Dear Thom Hartmann,
May I say what a pleasure it was to read a couple of your books: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, your account of global energy consumption, and The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century. Great titles by the way. Comparing the two, I have to say that I prefer your nonfiction over your fiction (I’m speaking of the style, you realize).
But rarely do I read books purely for their literary value, and I never worry about a book’s condition, age et cetera. For me, those come a distant second to the content, and so when I started to struggle with the structure of your story, I persisted. I just had to find out your ‘secret’.
My patience paid dividends. On page 222, I read: "The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century, of every Century, is 'We Are All One.'" And then, a few pages later, you wrote that time and space do not exist. “Right on!” I thought, “Thom rocks!”
But Thom, you failed to take it further. You didn't build upon that theme or follow where it led. I was expecting a conclusion; you were on the verge. You had a hold of the dragon’s tail, but then you let it go. You let the big one get away, my friend. Puff petered out.
Elsewhere in the book you state that there are six billion (and counting) answers. One of those, therefore, is mine. And, if I may say, my answer works better for me than yours does—well, I guess that’s only natural. But look, let me make you a deal. Just as I pressed on with your book, I suggest that you keep a-reading here . . .
Mark Kingwell, the author of In Pursuit of Happiness: better living from Plato to Prozac writes:
We all know that some books work like ingenious traps.
They begin innocuously, articulating a few genial sentiments or
unobjectionable home truths designed to lure you down the false path of a
deceptive familiarity. You stride ahead without fear. By subtle steps,
each plotted with argument or example or statistic, you are moved closer
to the place where artfully strewn leaves cover a hole in the ground.
You know very well what is coming, or anyway suspect it, but at some
point - if the author is any good - you fall, on cue, into conviction.
Aha! You now think what the author thinks.
Maybe you're happy to find yourself there, and make
yourself comfortable. Maybe you're feisty and seethe from your ignoble
position in the trap, scanning memory and logic and the rest of the
mental horizon for a means of escape. Either way, the trap affords
complicated forms of pleasure. As trapping games go, there are not many
better or more interesting than walking through a good book of argument.
Not all books . . . seek to ensnare the reader in the
author's own convictions . . . I faced a choice between setting a trap
in the traditional philosophical manner, ascending to the high ground of
objective detachment to observe the results, and doing something quite
different: beginning an intimate conversation with one reader at a time.
Books on deep and difficult topics can trumpet and they can whisper;
they can declaim and they can hint. But for me, they work best when they
just talk, in a manner as close as possible to the true voice of their
author.
Okay then. You’ll find that I don’t write as good well as Kingwell. I’m not a natural-born killer with a pen. I lack the literary expertise required to turn my limited understanding—concepts that I struggle with and only intermittently grasp—into words.
Although I know where I’m coming from, and where this talk will ultimately lead, I am far from certain how best to tell the tale. Still, I’ll try to go about this in, as Mark Kingwell suggests, “a manner as close as possible to [my] true voice”.
Thought experimentation doesn’t seem too dangerous. Nothing is likely to blow up in your face. With thought experiments, you don’t usually expose yourself to the sort of rays that cause cancer. Which is not to say that they are foolproof or that they can’t go wrong; for how long didn’t people believe that heavier object fell faster than lighter ones, or that the world was flat? But are thought experiments a legitimate modus operandi? Can they lead you anywhere?
Actually, if you want to make dramatic progress, they are your only option. Application of the scientific method has never resulted in any great leap forward. Every stride has only ever been achieved through imagination, creativity and lucid dreaming. Thought experiments are extremely powerful. Einstein is said to have arrived at his Theory of Relativity after he imagined himself riding on a beam of light. Other examples include Kekule’s benzine ring, the discovery of Velcro, television, the microwave oven, alternating current, coordinate geometry, chemical transmission of nerve impulses—eureka moments all.
You’re bound to have come across thought experiments too, but maybe in another guise—perhaps as koan, haiku, riddles, puzzles and even jokes. To some degree, these are all thought experiments. If you think about it, the act of reading is itself a thought experiment. Consider how amazing it is that the inky squiggles that your eye perceives translate into a shared experience with their author. And it's all happening right inside your head! Reach up with your hand and grasp the back of it where the entire universe fits ever so snugly.
Science fiction provides a particularly good portal in terms of thought experimentation. Riverworld, Ringworld, Foundation and Chung Kuo—every tale starts off with, and flows on from, one or more ‘suppose ifs’: po statements that we accept for the duration in order to enjoy the story. We don’t worry about how likely or believable they are. This is great training. For example, take that premise that underlies the Matrix movies. Say that everything we perceived as real by our senses is not, and that the universe as we know it an elaborately constructed virtual reality world that we’re all hooked into. If that was so, you wouldn’t know the difference. No one can prove that anything is really out there.
Yeah, but hey, you say, it's real. I can smell it. Nope, that’s just molecules tickling some nerve ends and scooting upward from there into your grey matter. But I can touch it, you protest. Again, that’s just another set of electrical impulses traveling up, this time, from your fingertips. Et cetera and so on. Stick with me, as I pick away at the warp and woof of that insight.
“What are you going to do when your home is invaded, and they start torturing your son?” someone is bound to challenge me. “Are you going to turn around and say, Oh, but you’re not really hurting anyone here; we’re all the same person et cetera?”
My answer would be, “No, of course not. This tableau feels as real to me as it does to you. It wounds me just as deeply.” But that doesn’t prove that I’m wrong, only that I’m subject to the same rules as everyone else. Being able to see a higher plane doesn’t mean that I get to reside there.
On the plus side, by accepting the Rickmansworth meme one banishes death. Now, that’s a biggie in anyone’s book. No death, for heaven’s sake! As jabberwocky, we’re immortal. Woowee! That’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, or even a cooked one.
Just a quick reminder about how that works. Our jabberwocky body has a span in every dimension, including time. It attains those dimensions and no further. It is static, remember? We’re not going to budge them no matter how we stretch and strain.
So why grieve just because you can't reach the honey jar on the upper shelf? Why mourn for the airy emptiness just beyond your fingertips? No one bemoans not having lived before they were born; if you’re not bothered how far that wing extends, then why would you worry about the other?
God is continuously tapping into and out of our jabberwocky's range of experience. Think of the keys of a piano. The notes are struck in chords and rhythms, scales and arpeggios, legato, staccato, fortissimo, pianissimo, ritardando (yep, I had lessons as a kid).
Your piano has eighty-eight keys corresponding—if you are moderately lucky—to that number of (nested) years. You are forever being played upon, that music savored by a god who would otherwise be at a loss for entertainment. Give yourself a pat on the back; you’re performing a commendable service.
And so is everyone: friends and family, strangers and enemies, figures from the past, present and future. We’re all in the same boat on a grand adventure at least is as good a read as Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series. To meet our cronies, there’s no need to wait until we go to heaven. We’re all on the same riverbank. Indeed, we're a veritable mangrove swamp of intertwined jabberwockies slithering in the . . . what was it . . . tulgey woods?
And that’s the preamble to the ramblings over also. The first book is done. I’ve brought Theo up to the headiest of heights, but I won’t be so irresponsible as to leave you up there high and dry. The second part of my mission is to bring you down safe and secure.
In the book that follows, we’re going to have to process the journey. There’s a lot to unpack and internalize before we’re fit to be released into society and the world the world at large. Let’s debrief.
The pages we’ve passed through you may think of as a greatest hits package. I grant that in style it’s a bit of a rock opera. What follows now will be the loose jamming that happens backstage after the concert is over: the gradual unwinding.
Or, to use another analogy—one that we’ve made a lot of use of—we’ve just sat through the main feature and have now selected another option from the menu. This book is unique in that you get to rerun the entire movie alongside a running commentary. We’ll ask for input from the producer, the director and an actor or two.
I suggest that you make yourself comfortable—maybe get yourself a refill of popcorn (just go easy on the coke). You see, our next job is to work out how the theory translates into practice. It’ll be a Talmud of sorts. I want to follow up some of the consequences of our new home-spun philosophy. I bet that, where the rock and a hard place meet, and where The Theory of Everythink evolves into the ideology of Ism, it will lead us to a veritable bizarro world of conclusions.
Be seeing you.
