they wouldn’t be there without the efforts of many individuals banding together to make the land arable. Typically, deserts and semiarid regions might be inviting to thrill seekers on ATVs and great places for terrorists to hide from governments, but they are generally not inviting, and they are only rarely the sites of widespread agriculture. We need water to drink and to grow food, so ‘empty quarters,’ such as the Rub’ al Khali don’t support large populations in Third World countries like Yemen. But in the USA where infrastructure is supported by great wealth, the Imperial Valley is a naturally dry area that supports not only a local population, but with its agriculture, many throughout the country. Remarkable.
 
 “The Imperial Valley encompasses 500,000 acres of farms adjacent to The Salton Sea. It lies in the Colorado Desert that is part of the Sonoran Desert. That the Valley is comprised of so much arable land is testimony to work of irrigation engineers and cooperative political units. Not so in the Rub’ al Kahli of Yemen. Torn into small uncooperative sections by rival Bedu tribes and now by terrorist organizations, the Empty Quarter is really empty. The obvious contrast between the developed land of southern California and the desolation in Yemen makes me think of the Imperial Valley as an Empty Quarter filled with water. It also makes me think of the two ways people handle their circumstances.
 
 “Some people prefer organizing, find some way to enter joint ventures or agreements for their mutual benefit. They develop a strategy to reach identifiable goals. Other people merely act in the moment. The two naturally arid landscapes reflect in their current differences the effects of California’s overall organizing and Yemen’s contrasting individual acting. Of course, one could argue that the great wealth present in southern California assured the development of the Valley, but the region was undeveloped for centuries when it was subject to the same kind of social structure that exists today in Yemen’s Rub’ al Khali. There was no large-scale effort to transform the valley before the nineteenth century. And if you say that it was because the technology wasn’t available, I will note that the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians both irrigated their lands. How hard can it be to dig a ditch? If you argue that California is affluent, I will point to the potential affluence of a culture sitting on untapped petroleum reserves on the Arabian Peninsula.
 
 “When you look at both regions from space, you see the obvious contrast. But you don’t have to examine satellite images of Yemen to get the point. From space the Imperial Valley looks like a checkerboard of farms. But that colorful checkerboard of various shades of green stops abruptly at the southern border of California. Apparently, a similar regional strategy doesn’t apply in Mexico.”*
 
B: “True, I just looked at one of those images of the border. I can see the difference from space. Kind of amazing. If I were an alien from a faraway planet, I would immediately land in the vicinity to see why there was such a contrast in the colors I observed on my way to Earth. But I guess, since I’m one of those seven billion who live here, I can offer a different perspective on the regions. There are arguments that favor individual act over strategy. Numerous analogs occur in warfare. Individual military units and even individuals have changed the course of supposedly well-planned battles. At Gettysburg, for example, the Twentieth Maine with little ammunition charged downhill to turn back a Confederate unit. Call it desperate; call it impetuous; whatever one calls the action, that downhill charge helped the Union defeat the Confederates during that battle in 1863. The charge wasn’t part of a larger strategy, but it worked for the larger cause.
 
“I think most people resist cooperating when they think their individuality might be subsumed by a large entity. Sometimes people in apartment buildings want to turn up their music if only for a brief time, but that time might be in the middle of the night. Living within any planned system prevents that kind of act. Living alone and acting alone allows it.”
 
A: “Individual acts do make a difference, but a highly organized group with well-defined roles might be the only way a population headed rapidly from seven billion to eight billion and more can thrive. The planet has numerous untapped resources that can benefit people well beyond local regions. As long as individuals fail to cooperate for the greater good, many of those resources will lie beneath Empty Quarters, not even serving those who encamp atop them.
 
“Resources require management. Large populations require some organizing. Yet, the problem for all of us as individuals is the one of balancing our personal freedoms and habits with our contemporaries’ needs. What’s our viable alternative? Constant warfare that prevents a regional plan of development? Constant suspicions about those who approach our individual territories? Constant hoarding, and with it, constant wasting? Traveling on camels and living nomadically? Scarcity over abundance in spite of a burgeoning population with the potential for more individuals to cooperate for their mutual benefit and for the benefit of the world at large?”
 
 * http://i.imgur.com/Ue1Rntj.jpg

There’s no denying we live complex lives, even when we think we can get away, get off the grid, become a hermit. The physical needs alone call for at least some complexity, some organizing. We can’t, for example, spoil the water we drink, and we can’t find protection from insects, animals, and the weather without adding a layer of complexity. I’m imagining the dwellers of the rock shelter called Meadowcroft, where people lived as many as 13 to 16 millennia ago. Why live beneath a rock shelter perched high above a stream? Human reasoning: bears; wolves; snakes; and other humans with not-so-friendly intentions. Still, a relatively simple lifestyle compared to yours, right? So, why all the additional complexity? Is it our nature to complicate everything?
 
And then there are those movements: Hippies in communes going back many centuries. Call them monks and nuns; call them Brook Farm enthusiasts in the nineteenth century; call them “off-the-grid” today. In art? Dada. In music? From folk to Baroque and back to folk or coffee shop with an acoustic guitar, and maybe even rap. Apparently, there’s a periodic need for simplicity that emerges to counter the complexity. Thoreau going off into the woods and writing, “Simplify your life…Simplify!” Of course, one wonders why he needed to add the second “simplify.” Well, those are the words he wrote with his pencil.
 
Tools and possible evidence for the use of controlled fire in the Tabun cave in Israel apparently date back more than 300,000 years. From chipped stones (and probably sharpened branches) to pencils and Swiss watches, we’ve added complexity to our lives (but then, chipping petroglyphs is laborious and sundials don’t work at night). Overwhelmed by our own inventiveness, we take a step “back” as we believe “back” means to recapture that imagined simple life and simpler times. Yet, every step “back” has its own layers, its own complexity.
 
As the people of Brook Farm discovered in the nineteenth century, a simple communal life falls apart when individuals fail to cooperate, that is, to pitch in to help with the work necessary to keep everyone fed. That should make us realize that the desire for some kind of social Dadaism will always fail when two or more individuals gather. I can’t imagine a group in Tabun cave or Meadowcroft rock shelter rejecting the more complex tools of our time—at least initially. We appear to be drawn toward complexity while we say we reject it. The Amish using a wheel and a metal hammer to help in a barn raising with squared wooded beams cut by metal saws or purchased at the lumber yard; the Mennonites using a car; the Franciscans wearing sandals with buckles or Velcro and choosing a cassock of appropriate size and material; and a Buddhist forging a bell and donning a robe called a kāṣāya, a triple-robe composed of the antarvāsa, the uttarāsaṅga, and the saṃghāti. How simple. Simple how? 
 
Of course, if you do live in a lean-to off the grid, where you eat some insects and mushrooms, you aren’t reading this. No, off the grid you’ve achieved some simplicity, some romantic ideal of living one-with-Nature.
 
I live in a different world, a place of tools, machines, controlled energy, and complex interactions that include getting fruits and vegetables from places far away. I might desire some simplicity, but I keep going back to complexity, just as Thoreau left Walden Pond to return to society, serving his contemporaries by inventing a machine for grinding graphite and one for injecting it into wood to make pencils. His inventions “simplified” the pencil-making process.
 
If you are reading this, you’re obviously “on the grid.” And if you are “on the grid,” you are surrounded by complexity. In fact, you add to it, even when you say you want to “get away.” How, for example, will you “get away”? Car, plane, bike, good hiking shoes, well-worn path, spa in Arizona, mountain-top retreat you reach while wearing Gortex? Living the “simple life” is relative and often a fiction we frame as an ideal.
 
You’re complex. Face it. Deal with it. Revel in it. Just don’t get lost in it. And that’s where you can achieve your simplicity: knowing how to put all you know, do, and use in perspective without claiming a simplicity that you contradict in that knowing, doing, and using.
 
We are hypocrites when we talk about simplicity. Take Einstein, for example, a guy who said that the simplest explanation is worth achieving, that an elegant mathematical explanation is the simplest. With regard to education he seemed to suggest that less is more: “it is…vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young…a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening…with too much and with too varied subjects…Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality” (p. 67).* Yet, Einstein combined a complex geometry and physics to achieve his “simple” explanation of space-time. Would he have been as creative had he learned only Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics? Should he have ignored Riemannian geometry as an unnecessary layer of complexity and another subject that merely increased an “overburdening” of his mind?
 
Really, Albert? Here’s another view. Delve into as much complexity as you can. You will find your brain enriched and more creative as you put together thoughts and knowledge in new ways and invent what others have missed, all the way back to those ancient cave and rock shelter dwellers. Go ahead. Add some complexity; don’t be afraid of it. You can always choose to ignore it in your search for simplicity. Having all that complexity allows you to make a relative “simplicity” of your choosing.
 
*Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York. Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, 1982. Based on Mein Weltbild, ed. Carl Seelig, trans. by Sonja Bargmann.