-- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Meditation: by the British-born scholar of Easter philosophy and Zen Buddhist practitioner Alan Watts
If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death, or shall I say, death implies life, you can feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke. But you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities. I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power, within one night to dream seventy-five years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure. And after several nights of seventy-five years of total pleasure each, you would say, “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me, that I don’t know what it is going to be.” And you would dig that too, and come out of that and think “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles what you would dream. And finally you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of living the life you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have – of playing that you weren’t God. Because the nature of the Godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not.
So in this idea everyone is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the Self the deep down whatever there is. And you’re all that. Only you’re pretending that you’re not.
Reading: by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson from Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries (p. 229-230)
Many generations of thinkers, both religious and scientific, have been led astray by anthropocentric assumptions, while others were simply led astray by ignorance. In the absence of dogma and data, it is safer to be guided by the notion that we are not special, which is generally known as the Copernican principle, named for Nicolaus Copernicus, of course, who, in the mid-1500s, put the Sun back in the middle of our solar system where it belongs. In spite of a third-century B.C. account of a Sun-centered universe, proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristarchus, the Earth-centered universe was by far the most popular view for most of the last 2,000 years. Codified by the teachings of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and later by the preaching of the Roman Catholic Church, people generally accepted Earth as the center of all motion and of the known universe. This fact was self-evident. The universe not only looked that way, but God surely made it so.
While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you're one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.
Reading: by the American author Bill Bryson from A Short History of Nearly Everything (p. 17)
As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.”
The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet’s surface, he would never find and edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.
Just as there is no place where you can find the edge of the universe, so there is no place where you can stand at the center and say: “This is where it all began. This is the centerpoint of it all.” We are all at the center of it all.
The Center of the Universe
A Sermon Delivered on November 16, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Where is the center of the universe? If earth isn’t the center of the universe, is the center of the universe somewhere out there in outer space, maybe where the Big Bang happened billions of years ago?
I guess not. Scientists say there is no place where you can say: This is the center. This is where it began.
This morning, I am happy to tell you, I have the privilege of sharing with you a truth even the most respected of the world’s scientists have not discovered: I know where the center of the universe is. And I will tell you.
Amazingly, and luckily for us, it isn’t very far away. It’s actually just 17 miles from here. My wife, Elaine, and I have driven by several times, and we didn’t even realize it.
I discovered the truth earlier this week perusing the archives of the Urbana Free Library, where I found a book that will perhaps now become world famous, once the news of this discovery spreads. The book is entitled “Our Village History, Philo, 1875-2000: the center of the universe.” In it, I found “The Story of How Philo Became the Center of Universe,” and even photographic proof: a photo of the Philo water tower with words clearly painted on it, that say “Philo, IL – Center of the Universe.”
The story goes like this:
“It was Thanksgiving 1969 and the Narbey Khachaturian family was in India where Professor Khachaturian was serving as consultant to the US Agency for International Development, for the advancement of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.
Teenagers Greg and Jon were attending the American International School in New Delhi and had brought a friend, Bill Stollberg, home for the holiday… The family took Bill to Bitur, a place by the Ganges River that was of significance to the Indian people.
It was so significant, in fact, that there was a small shrine-like area that sheltered a plaque that read “Bitur – The Center of Universe.”
“Oh, that is not true,” the boys told their friend. “PHILO is the center of the universe.”
[And so it was, the residents of Philo agreed… in the mid- 1980s] the Philo Village Board voted to have this geographical news painted on the water tower…. [And] in 1992, the Philo Woman’s Club had shirts and caps made with the Center of the Universe Declaration.”
* * *
Though clearly meant as a joke, the story of the Khachaturians does point to a profound and perhaps universal human perception: We each live in the center of our own personal universe.
Our universe is made up of the places we have been, and the people in our lives we care about. We are surrounded, first and foremost, by friends and family members closest to us. Beyond them, in concentric circles around us, are our casual acquaintances: the colleagues and neighbors we see every week. And beyond them are fellow citizens in our city, whose names we don’t know, but who we see on the street or in the grocery store. And then there are strangers across the country and around the world who we have never met, who we don’t much care about. Most of the time we forget they even exist.
We are each in the center of our own universe, each most concerned with what affects us directly – the events of our lives that make us happy or sad, personal accomplishments or personal losses. When a project we have long been working on is successfully completed, when a family member is in the hospital, or when a friend of ours dies.
We each have our own distinct perspective on the universe that extends in all directions around us. And from our subjective point of view, we are in the middle of the universe.
From an objective point of view, of course, none of us are at the center of the universe. And neither is Philo.
* * *
From an objective point of view, Copernicus is right – the earth isn’t the center of the solar system. We are traveling around the sun, just like the other planets close by, and the countless asteroids and comets zipping through space – one of which now has a small European probe on it, which landed there successfully this week. The Rosetta spacecraft was traveling 34,400 miles per hour, and caught up with the comet 334 million miles from the sun, after a ten-year chase.
The Copernican principle says, the universe does not revolve around us. Humanity is not the measure of all things. And likewise those of us who imagine we are the crown of God’s creation are likely mistaken.
Copernicus demoted humans from the center of the universe. He is often cast as a champion of science and challenger of religion. But this simplistic story line doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of either religion or science.
In a book entitled Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion the intellectual historian Dennis Danielson says, it seems we can’t utter Copernicus’s name without at once feeling the urge to say he “dethroned” the earth or us humans. Danielson writes,
“Almost every week new examples of the same claim appear in newspapers, on the web, and on the syllabuses of college courses – it is repeated so often, and by such respectable voices, that it has become like a perennial mold of our collective mental cupboards and a gratuitous blight on the planetary morale.”
What this intellectual cliché overlooks, however, is that for Copernicus being in the center was not necessarily good, and being removed from the center was not necessarily bad. So, for instance, a few centuries earlier,
“Thomas Aquinas, the foremost Christian philosopher of the Middle Ages, [said] that “in the universe, earth – that all the spheres encircle and that, as for place, lies in the center – is the most material [the lowliest] and coarsest of all bodies.” …[And] Dante, writing his Inferno in the early fourteenth century, placed the lowest pit of hell at the very midpoint of the earth, the dead center of the whole universe.”
Another assumption about Copernicus is that “in allegedly reducing the status of the earth, he also struck a blow against religion, particularly Abrahamic religions, which supposedly require the cosmic centrality of humankind.” But, as Danielson points out, in both Jewish and Christian teachings humans are not generally portrayed as the central masters of the universe, but rather the scriptures describe our human “smallness, weakness, and often moral incapacity against the immense greatness, goodness, and otherness of the Creator.” For instance in the Psalms it says: “When I look at your [God’s] heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them.” (8:3-4; NRSV).
Yes, it is true, Galileo got in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church for promoting the ideas Copernicus introduced. But Galileo’s offense was not that he challenged church doctrine. It was that he challenged the scientific authority of Aristotle, long accepted by the church. The conflict was not between science and religion, but between new science and old science.
* * *
Casting Copernicus and Galileo as protagonists in a long-standing battle between religion and science is really a gross simplification of both scientific research and religious thought.
For centuries, and especially since Einstein, modern science has shown us that the world is not as it seems. Time and space are relative. The objective world Newton imagined cannot explain the subatomic and astronomical universe in the midst of which we live. In a quantum world, it turns out, subjectivity is not an aberration but an essential aspect of the way the world works.
We depend on our observations and perceptions to make sense of the world in which we live. And yet our perceptions play tricks on us. Our eyes are playing tricks on us when we think the earth is flat, because it looks flat. We know of course, it isn’t.
Our senses are playing tricks on us, when we think the earth on which we are standing is stationary, because, of course it isn’t, it is speeding around the sun, and spinning at a dizzying rate.
Our senses are playing tricks on us when we think the objects around us are solid: the pews on which you are sitting, the pulpit behind which I am standing – we know these objects are made out of atoms, which in turn are made up of particles that whirl around huge empty spaces. (Do you remember the sermon Pam Blosser delivered a few months ago? She said, “there is a common analogy about the structure of an atom. Imagine with me now that the nucleus of an atom is like a fly in the center of a sports stadium and the electrons are tiny, tiny gnats circling the stadium…”)
The color red we perceive is simply a particular wavelength of light. And all the colors we can see are only a fraction of the light surrounding us. And yet still we cling to these illusions our senses provide for us.
* * *
Alan Watts asks us to imagine what it would be like to awaken from this illusion. Imagine the universe is not what it seems.
Imagine that the life we are living is a dream. A dream we are making up as we go along. A dream that has twists and turns we can’t anticipate, and yet which we can influence.
We need to wake up from our illusion, Watts says, we need to realize “that our real body is not just what’s inside the skin, but is rather our whole, total external environment as well, [we need to realize we are inseparable from the world around us] because if we don’t experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission; and when we do that, disaster follows. We exploit the world we live in. We don’t treat it with the love, gentleness and respect that it so richly deserves.”
My senses tell me I am THE center of the universe. My senses tell me that I am more important than anyone else, that MY health and happiness is more important than anything else, and that the people closest to me, the ones I love, are the only people who matter. But this is an illusion.
We are not more important than everyone else. Everyone else is just as important as we are. Everyone’s claim to health and happiness, to prosperity and safety, to freedom and justice, is just as valid as our own. Every single human being is at the center of the universe.
If we were to awaken from our dream, if we were to pierce the illusions with which our senses surround us, we would realize that we are each an expression of the entire cosmos. Alan Watts says: “We are each something the whole universe is doing, the way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” The wave is the ocean. The ocean is the wave.
We like to think we are the single center of the universe, as if that were a good thing. But imagining ourselves and only those closest to us in the center of the universe, ends up isolating us, separating us from the rest of the world. And instead of being part of the ocean, we are just a little puddle of water, surrounded by dry land on all sides, all alone. This is an illusion.
Both science and religion tell us we are inseparable from all existence. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. When we are able to awaken from our dream, we know that this is true.
Mindful of this truth, may our every word and deed
be guided by a spirit of love, gentleness and respect
for all people, and the whole world.
Amen.
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