Que Sera Sera

Que Sera Sera

by Marco M. Pardi

“You’se gonna’ take a dark trip wit’ a long stranger.”

“Sister Cornelia, if God is all knowing how can we do anything he doesn’t already know we will do? How can we act against his will, and sin?”

Doubting Thomases noted that, as Sister Cornelia, a recent transfer from the parish of Our Lady of Ongoing Agony anticipated Sally Fields by two decades and flew through the air to answer in a distinctly un-Rhadamanthine way, a lesson in causality was taking form. Indeed, the 18 inches of her wooden ruler (with sharp brass straight edge) did not define the limits of her reach. And the predictable outcome was a day amassing penmanship demerits as the various phalanges and metacarpals gathered to decide when it was safe to reappear as a hand. Of course, in the 4th grade the thrill was worth the pain. But by the 6th grade hormonal fluctuations relegated such questions to the abstract.

Still, they remained, if in a more sophisticated, non-theistic form. Older, and with money to spend, people go to “fortune tellers”, or whatever they call themselves, to “see what the future has in store.” At least there is long standing precedent.
Of course, we can only infer. but shamanic practices dating back thousands of years appeared to include scapulamancy, the reading of the cracks in heated scapulas, still practiced by modern Siberian shamans. Egyptians placed great importance on pre-cognitive dreams. But Kurt Seligmann, in his book Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion, reminds us the Egyptian hierarchy proscribed divination from the common man for fear they would “throw down their tools in despair, or throw down their tools in joy.”

The Etruscans interpreted the flights of birds. Greeks and Romans read the organs, especially the livers of sacrificed animals. The Oracle of Delphi, a woman sitting atop mind altering gasses, was revered as well as other Sibyls of the Mediterranean World. And well into the 20th century one could find people, usually women, sleeping outside village churches in hopes of prophetic and/or incubation dreams.

But as prophets, astrologers, seers, and necromancers had varying degrees of acceptance in that world, the more interesting issue is that, when they were negatively sanctioned, it was more often not because they were wrong but because it was considered improper to venture into the future. The possibility that one could do so was less the issue than whether one should do so.
More fundamental still was the usually unspoken question of Fate versus Free Will. Again, most world myth systems have within them an unalterable clockwork of Fate usually overseen by a demi-god or gods, be it the Fates of the Greeks – the goddesses of destiny known as the three sisters Clothlo “The Spinner”, Lachesis “The Decider”, and Atropos “The Inevitable”, the Norse and Germanic Nornir, or the unnamed but ubiquitous force of the Hebrews, as seen in Ecclesiastes 3 King James Version (KJV) 1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; and etc.
In an interesting aside, the Lachesis figure, who measures the thread of remaining life and the Atropos figure, who cuts this thread binding a human to life, anticipate the recent discovery of the telomere, mentioned in an earlier blog. As we assault our cells through life the telomeres appended to each end of the
chromatid shorten until gone. We come to “the end of our rope”. Of course, there are those who insist that we can slow the trimming of our telomeres, perhaps through the diet book they are selling. And there are those who, should they organize, could start a new 12 Step Program, beginning with “I came to realize I was powerless over my telomeres.”

So, is it all in the cards, the entrails, the stars, or perhaps the telomeres? In his 1951-53 works, The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov, who had more Ph.D.s than many people have fingers to count them, posed a Galactic Empire for which the present was understood and the future had been plotted through a mathematical process called “psycho-history”. Essentially a forward projection based statistically on all that had preceded, it reminded me of lessons from a friend, Henry Wingate Ph.D., an Applied Mathematician/Science Officer, who patiently explained the mathematics of listening to incomplete human utterances and plotting the statistical probabilities of any next word to come from the person’s mouth. A remarkable intelligence agency tool for salvaging interrupted intercepts and rank ordering likely “paste ins”, it was ill advised in every day use except perhaps for keeping your OCD significant other busy. Still, it deals only with probabilities.

But Asimov repeatedly stated in his Trilogy that while human behavior could be predicted and chart plotted in the aggregate, the individual was an unquantifiable entity. “Freedom” existed at the individual level, but group behavior was amenable to calculation, more easily so as the group enlarged. In a very real way, the same applies to linguistic utterances; the longer they are before interruption the easier to calculate the probabilities of the next word. Of course, this calls the question of whether “freedom” is merely the reflection of current mathematical limits or if there really is such a thing as Free Will.

Before settling for Asimov’s view of the individual we might consider the context in which it was written. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, American psychologist, inventor of the operant conditioning chamber, and in modern eyes an egregious animal abuser, was following the lead of John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov in quickly establishing his school of radical behaviorism. He is still considered as one of the triumvirate of modern Behaviorism, a school many consider to be an over zealous reaction to the amorphous musings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. While the lockstep formula of the Behaviorists’ conditioned response has largely fallen into some disfavor, more recent explorations raise the question of just who is being conditioned.

Also eventually in disfavor was the body of National Character Studies, developed out of the gestalt approach of Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, 1887-1948, “The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers”. Persisting well into the 1950’s, these studies reinforced, if not originated the idea that the culture into which one was born determined the adult personality, down to minute traits. Stereotyping thus seemed to have a scientific basis.

So where do these traits, including the probability of deciding and acting one way versus myriad alternatives come from? In his first publication released to the American market, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Norretranders, a breath taking Danish science writer exhaustively and precisely provides us with the neuro-linguistic data clearly showing that appropriate areas of the brain “light up” prior to our conscious intention to generate the act for which they are responsible. Subjects repeatedly identified the exact time at which they formulated the intent to move their finger, only to learn that the finger movement area of the brain had already set the process in motion before they thought of doing so. Repeated experiments since, done in various ways, have universally supported these findings.

Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds and Lynn McTaggart’s The Field exhaustively document studies with human subjects and with quantum mechanics which convincingly throw serious doubt on the long held sanctity of the autonomous human actor. Each of these three researchers, along with many others, throws serious doubt on the valence of culture as a determinative force.

A frequent criticism of divinatory – for the “future” – practices such as Tarot is, “I only wound up doing it because that damned card reader put it in my mind.” Staggeringly simplistic, this concept overlooks basic elements:
1. At Point A Madam Nozall sees Point C as an existing state.
2. The event during which Madam Nozall transmits this information to the sitter is thus Point B.
3. The interim between Point B and Point C is therefore Point C In Development.
4. The fact that Madam Nozall does not recognize or pronounce herself as part of Point C In Development does not negate the historic fact that at Point A she saw Point C.

In short, “The Devil made me do it” does not stand. Nor would “My culture made me do it”. And, a more thorough examination will likely expose the earlier development of Point C long before Point A occurred, including the mechanics of what brought the sitter to Madam Nozall to begin with. Blaming Madam Nozall is equivalent to an overboard white water rafter, who having thrashed several hundred yards downstream, blames someone on the bank for pointing out that he is heading for a rock.

Over the early years of teaching Death & Dying I sometimes asked my students if they would want to know when they are going to die. The answers were scattered, but the question raised concerns. Do my choices in life determine my death, and if so, how?

Recent developments in genetics and other forms of analysis now bring that question more into the realm of possibility, for groups if not the individual. Yet, we are still treated to some questionable “studies”. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this is the growing tendency to replace the stars, the cards, the yarrow stalks, the entrails, the will of some god, etc. with “the genes”. In the same way that Sister Cornelia could not reconcile an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient god with a free will in any given actor, we now find ourselves living in an “Eat well, exercise, and die anyway” world view.

I was going to drive to the mall this afternoon. But, remembering those instances of small planes being forced to land on highways, I think I’ll just go back to bed.

“Lost and alone on some forgotten highway, traveled by many, remembered by few.
Looking for something that I can believe in,
looking for something that I’d like to do with my life.
There’s nothing behind me and nothing that ties me to
something that might have been true yesterday.
Tomorrow is open and right now it seems to be more than enough
To just be here today, and I don’t know what the future is holding in store,
I don’t know where I’m going, I’m not sure where I’ve been.
There’s a spirit that guides me, a light that shines for me,
my life is worth the living, I don’t need to see the end.

Sweet, sweet surrender, live, live without care,
like a fish in the water, like a bird in the air.
Sweet, sweet surrender, live, live without care,
like a fish in the water, like a bird in the air.”
John Denver. Sweet Surrender.