Reflection: Where my curiosity led me
by Eric Meece, March 28, 2019, revised April 25
For May 5 First UU Church of San Jose service
My point of view on the world went through a total change during my youth. Why did this change happen? Was I trying to solve my problems, and figure out how to succeed? Maybe in part, but actually I just became very curious. What am I, and what am I doing here? What’s going on? How could all this be, really?
My curiosity led me in opposite directions to what Diana will describe, even though it started and ended up in a similar place. At that time, I thought mathematics was the first principle of the universe, and the purest truth. That was a common opinion among science-oriented people like me. My high school teachers said I had the best scientific background in the class--- if only I would apply myself more. My science-oriented parents had already brought me to this very church, where you didn’t have to be religious in the usual way. It was a relief not to have to believe in God, or assume that Jesus died for me on the cross.
But mathematics could not answer my new questions. Were numbers really the basis of reality? I began to wonder if they were too abstract to be such a basis. And I had decided by now that I didn’t want to be a scientist and do things like dissect animals. Somehow I was beginning to suspect that you could not explain life by dissecting it.
But I could not articulate these beliefs yet. I was only getting a sense of this. My curiosity and my sense of something happening had been welling up in me for about 9 months, when my first big question clearly came to me: what is beauty? The wonder of the world began to astonish me for the first time. I would gaze out at the sky and felt connected to what was going on. "There’s something in the air," I said to myself. I was overwhelmed with the feelings and visions that came to me. And I found the answer to my question. Love was the answer; my love itself creates the beauty I see. The love that surrounds me and everyone everywhere makes things beautiful.
That was a neat answer, but it proved to be just a doorway to another 9 months of continuous discovery, after which my world view shifted 180 degrees from anything I had ever known before in my short life. I guess I have to date myself. It was the Summer of 1966. I admit I was already fascinated with how people were being changed by LSD that year, but I had no inclination to take it myself. Partly because of this, young people and people of all ages started asking some of the same questions I was asking. The songs that just then started to come out were amazing, and from then on music was the soundtrack for my path. Then I heard about ghosts on the radio, and I read about them. What could explain this? It seemed like anything beyond the scientific view I had held before suddenly interested me. And I began to think about all the artificial walls and routines that restricted us. I learned soon that I was not the only dreamer.
As the 9 months passed, more questions came to me. Why am I restricted to just being me? Is there a wall between life and death? Is the world substantial? "The great void is upon us," I wrote on my wall. Was the love that came to me divine? Like those who took LSD, I too began to accept the idea that God in some way might exist after all. Then I began questioning the rules of logic that my passionately-rationalist high school English teacher wrote up on the blackboard. The abstract laws of identity did not apply to real things, I decided. The syllogism was false. My friend thereupon gave me books on Zen and Yoga, and they seemed to ring true to me. I was moving toward pure consciousness or spirit as the first principle of all things, instead of math and matter. I experienced myself as one with all. Soon I wrote a paper on Zen for my rationalist teacher, and reluctantly talked about it to the class. My teacher excoriated my views in his written review, but he gave me a B anyway.
After that though, my head was filled with the arguments with him, and soon I was arguing with my parents and other teachers too. The second 9 months were up. A time of darkness fell over me. If everything I had believed in was gone, what could I rely on? I began to doubt everything, and I wanted to prove everything. My shyness got worse instead of better. Gradually this feeling lifted. I went to San Jose State and confidently wrote about my new world view. I met some wonderful friends and teachers, and our new minister came. I majored in philosophy, and studied existentialism thoroughly. I got an easy A in my Oriental Philosophy class, and a D in mathematical logic. Or was it an F? I forget. Meanwhile I had also encountered other things, like astrology. In early 1967 I heard Gavin Chester Arthur talk about it on the radio. The door to it was opened, but I was curious. So first I read what the planets and signs meant, and then I put it to the test. If this stuff was true, I asked, what would my chart look like? Where would the planets be? The chart turned out to have everything in it that I thought it would have. Considering my former beliefs, you can imagine how astonished I was at this.
Then I took a class in Plato. Why not, I thought? There was always something attractive about him, even if I disagreed with his rationalism now. I was amazed to discover that I could justify his idea of eternal forms and archetypes as a basis of things. Maybe my astrology background prepared me for this further change in my world view. I wrote my masters degree paper about an argument between existentialists and platonists. I decided that mathematics and numbers could be, in part, the basis of reality after all, because numbers have definite qualities and rhythms. I found that nothing could explain the qualities of things except the forms. My original question had also been one that Plato had asked. What is beauty? He postulated that there was an eternal essence of the beautiful. I also found Teilhard de Chardin, who provided just what I needed: a holistic view of individual beings evolving within the whole. Whew, I could be myself again!
Meanwhile I took that mathematical logic class again, and this time I got an A. I had come almost full circle. Not quite, to be sure. But far enough that I decided I could put all of philosophy on a circle. I call it the philosophers wheel. That’s the name of my website too. And, I’m still going in circles. The law of astrology, as above, so below, is the reason for fractals, holograms, and sacred geometry too, like the circle and the spiral, and so much more.
So, as one of my favorite science commentators on you tube says, “stay curious.” And we’ll see you on the philosophers wheel.