[KaiserJeep]

A Meditation on the Void and the Presidential Election
by ESTHER GOLDBERG, September 4, 2016, 12:10 am

Metaphysics to the rescue as one to tries to make sense of it all.


There she stood in the doorway
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
‘This could be heaven or this could be Hell’
—“Hotel California,” The Eagles

I was delighted last Saturday to come across an article in the Wall Street Journal that was about something unrelated to contemporary events. Only, in the end, one realizes that in an interconnected world everything relates to the present.(1)

Not that Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek looked explicitly at contemporary affairs. In “A Physicist’s Nightmare of the Void,” he didn’t discuss the fragmentation of contemporary America into ever-narrower tribal identities, or the conflagration consuming much of Africa and the Middle East.

Instead, Wilczek described a terrifying dream in which he experienced the complete emptiness — the “Void” — that, as a scientist, he’d hitherto understood only in an abstract way.

Unmoored, floating, bathed in a featureless, preternaturally bright pure white, I didn’t know where I was or which way I pointed. Those questions had no resolution — indeed, no meaning. There were no landmarks, no sources of orientation, nothing to approach or to touch.
Deprived of all sensory stimuli, Wilczek tells us, people begin to provide their own experiences by hallucinating. And, as Aldous Huxley so vividly describes in The Doors of Perception, which chronicles his experience with mescaline, when you are in the midst of a hallucination you experience it intensely. To you it’s undeniably real, even if it strikes you that all of the laws of nature are being bent.

Wilczek had been engaged in a search for the origin of the universe, and to this end he’d been thinking about how to empty space to its original purity. Space as it might have appeared to its Creator. But now, faced with this nothingness, Wilczek was profoundly frightened. He wondered whether “this was death, delivering on the promise of eternal, omnipresent celestial light — the Empyrean of the ancient Greeks and of Dante’s ‘Paradiso.’”

If this was Heaven, Wilczek, the physicist, was experiencing it as the Void he’d been working hard to find. And he didn’t want to be there forever.

I understand Wilczek’s ambivalence toward the hereafter. Whenever I read Adonais, Shelley’s reflection on the death of his friend John Keats, I’m particularly struck by the following lines:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Shelley sensed the ambiguity implicit in the “white radiance of Eternity.” To get there, Death must trample life into fragments.

I, too, have a preference for the “dome of man-colour’d glass.” I love watching the ever-moving pieces of the kaleidoscope of life as they arrange and rearrange themselves into pictures that are random yet coherent. Eternity can wait. So long as I have a choice, I’ll choose life.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche devotes a section to “the Preachers of Death.” They are the life-deniers, for whom life is not a gift but a curse. They long only for Eternity, and in order to reach it, they would kill everyone, including themselves. They see the world as “full of those to whom death must be preached.” They’d sacrifice humanity on the altar of environmentalism, or Allah.

In my own dream of the Void a few years ago, I felt my body being violently taken from me, and I was afloat in a vast, limitless blueness and doubting my own existence. I tried to distance myself from my experience by intellectualizing it. I reasoned, in lawyerly fashion, that this could not be happening because I hadn’t consented to it. More philosophically, I reasoned that, as I was thinking, I must still exist, if only as a thinker.

Increasingly uncomfortable, I recalled how Nietzsche’s experience of the Void and how he’d transcended it. Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which he conceived in a hallucination, is based on his understanding of the second law of thermodynamics that posits infinite space and time, and finite matter, from which it follows that the same combinations of matter must necessarily recur an infinite number of times. In other words, we are condemned to relive every moment of our lives eternally. Within this system, suicide is not a live option.

Nietzsche was paralyzed by this vision for a long time, and was able to pull back from the abyss by formulating his idea of amor fati, the act of embracing of one’s fate. You can’t change events, but you can change your attitude towards them. (Remember the movie Groundhog Day?) You transcend death by fully embracing your life. And so I decided that I would relax, take everything in, and regard the entire matter as an adventure.

But as there was nothing to take in, I began hallucinating. I conjured up pictures from my past that I didn’t want to leave behind. There was my husband, sitting across from me on a Ferris wheel one lovely evening in Paris, wearing his baseball cap and grinning the grin I’d come to know so well over the years. There was my daughter on the occasion of her Bat Mitzvah, reading from the Torah in Hebrew before her family and the whole of our Congregation, looking at the same time both confident and vulnerable. As far as I was concerned, this dream never had to end.

But the pictures began to deteriorate. They faded and their edges got ragged. They began to crack, trampled into fragments, like very old photographs. Soon there’d be nothing left of them. It was at this point that I found myself approaching a tunnel. What’s a transition without a tunnel? On the other end I could see Wilczek’s “preternaturally bright pure white” and I was being drawn directly into it, becoming a part of it.

I never got there, however. I awoke, confused, to the sound of my own voice reciting over and over again in Hebrew the last words that Jews are required to say before they die. “The Lord our God is One.” I heard my husband mutter in his sleep, “What are you talking about?” It was dark, I was in my bed, my husband beside me, and it was good to be alive.

Our different lives caused Wilczek and me to experience and respond to the Void in different ways. Nietzsche’s experience was undoubtedly shaped by his time that was giving birth to the deadly cult of Nazism. We all carry our histories with us. They embody the archetypes and instincts that underlie our reasoning, and determine the way in which we will react in a stress or crisis situation.

“We are all just prisoners here, of our own device,” sang The Eagles. We create our own Voids.

Today, the most powerful nation in the world is also experiencing a kind of Void, an emptiness in which everything solid has melted away. As in here are preachers of death amongst us. Our values are shattered, our virtues are forgotten and our religion is in tatters. We destroy our environment and murder fetuses without compunction even as we decry the burning of villages and murder of innocents by Islamists. In the face of unspeakable atrocities we are paralyzed.

We are asked now to choose between two candidates for the presidency of our great country, both very different from the presidents we’ve seen before. The familiar signposts have been erased, the trusted pillars of the past are no more. The voice of the lying partisan is stilled. We are thrown back, radically, upon ourselves. How we react will determine whether we find the way back from the Void for our country and ourselves. And, indeed, the world

(1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-physicists-nightmare-of-the-void-1472045991

Original is at: http://spectator.org/a-meditation-on-the-void/

[Plantagenet]

Today, the most powerful nation in the world is also experiencing a kind of Void, an emptiness in which everything solid has melted away.

We are not experiencing a "void" and things are not "melting away." There are very real and concrete problems facing the US, just as there has been in the past. The only difference now is that people are no longer willing to discuss the nation's problems because what needs to be done to fix the problems isn't "politically correct" so they discuss an imaginary "void" instead.

As in here are preachers of death amongst us. Our values are shattered, our virtues are forgotten and our religion is in tatters. We destroy our environment and murder fetuses without compunction even as we decry the burning of villages and murder of innocents by Islamists. In the face of unspeakable atrocities we are paralyzed.

We are asked now to choose between two candidates for the presidency of our great country, both very different from the presidents we’ve seen before. The familiar signposts have been erased, the trusted pillars of the past are no more. The voice of the lying partisan is stilled. We are thrown back, radically, upon ourselves. How we react will determine whether we find the way back from the Void for our country and ourselves. And, indeed, the world

(1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-physicists-nightmare-of-the-void-1472045991

Original is at: http://spectator.org/a-meditation-on-the-void/

People who say they are "paralyzed", and complain their values are "shattered" etc. are fools. Its no different now then it was during WWII, or the VietNam War, of the civil rights movement, or the free speech movement. People just need to figure out what they want, and then work to make that happen.

I can see how if you are a D, you might be disappointed that your party pre-selected a corrupt, lying, thieving greedy wall street crony to run for president, and if you're an R you might disappointed that your party has been taken over by a corrupt, lying, thieving greedy demagogue.

Well, thats just how it is. The nice and free and democratic and egalitarian USA we all imagined we lived in has turned out to be a mirage. The USA is a really a racist, imperialist nation. Everything in politics is really controlled by the wealthy and powerful. So what? ----life goes on.

The problem isn't that reality has turned out to be a void. The problem is that reality isn't a void. Reality is all too real and it doesn't have guaranteed happy endings like a hollywood movie.

cheers!

[KaiserJeep]

Yeah, Plant - the only good thing about the USA is it's better to be here than almost any other place. Witness the long line of refugees at the Southern border.

I saw nothing PC in the article above. It is an expression of angst, which seems to me to be felt by every generation.

[Plantagenet]

....the article above. It is an expression of angst, which seems to me to be felt by every generation.

Right-O. Angst about the void.

Sorry but I don't have time for angst about the void.

Every prior generation has overcome their angst to act to make the world a better place. This generation wants to pretend that it has acted. Its time for this generation to stop pretending to act, and to actually make decisions take the steps need to fix problems in the USA. Why not act to make the world a better place again instead of just pretending?.


I blame obama, of course. We elected him because he promised to find solutions to real problems. But instead of real solutions, we got pretend solutions.

End the war? Obama's at war in FOUR countries....but the anti-war movement is silent and the media pretends it isn't happening

Fix the economy? Obama boasts constantly about how he has fixed the economy while wages stagnate and tens of millions of people have left the workforce to be classified as "discouraged" or on "disability".

Fix the healthcare system? Right-O, with Obamacare which as seen all the public co-ops go bankrupt and insurers drop out one after another so that it now features deductibles so big its about worthless for anything short of a heart attack and price increases this year alone of up to 40%.

Improve race relations? Electing a black man president seemed like a way to get past the eternal bickering over race, but who ever dreamed our president would start claiming that police are "stupid" and racist and the justice system is rigged against black people, helping to gin up the worse racial climate in the USA since LBJ.

Fix Climate Change? How about a sham agreement that outlaws global temperature increases but doesn't reduce CO2 emissions---Obama can do that.

Every day's news is like a theatre of the absurd. Just today Obama was just in Laos, lamenting all the damage US bombing did to Laos 40+ years ago. Meanwhile Obama is silent in his speech about bombing about the damage his own bombing is doing in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and all the other countries he attacked with UAVs.

Its been sham after Fraud after Failure after lie---but all with the nicest sounding promises and the best of intentions. No wonder people envision the world as a "void."

[peripato]

Every prior generation has overcome their angst to act to make the world a better place. This generation wants to pretend that it has acted. Its time for this generation to stop pretending to act, and to actually make decisions take the steps need to fix problems in the USA. Why not act to make the world a better place again instead of just pretending?

This is about as likely as a week with two Tuesdays...

[Rod_Cloutier]

Channel higher self channeled this message from God about the potential collapse of the economy in 2008:

https://youtu.be/0WnelsCJlJk

[ralfy]

The "void" has been in place for decades.

[jedrider]

Seems like a bit of creative writing, nothing more.

As regards the void, I suppose some people feel a void and this is nothing new (as already pointed out).

I don't see any void at all. This all makes perfect sense. We fucked up. We're just going to have to deal with it (and have it deal with us). But, a 'void' it is NOT.

[Tanada]

Seems like a bit of creative writing, nothing more.

As regards the void, I suppose some people feel a void and this is nothing new (as already pointed out).

I don't see any void at all. This all makes perfect sense. We fucked up. We're just going to have to deal with it (and have it deal with us). But, a 'void' it is NOT.

I tend to agree with this view. In the USA the voters became very complacent over the last 50 years and just keep sending the same empty promise politicians back to office election after election. Now we are reaping the consequence of those two generations of inattention by the voters and the general public. Face it, if the average voter were actually engaged and motivated they would have elected entirely different people to office, but a pathetically small percentage even votes during the primary process. The void, such as it is, comes from our culture of inattention.

[jedrider]

The void, such as it is, comes from our culture of inattention.

EMPIRE OF ILLUSION by Chris Hedges -- The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

And, our attention span being reduced to a few seconds from being bombarded with both soundbites and videobites hasn't helped.