How the World Can Be the Way It Is

I’m reading a book by this title, by Steve Hagen, published in 1995. The book has recently been revised and retitled Why the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense, published by Sentient Publications. Hagen is a Buddhist teacher with lots of credentials. Anyway, the book so far has been pretty repetitive, basically saying that Reality (with a capital R, the real thing) is different from what we think it is. Pretty interesting, but not earth-shattering.

But in the second part of the book, Hagen talks about Chaos (i.e. nature), fractals and complex numbers, and this is getting interesting – mainly because I LOVE these topics!

So, in Reality, the boundaries between “objects” (which don’t exist by themselves anyway) are infinitely complex, like the Mandelbrot set, and the universe is also finite but boundless, like the Koch snowflake, or the coastline of any land mass. Very cool!

But it gets better…

Reality can only be explained by complex numbers!! Finally, a use for these numbers that include i, which is the square root of -1, and considered “imaginary” by early mathematicians! Reality consists of a “real” part, or what Hagen calls the relative part, and an “imaginary” part, or what Hagen calls the inconceivable part.

This description, believe it or not, fits with quantum theory and the theory of relativity, two theories of science that I have had a lot of trouble with (I’m not alone of course).

So now I can add an explanation of the universe as a complex number to the explanation of Stephen Wolfram, who claims in his book A New Kind of Science that the universe is a simple computer program.

Hagen attempts to explain consciousness and mind in this book, which is a subject that has come up recently for me in exploring the claims of Eben Alexander in his book Proof of Heaven. So far, Hagen has piqued my interest by stating that the mind is obviously not part of the brain, and not even really part of a particular person. Woo-woo!

I’ll update this post when I finish the book, and if anyone out there has read it, please let me know what you think of the content. Thanks!

This post also appears on my blog.

Update: Well, I’ve finished the book (it was due back at the Astoria Library last week), and must say that Hagen didn’t add much towards the end, except that time is always NOW (there is no past and no future), the number 10^-40 seems to pop up a lot when dealing with fundamental constants, and we must see (he put this in bold) Reality, though he doesn’t give much guidance in how to do this. He says we can solve all our problems if we will just see. In summary, Hagen believes that Reality is a lot closer to the quantum theoretical world and the relativistic world, and consciousness (which he believes exists outside material objects) tells us a very different story, so we can function in the world. For me, I’m looking for that objective Reality that he touches on, and I’m having a hard time picturing it, still.

Perhaps my next book, which I’m reading at the suggestion of my friend Steve Berk, will help. It’s titled Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake. Another guy that thinks materialists are missing the boat. I’ll let you know what I think of this one when I’m done, which will be in 3 weeks, since this book is also from the Astoria Library (because the Kindle e-book version is $14, and there is no iBooks version).