Behind The Mask ~ THE DAWN OF WONDER
Ignorance
is good, if we know it, because it then provides the
basis, the material, to learn from, and discovering
something that we have not known before is usually
exciting and accompanied by joy. Not to know that
we are ignorant—and we are ignorant, so damned
ignorant!—deprives us of the possibility of
learning or discovering the things that we are ignorant
of or don’t know. What we already know we can’t
learn; we can learn only things that we don’t
know, and as there is so much that we don’t
know, the field of learning is inconceivably vast,
and consequently, the joy of discovery awaits us all
in incalculable amounts.
While recently re-reading Fritjof Capra’s
book, The Tao of Physics, (I last read it in 1978
and it must surely be expected that my mind has opened
a bit more since then), I came upon a passage about
the space in an atom, how atoms are composed more
of space—that is, what is not there—than
what is there: the nucleus and the electrons that
whirl around it. I would like to quote the passage
here so that I won’t get it wrong by putting
it into my own words:
"Far from being the hard and solid
particles they were believed to be since antiquity,
atoms turned out to consist of vast regions of space
in which extremely-small particles—the electrons—moved
around the nucleus, bound to it by electrical forces.
It is not easy to get a feeling for the order of magnitude
of atoms, so far is it removed from our macroscopic
scale. The diameter of an atom is about one hundred-millionth
of a centimeter. In order to visualize this diminutive
size, imagine an orange blown up to the size of the
Earth. The atoms of the orange would then be the size
of cherries; myriads of cherries, tightly packed into
a globe the size of the Earth—that’s a
magnified picture of the atoms in an orange.
"An atom, therefore, is extremely small
compared to macroscopic objects, but it is huge compared
to the nucleus in its center. In our picture of cherry-sized
atoms, the nucleus of an atom will be so small that
we will not be able to see it. If we blew up the atom
to the size of a football, or even to room-size, the
nucleus would still be too small to be seen by the
naked eye. To see the nucleus, we would have to blow
up the atom to the size of the biggest dome in the
world, the dome of St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.
In an atom of that size, the nucleus would have the
size of a grain of salt! A grain of salt in the middle
of the dome of St Peter’s, and specks of dust
whirling around it in the vast space of the dome—this
is how we can picture the nucleus and electrons of
an atom".
So, why have I written about atoms here
when I started out talking about ignorance? What have
atoms got to do with our spiritual lives? Quite a
lot, actually; in fact, everything being interconnected,
there is nothing that does not touch and affect us
in some way or another. Apart from us being made up,
physically, of atoms, the illustration above serves
to show how much we do and do not know, how great
is our ignorance. What we know might be compared to
the atom’s nucleus or the grain of salt, while
our ignorance, or what we don’t know, might
be compared to the atom’s space or the dome
of St Peter’s. Terrifying, isn’t it? But
it is also very exciting, as it means there is so
much ahead of us to discover. Thus, ignorance, in
one way, might be regarded as an asset, or undeveloped
resources, something like iron-ore in the ground:
if there is a lot of ore, much steel might be made
from it! Of course, we cannot measure ignorance in
the same way we can measure atoms and their components;
moreover, there are different degrees of ignorance.
But a little bit of hyperbole can sometimes be useful
in striking us and causing us to think; it is often
used in the Buddhist (and other) scriptures.
I discovered the following passage among
my notes, taken from The Tangled Wing, by Melvin Konner.
It says what I feel, and I am going to reproduce it
here, with this comment:
We seem to have largely lost our sense of
wonder—that is, our ability to marvel at things—if
we ever had it or were aware of it to begin with.
This applies especially to children today, who have
a superabundance—a gross superfluity—of
means of entertainment in the form of electronic gadgetry,
which robs them of the ability and need to entertain
themselves, and inculcates in them a drug-like dependence;
ever more and more stimulation is required to maintain
the ‘high’. It is, in my opinion, a loss
rather than a gain, though having known nothing else,
many young people probably would not agree with me.
"The dinosaurs ruled this planet for
over a hundred million years, at least a hundred times
longer than the brief, awkward tenure of human creatures,
and they are gone almost without a trace, leaving
nothing but crushed bone as a memento. We can do the
same more easily and in an ecological sense, we would
be missed even less. What’s the difference?
seems an inevitable question, and the best answer
I can think of is that we know, we are capable of
seeing what is happening. We are the only creatures
that understand evolution, that, conceivably, can
alter its very course. It would be too base of us
to simply relinquish this possibility through pride,
or ignorance, or laziness.
"It seems to me that we are losing
the sense of wonder, the hallmark of our species and
the central feature of the human spirit. Perhaps this
is due to the depredations of science and technology
against the arts and the humanities, but I doubt it—although
this is certainly something to be concerned about.
I suspect it is simply that the human spirit is insufficiently
developed at this moment in evolution, much like the
wing of archaeopteryx. Whether we can free it for
further development will depend, I think, on the full
reinstatement of the sense of wonder. It must be reinstated
in relation not only to the natural world but to the
human world as well. At the conclusion of all our
studies we must try once again to experience the human
soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bio-electricity;
the human will as will, and not just as a surge of
hormones; the human heart not just as a fibrous, sticky
pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding.
We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities—they
are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of.
But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed
fragments but as wholes made real by our contemplation
of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the
way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand
in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are
dissected before our eyes.
"As for the natural world, we must
try to restore wonder there too. We could start with
the photograph of the Earth; it may be our last chance.
Even now it is being used in geography lessons, taken
for granted by small children. We are the first generation
to have seen it, the last generation not to take it
for granted. Will we remember what it meant to us?
How fine the Earth looked, dangling in Space? How
pretty against the endless black? How round? How very
breakable? How small? It is up to us to try to experience
a sense of wonder about it that will save it before
it’s too late. If we cannot, we may do the final
damage in our lifetimes. If we can, we may change
the course of history and, consequently, the course
of evolution, setting the human lineage firmly on
a path towards a new evolutionary plateau.
"We must choose, and choose soon, either
for or against the further evolution of the human
spirit. It is for us, in the generation that turns
the corner of the millennium, to apply whatever knowledge
we have, in all humility but with all due speed, and
try to learn more as quickly as possible. It is for
us, much more than for any previous generation, to
become serious about the human future, and to make
choices that will be weighed not in a decade or a
century but in the balances of geological time. It
is for us, with all our stumbling, and in the midst
of our dreadful confusion, to try to disengage the
tangled wing". |