5. What the hell is “water”?

(This post is an elaboration on a point made in blog post #4, “Riding the Quantum Wave”.)

You may have heard this little parable before in some shape or form. Essentially, it goes like this:

Two young fish were swimming around in a lake one day, minding their own business. An older fish swam by and said to them, “Good day, you two! How’s the water?”, then swam away. One of the younger fish, confused, looked at the other and asked, “What the hell is water?”

I love this parable for its layers and dimensions. If the two younger fish don’t even know what water is, could they fit the concept of land and air into their minds? How about space? How about subatomic reality? Etc. The parable also seems to infer that age can bring wisdom and awareness regarding the fundamental nature of our reality.

In my last blog post, I harkened to this parable in light of atheistic views on morality and meaning, both of which are seriously criticized and undermined by the materialist thinking which almost always accompanies atheism. Much greater minds than my own have debated these ideas, but I’ll take a stab at it. Materialism denigrates meaning as an artificial construct in the human mind, but isn’t it counterintuitive to debase this human quality which led to the arts and sciences themselves? Indeed, if man has this compulsion to search for meaning, certainly an intelligence greater than our own, whether alien or supernatural or simply a great field of consciousness, would contain within it a construct for meaning; otherwise it follows logically we would not have been able to arrive at the concept of meaning at all. It is my deep belief that “meaning” as we would define it is so pervasive, so fundamental to reality, that the term itself can seem, quite ironically, meaningless.

Like water to a fish.

Now this is interesting: right after I wrote that blog post, as if by some synchronicity, I chose to finish a book I’d started almost a year ago, and I encountered the exact concept I am talking about right now almost immediately in my reading…almost like my statement, and this follow-up blog post, was something preordained. I do not wish to fluff up my own ego or fall victim to solipsism, but this did strike me as exceedingly coincidental. (Maybe I’m onto something here; I guess we’ll see.)

The book is Perelandra and it is one of my favorite books, written by my favorite author, C.S. Lewis. It’s part of what people call his “Space Trilogy” or “Cosmic Trilogy”, Lewis’ only works of science fiction. To summarize concisely as I can, the basic plot follows a character named Ransom through his accidental journey to Mars in the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, and an intentional journey to Venus at the behest of an angel in the second book, Perelandra. Ransom discovers that all of the planets in our Solar System have archangels which govern the planets’ natural courses, including alien plant and animal life. Ransom is a philologist—a language expert—so he is able to learn the native language of Mars; he discovers this language is spoken by all inhabitants of the Solar System, with the exception of Earth. This is because Earth’s archangel is “bent” or “dark”, and has tried to cut Earth off from any intercommunication with the inhabitants of “Deep Heaven”—the good angels—hence Earth’s nickname, the Silent Planet.

In Perelandra, Ransom meets only two humans (though they are more than human, in a way), the “Adam and Eve” of Venus, and aids them in averting a crisis like the biblical curse which befell humanity in the garden of Eden. He does so by defending the Lady from dark design and temptation at the hands of a possessed physicist who has also made a surprise visit to Venus. At the end of the book, having succeeded in that defense with the help of “the still small voice”, Ransom stands on a mountaintop with the archangels of Mars and Venus (Malacandra and Perelandra) and with the aforementioned Lord and Lady, witnessing the transfer of lordship from the planet’s archangel to the human couple. It’s a beautiful moment where Ransom sees paradise as it should have been on Earth, with humans as equals with the angels, but with equality as something not to even be considered (reminds me of another person).

There is a point in this coronation where Ransom begins to wonder if there is some validity in the points made by “the Unman”, the possessed physicist.

Ransom says, “Is the enemy easily answered when He says that all is without plan or meaning?”

The angels answer with a long chorus of exultation, during which one says (with a bit of insertion for context):

“Set your eyes on [any] movement [in the Great Dance] and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. There seems no plan because it is all plan; there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He!”

Think on this: one quantum particle can be in two locations at once—a “superposition”—and two quantum entangled particles spread apart by massive distances will maintain instant correlation, spin, etc. Does this not sound like the Great Dance Lewis alluded to in the passage above? Like a master movement, a non-central center at any location, at every interval no matter how macrocosmic or microcosmic? By the way, during this chorus the angels even talk about “the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo in return to him”, akin to the void we so often hear about in Hinduism and Buddhism (many agree C.S. Lewis was likely a universalist).

We do not need to understand every single thing there is to understand about water to be damn good fish.

All reality is shot through with quantum poetry. If poetry is pure art and expression merely for expression’s sake, then at the quantum/physical/metaphysical/whatever level, we do not need to know every meaning, and fit every design into a human logical framework to hear the poetry and be edified by it. Being aware of that meaning and that basic poetry is enough. We are already finding the fundamental nature of reality to be teeming with ways higher than our own. I am convinced there is a meaning to it all, a meaning so high that a human brain will never trace it, but through that brain and through this human incarnation, a meeting of heaven and earth is not only possible, but dutiful.

As we deconstruct the doctrines that once held us down, instead of “darkness”, “The Devil”, or “Satan”—if those terms haven’t served you well till now—we could simply say entropy in the Great Machine of Reality, if you will, at times suppresses that human duty. The Law, the code of conduct, the ethical conclusions of humanity, become incarnate for us through Christ Consciousness in Jesus of Nazareth, in the Buddha, and in you, Beloved. The fight of finding the light, of seeking the truth, of surrendering our egos to the Great Dance, and thus becoming the very best humans we can be seems the point of human life.

And that is meaning enough for me.

“Nature is a poet.” -Alan Watts

—cheers.