Writing group didn’t happen this week. I’ve been feeling very odd, and finally decided I would try to write about it. Not what I expected!
Written on Friday, August 11
3rd cup. coffee. I want to do a writing like I do in writers group. keep the pen moving. o gosh — I’ve been feeling really empty. Sometimes it feels good, like when I say “May my presence be a blessing” and then feel the blessing energy flowing through me. But mostly it’s too close to meaninglessness. I try to keep my mind quiet, hoping that a deeper voice will speak, or maybe just give a feeling, like the one I had after Daddy died. Not so much hearing him speak as just getting a feeling of the truth: that even though he didn’t begin to understand me, he still felt kindly toward me. . . . odd meaningless syllables. . . So. being empty. I read somewhere recently that the word translated as “emptiness” in the Buddhist scriptures should really be translated as “spaciousness.” Not emptiness as meaninglessness, but spaciousness as room for the new and the unknown. Again this morning I had a song in my head, an earworm, about Mister Snow. What possible meaning could that song have for me? I never wanted a conventional marriage, and certainly the one I had was not conventional. There goes the A/C again. I heard others around me going off in the night. Very aware that humans are damaging the earth’s life-support system.
Thinking of the Gaia Hypothesis, that the earth is a living creature that self-regulates, reminds me of how easily I was able to extend that to the Universe. Brian Swimme said Tuesday night that the rate of expansion of the universe is such that life can be created and flourish. If it was any faster, material would separate too fast to form enough stars to continue the process. If it was any slower, material would collapse into a black hole. I was thinking that this proved the Big Bang, but I realize now that the speed the galaxies are moving would correlate just fine with the steady state hypothesis, which only requires one hydrogen atom per cubic yard to be created every million years. I think this still doesn’t fit with the observation that galaxies are found in flat sheets or huge clumps with a lot of space in between. So we have a way to go with our theories of cosmology. Swimme also said that the universe was not static but evolving. But I think people have seen that for a long time. It was only the church that said science was wrong, the Bible was literally right.
That’s it. I’m done.
The song about Mister Snow is in Carousel. Often when there’s a song in my head I can take it as a message, but this one is clearly not.
When I got my degree in Astronomy at Wellesley College in the 60’s, there were two theories of the origin of the universe, the “Big Bang” and the “Steady State.” Though people talk about it as though the Big Bang is proven, it is just a hypothesis that has so far been supported by the evidence. One problem with cosmological theories is that they assume that the “laws” of physics, as we have determined them in our laboratories here on the planet Earth, a typical planet going around an ordinary star in an average galaxy, that these “laws” hold true for all time and space. But we know from Einstein’s theory of relativity, that how “time” functions is related to how fast something is moving. And space can be distorted by gravity. So I think we are a long way from knowing the truth about the universe.
Another theory of the origin of the Universe is the one proposed in a book published in 1991, The Big Bang Never Happened, which is based on the alternative views of Hannes Alfven.
Tuesday nights I have been watching a course promoted by The Shift. It’s on Science and Spirituality and the teachers are Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme.
I could not think of a title for this post, so I’m using a line from the Prajna Paramita Chant that I learned at the Rochester Zen Center.