Andy's Mind

As news sources have been informing around 4 million people have already arrived in Rome with others expected today. This would be largest human gathering in history, which is something. It’s hard to imagine this number of people crowded on terrain, which normally holds 3 million inhabitants. Logistics of this event are an enormous problem – those millions of people have to eat, drink and, well, defecate. This could cause a local ecological disaster with city’s sewage overloaded, tons of waste left by the pilgrims. And then there is terrorists threat.

Despite the fact that even Muslims expressed sorrow and sympathy for the Christians over the Pope’s death such a large gathering of VIPs and people in general is a huge opportunity for any crazy enough to think of it in such terms. A plane attack is probably out of question, because that’s what all security forces are preparing for. But even a few fools blowing up themselves in this kind of crowd would cause panic and a huge disaster. Let’s just hope that they didn’t have the time to prepare, since magnitude of the event surprises everyone.

But now I’m glad I didn’t go to Rome. After all, chances of getting into the Vatican and witnessing the event are practically none and I can watch TV at home as well.

As people stop to just mourn and start to think about what happened there are some conflicting views now regarding John Paul II and his pontificate. Media are full of talking heads debating various aspects of it. What particularly irritates me about the coverage in CNN and the likes is that during the discussions they inevitably bring gay marriage and ordaining women as serious issues. I don’t get it why people can consider someone’s sexual deviation a serious issue for anyone except his therapist. But even more, I don’t understand how Christians can possibly dispute the decisions of their lord? After all, it was Christ himself who, as a son of god, choose the apostles – and he choose all of them to be men. And homosexual intercourse is explicitly forbidden in he Bible.

Both those “serious issues” just happen to be the (few) things in Catholicism that are perfectly logical, based on the Bible whish is supposed to be its foundation. What I don’t get is why people who don’t agree with Christ and the Bible want to be Christians! I can’t understand it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact, that many people don’t get to actually choose their spiritual path. They get it from their parents, sometimes together with a baptism just after birth, and then either accept and embrace it or struggle with it.

Oh, what a blessing it was to be born into a religiously neutral family.

These have been two sad days, with the global death watch for the John Paul II, with all TV channels showing live images from Vatican, Poland and around the world.

The good news of this day is that he is not suffering anymore – and that so many people were able to unite in peace, good motives and extending good wishes for the Pope. These moments of unity are his farewell.

His death would be much more tragic for Poland than for the Catholic Church. All popes so far died, among them many great and important, yet the Church caries on. There would be next Pope, but surely he won’t be Polish. So his death somehow marks the end of the historic window of opportunity which opened for this small European country when he was elected. After all, when he was the Pontiff, every Catholic on Earth at least knew Poland exists – this knowledge will now gradually fade out.

I’m reading “The Quantum and the Lotus“, a fascinating dialog between an astrophysicist and an ex-biologist who became a Buddhist monk and philosopher. I’ve been reading only for last three days so I’m now past chapter 6 or so, and yet I’ve already learned things I never heard of. The most mind boggling are the wider implications of the Foucault’s pendulum shifting in relation not only to Earth and twin photon experiment conducted by Nicolas Gisin in 1997 – an offspring of the almost century old EPR paradox.

It’s hard to boil all this down to few sentences but overall it seems that the famous phrase which pulled me towards Buddhism – “The form is empty, emptiness is form” – is more in agreement with current scientific understanding than I expected.

I also have some thoughts going around my head as I read. For example one thing that – so far – has not appeared in the author’s cosmological dialog is recognition of the fact that our perception as parts of this universe of interdependencies is inherently limited. We are unable to scientifically measure or probably even understand in terms of human reasoning anything that might be outside of it. Any speculation reaching outside is bound to be an extrapolation of our own way of thinking – just as saying that life – and especially intelligent one – has necessarily to be based on carbon biology as we know it from Earth.

Another raw, yet unrefined reflection regards consequences of the experiments mentioned. If something clearly can move faster than light (even if it is just some form of information) and stability of phenomena on macroscopic level is rather an illusion than fact then there is hope that somehow the great distances of space can be traversed. It is of course far fetched, but maybe way forward for us is not only to try to blend general relativity and quantum mechanics into one single theory but rather in unifying the understanding of cognizant, conscious part of the reality and what we perceive as inanimate matter. Because it seems that fundamentally they are intrinsically connected.