The Universe

Great quote on radio last night from Carl Sagan "To make an apple pie from scratch, one first needs to make the universe."

This taps straight into the awareness of the total interconnectness of "things" and the awareness that things are not bounded by "self" or "what they are" but rather "everything else" and "what they are not". An apple pie is both a substantial thing made from an essence which is "apple pie" (the stuff we get out teeth into) and also at the same time the hole made in everything else by the same apple pie (we get our teeth into the hole just the same) i.e. To make an apple pie you can either make the substance or you can make the hole in everything else - both are apple pie shaped and both taste like apple pie! Substance is emptiness!

Carl Sagan misses something though maybe. To make an apple pie from scratch we need the universe. To make the solar system from scratch we need the universe. To make the galaxy we need the universe first. To make the galaxy cluster we need the universe first... where do we stop? Actually to make the universe we first need to make the universe!

This points at something else I've ment to say. A lot of arguments stem from this idea of "universe" or "ultimate" such as ultimate cause (which currently sits at the big bang). And a lot of puzzles exist like what caused the big bang, or time, or what lies outside space-time. Are there other universes? etc etc

At the same time scientists are tantalised by the "ultimate" answer - the understanding from which all other understandings can be derived (except itself?). Unified Field Theory the tantalising plateau that explorers currently seek. Of course from this plateau new high grounds will come into sight...

Compare all this energetic exploration with the attitude of Siddhartha Gotama (aka Buddha) which was to ignore such questions as fruitless. What had he seen?

When asked what caused the universe, or what was the first cause etc Buddha simply remained silent. Such probing he assured everyone would attain nothing but confusion and deeper ignorance.

I heard recently that Montesquieu the french thinker - who was an extremely learned man - realised once watching a goat that actually the goat seemed happy and he wondered what all his learning had achieved which the goat hadn't achieved.

Lao Zi would smile.

The universe came into existence long before Men came to contemplate the event (unless you are an Monist - the sound? of trees falling in the Carboniferous to make the oil today) long before any Man had ever built anything. The Universe seems to work itself.

The "Universe" - what do we mean? Normally we can refer to entities with a boundary. I gave a list already: solarsystem, galaxy, galaxy cluster. But when we come to Universe it is the other way around: everything and anything else you may say. Universe is not an entity like other things just an procedure which means exclude nothing. As such it is an ongoing process, not a discrete enclosed entity. As such - like infinity in maths - we should treat thoughts including it with caution - they are actually undefinied!

When we ask what caused the universe... we mean what?

Schopenhauer is quoted as saying "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world".. not that I rate Schopenhauer whose only claim to fame is Nietzsche who is equally flawed... but it makes the relevant point. In this sense we each occupy different universes and the only way to grasp the concept is to accept that we can't grasp it. That humility brings us a lot closer to the infinite: we as mortals are pitifully finite. It could be argued (as I used to argue) that all such actions of humility or arrogance are really just actions of Mind so Mind is the ultimate... but its just another word for infinite!

This also points to another obvious fact. We can understand the world without understanding its foundations. We don't know how the universe came into existence - yet that doesn't stop people getting off to the shops. What makes teh world go around is not understanding of fundamentals: this is what Buddha meant. What does make the world go around? The scientists are clearly looking in the wrong place.

I'd also like to drag up the self-reference argument here: it is a priori that an entity that is supported by the universe cannot derive anything but a symbolic representation of the universe. The idea that we can gain any actual "understanding" of the ultimate is futile and pointless.

Answers to questions such as these are not "understanding". They are beyond understanding. They are enlightenment (small "e" cos the Europeans stole big "E" for the World's greatest folly in the 1700s - the Enlightenment - the effects of which we are trying to remedy today - as if Man could take control of his own destiny - even the "unEnlightened" ancients realised this leads straight to Tragedy and Hell).